For anyone navigating lovelessness in a world that tells you it’s your fault.
For the Black girls who carry themselves like whole universes and still wonder if anyone will stay.
For the ones told to “just be themselves” as if the world doesn’t punish us for exactly that.
For anyone who’s been called too much for daring to want more, or too naive for believing it could be good.
This is a love letter to our longing.
To our refusal to stop wanting more.
To our softness that keeps showing up, even after every goodbye.
To the still-burning belief that we could be chosen without first being edited.
Some weeks just gut you.
They don’t ask gently. They pry open all the soft places, poke at the half-healed bruises, and whisper questions like knives.
Will it ever not just…end?
Will I ever have a say?
Will it ever be me?
Why (not)?
Some weeks ask questions like a mirror—cold, sharp-edged, and too close for comfort. And the worst part? You already know none of the answers will satisfy you. Not really. Not in a world that keeps handing you closed doors and then gaslighting you into thinking you’re the problem for knocking.
I’ve been in one of those weeks for a few weeks now. One of those stretches.
And I’m exhausted.
Not just from the pain, but from the performance. The daily mental gymnastics of being “together”, the “deeply reflective” one, the “resilient” Black woman who is supposed to just keep going. Who’s told to meditate instead of mourn. To “trust the process” when the process feels like a trap. To stop wanting so badly, as if desire itself is what’s making things hard—not the conditions stacked against you for daring to want in the first place.
So, for once, this post is not me pulling out a lesson at the end like a rabbit from a hat.
This is not me telling you I’m over it or that I found a silver lining.
This is me carving out a space where it’s okay to be disappointed.
To feel like shit.
To not be okay and not make that into a metaphor.
Just give me this space and then I’ll get back up again, promise.
Because truth is: its hard out here.
Hard to be loved without precondition or performance. Hard to be seen without being distorted. Harder to be the subject of softness rather than the container for everyone else’s. It’s harder to navigate dating, vulnerability, self-expression, and even longing without someone calling you naïve, or cold, or wanting, or not enough. Or too much.
Especially when you’re a tender soul. Especially when you’re a Black woman.
Especially when you dare to want intimacy that doesn’t require you to shrink.
Because despite what people like to tell us—that it’s all about self-worth, that we just have to “know our value”—I don’t think that’s the whole story. That tidy little self-help slogan ignores the reality that even the most self-assured among us still have to weigh a cost-benefit analysis every time we decide to care.
Sometimes we know what we deserve and we still choose breadcrumbs. Not because we’re incompetent, but because the alternative—loneliness, disconnection, invisibility—is heavier than it looks. Because when someone almost sees you, it can feel like air after being underwater. Even if that someone still doesn’t stay. Even if that someone runs the minute you start hoping.
And yet people will still say the problem is us. Not the structures. Not the socialization. Not the ways we’re conditioned to bend and give and carry. Just us.
We wanted too fast.
We stayed too long.
We asked for too much.
Or not enough.
And then they say “Just be yourself.”
As if that’s a neutral thing to do in a world like this.
As if being myself—anxious, soft, scattered, sincere, still somehow hopeful after all this—isn’t met with side-eyes or silence or someone telling me I’m doing it wrong. As if there’s not some unspoken script we keep failing to perform. Like love is supposed to be the reward for getting it all right. Like we’re supposed to be healed before we’re held.
Like wanting more means we’re greedy, or broken, or naive.
It’s odd—in these weeks, as I’ve shifted through my own feelings and non-feelings about romantic love my mind kept traveling back to how I never got to believe in Santa growing up.
My mom sat me down looked me in the face, and said yeah… no. The world can be cruel and uneven. Magic doesn’t come to every chimney. I needed to be smart, empathetic, sincere. I needed to see the gaps. And I did. I learned to explain it all away. To prepare. To put things in boxes labeled “unfair but true.”
But love—I kept off that shelf.
We didn’t talk about romantic love too much growing up, so I guess I let myself invent my own version. Untouched, unblemished, a kind of natural, infinite resource. The one thing I thought might still be sacred. The one thing that could still surprise me.
I held onto that—love. I kept that on the pedestal. I let it glow.
And now I’m here, decades in, and love feels just as rigged. Just as conditional. Just as full of ghoulish gatekeepers, shallow boundaries, and unspoken paradoxes as every other system I was told to outsmart.
So what’s left?
If even this is muddied—if even this asks me to contort—what is clean?
I don’t have a neat wrap-up.
What I maybe sort of have a refusal.
A refusal to gaslight myself one more time.
A refusal to let this blog post be another palatable performance of “resilience.”
This is a place for my disappointment to exist without apology. For my anger to sit on the couch with her shoes off. For my ache to stretch out her legs and not be rushed to stand up and get back to work.
And if you see yourself in this—if you’ve ever sat in your room feeling like your longing made you weak, like you were asking for something too big, or that the story always ends before the love gets good—then this space is for you too.
Let this post be a stake in the ground.
For anyone navigating lovelessness in a world that tells you it’s your fault.
For the Black girls who carry themselves like whole universes and still wonder if anyone will stay.
For the ones told to “just be themselves” as if the world doesn’t punish us for exactly that.
For anyone who’s been called too much for daring to want more, or too naive for believing it could be good.
This is a love letter to our longing.
To our refusal to stop wanting more.
To our softness that keeps showing up, even after every unspoken goodbye.
To the still-burning belief that we could be chosen without first being edited.
May this remind someone—maybe you—that you’re not alone in the asking.
And you’re not wrong for still hoping, even when the world hasn’t made it easy.
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