Currently, Kaylee

i think one of the most terrifying, gut-wrenching thoughts i’ve ever had is that one day the person i love most might stop loving me the same way.

not because of some major betrayal. not because of the most catastrophic fight. honestly, i think those things would almost be easier to understand. what scares me more is the quieter version of losing someone. the kind where they’re still sitting beside you, still telling you they love you, but something feels different enough that you begin to wonder if they mean it the way they used to.

and lately i’ve been wondering that more than i’d like to admit.

i’ve always been someone who loves hard. growing up, my family like to call me “boy-crazy,” and for a long time i believed them. i thought maybe there was just something embarrassing about how badly i wanted to be chosen by someone.

but looking back now, i don’t think it was really about boys.

i think i just needed someone on my side.

when you grow up feeling like you are a constant disappointment to the people whose approval matters most, being wanted by someone feels different. attention feels like reassurance. affection feels like proof that maybe you aren’t as difficult, disappointing, or unlovable as you’ve been conditioned to believe.

so yes, i craved male attention.

but i think what i was really craving was the feeling of being loved without having to earn it.

the problem is, i’m not sure i ever learned how to believe that kind of love could actually last.

the relationship that wasn’t a relationship

by the time i met him, i had already sworn off boys.

i was a senior in high school, working at a restaurant to save up for university, and he was already in college. i remember him singing karaoke with his friends one night and inviting me to sing a song that i loved with him. it was ridiculous and goofy and somehow charming enough that after that, he wasn’t just a customer anymore. he was someone i started noticing.

then he started coming in more often.

eventually, he got a job there.

at the time, that meant everything to me. in my head, it was proof. he wanted to be around me so much that he had found a way to make himself part of my everyday life. maybe that sounds dramatic now, but when you spend most of your life wondering whether you’re worth choosing, someone rearranging their week just to be near you feels like proof that you are.

we started spending more time together outside of work. he was the one who introduced me to the gym, which would eventually become a much bigger part of my life that i would’ve ever known back then.

that summer felt like one of those romances you only really understand when you’re young enough to believe that intensity meant permanence. everything happened quickly. we spent almost all of our time together, and somewhere along the way, i fell completely into it.

he was the first person i ever fully allowed myself to be vulnerable with. my first everything. and when you’re that young, being someone’s first can feel strangely permanent. even if we didn’t last, he would always have a place in my story that nobody else could take.

then we both moved to college, went to the same school. and the question began to get harder and harder to ignore.

what exactly were we?

we talked constantly. we spent our free time together. i believed that i loved him.

but i wasn’t his girlfriend.

i kept waiting for the relationship to become official, and when it didn’t, i told myself not to push.

he had told me about a past toxic relationship and how badly that relationship affected his view on commitment. i didn’t want him to look at me and see another demanding girlfriend before i even got the privilege to become his. so i tried to be understanding. i tried to be patient. i tried to convince myself that a label didn’t matter as long as what we had felt real.

and to me, it was real.

maybe that was the hardest part.

we weren’t technically together, but i had all the feelings of someone who was.

so when he ended things, there wasn’t even a relationship to mourn in the traditional sense. no anniversary to look back on. no official title to explain why i was so devastated.

but i was broken.

early on, i had made him promise me one thing: if he ever decided he no longer wanted to be with me, don’t do it over the phone. i wanted him to respect me enough to say it to my face. i wanted the chance to look at him, say goodbye, and understand that what we had was over.

instead, the weekend i went back to visit my parents, my phone lit up with a facetime call from him. telling me we were done.

i remember sobbing while i listened to him tell me that me that we weren’t going to be together anymore. there was nothing i could say that would change his mind. i didn’t beg him to stay. i didn’t try to convince him to change his mind.

i just sat there and cried.

it felt like my heart had shattered into pieces, and the only person that could fix me was the one that threw it on the ground.

afterward, i did what i do best when i didn’t know how to deal with myself.

i tried to outrun it.

i threw myself into the gym. two hours. three hours. sometimes twice a day. if my body was exhausted enough, maybe my brain would finally stop thinking about him.

it didn’t.

i drank too much. i cried about him constantly. sometimes i called him drunk. seeing him at parties felt like someone had reached into my chest and reopened something that had barely begun to heal.

and embarrassingly, painfully, it took me almost two years to get over something that lasted six months.

for a long time, i thought that experience taught me that all boys were bad.

looking back, i think it taught me something much worse. it taught me how terrifying it was to love someone without knowing if they had ever chosen me in the same way.

then i met him

two years later, i was in what i can only describe as my “i hate all men, i just wanna rave” phase.

