There are moments along the path where the light doesn’t arrive all at once.
It flickers.
It hesitates.
It shows you just enough to take the next steps, but not enough to see where the road is leading. This is one of those moments. I stood there today, in a space that was meant to hold laughter, presence, and the quiet joy of being seen, and realized something I think I have known for a while but refused to name.
Not everyone who walks beside you is walking with you.
Some are simply passing through. And some… stay just long enough to let you believe they might choose you, before showing you, in quieter ways, that they already have not.
I used to believe that if I gave enough, showed up enough, helped enough, carried enough, offered enough, then one day my special someone would look at me and say, “ Yes. You. I choose you.”
I understand, now, that it is more important for me to choose myself, first. Depending on someone else to choose you doesn’t give you value. That, I already have.
But, there is a quiet kind of clarity in realizing the person to whom you have given much does not choose you. That immediate understanding that, “I am not your person, am I?”
And somehow, that truth, as painful as it is, is also freeing. Because in that recognition, there is an opportunity to break the pattern.
Not with anger.
Not with bitterness.
But, with awareness.
With the quiet decision to stop offering pieces of myself in exchange for the hope of being chosen, and instead begin standing in the truth that I do not need to be earned into someone’s love.
Nor do I need to earn theirs.
Maybe that is what this lamppost is meant to hold. Not the story of someone who didn’t choose me, but the moment I began to choose myself.
