Someone Else’s Capacity To Love Is Not Our Responsibility

It’s interesting, the space we presume we take up in someone else’s mind.

Sometimes these presumptions are based on words they uttered, phrases they sold to us in the dark, moments we stole that we held too tightly to.

We have this hope that we matter much more to someone than we do, because we believed them when they said we did. We listened to their words more than we paid attention to their actions, and that was our mistake.

Perhaps they meant what they said in that very moment. They have the capacity to preach these declarations of eloquent magnitude which sweep us off our feet. But those grand speeches are as temporary as the air their words are carried on—they don’t tend to last. It’s okay to enjoy these in the moment, just remember how fickle they might be in the long run.

They have a life, a history, a part of themselves that we are (nor will we ever be) privy to. There is an entire existence we aren’t allowed to know for some reason or another. Knowing this gap in our involvement, how could we ever assume we were as important as we originally thought?

This isn’t really a question of being enough for someone, or ‘if they wanted to, they would’. Let’s be honest: those are outdated ways of thinking anyway. It’s more the scenario of everyone only has so much capacity, so much space they have to fill. And maybe, just maybe, they didn’t have as much space as we thought.

People are only truly capable of so much, and being more realistic of what someone’s capabilities toward us are will only aid us in the long run. We don’t need to question ourselves here, we just need to ask if this other person is really in the space to allow us in in our entirety.

If they’re not, if they’re unable to hold and treasure all that we are, we need to leave. We have to graciously accept their circumstances, even knowing it might hurt us, and we have to walk away. We have to understand that sticking around would only cause us both harm, and no one wants that.

There will be someone down the road (however short or long that road may be) that does have the space for us. That wants to allow the room to stretch and grow and include us. But we shouldn’t be trying to shove ourselves somewhere we don’t belong when there’s someone else waiting with much more space.

We have to drop our ego, accept someone else’s limitations, and move forward on our own.