Dear Stranger,
You must be wondering why I’m here again. Back in the same place, writing about the same ache in a slightly different way, returning to a question I thought I would have stopped asking by now. But some questions don’t really leave you, do they? They just become quieter. They sit somewhere in the back of your mind while you go about your day, while you laugh with people, while you convince everyone, including yourself, that you’re doing fine. And then, usually when everything becomes quiet again, they come back.
For me, it has always been this: what does it feel like to be chosen? Not chosen because there was no one else. Not because I was convenient, familiar, or simply there at the right time. Not because loneliness made my company feel better than being alone. I mean chosen. Fully. Deliberately. Without hesitation. I want to know what it feels like for someone to look at me, not past me, not through me, not toward someone they once loved or someone they are still hoping to find, and simply think, you. I want you. Not a version of me. Not the person I could become if I changed enough things about myself. Just me.
I don’t think I have ever really known that feeling. Every time I let someone in, it somehow feels like there is already someone else in the room. Sometimes it is an actual person, someone from their past they never completely stopped missing, someone they compare everyone after them to. Sometimes it is not even a person at all. It is an idea. A version of love they imagined before I ever arrived, a picture of the person they thought they would end up with, a collection of expectations I never knew I was supposed to meet. And somehow, without realizing it, I find myself competing with ghosts, memories, possibilities, and people who don’t even exist.
I never loved them with a checklist in my hand. I never kept track of every flaw and every disappointing moment so I could bring it up later as evidence against them. I knew they were imperfect. Of course I did. I saw the difficult parts, the insecurities, the contradictions, the moods they didn’t know how to explain, the things they were still healing from. And I stayed. Not because I thought I could fix them, and not because I expected them to become somebody else. I stayed because they were them, and for me, that was enough.
I thought loving someone meant learning the shape of their imperfections and making room for them. I thought it meant saying, I see all of you, and I’m still here. Maybe that is why it hurts so much when the same grace is not given back. Because when they leave, somehow the conversation becomes about everything I could not give, everything I lacked, every way I failed to fit inside the life they imagined. And suddenly the things I did give disappear from the story.
The nights I stayed awake listening. The times I swallowed my own hurt because they were already hurting. The patience, the reassurance, the forgiveness, the small ways I tried to make their life lighter. The hundred quiet things that never looked dramatic enough to be remembered. It is strange how quickly people can forget the ways you loved them once they decide to focus on the ways you disappointed them.
And maybe that is what hurts the most. Not losing someone, but realizing that while you were loving them for who they were, they were quietly deciding whether you could become who they wanted.
So when they leave, I do what I probably shouldn’t do. I replay everything. Every conversation. Every moment where I could have spoken differently, acted differently, loved differently. I wonder whether there was some invisible test I failed without knowing I was taking it. I wonder if I should have been easier to love. More interesting. More beautiful. Less complicated. Less emotional. More emotional. Something. Anything.
And somewhere inside all of that wondering comes the question I hate admitting I still ask: What was wrong with me? Because after enough people choose something, or someone, else, it becomes difficult not to turn their decisions into a definition of yourself. You start thinking maybe there really is something missing. Maybe everyone else can see it and you can’t. Maybe you were meant to be almost loved, almost chosen, almost enough.
I wish I could tell you I have completely stopped thinking like that. I haven’t. Some mornings, I still wake up carrying that question with me. Just once, can I know what it feels like not to compete? Can I know what it feels like not to constantly prove that I deserve my place in someone’s life? Can someone choose me without making me audition for the role every day? Can someone look at all the things I am and all the things I am not and decide they still want to stay?
Maybe you know this feeling too, Stranger. Maybe you have spent years being someone’s almost. Maybe someone loved you while secretly wishing pieces of you were different. Maybe you gave everything you knew how to give and still watched them walk away. If you have, I am not going to tell you that it shouldn’t hurt. It does. Being overlooked hurts. Being compared hurts. Watching someone you would have chosen without hesitation hesitate over you hurts in a way that is difficult to explain.
So feel it. You do not have to turn every heartbreak into a lesson immediately. You do not have to pretend you are grateful for every person who wounded you. Sometimes something can simply hurt before it teaches you anything.
But there is one thing I am slowly learning. Someone failing to choose you does not automatically mean you were not worth choosing. Sometimes people are looking for something so specific that they cannot recognize something beautiful standing right in front of them. Sometimes they are still in love with a memory. Sometimes they are afraid. Sometimes they are confused. Sometimes they simply want something different. And none of those things make you lesser.
Their inability to see you completely is not proof that there was nothing worth seeing. So maybe the question I need to stop asking is, Why wasn’t I enough for them? And maybe I need to start asking, Why did I keep trying to prove my worth to people who were already looking somewhere else?
I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still learning. I’m still trying to believe the things I am writing to you. But maybe that is why I keep coming back here. Maybe these letters are not written by someone who has figured everything out. Maybe they are written by someone sitting beside you in the same confusion, saying, I feel it too.
And until the day someone chooses us without hesitation, maybe we have to stop treating ourselves like people waiting to be selected. We are not placeholders. We are not consolation prizes. We are not temporary homes people stay in until they find somewhere better.
I hope one day someone looks at you, and at me, with the kind of certainty we have spent so long looking for. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just surely. Like choosing you was never a difficult decision. Like there was never a comparison to make. Like they had seen enough of the world to know where they wanted to stay.
Until then, Stranger, I’ll probably keep writing. And maybe you’ll keep finding these words whenever the nights get a little too quiet. And perhaps, slowly, we’ll learn something together: being chosen by someone else may be beautiful, but their choice was never supposed to determine our worth.
Still, if I’m allowed to be selfish for one moment, I hope that someday, just once, I get to know what it feels like. To be looked at without comparison. To be loved without negotiation. To be wanted without doubt. To be chosen. And to finally stop wondering whether I am enough.
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