instead, let yourself be honest.

honest to others of course, but more importantly, honest to yourself.

let the silence last a little longer before you fill it. say “i don’t know” when you don’t. be okay with needing things. allow yourself to disagree.

because when you grow up with emotionally immature or dysregulated parents, love becomes conditional on your usefulness. and so you do exactly that, you become useful, become good. you learn to co-regulate people who never learned to regulate themselves. and in doing so, you start abandoning yourself without even realising it.

it’s not that the love you receive is fake. it’s that it is built on the parts of you that feel safest to reveal, so your relationships become echoes of your accommodations. you feel seen and held, but not known , or met . the reality is, being easy to love often means being hard to access.

being easy to love becomes a burden. because every time you accommodate instead of express, you reinforce the idea that your needs are optional, your boundaries, negotiable. and that your fullness is too much . a part of you starts to wonder, if i stopped being this way, would they still stay?