Learning when to stop being available to those who never planned to stay
There comes a point when you realize you have been the last rest stop for too many people.
The place where they pull off, take what they need, steady themselves and then merge back onto the highway unchanged.
For a long time, I mistook availability for kindness and tolerance for strength.
Self-esteem has to rise before you can close those off-ramps. Until it does, the wrong people keep finding their way in.
They arrive with a rulebook for how you are expected to behave, what you must accept and how little room there is for objection. Any boundary you try to set is treated as negotiable, while theirs remain fixed.
Any concession they make can be withdrawn without warning, while yours is expected to stand.
I do not regret the time I shared with any of them. Those moments mattered.
But there comes a point when the familiar reassurance of “you just haven’t met the right one” begins to ring hollow, especially when it is followed by “I wish I had met someone like you,” an uncomfortable laugh and a quick shift in conversation.
Over time, it becomes clear that for some, that line is less encouragement and more a way to keep you close, just not close enough.
The hardest truth is simply some people were never attracted to who you are. They were attracted to access, opportunity and what a name opens, what the work provides and what simply being close makes easier for them.
That realization quietly alters how intimacy feels, even in its smallest moments.
When that illusion finally breaks, clarity follows. You begin to see what you were never meant to notice while moving at someone else’s pace.
All along, the road ahead was visible, but distance reveals how often you were asked to enter quietly, to take the back way in, to exist as a shadow in public while someone carefully maintained the declaration of being single, even while sharing a vacation, a moment or a life adjacent to yours.
There is no rest in a place that asks you to disappear. There is no safety in a home that requires secrecy.
Anyone who insists on keeping you hidden from nearly everyone is not protecting privacy, they are protecting options. Do not be fooled. This applies to men and women alike.
At this point, those emotions are being laid to rest. Not out of bitterness, but out of self-preservation. I am done being convenient. I am done living on a leash, long or otherwise.
Whatever emotions remained for that world have reached their end.
Some chapters are not meant to be revisited. They are meant to be closed, honored for what they were and left behind so something quieter, truer and whole can finally take their place.
