They Watched Me Fall Apart. They Left When I Said No.
People love you at your worst in a very specific way.
They are there when you are crying at 2am. When you are making bad decisions and they can watch. When you are grateful for any attention because you have nothing left. They show up for that version of you with remarkable consistency.
And then you start to get better. You find your footing. You say no to something for the first time in years and mean it.
And they go quiet.
I used to think this said something about me. That I had somehow become less loveable by becoming less broken. That the version of me who needed nothing was less interesting than the version who needed everything.
What it actually said was simpler than that.
Some people are not in your life because they love you. They are in your life because you need them. The moment you stop needing them, the reason disappears.
The strings only work if you keep dancing.
I stopped dancing. The strings went slack. And one by one, the people who held them walked away and called it my fault.
That is not a loss. That is a diagnosis.
You find out who actually loves you by becoming someone who no longer needs to be saved. The ones who stay after that, the ones who show up for the healed version as readily as they showed up for the broken one, those are yours.
The rest were never really there.
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.