I've been sitting with this for a while. Not as a conclusion I reached suddenly but as something I've been slowly circling, the way you circle a thought you're not sure you're ready to have.
For a long time, I was very good at understanding people. I could trace the logic of someone's behavior — where it came from, what they were afraid of, how their past kept showing up in the present moment. I thought this was a kind thing to do. It felt like generosity. If I could make sense of why someone pulled away, or why they kept doing the thing that hurt, or why their words and their actions kept arriving in separate directions — then I could be patient with it. Then I could stay.
What I didn't understand then, and still am not completely sure I understand now, is the difference between empathy and self-erasure. Between trying to see someone clearly and using that vision as a reason to accept something that wasn't working.
Understanding why someone does something doesn't change what it feels like when they do it. I keep having to remind myself of this because my instinct is still to explain before I feel. To process before I grieve. Like if I can get to the reasoning fast enough, I won't have to sit with the impact.
But the impact is there regardless.
Consistency is something I didn't used to think about consciously. I thought about love, about connection, about whether someone meant well. I gave a lot of weight to intention. Whether someone was trying, whether they cared in theory, whether they had good reasons for the gaps. Caring about intention matters — I still believe that. But intention by itself doesn't hold anything up over time. You can intend well and still be unavailable. You can mean what you say in a given moment and still not follow through across the hundred quieter moments that come after.
What I'm slowly learning — and not without resistance — is that consistency isn't a high standard. It's just the basic version of showing up. It's not about being available every second or never causing hurt. It's about being someone a person can observe across time and see a pattern in. A pattern that says: this person is actually here. Not just when it's easy. Not just when they feel like it. Across the inconvenient stretches, the busy periods, the moments when showing up requires real effort and no one's watching.
The difficult thing about this realization is that it doesn't make anyone a villain. Most people who were inconsistent with me weren't trying to cause harm. They were probably doing their best within whatever constraints they were operating under. Understanding that is true. And it's also not enough. Because the experience of being on the receiving end of someone who loves you in theory but can't show up consistently is a particular kind of loneliness. You can't argue against it cleanly. You can't say they don't care, because maybe they do. You just have to decide what to do with a love that doesn't quite land.
I think there's also something I want to say about the way I used empathy as a reason to bypass my own feelings. Not consciously. But looking back, I can see how the habit of understanding other people gave me somewhere to go when I didn't want to sit with what I was actually feeling. If I redirected my attention toward their reasoning, toward what they were carrying, I didn't have to be honest about what the situation was doing to me.
This is something I'm still unlearning. The instinct to protect other people from my own disappointment. To smooth things over internally before they ever surface. To decide, on someone else's behalf, that they've had enough to deal with and I don't need to add to it.
Empathy, at a certain point, can become a form of self-abandonment. When you've spent so long learning to see from other people's perspectives that you've stopped checking in with your own.
I don't have a clean answer to any of this. I'm not sure what the right ratio of empathy and self-protection is, or whether that framing even makes sense. I just know that I spent a lot of time believing that if I loved someone hard enough and understood them deeply enough, the relationship would eventually become what I needed it to be.
It doesn't work that way. And I think I knew that long before I admitted it.
What I'm sitting with now is this: I can understand someone completely and still acknowledge that the relationship wasn't functioning. Those two things don't cancel each other out. I don't have to win an argument about who was right or who tried harder. I just have to be honest about the pattern — what it looked like over time, what it gave me, what it cost.
And whether I can honestly say that what I was getting back was worth what I was extending.
For a while, I kept answering that question with explanations instead of with the truth.