the bare minimum should disgust you

it disgusts me every time i remember how little it took to make me believe i was loved. there are memories i almost cannot bear to look at anymore. someone remembering something i said weeks ago and i carried that feeling around for days. someone asking if i had eaten and i let that one question convince me i mattered. someone reaching for my hand once and i found myself replaying it in bed like it was evidence, like i could build a future from one moment if i held it tightly enough.

i keep looking back at those versions of myself and wondering how empty i must have been for ordinary human decency to feel like something i had to earn.

i don’t blame that version of me anymore. i know him too well. someone who’s starving doesn’t know what’s edible and what’s poison.

you don’t stand there wondering whether what you’ve been given will nourish you. you don’t ask whether it’s enough. your body has already decided for you. it reaches before your mind has time to question it. hunger makes everything look valuable. it convinces you that a few crumbs are a feast because you’ve forgotten what it feels like to leave the table full.

and i think there are people walking around carrying that same hunger in their hearts. maybe you’re one of them. maybe you’ve looked at someone giving you the smallest fraction of themselves and thought, “please let this be love.”

i have looked at inconsistency and called it hope because hope hurt less than the truth. i have waited for people who never asked me to wait. i have excused absences they never explained. i have thanked people for staying one afternoon while pretending i wasn’t bleeding from all the days they left me wondering whether i mattered at all. i wasn’t asking for miracles. i wasn’t asking to be rescued. i just wanted to stop feeling so impossible to choose.

and i think that’s the part that still breaks me. it wasn’t love that kept me there. it was the fear that this might be the closest thing to love i would ever receive.

once that fear gets inside you, it changes everything. you begin negotiating with your own loneliness. you tell yourself not to ask for too much because asking might make them leave. you swallow questions before they reach your mouth. you convince yourself that needing reassurance is embarrassing.

you become grateful for things that should have arrived without gratitude attached to them because somewhere along the way you started believing that being loved was a privilege instead of something every human heart reaches for.

i wish i could go back and sit beside that version of myself. i wouldn’t tell him to have higher standards. i wouldn’t tell him to love himself more.

i think i would just hold his face for a while and tell him that he looks so tired. i would tell him that he has been surviving on scraps for so long that he has forgotten what it feels like to be full. i would tell him that the ache in his chest is not proof that he is difficult to love. it is proof that he has been trying to make a home inside places that were never built to keep him warm.

maybe that’s why the bare minimum disgusts me now.

not because i’ve become harder. but because i finally understand how much of my life was shaped by deprivation. i wasn’t chasing impossible love. i was chasing enough. enough attention to get me through another week. enough tenderness to quiet the part of me that had spent years wondering what it was about me that made people leave with half their heart still somewhere else.

and there is something unbearably sad about realizing that i kept calling myself grateful when what i really was, was hungry. hungry people don’t choose crumbs because crumbs are enough. they choose them because, for a little while, they make forgetting the hunger possible.

maybe you know that feeling too. maybe you’ve thanked someone for giving you what should have been there all along. maybe you’ve convinced yourself that almost was enough because enough had always felt so impossibly far away. i don’t blame you for that. i couldn’t blame myself either. hunger has a way of making poison look like nourishment, of making absence feel ordinary and scraps feel sacred.

and by the time you realise you’ve been surviving instead of being loved, you’ve already built a home around the ache.

(thank you vesper for the ideation process)