So I intellectualized my pain, crafted it into palatable stories. I wrote versions of myself that I could hold up like a mask, judging it and judging myself before anyone else could. If you thought I was too much, or not enough, I could just point to my writing and say, "Yeah? Tell me something I don't already know."

I turned vulnerability into performance. But performance, by its nature, creates distance. 

I was so desperate to be seen, but I wrapped myself in language so thick no one could reach me. And when they couldn't, or didn't do it in a way that I could write into the narrative of my life, I dismissed them. 

I know that people tried. But I never fully accepted their efforts.

I now see that I was hard to be close to.

There were reasons for that, some of them chemical, some psychological: the depression I kept trying to outsmart with metaphors, the ADHD I didn’t know I had, the panic attacks I called intensity, and the suicidal ideation that felt like both a threat and a comfort. But reasons aren't excuses. They don’t erase the impact.

It's taken me a long time to realize: I wasn't just hurting, I was careless with it. That's a painful insight to have now, because it was never my intention. 

I wanted connection, but I didn't make it easy. I had so little faith in my own value that I needed people to prove they wouldn't leave. But words weren't enough. So I set every bridge on fire, sometimes to keep people away, and sometimes just to see who would cross anyway.

I didn’t always carry my pain carefully. And expecting others to bear my burdens wasn't fair.

I also didn't treat everyone's attention equally. 

If I thought you were smart enough, complex enough, wounded enough — then your attention mattered. 

But if you seemed shallow, unremarkable, or uninteresting, then your words didn't count. 

Why? Because if someone whose lens I didn’t trust thought I was impressive, it didn’t feel like affirmation. It felt like confirmation of my worst fear: That I was only remarkable to the unremarkable.

Their praise didn't land because I didn’t believe it took much to earn it. And if it didn’t take much to earn, then maybe I wasn’t worth much after all.

It wasn’t really about them. It was about me. I was terrified that I’d only ever be admired by people whose standards I wouldn’t hold myself to.

But I turned that same scrutiny on myself.

My interests, my talents, my insights: they only counted if they met some impossible threshold. I kept striving for perfection, feeling if I was less than exceptional, others would also dismiss me in the same way.

I was a flawed person, depressed, erratic, and deeply trying not to be, but not ready to admit the things to myself that would actually have allowed me to improve.

I didn't know how to save myself. 

I thought if I was smart enough, I could fix it on my own. Admitting I needed help felt like admitting that I wasn't capable. Which would mean I wasn't as valuable as I needed to be, which meant not as worthy of love. 

So, instead, I turned my suffering into a script. 

I cast myself as the tragic lead. I handed supporting roles to people who never auditioned. They were real, but I didn't always relate to them as themselves, I related to the roles I needed them to play.

Don't get me wrong, I cared deeply. There were some people I entrusted my identity to. But I also used some people as mirrors, or metaphors. 

I also likely hurt some people who I treated as just footnotes. People who didn't make it into the story because they didn’t burn brightly enough, or their pain or depth didn’t echo loudly enough for me to notice.

Part of growing into a more whole version of myself isn’t just healing my wounds. It's seeing who I became while I was still bleeding.

And it’s being willing to say:

“Even though I was in pain, I caused pain. And not just to the people I loved, but to the ones I used as mirrors, placeholders, or props. I want to own that, not just explain it.”

I know I sometimes came off like I thought I was better than some people.

It wasn't arrogance. It was terror.

If I wasn't the smartest, most capable, most intuitive, most emotionally aware person (or sometimes, just the most broken) in the room... then who was I?

I clung to my intellect because I didn't think I had anything else worth offering.

The trauma, the writing, the razorblade nights, they’re all part of this subconscious contract I'd made with the world: 

“If I feel more, suffer more, think more deeply than others, then I must matter more.”

So I pushed “normal” people away. Not because they weren't enough, but because they didn't trigger my need to prove I was. 

It was safer to be unreadable than to risk being read and not valued.

I'd love to say that has completely changed. It hasn't. Not fully.

I still overidentify with competence more than warmth. I still sometimes measure my value by how useful or insightful I can be. But I'm learning. Slowly.

If you were someone I overlooked, dismissed, or quietly hurt while chasing meaning — or if you ever felt unseen because I didn’t ask, didn’t follow up, or stayed wrapped in my own story, I want you to know:

I see that now. I’m sorry. I wish I had shown up better.

You deserved more than what I gave you.

You were always more than a side character, even if I treated you like one. If you felt invisible, that was about my blindness, not your brightness.

That fear still lingers, the one that says unless I'm extraordinary in some way — brilliant, broken, or intense — I'll be forgettable.

I thought I had to earn love. That being loved wasn't a given, it was a prize for being remarkable. That my value was in how deeply I thought, how much I helped, how beautifully I suffered.

