You Weren't Chasing Love. You Were Chasing Potential.

Let me be honest with you about something that's going to sting a little. You are not in a relationship, you are in a construction project, and you are the only one wearing a hard hat. The person you're grieving right now, the one you keep replaying conversations with, the one you're still checking your phone for, that person does not fully exist, and they never did. What you fell for was a blueprint, a set of plans for building a house that never broke ground. And somehow you are standing on an empty lot crying over that house. You may have labeled that as love, but it's not. And it's haunting. To be more specific, chasing potential is not accidental. Your nervous system is not confused. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to chase intermittent reward. Think about a slot machine. It doesn't pay out every time, and if it did, you'd play one's collector money and walk away. The addiction lives in the almost, the near miss. The one time it paid out and your entire nervous system lit up like a city at night. That one moment they finally opened up, or gave you that one look. Or said the exact right thing that your brain filed it under proof. Proof that the person you imagined was in there somewhere, that they were just waiting to be unlocked and you kept pulling the lever. But here's what you need to understand. That moment was not a breakthrough. It was a trailer for a movie that was never going to be released, and you bought the ticket anyway. You didn't fall for them. You fell for your own story about them. This is a part people don't want to look at. I get it. It is normal and natural to want to paint them as the villain, as the one who confused you and caused you pain. But you got to get real with yourself and start asking why you're participating. By the time someone pulls away and you're spiraling, you're not even grieving a person anymore. You're grieving the version of them you spent weeks, maybe months or years, building in your head. Every good moment became a data point. Every red flag got filed under context or timing or they just need more time to trust. You became an anthropologist of their pain, mapping their trauma out so you could navigate around it without disturbing anything. You weren't loving them. You were managing them and you called that devotion. The person and the fantasy are two completely different losses. It is hard to separate them. People spend months grieving someone who only showed up inconsistently and left you with a pit in your stomach more often than not. But the fantasy, it was incredible. The fantasy was available. The fantasy was everything you needed and that fantasy was you. You are the common denominator for why you're in the situation you are in. Yes, I understand there are nuances to this, but truly, if you are making the decision to chase, if you are making the decision to stay in the loop that is unhealthy for you, then you really need to understand why. And here's why you specifically chose this. Here's where we stop talking about them entirely. Why are you so comfortable in the waiting room of someone else's life? Unavailability doesn't land randomly. Something about this dynamic felt familiar enough to move toward. Maybe consistency felt foreign to you. Maybe someone who showed up fully without games, without push and pull felt like too much exposure. Maybe you were raised in an environment where love came with uncertainty attached. And so certainty doesn't register as love. It registers as not passionate enough. Or maybe this is the one that really cuts. As long as they were the project, you didn't have to look at yourself. As long as you were busy decoding them, fixing them, waiting for them to finally wake up and see you, you had a reason not to ask the harder question. What am I not facing in my own life right now? The chase kept you occupied, and occupied felt safer than still. Nobody abandoned themselves all at once. It happens in moments so small you barely noticed them. The thing you didn't say because you didn't want to seem like you were too much. The cancellation you laughed off when it actually hurt. The boundary you quietly moved because you could see they were struggling and it didn't feel like the right time. The version of yourself you slowly edited down to being less needed, more chill and more patient because you were auditioning for a role in someone else's life and you wanted to be easy to cast. Stack enough of these moments and you've built a relationship with a version of yourself. You don't even recognize. You have been so busy trying to be everything that they needed, you've completely vacated your own life. That is you disappearing. When someone pulls away and you spiral, when you're checking their social media profiles at night, running the last conversation back through your head, looking for the one thing you said wrong, you weren't chasing them, you were chasing a birded. You want them to come back and choose you so that you can finally confirm something about your own worth, that you haven't been able to confirm yourself. You outsource the question of your own value to someone who was never qualified to answer it and also didn't have the capacity to hold you and then when they withdrew, it felt like they took the answer with them. But here's a truth that changes everything. If you need them to confirm it, it was never really confirmed in the first place. That's not a relationship problem. That's a you and yourself problem and this person you're chasing just made it visible. The verdict you're looking for cannot be delivered by someone who won't even text you back. It can only come from one place and you already know where that is. Real love, the kind that actually sustains you, it's almost embarrassingly undramatic by comparison. It's someone saying they'll be there at seven and actually being there at seven. It's not needing to decode a text for three hours with your best friend. It's the absence of that frantic vibrating energy in your chest that's telling you something is wrong. When you stop chasing potential, you might actually feel bored at first because your nervous system is so calibrated for turbulence and that piece feels like something is just missing. So you're so used to the adrenaline of the chase that saidiness doesn't compute as love yet. But peace is not the absence of passion. Peace is the floor you build a life on. You cannot build anything on a foundation of maybe. So come back to yourself. The hardest part of all of this is realizing that you were the one keeping the dream alive. The moment you stop pumping oxygen into the fantasy, it dies. And yes, that's lonely and there's a specific kind of grief that will visit you. But in that silence, something else happens. You finally get to hear your own voice again. And if you listen, it's been saying the same thing the whole time. Come back. I've missed you. You've been gone so long chasing someone who was never really there. That's your inner child asking for the love you never got. And doing so in the most unhealthy yet familiar way possible. But now as an adult, you get to choose differently. Stop chasing potential. Give yourself what you keep trying to extract from somebody else. Match reality. Clock the red flags and quit sticking around to see how much redder they can get. Nothing is more freeing than honoring yourself enough to know you don't have to keep chasing someone who isn't even choosing you. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and share it out. And as always, leave a comment. I read every single message and I am so grateful that you're here. [Music]