i wasn’t looking for a relationship. honestly, i wasn’t really looking for anything serious at all. i had spent so long trying to get over the last person that the idea of willingly putting myself through that again sounded insane.

then one of our mutual friends decided he knew beter.

i had come to austin for the weekend, and our friend invited him over. i barely knew who he was before suddenly being told, “okay, you’re riding with him to san marcos for the rave.”

absolutely not.

this was a complete stranger.

our friend kept insisting, “no no, it’s okay. i trust him.” which was great for him, except i didn’t know this man.

somehow, though, i got in his car.

and the awkward silence lasted maybe two minutes.

we clicked almost instantly. not in the dramatic movie-like way where i looked over at him and somehow just knew he was the one for me. this isn’t how i met your mother. i wish i could say i had met my marshall erikson just right off the bat.

instead, i remember thinking something much simpler, “wow, he could be a really fun addition to our rave group.”

apparently, that was enough to start something.

for the next three weekends, he kept showing up to raves i mentioned i was going to. somewhere between those weekends, we started talking constantly. texting throughout the day turned into phone calls that lasted late into the night.

and still, i don’t think i realized i was falling for him.

not until the third rave.

i had just gotten off a twelve-hour shift and had maybe twenty minutes to get ready before going out. when i saw him, he had a red bull waiting for me because he knew how much caffeine i lived off of. then he told me i looked really good, that it didn’t look like i got ready in twenty minutes.

and apparently that’s all it took.

i took shots, i drank, and i gathered up the courage to make my move.

we danced together for the rest of the night, and i remember feeling something inside me that i hadn’t felt with anyone before. it wasn’t just excitement. it wasn’t the desperate need to be noticed that i had confused with affection so many times before.

it felt like fire.

but of course the universe loves to play jokes on me.

he was leaving for vacation in vietnam in a couple of weeks. so suddenly time felt limited.

one day, he called me out of the blue and asked me on a date.

that probably sounds like the bare minimum, but no one had ever actually asked me on a date before. not like that. not intentionally. not in a way that made me feel like someone had decided they wanted to take me somewhere because they genuinely wanted to spend time with me.

god, it melted me.

he took me to the zoo and let me drag him around while i looked at every animal i possibly could. when i got tired of walking, he carried me on his back. then the next day we went to six flags with our friend. then the next weekend we went camping with his friends.

and then, almost as quickly as he had appeared in my life, he left for vietnam.

i told myself not to get attached. i had done attachment before. i knew what happened when you gave somebody enough of yourself that losing them could destroy you.

but apparently my heart didn’t care what my brain had learned.

before i knew it, i was crying because i missed him.

there was a twelve-hour time difference between us, so i changed my sleep schedule just to talk him to him. every morning and every night that i was able to hear his voice, i fell a little deeper.

when he finally came home, he asked me to be his girlfriend. there was no guessing. no waiting around wondering what we were. no convincing myself that a label didn’t matter because i was too afraid to ask for me.

he chose me.

and i was swimming in happiness. for the first time, i thought maybe love didn’t always have to feel like uncertainty. maybe this time, i could let myself have it.

but loving someone when you’re terrified of losing them comes with its own kind of danger.

the first two years of our relationship was rough.

i failed out of school. i didn’t have much direction. i didn’t really know what i wanted my life to look like, and eventually neither did he.

there came a point where he questioned what kind of future we could have together if i couldn’t even give myself the chance to have one.

and for the first time in my life, i begged someone not to leave me.

with the ones before, i cried and i let them go.

but with him, i couldn’t. i told him i would change. i told him i would figure myself out.

we set a plan for me, to go back to school when i felt like i was ready to take it seriously. to get myself out of the environment i was in.

eventually, i packed up my bags, moved away from san antonio and the distractions it provided, and moved to a city with him where everything revolved around school, ambition, and building a future.

in a lot of ways, being with him forced me to start thinking about who i wanted to become because he saw the potential i had to reach.

but somewhere along the way, i think another fear began growing underneath all of it.

because once you finally know what i feels like to be chosen, you also learn exactly how much you have to lose.

when being loved stopped feeling safe

the distance didn’t happen all at once.

i think that’s what made it so hard to understand.

our first year living together didn’t really feel like living together. we had a roommate, and then he left for an internship for a semester, so there was always some kind of interruption keeping us from fully settling into a routine.

but the second year was different.

it was just us.

and somewhere in that comfort, things began to change.

there was less physical and emotional affection. less initiation. dates became rare until eventually they barely happened at all. we stopped treating every moment together like something exciting because suddenly, being together was just normal.

that was what was happening on the outside.