And I didn't just want to be loved. I needed to matter.

These days, I am still negotiating my worth. But the truth I'm learning is:

I don't need to be exceptional to be worthy.
I don't need to be effortless to be lovable.
I don't need to be palatable to be kept.

It still feels wrong. 

But I'm working on believing it.

But, it meant that when people left me, I saw it as a direct reflection of my value. 

I thought being fascinating would protect me from being abandoned. If I could make myself unforgettable, people wouldn’t leave. 

But I didn’t know how to be safe. Or consistent. I only knew how to be intense. 

And looking back, I can see how exhausting that must have been for the people who tried to love me. I blamed people for not loving me, when I couldn't love myself without bleeding.

That wasn't fair. 

I don’t think I knew how to be close without pain, or how to feel important without chaos. I didn't know how to love myself unless it hurt. Not unless I was bleeding. Not unless someone was leaving. Not unless I was proving. Not unless I was surviving. 

The idea that I could be calm, safe, happy (maybe even ordinary) and still be significant? It felt impossible. Because if I didn’t need to perform my value, how would anyone see it?

So instead, I built a soul so intricate, so vivid, so beautifully tragic, that peace felt like erasure. Stillness felt like death. Normalcy felt like exile. I didn't believe I got to be worthy without some sort of suffering contract attached.

And that put weight on people who were never meant to carry it.

I see the harm now, not just the hurt. 

Back then, I always thought of myself as the one who was wounded. But I wounded too. 

I didn't know how to check what I was projecting. And some people caught shrapnel from a war I was fighting with myself.

There was one person in particular who I bound my survival in. They never asked for that burden. They couldn't have carried it, even if they tried.

I thought love could drown me and save me, and god, I wanted it to. 

I never felt like I belonged anywhere. So I searched for proof that I was wanted. Needed. Desired. Valued. Chosen. Worth something.

But I made complexity a pre-requisite for intimacy. I confused intensity with meaning. And because of that, peace often felt like rejection. You can't build a stable life on that foundation. 

I was scared to build something lasting because deep down, I believed I would always ruin it. I would be too much. Too loud. Too weird. Too sharp. Too me.

And once that relationship finally broke, I did too. 

I had built my identity around being connected to him, around being seen by him.

I had assigned all my love, all my worth, to that relationship. So when he left, it didn't feel like a breakup. It felt like verdict.

Him leaving was internalized as evidence that I was inherently unlovable in my truest form. To me, it confirmed my worst fear: That I was always too much, or not enough.

His love had validated my existence. So his absence invalidated it. If I wasn't his person, his PosterGirl, then it meant becoming someone undefined. 

I had built my sense of self around being loved while broken. So when that love vanished, my brain grasped for safety and landed on this:

“I must have been too broken to keep.”

And that wasn't fair. Not to him. Not to me.

He didn't ask to be my reason for surviving. He didn't sign up to carry my identity or prove my worth.

I didn't know how to love someone maturely, responsibly, while keeping myself whole. We were young and unequipped to navigate it. But I didn't know that.

And when his love didn't complete me, I held onto it like it would. I gave him everything I had, hoping it would be reflected back as proof that I was enough. But he deserved better. And so did I. 

Now, with distance, I understand why he left. If I were him, I might’ve done the same. 

And I truly hope he's found a life where he's not needed to rescue anyone. A life where he's wanted just for being himself.

I used to think healing was just about understanding myself: mapping the pain, naming the patterns, explaining how I got here.

But healing isn’t complete until it accounts for its echo. Until it turns outward.

Because my pain didn’t exist in a vacuum. It leaked. It landed. It shaped people who didn’t ask to carry the fallout.

So this part isn’t about who I was to myself. It’s about who I became to others, especially when I was too consumed by surviving to see what I was costing them.

At the time, I used that grief as a shield. Holding on to him gave me a reason not to risk again, not fully.

I was flailing. I had lost the relationship that gave me meaning, so I desperately searched for something to fill that void.

I scoured the emotional wilderness for people who might reflect my own intensity, depth, and damage back to me in a way that felt like recognition.

I sought out those who were as broken as me, who loved as recklessly as me — who gave me a glimpse of a depth that might mean they could accept mine. 

And I tried to rescue them. Because, if I could save them, then maybe I could save myself. Or maybe, I wouldn't need to. 

Maybe it would be proof: that I was capable enough. Helpful enough. Loved enough. Smart enough. Worthy enough.

If I could love someone into wholeness, maybe there was hope for me.

Most of those connections, I still cherish. I didn't pity them, I resonated with them. 

Their trauma didn't repel me. It wasn't a warning sign; it was a shared language.

And sometimes, they let me be dangerous and delicate in the same breath. I found something holy in their brokenness.

