Okay.

Fuck all that.

Seriously.

Because at this point, I know what you’re thinking.

How the hell does a grown-ass woman with degrees, a career, a decent head on her shoulders, and enough common sense to help other people navigate their emotional bullshit end up crying over a man who couldn’t even decide if he wanted to be with her?

Valid question.

A little judgmental, but valid nonetheless.

And trust me, I’ve asked myself the same shit more times than I care to admit.

But before you start rolling your eyes, calling me stupid, or screaming STAND UP, SIS at these pages, I think we need to rewind a little.

Because you don’t know me.

Not yet, anyway.

You’ve met the heartbroken version. The exhausted version. The woman who loved a man so hard she damn near forgot what it felt like to be loved without having to ask.

But that’s not all there is to me.

Not even fucking close.

See, somewhere between childhood trauma, questionable romantic decisions, an impressive collection of degrees, and an almost concerning ability to understand everybody’s bullshit but my own, I became this heart-on-her-sleeve therapist with a goddamn hero complex.

And I don’t mean the cute kind.

I mean the kind where I could spot somebody’s emotional wounds from across the room and immediately start mentally developing a treatment plan nobody asked me for.

Attachment issues?

I got you.

Childhood trauma?

Baby, pull up a chair.

Emotionally unavailable man with an avoidant attachment style and an inability to communicate his feelings?

Unfortunately, that seemed to be my fucking specialty.

Which is ironic, considering I was professionally trained to recognize unhealthy patterns.

Recognizing them was never my problem.

Leaving them alone?

Now that was a whole different conversation.

But don’t get it twisted.

I wasn’t some helpless little woman wandering around waiting for a man to give her a personality.

Oh, no.

I had plenty of that.

Probably too much, depending on who you asked.

I was educated, ambitious, opinionated, affectionate, and occasionally a little dramatic.

Fine as hell, too.

And before you call me conceited, let me stop you right there.

I know what God gave me.

Goddess-like mannerisms, a face that could get me out of trouble, a body that occasionally got me into it, and a mouth that had absolutely no problem making a bad situation worse.

I could walk into a room and have motherfuckers in a tizzy without saying a word.

Men noticed.

Women noticed.

Hell, sometimes people noticed me before I even noticed myself.

And I enjoyed being a woman.

The softness.

The sensuality.

The way a good outfit, the right perfume, and a little lip gloss could make an ordinary Tuesday feel like an occasion.

I loved being feminine.

Loved being desired.

Loved the occasional attention.

I wasn’t about to sit here and pretend otherwise.

But being desired and being loved?

Whew.

Two very different fucking experiences.

And somewhere along the way, I learned that being the woman everybody noticed didn’t necessarily make me the woman anybody truly saw.

People saw the smile.

The confidence.

The degrees.

The career.

The woman who could hold an entire room’s attention and still make one person feel like they were the only one in it.

They saw the friend who gave good advice.

The therapist who knew how to ask the right questions.

The woman who showed up when somebody needed her.

The one who could sit with another person’s pain without flinching.

What they didn’t always see was the woman who went home and sat in her own.

The woman who could explain attachment theory in her sleep but still found herself attached to people who made her question her worth.

The woman who encouraged everybody else to establish boundaries while treating her own like friendly suggestions.

The woman who could tell somebody exactly why they deserved better and then turn around and negotiate with herself about why she should accept less.

I know.

The irony is fucking embarrassing.

But here’s the thing.

I wasn’t always this version of myself.

Or maybe I was, and life just gave me better vocabulary to explain the shit I’d been doing since childhood.

Because somewhere, long before Steven, long before the therapy license, long before the men and the heartbreak and the countless conversations about what I deserved, there was a little girl.

A little girl who felt everything.

Who loved hard.

Who noticed when the energy in a room shifted.

Who wanted people to be okay.

Who learned how to be strong before she fully understood what strength was supposed to look like.

And somewhere along the way, that little girl started confusing being needed with being loved.

Or at least, that’s one theory.

Look at me.

Already trying to psychoanalyze my own damn childhood.

Occupational hazard.

But I promise you, this story isn’t just about the men who broke my heart.

Although, baby, we’ve got a few of those to discuss.

And I mean a FEW.

Some of these motherfuckers deserve their own case studies.

But there were friendships, too.

The kind that felt like family until they didn’t.

Women I would’ve gone to war for.

People I thought would be standing beside me when I finally became everything I dreamed of being.

There were beautiful moments.

Ugly ones.

Decisions I made out of love.

Decisions I made out of fear.

And some decisions that, to this day, I still don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.

There was grief.

There was joy.

There was sex.

There was faith.

There were nights I prayed for things I wasn’t even sure I wanted anymore.

And there were mornings I got up, put on a cute outfit, and went to work helping other people navigate emotions I hadn’t figured out how to manage in myself.

Because that’s the funny thing about being a therapist.

People assume you have all the answers.

Baby, please.

Sometimes I was one unanswered text away from needing my own emergency session.

And yes, I had a therapist.

A good one, too.

Mind your business.

But somewhere underneath all of that was a woman trying to figure out who she was when she wasn’t somebody’s daughter, friend, lover, therapist, or emotional support human.

Who was I when nobody needed anything from me?

When nobody was watching?

When there wasn’t a man to love, a friend to rescue, or somebody else’s feelings to consider?

I didn’t always know.

And maybe that’s why we’re here.

Because I could tell you about Steven until we’re both blue in the face.

I could dissect every conversation, every disappointment, every time I should’ve walked away and didn’t.

But that wouldn’t explain everything.

You’d know what happened to me.

You still wouldn’t know me.

And I refuse to let the most interesting thing about my life be a man who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be part of it.

Absolutely the fuck not.

So we’re going back.

Before the heartbreak.

Before the degrees.

Before the therapy language and the boundaries I was still learning how to enforce.

Before I became the woman everybody seemed to have an opinion about.

We’re going back to the little girl who started all this shit.

Because if you’re going to understand why I loved the way I did, why I stayed when I should’ve left, why I fought so hard to be seen by people who were already looking directly at me…

You’re going to have to meet her.

And fair warning?

She’s a lot.

But so am I.

You’ll get used to it.

Now.

Where the fuck do I begin?

Oh, right.

I should probably introduce myself.