on the inside, something much uglier was happening to me.

i had gained weight. and i hated myself for it.

i started looking at every change in our relationship through the way i felt about my body. if he didn’t initiate anything, maybe he wasn’t attracted to me anymore. if we hadn’t gone on a date in a while, maybe he didn’t feel excited to be seen with me. if he wasn’t as affectionate as he used to be, maybe he missed the girl i was when we first met.

and somewhere underneath all of those thoughts was a voice that didn’t belong to him.

it belonged to my family.

growing up, weight and love were never completely separate things. i was told that no man would ever love me if i was fat. that if i gained too much weight, he would eventually find someone thinner. find someone prettier. someone better.

i learned very young that being smaller meant being more desirable, and being more desirable meant being safer.

when i was fourteen, i lost almost fifty pounds in one summer. i was told by my family i was beautiful. then i was told i would be perfect if i “just lost ten more”.

and i listened.

food became something i felt like i had to earn. there were days when i barely ate. nights when i would be kneeling over the toilet, losing my dinner before the calories could sink in. i was in color guard during the days and doing youtube cardio training at night. but somehow it never felt like enough.

the worst part is that i remember feeling beautiful.

people noticed me. boys noticed me. my family complimented me.

and somewhere in my teenage brain, all of those things became tangled together until i learned a lesson i’m still trying to unlearn:

smaller meant lovable.

when my boyfriend met me, he met a version of me who lived inside that mindset. i worked out for hours. missing more than a couple days at the gym felt like death to me. i wasn’t necessarily taking care of myself. i was just making sure my body looked like i was.

and then i met someone who made me feel beautiful without having to fight for it. someone who made me feel wanted. irresistible, even. and the safer i felt with him, the more normal my life became.

i ate. i rested. i stopped treating every missed working like a failure on my end.

and over time, my body changed.

the irony of all of this is that being loved made me more comfortable, and then becoming more comfortable made me terrified that i would no longer be loved.

he has told me before that he wishes i would go to the gym more consistently.

not because of how i look, but because he wants me to take care of myself.

and strangely, i never hated him for saying it. if anything, part of me loved him more for it. because what i heard wasn’t, “be thinner.” i heard, “take care of yourself.”

but unfortunately, there is another part of me that doesn’t know how to hear those words without translating them through everything i was taught growing up.

sometimes i convince myself that because i am disgusted with myself, he must be disgusted with me too. that because i look at old pictures and miss the body i had, he must miss her too. that because our relationship doesn’t look exactly like it did when we first fell in love, the problem is me.

my body. my face. my weight.

and then i hear my mother’s voice all over again. he’ll find someone thinner. someone prettier. someone better.

the terrifying part is that i know he may still find me beautiful. i just don’t. and i’m beginning to wonder how much of the distance i’m terrified of is actually being created by that. because when you hate your own body, you don’t exactly make intimacy easy.

you pull away before someone else gets the chance to. you question compliments.

you hide yourself.

you assume rejection before it even happens.

you become hyperaware of every touch that doesn’t happen and somehow forget about the ones that do.

i keep telling myself that if i could just look the way i did before, maybe we could get our spark back.

but i don’t actually want to become that girl again.

not completely.

because that girl was thin, but she was also starving. she was disciplined, but she was also punishing herself. she looked healthy from the outside while quietly destroying herself on the insde.

i want to become a healthier version of myself without believing that shrinking my body is the price i have to pay to keep someone’s love.

because if i’m being completely honest, i don’t know whether he is pulling away from me. but i do know that i’ve spent most of my life preparing myself for the day someone finally proves my family right.

and i’m terrified that if i keep waiting for him to leave me, i might start destroying the very thing i am so desperate to keep.

i don’t have a perfect ending for this.

i wish i could say that writing all of this suddenly made me believe every compliment, stop comparing myself to old photos, or completely silence the voice in my head that tells me love has an expiration date.

it didn’t.

i’m still scared.

but writing this down is making me realize that life isn’t a cycle. my story doesn’t have to end the way i was always told it would. i don’t have to spend the rest of my life waiting for someone to leave me, and i don’t have to become smaller just to make myself easier to love.

i can reach the goals i want because i want them for myself. i can become healthier because i want to take care of myself, not because i’m terrified that someone will stop loving me if i don’t.

and maybe i still have a lot to unlearn before i completely believe that.

but i want to.

i hope i was able to reach someone with this. maybe someone else who has spent their entire life loving so hard that they forgot what it feels like to simply let themselves be loved.

and even if i didn’t, it felt really good to be able to say it out loud.

always and forever,

kaylee ❤