I kept excusing what I should have believed sooner

Dear Delyara, Looking back, I can see how many times I translated disappointment into patience. I told myself they were tired, busy, distracted, emotionally limited, going through something, not good at communication, just not thinking. Maybe all of that was true sometimes. But the deeper truth was simpler: I kept excusing patterns that were making me lonely because I didn’t want to lose the history. That’s what hurts now. Not just what they did or didn’t do. How long I defended it against my own clarity. I think self-betrayal often looks very reasonable while it’s happening.