The Sovereign Shift ✨
After everything I said in I Don’t Want to Just Be Friends, I thought I was trying to figure out what I wanted.
Whether I wanted friendship.
Whether I wanted something more.
Whether I wanted distance.
Whether I wanted anything at all.
And maybe I was asking the wrong question.
Because I’m realizing something.
And I’m not saying this like I’ve figured it all out.
I’m saying it because I’m literally figuring this shit out while I’m writing it.
I think I got so consumed with how I was experiencing the connection that I lost sight of something really important:
He was experiencing it, too.
Same connection.
Different person.
Different history.
Different needs.
Different wounds.
Different way of seeing it.
And just because two people are standing inside the same connection doesn’t mean they’re experiencing the same connection.
I know what it felt like for me.
I know what he became for me.
He was my safe space.
And I’m not taking that back.
I’m not going to rewrite my experience just because I’m beginning to see something else.
He really was.
There was an area of my life where I could breathe around him.
I could talk.
I could laugh.
I could be weird.
I could talk about things that had absolutely nothing to do with somebody else’s problems.
And that was huge for me.
Because I’m used to being the person people bring their shit to.
So having somebody I could just be with?
That felt fucking good.
And I think I needed it more than I realized.
Maybe that’s why I became so immersed in it.
Because when you finally find somewhere you can breathe, you don’t necessarily want to leave.
But here’s where I have to tell the truth about myself.
I knew my friend needed space.
I knew that.
He needs his alone time.
He needs to be unbothered.
He needs a life that exists outside of the connection.
And there were times when that absolutely offended me.
Not because I didn’t understand it.
Because my wounds didn’t want to understand it.
My wounds needed their time, too.
My wounds wanted closeness.
My wounds wanted reassurance.
My wounds wanted access to the person who had become my safe space.
And when what I needed was closeness and what my friend needed was space…
those two things collided.
And I think that’s where I started making a mistake.
Not because I wanted too much.
Not because I was trying to consume somebody.
Not because I was trying to take something from him.
But because I started losing myself inside of the connection.
And I want to be careful with that statement.
Because I don’t believe that being deeply connected to someone means you’ve done something wrong.
I don’t believe that loving somebody means you have to keep them at arm’s length so you can prove you’re independent.
And I don’t believe that making a relationship a priority means you’ve failed at having a life.
People are different.
Relationships are different.
Some people need a tremendous amount of independence.
Some people naturally intertwine their lives.
Some people need more space.
Some people need more closeness.
Neither automatically makes one person right and the other wrong.
But there is a difference between allowing someone to become important to you and allowing the connection to become your entire world.
And I think I got close to that line.
Maybe I crossed it sometimes.
Because I started making room for the connection in ways that displaced other things.
I started rearranging my time.
My attention.
My availability.
And I didn’t necessarily notice it happening.
I was just happy.
I finally had somebody I could talk to.
Somebody I enjoyed.
Somebody I felt comfortable with.
Somebody who gave me a place to rest.
So I made room.
And then I made more room.
And then eventually I had to ask myself:
What else am I making room for?
Because this is the part that hit me.
I don’t want to learn that the answer to attachment is to need less.
I don’t want to become the woman who never gets excited about somebody.
Never wants to talk all day.
Never gets attached.
Never needs reassurance.
Never lets another person become important.
That’s not growth to me.
Growth looks more like:
I can fucking love being here with you and still go live my life.
I can miss you without abandoning myself.
I can want closeness without making your distance mean something about my worth.
I can appreciate the access you give me without turning that access into an expectation for more.
And I can allow you to be who you are without needing your way of being to change because I got closer to you.
That’s the part that has really been sitting with me.
Because I knew my friend needed space.
And when I chose to get closer, I also chose to get closer to the whole person.
Not just the parts that felt good to me.
Not just the version of him that was available when I wanted him.
Not just the version that made me feel safe.
The whole person.
The person who needs to be left alone sometimes.
The person who values his independence.
The person who doesn’t necessarily attach the way I attach.
And if I can’t accommodate that?
Then I have a choice.
I can step back.
I can leave.
I can decide that our needs don’t fit.
But I don’t get to move closer and then resent somebody for needing the space I already knew they needed.
That’s my part.
And I think that’s what I’m finally seeing.
But there’s another part of this that I can’t ignore.
Because while I’ve been looking at what I experienced, I’ve also been thinking about how easy it is for us to assume that because two people shared an experience, they must have experienced it the same way.
