I think there must be about a billion ways to leave yourself behind.

There’s the kind that is invisible at first, when you don’t realize yourself, forcing you to say “yes” when really, your chest is begging for you to say “no”.

It doesn’t always look dramatic. It can be laughing when nothing’s funny, apologizing when you didn’t do anything wrong, or letting people decide things for you because you don’t really care. But you do. Don’t you? Are you sure it’s that you don’t care? Or that because it happens so often that’s just the standard way to describe it? You do, but you’re just too tired to argue.

And so, little by little, you stop noticing. You get used to putting yourself second, then last. You start to wonder if maybe that’s just who you are now, someone who exists for other people but not for yourself.

And then one day, it doesn’t even feel like “putting yourself second” anymore. It just feels like the natural order of things. You convince yourself that’s what kindness is, you’re being generous to others. You tell yourself you’re easygoing, flexible, good at compromise. But no one’s asking you what you want anymore because you just “don’t seem to care”. That is the problem.

Once you’ve abandoned yourself enough times, it stops feeling like a choice. It becomes an automatic reflex. Someone raises their voice at you, and you shrink, don’t say anything back. Someone says “it’s fine,” and you stop explaining because then it makes it look like you’re being overdramatic. Someone asks what you think, and you laugh it off, “whatever you want.” And each time, it chips away at you until you forget there was ever a version of life where you belonged to yourself.

And after all you’ve been through, the worst part is realizing one day that you don’t even know what you want anymore. You’ve left yourself behind so many times that when you look for who you used to be, there’s nothing there.