The Person Who Left You Wasn't Your Ex. It Was You.

I finally woke up and realised what had been missing all along, and it was me. Not a better version of me, nor the version that had it all together. Just me, unfinished and full, right here. I had been yearning for myself all along without realising.

This is for the ones who've been searching in all the wrong places, and for the ones who didn't even know they were searching.

We grew up in a culture that taught us to source everything outward, looking for our worth in who wants us, validation from who sees us, or even meaning from how productive we could be. We were handed busyness as a virtue and told, in a thousand quiet ways, that a woman who is always doing is a woman who is valuable. That to slow down is to fall behind, to need is to be weak, and that to rest; truly rest, without guilt, is a luxury you must earn first.

So we learned to outsource. We outsourced our worth to our output. We outsourced our wholeness to other people. And somewhere in all that motion, all that doing and achieving and showing up and holding it together, we forgot to ask whether any of it actually felt like ours.

That is the quiet epidemic no one names. Not burnout, nor loneliness exactly, but something underneath both. A woman who has been so busy performing her life that she has lost the feeling of actually living it.

It showed up at work first, or maybe we noticed it there first: the frantic pace, the inability to sit still. The guilt that arrived the moment we stopped being productive, as though our nervous systems had forgotten that rest was allowed. We became women who could not potter without a goal or dawdle without a destination. Women who said yes when we meant no, who helped when we were already depleted, who kept going because stopping felt like a kind of failure.

The more you study happiness; real happiness, not the curated kind, the more you realise it comes down to one thing: living in alignment with what truly matters to you. Not success, not achievement, not performed love, just a life that feels wholly yours. When you wake up glad it's your day, your joy isn't borrowed from someone else's approval, and your worth isn't hanging on what you achieve next.

I want to be a relaxed woman. An unhurried woman. A woman who has untangled her self-worth from her productivity, who can rest without guilt or anxiety, who trusts in her own rhythms of hard work and deep rest, of outer contribution and inner healing, of holding others and letting herself be held. A woman who feels safe to say no, safe to ask for help, and safe to slow down. That kind of woman is not built by doing more. She is built by unlearning the idea that she has to earn the right to simply exist.

And then it showed up in love. Of course it did. It was always the same wound, just wearing a different face. We took that same outsourcing into our relationships. The same hunger for external validation that made us overwork made us over-love. We gave more than we had, and we stayed longer than we should have. We thought, If I love harder, if I show up more, if I make myself undeniable, surely then they'll hold me. We confused the feeling of being needed with the feeling of being loved, and we stayed in things that were half-formed and hollow because being alone felt like proof of something we were afraid was true about us.

I am a true romantic. I want to be clear about that. I believe in love; the wholehearted, soft, and brave kind. But there is also a version of romance we've been sold that isn't love at all. It's the avoidance of oneself, the fear of being alone dressed up as connection. Everyone is so scared of loneliness, yet still lonely inside these lacking relationships, half-healed, half-present, giving themselves to people who were never going to meet them fully because they hadn't yet learned what it felt like to meet themselves.

Everyone is so scared of being lonely, yet still lonely inside these lacking relationships.

The over-giving was never a character flaw. It came from not yet knowing what you deserved. You thought if you gave enough, showed up enough, loved hard enough, you could make someone choose you. But did no one tell you that you cannot give your way into being chosen by someone who was never going to choose you? You'll only end up feeling smaller. And then you spend years wondering whether you were too much, or too little, or somehow always the problem.

You'll always be wrong for the wrong people, no matter how right you try to be.

In Call Me by Your Name, Elio's father says something that has never left me: "We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty." That is what we have been doing. Bankrupting ourselves at work, in love, in every place we thought approval lived.

Both things; the overworking and the over-loving—are the same story. A woman who was never taught that she is enough simply by being. Who learned, somewhere early, that worth is performed, that love is earned, and that saying no is something you have to justify. Because the very thing you're looking for someone else to give you is the very thing you withhold from yourself.

And until that changes, until love and rest and worth stop being things we chase outside ourselves, we'll keep arriving at the same door. Different jobs. Different people. Same hunger. Same hollow feeling after.

So what does it look like to come home?

Think of Maddy Perez from Euphoria. Set aside some of her actions and just watch her arc. Broken open, publicly, repeatedly. Then watch her arrive somewhere most of us are still trying to find: "a state of pure harmony." Not because life stopped being hard, but because she stopped needing it to be easy before she could be okay. She chose, against everything, to carry herself like she belonged here. Calm. Unhurried. Knowing exactly who she was.

Don't we all want that? A stillness that doesn't depend on the conditions being right?

Close your eyes and you will find three guides that are always within you: your intuition, your values, and your nervous system. Trust their truth, and they will make the way forward clear. You have to trust that no one knows you better than you do. And that the place your nervous system keeps trying to lead you; that unhurried and deeply settled place, is not laziness. That is what it feels like to live at the pace of your own soul.

Whatever love you expect from others has to be an addition, not a completion.

And one of the healthiest things you can do, through all of it, is protect your whimsy. Not your productivity. Not even your image. Your whimsy. The soft belief that life can still surprise you. That something; alignment, grace, whatever you choose to call it, is quietly working in your favour. The world keeps trying to harden women, but there is nothing weak about staying enchanted. It takes real strength to still believe in good things after you have seen how cruel life can be. In a world that profits from women being tired and cynical, staying hopeful is its own quiet rebellion.

You could come home to yourself and warm it up.

Not back to who you were before anyone hurt you. Forward into a woman who knows how she feels, what she needs, and what she will no longer settle for. A woman who trusts her rhythms. Who rests without apologising. Who loves without disappearing. Whose worth is not conditional on her output, her relationships, or how well she holds it all together.

You are full of love and light, and you deserve effort, consistency, and full respect. Not because you performed well enough to earn it, but because you are a person, and that has always been enough.

The quiet you've been running from; it's where you live. It has always been waiting for you.

You were never missing something someone else had to bring.

You were just temporarily away from yourself.

Come home.

Photo © Lily James photography by Bryce Scarlett (@brycescarlett)