The Woman Who Loves Too Hard Is Terrified of Being Left
When relationships ask you to disappear, here’s your permission to walk away.
Most of this year I lived between Arizona and Switzerland, consolidating my life so it could fit into a few suitcases. I made donation piles of books and clothes. I kept two sets of toiletries and split my closet in two, one here and one there, so I could move without thinking.
I told friends I was moving, always with a practical, convincing update. Under those answers, I was rearranging myself to keep the dream intact.
I kept reshaping my vision so it wouldn’t inconvenience his, and somewhere along the way I became a supporting character in someone else’s story.
So I made a different decision. Switzerland is off the table, indefinitely.
I am done shrinking myself just to keep the peace. I am unlearning the old belief that love must be earned through self-sacrifice.
From this point forward, I choose to honor my needs.
What “ours” sounded like
This summer I helped my boyfriend move into our new apartment in Switzerland. I unpacked boxes in a language I was still learning, organizing a kitchen where I didn’t yet know the words for plates or dish soap. I hesitated to call anything ours. It felt like his place, and I felt like a visitor. He corrected me often, saying ours until it started to land. I wanted that word to be true more than anything.
I learned to navigate the city and found my favorite local restaurants. I memorized which grocery stores had the products I loved. I learned how to make espresso. I was trying to convince myself that Geneva was my new home. I learned the particular quiet that settles in when you are working very hard to belong somewhere your soul has not fully agreed to live.
The blueprint I grew up with
I grew up in an environment where love was often shown in rather intense ways, like yelling, fighting, and even moments of violence. I realized that the loudest emotions tended to set the tone for everyone around. I learned the importance of being agreeable and keeping the peace, and I believed that being easy to love was the key to receiving love.
My mother raised me, saying she would fight to the depths of the earth for the people she loves. I absorbed that as the blueprint, as proof of what devotion required. I heard ‘fight’ and translated it to ‘sacrifice’. I heard ‘devotion’ and translated it to ‘no limits’.
I thought love was measured by how much of yourself you could give up without making a sound.
That belief followed me everywhere. It shaped my choices and my silences. It taught me to swallow requests before they reached my lips and to edit my needs down to something manageable.
It taught me to stay when my body was begging to go. Even the compliments I received often praised how strong and accommodating I was. Encouragement can become a trap when it keeps rewarding your vanishing act.
If someone had asked me what love feels like in my body, I would have said it’s like holding my breath and calling it calm.
The first vanishing
My first relationship was in high school. From the outside, it looked like an average teenage connection. Inside, it was a mix of control, manipulation, and fear that arrived without warning. I did not have words for it. I only had the sense that if I could love harder, it would stop hurting.
Most of high school, I genuinely did not want to keep living. By sixteen, the darkness pulled me into a psychiatric facility. Doctors handed me pills and called me by a chart, not a name. The smell of antiseptic filled the air, but it never quite masked the sadness that lingered.
I quickly learned to sit up straighter during daily check-ins. I figured out exactly how to present myself to the adults in a way that would convince them I was “good enough” to be discharged. I understood which answers would earn me some privileges and which ones would keep me stuck there even longer. I learned that survival sometimes looks like lying about how much you are still drowning.
Therapy dragged me back from the edge. It taught me coping mechanisms and gave me vocabulary for things I had only felt in my chest. But it could not undo what was so deeply imprinted. That blueprint of love stayed. My needs often took a backseat to keeping the other person happy.
I left that season with a nervous system trained to equate peace with compliance, and safety looked like smallness. I became an expert at disappearing in plain sight.
The pendulum swing
When I started healing, I promised myself I would never disappear again. So I hardened. I built walls that were impossible to get through. One wrong move and I would cut people out. I became angry, defensive, quick to speak my mind without filter, sometimes without kindness, terrified of ever being that voiceless girl again.
I learned to end things before they could end me. I walked away from relationships at the first sign of discomfort, unable to distinguish between legitimate red flags and my own fear of vulnerability.
I mistook isolation for independence.
Beneath that anger lived a deep hurt. I was afraid of being forgotten and unheard one more time. Finding any balance took years. I had to learn that boundaries do not require cruelty and softness is not weakness. It took almost my entire life to find that I can be gentle and still be safe.
But I had survived by intellectualizing the experiences that nearly broke me.
The love that seemed mature
My last relationship showed my recurring pattern in high definition. When I met him, I believed shared pain would make us careful with each other.
We both had scars and knew pain. I believed that mutual understanding would create safety and that two people who had seen dark days would know better than to break each other.
For a while, it did.
Then he moved to Switzerland. We began the choreography that long-distance demands. Time zones. Planning. I spent most of 2025 on hold for him, really.
When he moved, I knew I wanted to follow, which would require making significant sacrifices. I told myself this is what commitment looks like. Soon, my browser history turned into expat forums, tax rules, and a maze of international paperwork.
I called it a partnership. I kept saying yes, despite a nagging feeling that whispered something was off. I couldn't exactly pinpoint what it was.
There is a difference between fear of growth and the ache of self-betrayal.
Only you can tell the difference from inside your own body. One feels like expansion. The other feels like abandonment.
When love turns into a test
We had another one of those arguments. You know the kind that seems to pop up every few months, each time with a different twist. He demanded that I prove my love for him, and I have to admit, I was shocked. I’ve made so many sacrifices and put so much on hold for us. It made my heart race, and I shifted into “let’s find a solution” mode. I started listing all the things I’ve done, reminding him of the sacrifices I’ve made and how I was planning to move across the world for our future together. I’ve adjusted my life, timeline, and dreams to create space for our relationship, while my goals remained flexible, his stayed fixed.