But many of those relationships weren't about connection. They were experiments in reconstruction.

I was grieving in real time, testing who I could be in the aftermath. Trying on new mirrors to see if they reflected someone salvageable. 

I offered love to the parts of them that I couldn't love in myself: the displaced, the discarded, the deeply feeling. 

And I reached into their vulnerability behind the bravado, because I needed someone to do that for me.

Sometimes, those relationships awakened my sophistication. They tested my tolerance. And sometimes, they let me feel wanted in a way that felt elemental.

I kept learning the hard lesson that people don't heal just due to proximity to love. And neither do I. 

Those were the easier truths to admit.

Here's the harder one: I wasn't just drawn to wounded people because I understood pain. I was drawn to them because being needed was the closest I could get to feeling safe. 

I wanted their chaos. It let me be the emotional center without being seen as selfish. It let me offer care without risking rejection. It let me control the narrative by always being the stable one, even if I was broken too.

Because if they needed me, maybe they wouldn't leave me.

And truthfully, some of those relationships weren't connections. They were collisions. And I knew it. I walked into the fire anyway, telling myself it was passion.

I wasn't drawn to them because they matched my depth. I was with them because their instability distracted me from my own.

If I was managing their lives, I didn’t have to look at mine: Not the grief. Not the rage. Not the loneliness. Not the gaping void left behind when I lost the love I thought defined me.

Intensity became my identity. I became this gravity well for chaos, because I was trying not to disappear. Chaos, at least, proved I existed.

I didn’t always know how to be a friend without intensity. I didn't know how to be a friend, period. And I owe an apology to the people I hurt because of that. To the friends I overlooked while narrating my own story.

I thought I was being vulnerable: spilling truths, bleeding on the page, sending metaphors out like invitations. 

But I wasn’t really present. I didn’t ask about your days. I didn’t follow up. I didn’t notice when you were in pain, because I was too consumed by my own.

Some of you drifted. Some stayed longer than I probably deserved. Some are still in my life. And I imagine some still wonder if I ever truly saw them as more than supporting characters in my story.

If you were one of them: I’m sorry. You mattered. You still do.

At the time, I didn’t know.

I thought I was self-aware. I thought I was helping people. I thought I was seeking love, romance, connection. I thought I was doing the work.

But I wasn’t. Not really.

I was grasping, desperately, for anything that could resolve the emptiness I didn’t know how to name. Trying to prove I mattered because I didn't know how to believe it.

But if I couldn’t be whole, maybe I could be captivating. If I couldn’t be loved for being soft, maybe I could be admired for surviving sharp.

I wasn’t fully aware of any of that. I thought I was just intense. Passionate. I thought I was doing the work, and in some ways, I was. But I also missed a lot.

And that’s part of what I’m owning now, not just the actions, but the illusions I operated under while thinking I was doing everything right.

Even now, I second guess safety. I wonder if depth can exist without crisis.

When someone loves me without needing to be fixed, without me needing to bleed or burn for them, it feels suspicious.

At the same time, I still have this gnawing fear: That if I stop being different, stop being the one with the layered past and the scarred depth and the poetic lens, I'll vanish into ordinariness.

I'll just be someone’s wife, someone’s mom, someone’s friend… and disappear.

It's not true. Of course it's not.

But I built an entire identity around mastering the truth, around being the one who already knows. The one who sees all the patterns. The meaning behind it all.

But what I'd really been avoiding is being known in the absence of performance. To be known in the boring moments. In the silence. In the "nothing to explain" spaces.

Those are the scary spaces. ...I still fear I'm forgettable. 

I was a soul on fire. And it took me so long to learn how to live without burning everything to stay warm.

And this, this might be one of the hardest truths to sit with: I don’t need another epic. I need to grieve that my life isn’t going to be one.

That's the difference in my current relationship. It didn't start with "Who do I need to save?" It began with "What does love look like when no one has to bleed for it?"

And that's it.

I no longer expect perfection from others. 

I no longer measure flaws for evidence that someone is unqualified to validate me.

I no longer test love by making people walk through fire to reach me.

And I no longer present myself as something fleeting they might lose.

So here's what I know now:

• I often confused being compelling with being loved.
• I confused visibility with intimacy.
• I sometimes hurt people while trying to heal them.
• I needed to be exceptional because "ordinary" felt like "disposable."
• I thought the most interesting version of me was the only lovable one.
• I didn’t trust that the quiet version could ever be enough.
• Impact became my measure for worth, even when it had a cost.
• I asked too much of myself and of others without understanding the consequences.

I’m not writing this because I’m healed. I’m writing this because I’m trying to be accountable.

This isn’t a victory lap. It’s a reckoning. I still get scared. I still overthink.

But I don’t confuse chaos with connection anymore.

And I don’t think I need to shatter to be seen.