I think I’ve reached a point where I no longer want other people’s behavior to decide who I am.
If someone didn’t show up for me, I don’t automatically want to withhold from them.
If someone wasn’t generous with me, I don’t want that to make me less generous.
If someone doesn’t share my values, that doesn’t mean I abandon mine.
For years, I think I unconsciously believed relationships were supposed to work through some kind of emotional accounting. You did this, so I do that. You didn’t do this for me, so why should I do it for you?
And I understand why we do it. Sometimes it is self-protection. Sometimes it comes from resentment. Sometimes we are simply tired of giving to people who do not give back.
There is also an important difference between continuing to give and continuing to tolerate.
I can still walk away.
I can stop giving someone access to me. I can decide that a relationship, friendship, workplace or situation is no longer aligned with the direction I am trying to go.
That is not the same thing as changing my character because of what someone else did.
I think that distinction has taken me a very long time to understand.
My worth is not dependent on how you perceive me. My values do not become less valid because you do not share them. And I do not have to become someone I dislike in order to protect myself from someone who hurt me.
I’m not writing this from some enlightened mountaintop.
I still carry pain.
I still get triggered. I still misunderstand things. I still have moments where the older version of me arrives first.
The difference is that there is now usually another voice somewhere behind it saying: look again.
That is probably the best description I have for what years of inner work have given me.
Not a cure.
More awareness.
More space between what happens to me and what I decide to do with it.
It has taken me roughly fifteen years of examining myself, and probably seven years of doing it with real intensity, to get anywhere close to this place. Even saying that feels strange, because there is no universal timeline for any of it.
Nobody can tell you that grief takes six months.
Healing takes three years.
Forgiveness takes five.
Self-awareness arrives at forty, fifty or sixty.
There is no syllabus.
Your path is yours.
And perhaps part of growing is realizing that even when people give you advice about where you “should” be by now, you don’t necessarily have to become angry with them either.
Once you understand yourself a little better, you start understanding where other people’s words come from too.
You can hear something and think: that belongs to them.
You can decide where to place it without carrying it home.
That feels like a kind of freedom to me.
Not freedom from pain.
Freedom from allowing every painful thing to become an instruction.
Pain can tell me something happened.
Wisdom gets to decide what happens next.
And perhaps that is the work now.
Not becoming perfectly healed.
Just staying in that place of awareness for longer.
Recognizing sooner when I am moving away from myself.
Listening when my intuition tells me that a person, a dynamic or an environment is pulling me somewhere I no longer want to go.
And being willing to leave.
There are no shortcuts to this.
There is only the strange, private work of becoming someone you know well enough that other people can no longer define you for you.
I think I finally know myself well enough to understand this:
You do not have to treat me according to my values.
But I still have to live according to them.
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