Love Letter From A Healed Anxious Man

To the love of my life, my wife, my everything, Aina... 

I chased you the way I used to chase my mother's love.
with desperation,
with hope,
with a trembling heart that believed
"If I can be enough, maybe she won't leave".

You didn't ask me to,
but I turned you into the woman I needed, to feel whole.

So I performed,
I become who I thought you wanted,
the protector, the pleaser, the perfect man.
Always proving, never resting.

Because deep down, I didn't believe love could exist
without effort,
without sacrifice,
without pain.

I was so afraid of being abandoned
that I abandoned myself first,
and doing so, I was never truly present with you.
How could you feel safe with a man
who couldn't even sit with his own pain?

Every time you pulled away,
every time you went cold,
every time you shut down...

It activated something primal in me.
The terror of being left behind, alone.
The shame of not being enough.
The ache of a boy still waiting to be chosen.

But I see it now,
i was just re-enecting a story I never chose.
A boy trying to make a woman stay and choose him..
Because his mother never did.

And you?
You had your own pain.
Your own reasons for building walls before I met you.
Your own need to control what felt overwhelming.

And no matter how much I loved you,
it was never going to work,
because neither of us was choosing ourselves.

I was pouring from an empty cup.
You were running from a well you'd burried too deep.

That wasn't love,
that was survival diguised as romance.

But I've stopped surviving now,
I've stopped performing,
I've stopped abandoning myself in the name of connection.

And most of all...
I forgive the boy in me who thought love was
something he had to earn.

He was just scared,
just tired,
just longing to be seen.

By allowing the boy in me to heal and love properly, I now see you in a different light.

Not with pain,
not with longing,
but with deep respect.

You were the mirror that revealed my wound.
The portal that cracked me open.
The lesson I didn't want but needed the most.

And for that,
I'll always be grateful.