How do I explain to people who are only just beginning to know me that I am, in so many ways, a bright and happy person, and still carry a soul that has known devastating sadness?
That I can be warm, open, charming, full of light — and yet deeply self-conscious at the very same time.
That I can seem confident while quietly questioning myself.
That I so often feel too much and not enough all at once.
I have come to understand that healing, for me, has never arrived without grief holding its hand.
I heal and I suffer at the same time.
There is rarely one without the other.
I love being around people.
I need laughter, conversation, connection — almost like medicine.
There is something in me that comes alive in the presence of others, something soft and social and full of colour.
And still, solitude is sacred to me.
Not a punishment. Not a withdrawal.
A necessity.
A place where I return to hear myself again.
I love how open I become when I am happy.
How easily I pour from a full heart.
How naturally I share, laugh, reach, and let myself be seen.
But I also know the other side of me.
The one that goes quiet when hurt.
The one that turns cold when something no longer feels safe.
The one that disappears a little when it does not feel welcomed.
That is the strange thing about people like me, I think:
we can look like peace from the outside and still carry storms no one hears.
Even love, in the ways I receive it, has always felt like a contradiction.
Physical touch is one of my deepest love languages.
To be held gently, to be touched with care, to feel safe in someone’s presence — that means everything to me.
And yet I flinch.
I tense.
I pull away when I am overwhelmed.
Sometimes even the smallest touch can feel unbearable when my nervous system is already too full.
So much of my life has felt like this:
wanting deeply, and recoiling at the same time.
Longing for closeness, and needing distance.
Being tender, and defensive.
Being full of love, and tired of what people do with it.
Because I do love deeply.
More deeply than I can ever seem to explain without sounding dramatic to people who have only ever treated feelings lightly.
My intuition lives at that same depth.
So does my empathy.
So does my way of seeing people, sensing what sits underneath them, reading what is never said aloud.
And beautiful as that can be, it is also one of the loneliest things I have ever known.
Because no matter how deep a connection has gone, I have so rarely felt truly met there.
Not fully.
Not in the strange, whimsical, aching emotional language that feels most natural to me.
It is as though I have spent my whole life being fluent in a dialect nobody else quite speaks.
Maybe that is why I have always felt like a beautiful contradiction.
A tragic little paradox.
A soul full of light and old sadness, always trying to make something meaningful out of time, tenderness, and all the fleeting things people usually overlook.
And the truth is, I never really feared being alone.
What I feared was being half loved.
Underappreciated.
Heard, perhaps — but never truly listened to.
That has always felt far lonelier to me than solitude ever could.
As time passes, I find myself wondering whether I will ever truly fall in love again.
Not because I do not want to.
I do.
But wanting and believing are no longer the same thing.
We live in a world where people know how to flirt, but not how to be sincere.
They know how to say beautiful things, but not how to mean them.
They know how to perform affection, how to mirror desire, how to create the illusion of closeness — but not how to stay real once the performance is over.
Everyone knows how to compliment a face.
How to keep a conversation just interesting enough.
How to say the right thing at the right time.
But so few people know how to be honest.
How to be emotionally mature.
How to be consistent.
How to offer depth instead of charm.
Presence instead of potential.
Truth instead of tactics.
And maybe that is the real core of modern loneliness.
Not the absence of romance,
but the absence of depth.
The absence of people who mean what they say.
People who understand that words are not decoration.
That intimacy is not a game.
That being chosen gently and sincerely is still one of the holiest things in the world.
So of course the urge to become unreachable is tempting.
To stop replying.
To stop entertaining half-heartedness just because it arrives dressed as potential.
To stop dressing up for people who only ever admire you temporarily.
People with wandering eyes and convenient intentions.
People who like the idea of devotion, but not the responsibility of it.
And after enough almosts, enough wasted tenderness, enough near self-abandonments in the name of love, who could really blame a woman for becoming difficult to reach?
But maybe “hard to love” was never the truth.
Maybe what happens is simply this:
at some point, your soul develops an allergy to what is shallow.
To low effort.
To inconsistency.
To the cruelty of being desired without being cherished.
So maybe I am just an old-fashioned, hopelessly romantic soul looking for something this world has almost forgotten how to hold.
Or maybe my purpose in this life was never simply to be loved, but to love anyway.
To love deeply.
Purely.
Without becoming cynical.
To keep that spark alive in a world that keeps trying to reduce everything to convenience, performance, and passing attention.
Maybe that is its own kind of devotion.
Maybe that is its own kind of courage.
And maybe, in the end, I am not too much.
Not too deep.
Not too sensitive.
Not too difficult to love.
Maybe I have simply learned that I would rather be alone than be loved only in halves.
Mondmarmelade 