When Enough Stops Being About Them

When Knowing Isn't Enough Series | Part 4

The day before we were supposed to meet to decide whether we were going to continue the relationship or let it go, I was going through my phone and came across a voice memo I had recorded almost a year earlier. I had forgotten it was there, and as I listened to it, I heard myself laying everything out, what I needed, why I needed it, how many times I had already said it, and how I didn't want to keep having the same conversation over and over again. I could hear how clear I was, how certain I was, even then, that this wasn't something I could keep revisiting. And sitting there, listening to that version of myself, I felt sad. I couldn't believe another year had passed and nothing had changed. He had given me a hundred smaller things that showed he cared, but never answered the one thing I kept asking for. The only thing that had changed was how long I had been willing to stay in it.

I felt annoyed because I had been too clear, too intentional, too self-aware for this much time to have passed without any real movement. And I remembered something a friend had said to me, that continuing to allow things to be the way they were was beneath me. They understood my tendency to give grace, to be patient, to be understanding, because that had always been who I was. But at a certain point, staying had become beneath me. I had heard those words before and I had understood them. But sitting there with that voice memo playing, I felt them for the first time, not as a belief of a friend who loved me, but as a belief that had finally become my own. And it was only when that feedback turned into personal fact for me that I was able to see things differently.

Listening to the voice memo left me feeling both validated and done. Not in anger, but in clarity, because I realized that more conversation was not necessary. I had already said everything that needed to be said. There was nothing left to add. It was clear that the upcoming conversation didn't need new words from me. It needed new action from him.

But if I'm honest, I had already known that before I ever pressed play. It wasn't even the first time that kind of clearness had found me uninvited. The nights leading up to the conversation, it started showing up in my dreams. One night I heard myself say, 'I don't want to do this anymore', and the feeling was so strong it jolted me awake. I knew in that moment that something had shifted. Because all the time I had spent trying to soften myself, to quiet my needs, to convince myself they didn't have to matter as much as they did, it was like my unmet need had finally refused to be silenced, even by me. And that's why when I said it in the dream it felt so resounding and uncompromising. I didn't say I don't love you. I didn't say I don't want to be with you. I said I don't want to do this anymore. I didn't want to silence myself. I didn't want to live beneath the standard I had for myself. I didn't want to keep creating space for someone who wasn't putting forth the same effort to create space for me. In another dream the very next night, I found myself in that same place again, asking him to choose, and when he didn't answer, I heard myself say, 'then I will choose. We're done.' I woke up unsettled because I understood what it meant, and I wasn't sure I was ready to live with what that meant.

That's the thing about clarity, it doesn't always arrive when you're ready for it. Sometimes it whispers to you in a voice memo you forgot you recorded, or in a dream you can't shake, or in the quiet before a conversation you've already had a hundred times. And when it keeps finding you that way, it stops feeling like a question and starts feeling like an answer you've been avoiding.

When we met, I didn't rehearse it again or try to explain it differently, because there was nothing left to clarify. I just listened, not for effort or intention or even understanding, but for something different from what I had been given before. And when that didn't come, when what was offered sounded like everything I had already heard, I understood that nothing about this was going to change. It wasn't confusion or timing. It was what it had always been. And in that moment I stopped trying to make it enough, and I chose not to stay in a version of love that didn't make room for me.

And choosing not to stay in a version of love that didn't make room for me wasn't about moving toward someone else. When my marriage ended over a decade ago, my ex-husband asked if there was someone else, prompted by that old monkey and branch idea that you don't leave one branch unless you're already reaching for another. That wasn't the case for me. The branch I was on wasn't sustaining me and I was willing to try my chances on solid ground. I had no other branches.

I eventually entered other relationships because I was open to experience love differently. And I did. Each relationship reached a part of me that hadn't been reached before, and I carry genuine gratitude for that. But what I recognized is that the love I needed to experience differently was the love I had for myself.  I needed to love myself in a way that gave me a voice that didn't back down at the first sign of conflict. I needed to love myself in a way that allowed me to breathe and to coexist without disappearing.

And one of the more painful truths I had to sit with was that me not having a voice was not always about someone else muffling me. Sometimes, it was me muffling myself. Out of fear of losing them. Out of fear of them being unhappy. Out of fear that if I took up too much space, I would become too much. And so I kept making myself smaller, and I called it grace, and I called it patience, and I called it love. But it wasn't any of those things, it was self-erasure for the sake of "love".

I didn't leave any relationship to move on to someone else, I left to find my way back to myself. Until I could practice the art of truly loving myself, I would keep defaulting to the satisfaction of someone else. The version of love that made room for me needed to come from me first.

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