I have always questioned what I was meant for. Not in a dramatic, staring-at-the-ceiling way. More like a low hum that never fully shuts off. What is my purpose? What am I actually here to do? Here is the funny part. I have always been needed. By everyone I met. Somebody always needed something, and somehow I was the one who showed up. You would think that would answer the question. It doesn't. Being needed and knowing what you're for are two very different things. I learned young, at the Springer Road house, that silence was bad. That house was never quiet on purpose. My dad filled it. Parties, music, the TV humming in the background like it was part of the wiring. Noise was how love sounded in that house. Loud meant everybody was there. Loud meant everything was fine. So when a room went still, I braced. Every time. Quiet meant something was missing, or something was about to break. I still feel it in my body when a room goes silent. My shoulders go up before my brain even catches up. And I think that is where the other thing started. I always felt like I needed more of myself. More patience, more strength, more of whatever it takes. And because I was always reaching for more, I always felt like what I had wasn't enough. Needed by everyone and still not enough. Sit with that for a second, because I have been sitting with it for years. Then there is the part where I got scared to get close. People leave. That is not a theory for me. My family eventually did, and I took notes. So I kept everyone at arm's length. Close enough to feel connected, far enough that it wouldn't wreck me. And I rotated people. Always someone around, so I was never completely alone. From the outside, it looked like independence. Fiercely independent, that's me, right? Sass and a to-do list. But honestly, it was bracing. I was bracing for the next goodbye before anyone had even said hello. Here is the contradiction I can't talk my way out of. I am afraid of being alone, and I am afraid of getting close. At the same time. Both. Every day. So I live in the middle. Surrounded but never held. Near everyone and fully known by no one. And that middle feels like safety. It really does. Nobody can leave me if nobody ever gets all the way in. But it is a different kind of lonely. A quieter one, and ironic, since quiet is the thing I have always been afraid of. A room full of people and still nobody who knows what is actually going on inside me. I keep telling myself this is just who I am. Independent. Self-sufficient. A gypsy. Maybe some of that is true. But I am getting tired of calling fear a personality. So I will ask it plainly, because I do not have the answer. When will I finally let go of the fear?

For a long time I told myself I was doing it right. I had people. Not one person, a rotation of them. Someone to text in the morning, someone for the weekend, someone for the nights when the quiet got too loud. I called it independence. I said I didn't want the weight of obligation, and I really believed that. I thought I had figured out how to get connection without the cost. Here is what I was actually doing. I was making sure there was never a gap. Never an evening with nothing in it. Never a moment where it was just me and whatever I was carrying. And I was carrying something. Grief, mostly, the kind I didn't name out loud. I kept it moving so it couldn't catch me. The thing about a rotation is that it isn't clean. Nobody tells you that. Boundaries that start out casual get blurry fast. Someone assumes more than you meant. Someone sees a message they weren't supposed to see. I'd feel jealous over people I had told myself I didn't need, and then I'd feel embarrassed about the jealousy, and then I'd go find a distraction from the embarrassment. Round and round. The moment I saw it for what it was wasn't dramatic. There was no big blowup, no one dramatic exit. It was a quiet night, one of the rare ones where nobody was available. I sat there and felt something close to panic. Not sadness exactly. Panic. Like the floor had gone soft. I remember thinking, this is ridiculous, I'm a grown woman sitting in my own home. But my body was reacting like I was in danger. And that's when it landed. I wasn't protecting my independence. I was terrified of being alone with myself. Those are not the same thing, and I had built a whole system on pretending they were. The cost is hard to say plainly, so I'll just say it. I gave up the very thing I thought I was guarding. I wasn't independent. I was dependent on being wanted, constantly, by whoever was nearby. My peace of mind was gone because it was always tied to someone else's reply. And my self-worth took the hit, because I kept accepting scraps of attention and calling it a choice. I traded a lot of myself for a few hours of not feeling the quiet. I'm not going to pretend I've fixed this. I haven't. What I have is a different understanding of what growth even is. I used to think it meant getting better at finding the right people. Now I think it starts with sitting in the room when no one else is in it. Learning how to be by myself, which I never actually learned. I skipped that part and went straight to company. It's uncomfortable. Some nights it's genuinely bad. The grief doesn't disappear just because I stopped running from it. But I'm standing on my own two feet now, wobbly as it is, and for the first time that ground feels like mine.