Stop Abandoning Yourself For People Who Don’t Show Up For You

Stop abandoning yourself for people who don’t show up for you. The people who you never truly feel like you can be your full self around. The people who are nowhere to be found when you need them the most. The people who you never seem to be good enough for.

Stop bending over backward for people who are never there to help you stand back up when you fall. Stop making yourself smaller for people who hate to see you take up any space at all. Stop staying quiet to keep the peace with people who do nothing but disrupt yours. Stop overexplaining yourself to people who have already decided they do not care to understand you.

Stop suppressing your feelings to make people who repeatedly wound you more comfortable. Stop betraying your own boundaries for people who only disrespect them. Stop pretending you don’t have needs for people who would always say those needs were too much. Stop maintaining relationships with people when you know it’s destroying you to hold on.

Because when you do these things, you abandon yourself. And in your self-abandonment, you will shape-shift into someone you no longer recognize or really like all too much. You will feel like a stranger in your own skin. You will become bitter and resentful and angry and so beyond exhausted because you’ve exerted all of your energy trying and bending and breaking to play a role you know isn’t yours. And the worst part is that you will be surrounded by people who don’t see you for all of those messy, fucked up, and wonderful things you actually are. Instead, they’ll adore a character you wrote and you’ll hate yourself for it.

Please know nothing will break your heart more than being loved because you are acting like someone you know you are not.

I get why you do it, the self-abandoning. You don’t want people to leave and you think that the “easier” you are, the more likely they are to stay. But please know the right people would never ask you to shrink as a bartering chip for their love. They would never ask you to hold those messy, fucked up, wonderful pieces of yourself hostage. They would never demand you fold your heart away because they don’t want to take care of it. The wrong people will, though.

As scary as it is, you must start standing up in your truth, even if it means losing people in the process. Because if you don’t, you will lose yourself and that is a far worse fate. But just know that you will never lose the right people when you do this. In fact, you will make more room for the people who are meant to be here. The people who want to stay.