What You'd Do for Them, They'd Never Do for You

Tired of Giving Everything to People Who Give Nothing Back 

 You love them with your whole chest. You'd move mountains for them. And somehow, when you need them most they're nowhere to be found. It hit me on a Tuesday. No dramatic moment, no breaking point just me, alone with a glass of red, a playlist only I curated, and the kind of quiet that forces you to actually think. You ever just wake up and feel the weight of it sitting right on your chest? Not burnout. Not sadness exactly. Just the slow, honest realization that you've been pouring yourself out for people who never once thought to refill you. You look around at the people you love your friends, your family, the ones you'd drop everything for without a single hesitation and the math doesn't lie. Not because you're keeping score. But because the silence where their effort should be starts to get very, very loud. What you'd do for them, they'd never do for you. And the hardest part? You already knew that. You just kept showing up anyway. There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't come from doing too much. It comes from doing too much for the wrong people. You show up to every crisis. You remember every birthday, every dark season, every small detail they let you in on. You text first. You check in. You drive across town at midnight if they need you. You are, for lack of a better word, somebody. And sometimes that somebody feels invisible. 

 🎵 I had a whole album on shuffle while I was writing this. Music has a way of saying the thing your mouth won't. Sometimes a song hits different at 11pm alone than it ever could in a crowd. That's where some of my best thinking lives just me, the music, and a glass of wine that's seen more of my truth than most people ever will. None of this makes them villains, by the way. Some people are just takers not out of cruelty but out of habit. Some are too wrapped in their own survival to look up long enough to see yours. Some were never taught how to love without conditions. But here's what I've come to understand in my own company, in my own quiet: knowing why someone can't meet you where you are doesn't make standing there alone any less lonely. The grief of it and it is a grief is that you can't even be angry right. You love them. That's the whole problem. If you didn't, none of it would sting. But you do, deeply, the way a loner loves: all the way, privately, without needing an audience for it. Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. I've been in rooms full of people and never felt more by myself. What I want to say to anyone sitting in that same feeling tonight probably also alone, probably also with something in your glass is this: noticing the imbalance isn't betrayal. It's not selfish. It's not ungrateful. It's just honest. It's your spirit finally saying, we deserve some of what we give. So here's to the ones who love quietly and deeply. The ones whose playlists know them better than most people do. The ones who pour a glass, sit with the silence, and choose themselves not because it's easy, but because life goes on, and so must they. 

 Welcome to the blog. This is post one. It's messy and honest and entirely, unapologetically me. That's exactly how I plan to keep it.