They don’t.
I can tell you what he was to me.
I cannot tell you what I was to him.
I can tell you what I felt.
I cannot tell you what he felt.
I can tell you what I needed.
I cannot tell you what he needed.
And I think there’s something incredibly important about being able to sit with that uncertainty.
Because sometimes we get so consumed with the lens we’re looking through that we forget there is another lens.
I was looking through mine.
Through my history.
Through my wounds.
Through my need for safety.
Through the relief I felt when I found somebody I could finally breathe around.
And he was looking through his.
I don’t know exactly what was happening behind that lens.
And I’m not going to make up his experience just so I can make mine make sense.
That’s not my story to tell.
But I can acknowledge that it exists.
And maybe that’s where the real shift is beginning for me.
Because I don’t want to make him wrong for experiencing the connection differently than I did.
And I don’t want to make myself wrong for experiencing it deeply.
Both things can be true.
And that brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about.
Sometimes we say somebody fumbled us.
And sometimes they probably did.
Sometimes somebody doesn’t recognize what they have.
Sometimes they aren’t ready.
Sometimes they don’t have the capacity to hold something when it arrives.
But what if we’re not always supposed to take being fumbled as a statement about our value?
What if sometimes it is simply a statement about where two people were in their lives when they met?
That thought hit me differently recently.
Because people don’t meet us as finished versions of themselves.
Neither do we meet other people as finished versions of who they’re going to become.
We’re meeting each other where we are.
And we are constantly becoming.
Our experiences teach us.
Our relationships teach us.
Our mistakes teach us.
The things we lose teach us.
The things we mishandle teach us.
Sometimes we don’t realize who we were being until we become somebody different.
And then we look backward and say:
Oh.
I wouldn’t handle that the same way now.
That’s growth.
And maybe that’s why I’m becoming a little less offended by the idea of somebody fumbling me.
Because I have to be willing to admit that I’ve fumbled people, too.
Not because I didn’t care about them.
Not because they weren’t valuable.
Not because they weren’t worthy of being loved.
Sometimes I simply wasn’t the version of myself who knew how to hold what was in front of me.
And maybe that’s true for other people, too.
Maybe sometimes the person who couldn’t hold us wasn’t necessarily saying:
“You weren’t enough.”
Maybe they were saying, without having the words for it:
“I don’t know how to hold this.”
And that’s different.
I’m not saying that to excuse anybody’s behavior.
I’m saying it because I don’t want to spend my life turning every painful experience into a courtroom where somebody has to be the one who was right and somebody else has to be the one who failed.
Sometimes two people can care about each other and still hurt each other.
Sometimes two people can experience the same connection and walk away carrying completely different stories.
Sometimes we don’t know what the other person was carrying until we’re finally quiet enough to recognize that they were carrying something, too.
And I think that’s where I am.
I’m trying to become quiet enough to see beyond my own lens.
Not abandon my perspective.
Not invalidate what I felt.
Just widen the frame.
Because I don’t want to lose myself in connection.
But I also don’t want to protect myself from connection so fiercely that I never allow another person to matter.
I want to learn how to do both.
How to love deeply without disappearing.
How to attach without abandoning myself.
How to allow somebody to become important without making them responsible for every place inside of me that needs to breathe.
How to respect somebody else’s space without experiencing it as rejection.
How to recognize when something isn’t being offered instead of trying to convince myself it eventually will be.
And maybe most importantly…
How to remain myself while loving somebody else.
I don’t have that figured out.
Not even close.
I’m still learning.
I’m still looking at my own behavior.
I’m still asking uncomfortable questions.
I’m still trying to understand what happened between two people who experienced the same connection through two completely different lenses.
And I don’t know what we’re going to call it.
I don’t know what comes next.
I don’t know if there’s a next.
But I know something now that I didn’t know when I wrote the first piece.
I don’t have to choose between saying:
“What I experienced was real.”
and
“His experience may have been completely different.”
I can hold both.
Maybe that’s what growing up emotionally actually looks like.
Not having all the answers.
Not making somebody the villain.
Not making yourself the victim.
Not pretending you didn’t hurt.
Not pretending you didn’t hurt somebody else.
Just being honest enough to say:
This is what I can see now.
And maybe tomorrow I’ll see something else.
Because I’m still becoming.
And so is everybody else.
The Sovereign Shift.
Real thoughts. Raw truths. A higher you. ✨