I expected empathy from him. Instead, he was unmoved.
All the planning, the sacrifices, the ways I changed my life, my thoughts, my feelings, my needs, none of it seemed to register. No proof would ever be enough. Somewhere along the way, my existence became the problem in his story, the one blamed for every tension.
In that survival mode, the choice became clear: I could either continue negotiating my way out or make a different choice and finally honor my promise to stop self-sacrificing.
I chose myself. I stopped explaining.
True compromise means that both people make adjustments and find a middle ground where neither has to completely abandon who they are. This wasn’t a compromise.
Stories like this are often told with neat resolutions, but mine isn’t one of them. After the fallout, I found myself sitting on the floor, crying, overwhelmed by a mix of grief and relief. I was heartbroken because choosing myself meant the relationship had come to an end, a decision I had struggled with for as long as I could remember. But this time felt different. In the past, I always gave in.
This time, I stood my ground and stopped abandoning myself.
Protecting your heart can be painful, but there’s a certain kind of hurt that ultimately sets you free. I’m learning to recognize that kind of pain and choose it whenever I need to.
Staying in Arizona
So I am staying put. Maybe things will change. Maybe they never will. Maybe I’ll move. Maybe I don’t. Right now, I am building a life for myself. I am making myself a priority, fully and without apology, for the first time ever.
Honestly, I cannot tell you how freeing just writing this feels. Considering a future for myself without negotiations opens my mind to something entirely new. Something I know I could never have imagined before. A future built without guilt or shame.
There are invisible wins. A day passes without rehearsing how to convince someone to meet me halfway. I notice a moment where I might have apologized for having needs, and I do not. The reflex to prove I am worth loving loosens, even if only by a breath.
That counts.
Calling power back in everyday ways
Power used to be loud, a stance with sharp edges. Now it’s aligned words spoken once. It’s deleting the message where I take responsibility for someone else’s actions. It’s the text I never sent. It’s refusing the apology I’d make just to keep the peace.
It’s remembering I don’t owe anyone constant availability. It’s closing the door when my body asks for quiet. It’s feeling proud in private without needing an audience.
When the planning stopped, I feared the silence would swallow me. Instead, it became a teacher. What feels sacred now is ordinary, folding laundry without resentment, cooking for myself with care, writing without selling, sitting at home without waiting for a message that may never come. I can feel my energy cultivating, something steady, something honest
What I mean by love
I do not want a relationship that confuses loyalty for self-abandonment. I am neither a martyr nor a saint. I am simply a woman who has learned her shape and refuses to bend into something more convenient.
The love I choose next makes room for two whole people. Requests are clear, never tests. Generosity stays within each person’s safety. We can sit in discomfort and stay with each other without blame.
I want a love that can say I need without turning it into fault. A love that hears no and stays kind. A love that meets me halfway because the relationship matters more than being right. No scorekeeping, just steady showing up.
Why I keep learning in public
Every time I write something vulnerable like this, my full body hesitates. I feel like I want to vomit. I hover over deleting the entire thing and think:
What am I doing, why am I exposing myself, why am I handing people ammunition they could use against me?
Then I remember I have always been the girl who was convinced she was fundamentally unlovable. The one who believed the world worked better if they stayed on the sidelines and watched.
I write to them.
I write to the one who excels at execution and starves to be seen. I write to anyone who has learned to perform fine while falling apart inside. I write to anyone who reads just one sentence that can help them unclench their jaw.
I share for usefulness. Not to put myself on a pedestal and highlight my pain, but to remind you that rebuilding is possible after you lose yourself.
I’m willing to let my mistakes be visible so someone else can spot the pattern sooner. So someone else feels permission to leave earlier, choose themselves louder, and stop performing devotion when their soul is begging for air.
If you are here, you are one of those people. Thank you for treating my voice like something worth holding with care
If you are standing where I stand
Maybe you’ve been shaping your life to be easier for someone else to carry.
Maybe you learned to lower your voice so no one could call you dramatic.
Maybe you’ve mistaken patience for peace.
Maybe you’re exhausted from auditioning for a role you never wanted.
Maybe you keep trying to prove your worth to someone who decided not to see it.
You can stop.
You can leave without making anyone the villain. You can forgive without keeping the door unlocked. You can reclaim your time, your tone, and your tenderness.
You’re allowed to rebuild without rushing. You’re allowed to want a life that’s more than survival.
If you need a first line, try this:
I am no longer available for love that asks me to leave myself.
Say it out loud. Notice where it lands in your body. Feel the relief arrive. Let that relief teach you what comes next.
Learning in public, when you have no idea what the future has in store for you
Here is what no one tells you about choosing yourself:
It feels like relief and regret holding hands in your chest.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m still figuring it out. Some mornings I wake certain I chose well, and some nights I lie awake wondering if I let go too soon. Choosing myself can feel selfish, even when I know it isn’t.
If you’re here, maybe you’re in the middle of it too. Maybe you’re relearning how to trust yourself after years of outsourcing that trust. Maybe you’re tired of neat endings that don’t match real life.
What I can offer is honesty. We can do this hard thing together, even when it doesn’t feel like a win.
You don’t need anyone’s permission. You never did. The only approval you need is your own.
Until next time,
🖤 Joni @ The Rebirth Files
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