September 14, 2026

Tonight, I started watching The Gilded Age.

There was a woman in the show who had been loved by a man who once told her he wanted to marry her. And then, in the end, he left her for someone else—a woman who was wealthy.

While breaking her heart, he told her something that almost felt cruel in its tenderness:

“I really loved you.”

And I found myself thinking: How does someone say that while ripping another person’s heart from their chest?

Maybe love and leaving can exist in the same sentence. Maybe someone can love you and still choose a different life. Maybe sometimes the feeling was real, even when the ending wasn’t the one you deserved.

I suppose I got a better ending than she did.

But the scene still made me think.

Will I ever believe in love again?

I don’t know.

For the first time, I’m allowing myself not to know.

Today, I cleaned my entire room. Nothing extraordinary happened, but afterward I looked around and felt something I haven’t felt enough lately:

ease.

There was peace in the simplicity of it. Everything was where it belonged. The room felt lighter, and somehow, so did I.

It reminded me that regardless of whether someone loves you, chooses you, leaves you, returns to you, or never looks back, there is one relationship you cannot abandon:

the one you have with yourself.

You have to know your worth.

And maybe that is something we continue learning no matter how old we get.

I am learning how to genuinely love myself, even when I am alone. Especially when I am alone.

I am learning that solitude does not have to mean something is missing.

Sometimes solitude is where you meet yourself again.

I don’t know whether my heart will ever open as fully as it once did. There is a part of me that feels as though it never will. Loving someone that deeply changes you. Once you discover just how far your heart is capable of reaching, you cannot unknow it.

And I think I will love again someday.

Maybe differently.

Maybe more carefully.

Maybe with stronger boundaries and a little less willingness to disappear inside another person.

But until then, I am learning how to make my own life feel safe.

How to make my own room feel like home.

How to sit with myself without believing I need someone beside me in order for my life to be complete.

For now, loving me feels like enough.

And perhaps one day, when love finds me again, it will not arrive to fill an emptiness.

It will simply find someone who was already whole.