The Love I No Longer Want to Earn

I keep thinking about how easy it is to confuse being needed with being loved. Needed gives you a job. It tells you where to stand, what to carry, and how useful you must remain. Love is quieter. Love does not always hand you a list. Sometimes it simply makes room for you, and that can feel almost frightening when you are used to earning your place. Writing around this theme stirred up the question I think many women carry but do not always say aloud: If I stop doing everything, will there still be something here? That question has teeth. Because what if the answer is no? What if the relationship, the friendship, the whole delicate arrangement was standing because you kept holding it upright? What if your so-called strength was the scaffolding around something that never learned how to shelter you? I am sitting with the grief inside that realization. Not only the grief of what happened, but the grief of how long we can remain devoted to potential. We see the house as it could be. We decorate rooms that do not exist yet. We keep bringing lumber to a person who never agreed to build. And then we blame ourselves for being tired. While writing Bold As A Lion, I Fear No Evil, I kept returning to the quiet moments. Not the dramatic exits people expect, but the smaller refusals. The brief phone call. The pause before saying yes. The moment the body speaks before the mind has prepared its argument. Those moments matter to me because becoming is not always loud. Sometimes it looks rude to people who benefited from your silence. Sometimes it feels lonely before it feels free. I want readers to know that healthy love may not immediately feel like home. If home once meant watching, waiting, fixing, or proving, then peace can feel unfamiliar. You may be tempted to mistrust it because it does not activate the part of you trained to survive. Give yourself time. You are not foolish because you loved fully. You are not weak because familiar patterns found you again. But you are allowed to stop calling exhaustion devotion. You are allowed to become unavailable for the kind of love that only recognizes your worth when you are working for it. I am learning that self-worth is less about announcing what I deserve and more about noticing what I no longer negotiate. Quietly. Clearly. One refusal at a time.