For most of my life, I set a beautiful table and then stood at the counter to eat, if I ate at all. I gave the good plates to everyone else. I gave the last chair, the warmest seat, the biggest portion, and told myself that was what love looked like: the giving until there was nothing left to give.
I used to think wanting someone meant needing them to complete a sentence I could not finish on my own. Desire and dependency felt like the same word to me for a long time. They are not. I can want you at my table without needing you to be the reason I sit down. Feeling worthy of love was never supposed to be work I had to perform to earn a seat I already owned.
There is a difference between a person who adds to your life and a person who complicates it, and for years I confused the second for depth, as though how hard something was proved how much it mattered. It does not. There is no beauty in self-betrayal, no matter how poetic it looks from the outside, giving yourself away piece by piece until you are running the rest of your life on reserves nobody bothered to refill. Operating on empty was never required of me. I was just never taught that reciprocity was.
Kindness was never supposed to be a bonus feature, something extra a person hands you on their good days. It is the standard, or it is not love at all. And the kindest thing I ever learned to do was turn some of it back toward myself. The greatest act of love I know is the one a woman gives herself. It models what she will accept. It soothes her. It sets a boundary and then, harder still, it honors the boundary it just set.
I am no longer the woman who poured herself into whatever shape a man needed her to take, believing that flexibility was the same thing as love. I am the woman who can hold someone close and still keep her own shape entirely intact, her own name, her own mind, her own reasons for getting up in the morning. Love was never meant to require me to become unrecognizable to myself. I remain exactly who I am, and I have finally learned that the right love was never going to ask for anything else.