I am the one who leaves first. Rarely with my feet. Emotionally, I am usually a step ahead of the goodbye, already half-gone before anyone gets the chance to go from me.
I used to think that made me strong. I could feel the exact moment a relationship got close enough to hurt, and I could manage the temperature down before it got there. A little more distance here. A slightly slower reply there. Enough space that if it ended, I would see it coming and it would not take much of me with it. I called it self-protection, and it was. It was also a cage I built and then complained about being inside.
Controlling the disconnection is the thing I am best at. If I am the one deciding how close we get, then I am never the one caught off guard. I stay in the role of the giver, the reliable one, because that role keeps me useful and keeps me safe at the same time. People do not tend to leave the person who is always doing for them. They also never quite reach the actual me, because I do not let the doing stop long enough for anyone to see who is under it.
The question I cannot shake lately is whether I can ever let myself be fully known, past the capable version I perform for everyone. The whole thing. The needy parts and the scared ones. The parts that want to be chosen without having to earn it first. I do not know if I have ever let a single person see all of that at once. I am not sure I know how.
There is a cost to being this good at self-protection. The walls that keep out the hurt keep out the closeness too. They do not filter. I have kept myself safe and I have kept myself lonely, and I built both with the same hands.
I catch myself doing it in small ways now that I am watching for it. Someone gets warm and I get busy. Someone offers to show up for me and I say I am fine before I even check whether I am. Each one is a tiny door closing. I close so many of them without noticing.
I do not have a triumphant ending here. I have not thrown the walls down and walked into the light. What I have is the willingness to see the walls as walls, and to sit with the possibility that the thing keeping me safe is the same thing keeping me alone. That is where I am. Watching my own hands. Wondering if I can learn to leave a door open long enough for someone to walk through it.
If you do this too, I’m curious where you learned it. Was it something that happened to you, or something you built on your own?
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