I'm just a girl...

For the longest time, I believed I was the emotionally available one. The girl who communicated. The one who knew how to love. I prided myself on being the woman who felt deeply, who wasn’t afraid to speak her truth, who would show up and hold space for others. But lately, I’ve been sitting with the uncomfortable possibility that I might be the dismissive one. That maybe, just maybe, I’m the one who disappears without reason or worse, with a reason too hollow to be voiced aloud. "A strict woman & a leaver".

It’s so hard for me to talk to a man.

It starts as curiosity. A name. A smile. I try, I truly do. I give it a day or two, sometimes three. But by day four, I feel the itch, the quiet kind that starts under the skin and settles in the bones. I become irritated, sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes because he breathed too loud or replied too slow. And then I’m gone. Emotionally at first. Then completely. No further explanation. No angry text. No passive aggression. Just… absence. A red flag waving in my gut.

There are moments, fleeting, delicate... when I crave companionship. When I think, perhaps, I want to be held. To belong to someone. But those moments are short-lived these days, kinda like a song that never finishes playing. Because my obsession with solitude always wins. It’s not loneliness. I’ve grown fond of my own company. It’s comforting, predictable, quiet. And this is not a complaint. This is not sadness wrapped in poetic words. This is me dissecting myself and peeling back the layers and daring to say, this is who I am, right now.

And still, I’m fascinated by the way we talk about relationships. Women, especially. How we say we don’t owe men anything. And to a large extent, we don’t. But I’ve watched too many of us, myself included, expect men to behave a certain way with no real conversation, no context, no clue. A man doesn’t know what to get her for her birthday, and she’s hurt. She expected him to just know. But people are not born knowing our specific love languages. They learn if we teach them. But some of us would rather sit in silence and resentment than say, “This is what I like. This is what makes me feel loved.” Because to ask feels too vulnerable. To explain feels like begging. And we are taught to be anything but needy.

We confuse silence with strength.

I have done that too. Expected a man to reach into my unspoken world and hand me what I hadn’t named. I wanted him to prove something I wasn’t even sure I believed in.

Maybe that’s why I struggle to stay. Because I find safety in detachment. Because needing someone makes me feel like I’m standing barefoot on burning coal. Because intimacy is too much light, and I’ve grown used to the shade.

This isn’t a cry for help.

This is me, laying it all bare.

Unlearning what I thought I knew.

Becoming fluent in the language of myself.

Even if I’m still learning how to speak it out loud.

And i dare say, I'm not toxic.