You hate everything about me and you make sure I know it.
My family irritates you. My friends are an inconvenience. You creep into my hobbies until they don’t feel like mine anymore. And tonight you took something small and true — that I don’t like being a passenger when someone is driving reckless — and you twisted it into evidence that I am the reason we aren’t engaged. That I don’t trust people. That I am standing in my own way.
Earlier today you agreed with me. You said yeah, no one likes that. But by bedtime it had become my character flaw. My diagnosis. My fault.
I can’t do this anymore. I cannot be handed one more reason why the ring hasn’t come. I have watched the reason change a hundred times. It has been a hundred different things that I needed to fix, to work on, to become. And I have tried. I have bent and shaped and rearranged myself trying to be enough.
But it’s never enough. Because the reason was never really the reason.
I am not standing in my own way. I am standing in front of someone who will always find a new way to make it my fault.
I know that now. And I am not going to forget it.
