I Stayed. But That Didn’t Mean It Was Okay.

Sometimes it’s difficult to read something written by a younger version of yourself—not because the writing is bad, but because you’ve grown. With time and distance, the way you hold the memory changes. Here is a look back at “Choose,” seven years later

Years ago, I dated a man with a big personality.

He was outgoing, gregarious, intelligent, well-traveled, and seemingly unapologetic about who he was.

He was the kind of person who drew people into his orbit without appearing to try. And I, like so many others, was captivated.

Until one evening, when I was playfully tickling him, and he became angry.

He’d asked me to stop. I hadn’t listened.

And so he picked up his drink and poured it over my head.

I remember sitting there, stunned, my wet hair dripping into my lap, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

But what I remember even more clearly is what came next.

He told me it was my fault.

He’d asked me to stop, and I hadn’t. Therefore, I’d deserved what he’d done.

And while I understood that I should have respected his request, something about his explanation felt terribly wrong.

Because it was.

I got up, walked into the next room, and gathered my belongings.

When I returned, I found him sitting with his head in his hands.

And I stayed.

For years afterward, I would revisit that moment and wonder why.

Why hadn’t I walked out the door? Why had I allowed someone to treat me that way? Why had I continued a relationship that would eventually bring more moments just like that one?

In 2019, when I first wrote about this experience, I believed I had found my answer.

I believed that by staying, I’d taught him that his behavior was acceptable.

That I’d received the treatment I tolerated.

That my choices had somehow given him permission.

And while I still believe we have a responsibility to ourselves to recognize when something isn’t right, there’s something about that earlier interpretation that doesn’t sit quite right with me anymore.

Because staying wasn’t permission.

And my inability to recognize what I deserved didn’t make me responsible for someone else’s decision to mistreat me.

I can hold two truths at once.

I should have respected his request to stop tickling him.

And he should never have poured his drink over my head.

One does not cancel out the other.

I can also recognize that I had choices without pretending those choices were as simple or obvious to the woman sitting there with wet hair as they are to the woman writing about her today.

That’s something I’ve come to understand about growth.

We have a tendency to look backward with all the wisdom we’ve accumulated and judge our former selves for not knowing what we know now.

As though the lessons we learned through our experiences should somehow have been available to us before we lived them.

Funny how that works.

I look back at that younger version of myself with a tenderness I didn’t possess in 2019.

Because I don’t think she stayed because she believed she deserved to be mistreated.

I think she stayed because she wanted to believe the man she’d come to know was still the man sitting in front of her.

I think she saw him with his head in his hands and recognized something familiar.

Regret. Vulnerability. Humanity.

Perhaps she wanted to believe that one terrible moment didn’t define an entire person.

Perhaps she was more comfortable extending compassion to someone else than extending it to herself.

And perhaps, somewhere beneath all of that, she was afraid that walking away meant losing something she desperately wanted.

Connection.

Love.

The possibility of being chosen.

I can’t know exactly what was going through her mind. But I know enough about myself now to recognize how often I’ve mistaken someone’s potential for their actual capacity to love me.

How often I’ve extended understanding long after understanding stopped serving me.

How often I’ve been so invested in whether someone wanted me that I neglected to ask whether I wanted what they were offering.

And, friend, that last one is a doozy.

Because there’s a difference between wanting to be loved and being willing to accept whatever someone calls love.

There’s a difference between having compassion for someone’s struggles and making yourself responsible for healing them.

And there’s a difference between recognizing the humanity in another person and allowing that humanity to eclipse your own.

For a long time, I thought the lesson was that I needed to teach people how to treat me.

But now I’m learning a different lesson.

I needed to learn how to stop abandoning myself when someone else disappointed me.

Not because their behavior was my fault.

Not because I could control whether they were kind, considerate, honest, or emotionally available.

But because I could learn to recognize when the relationship I was experiencing was no longer the relationship I wanted.

And I could learn to trust that recognition.

I’ve spent years doing that work.

Learning to identify my needs, communicate my desires, establish boundaries, and recognize when I’m slipping into familiar patterns.

I’ve learned that someone’s vulnerability isn’t necessarily evidence of their willingness to change.

That chemistry doesn’t guarantee compatibility.

That understanding why someone behaves a certain way doesn’t obligate me to remain available for the behavior.

And that I can care deeply about someone without making their choices a reflection of my worth.

And there is something else that I find interesting.

Even after all that work, I still sometimes catch myself looking for reassurance in someone else’s attention.

Wondering whether I’m interesting enough. Attractive enough. Worth pursuing.

Feeling that little sting when someone doesn’t choose me.

And occasionally, if I’m not paying attention, allowing that disappointment to influence how I feel about myself.

Which tells me that growth isn’t necessarily the absence of old patterns.

Sometimes it’s simply recognizing them before we build a home inside them again.

It’s noticing the familiar urge to explain, excuse, accommodate, or prove ourselves.

And choosing something different.

Not from anger.

Not from a need to punish someone for failing to meet our expectations.

But from the understanding that we don’t have to convince anyone to see our value.

I think about the women I admired when I first wrote this piece.

Women who seemed so certain of themselves. Who spoke their minds, expressed their needs, and walked away from situations that didn’t honor them.

At the time, I thought the difference between those women and me was their ability to make better choices.

Now I wonder how many of them had simply learned, through their own difficult experiences, that they could survive the disappointment of walking away.

That they could tolerate the discomfort of not being chosen.

That being alone was not the same thing as being unworthy of love.

And that sometimes the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is stop negotiating with what we already know.

I don’t believe anymore that we receive what we tolerate.

Life is far too complicated for that tidy little declaration.

Good people are mistreated. Loving people are betrayed. Strong, intelligent, self-aware people sometimes stay in relationships that hurt them.

And none of that means they invited, deserved, or permitted the harm.

But I do believe that as we grow, we become more capable of recognizing what nourishes us and what diminishes us.

We become more willing to disappoint someone else rather than continually disappoint ourselves.

We learn that boundaries aren’t about controlling another person’s behavior.

They’re about deciding how we will care for ourselves in response to it.

And maybe most importantly, we begin to understand that our worthiness isn’t something we establish through the choices we make.

Our worthiness exists before the choice.

It existed when I sat there with a drink dripping from my hair.

It existed when I stayed.

It existed through every subsequent mistake, every disappointment, every relationship in which I confused being wanted with being valued.

And it exists now.

I don’t need to become a woman who deserves love, respect, tenderness, and reciprocity.

I’ve always been that woman.

What has changed is my willingness to believe it.

So, friend, if there’s one thing I’d tell that younger version of myself, it wouldn’t be to turn on her damn asshole radar.

Although, admittedly, that wouldn’t hurt.

I’d tell her to pay attention to herself.

To the discomfort she feels when someone’s words don’t align with their actions.

To the voice that whispers, “This doesn’t feel right”.

To the ways she begins to change and alter herself to accommodate in the hope of keeping someone close.

I’d tell her that she doesn’t have to stop loving someone to recognize that a relationship isn’t loving her back.

That she doesn’t have to prove someone is a terrible person to decide they aren’t the right person for her.

And that she doesn’t need anyone else’s permission to leave.

Most of all, I’d tell her that she doesn’t have to earn the kind of love she’s been searching for.

She never did.

We don’t become worthy when we finally choose ourselves.

We choose ourselves because we are already worthy.

Always,
Your Trusted Friend ❤︎‬