I'll Get Me A Dog
The empathy I carry is not a gift. It’s a lit match I keep handing to people and then acting surprised when they burn me with it. I give them my trust like I have an endless supply, like the last one didn’t really cost me three months of sleep and a version of myself I’m still trying to find.
I don’t need a blind admiration.
If I need it, I’ll get me a dog.
People don’t want to be known anymore. They want to be worshipped. Seen from a flattering angle, never too close, never in bad lighting, never on their worst Tuesday. They’ll take your applause and call it love, take your attention and call it a relationship. They wouldn’t mind being objectified as long as it comes with enough warmth, as long as nobody asks if any of it is real. Most of them prefer admiration over respect, and they don’t even flinch about it.
And me, I see their red flags, and I think potential. I see the wreckage of them, and I think I can help. That’s the sickness in me.
That’s the part I hate most, more than them, more than what they did. That I walked into it with my eyes open and called it devotion. I’m hating myself for giving trust to people who turned around and used it. I can’t see myself forgiving them. I want them to suffer, to crawl to my knees and beg me to release them from my wrath. And my wrath won’t be cold and clean; it’ll be hotter than hell, and they will burn in it forever for everything they’ve done to me.
I don’t need a blind admiration.
If I need it, I’ll get me a dog.
And I mean that literally. I have a cat now. She doesn’t care about my feelings, and she keeps her boundaries better than any person I’ve ever let close. She didn’t check on me when I sobbed into my pillow at 3 AM for a full week straight. She watched from the doorway, blinked once, and walked away. She respects me and my grievance process. That’s the most honest thing anyone has given me in a long time.
What I actually want, what I would burn the whole agreement down for, is unshakeable devotion. Loyalty that doesn’t need a good reason. A person who got their life in order and still chooses to give me their undivided time, until we both go back to our own lives and our own quiet. And if I ever settle for anything less than that, my father’s grave can damn me straight through to the next generation.
I read the sky and its elements religiously; I believe in synchronicities and redirection, yet I still couldn’t acknowledge the biggest red flag standing right in front of me. Call it ironic. I kept seeing their damage as something worth staying for, kept giving my time, my effort, my energy, like I was the cure for something that was never mine to fix.
I don’t need a blind admiration.
If I need it, I’ll get me a dog.
At least the dog means it.
The hardest part isn't them. It was never really them. The hardest part is me, sitting with the fact that this is my pattern, my sickness, my specific brand of self-destruction. I am wired to see the best in people before they've earned the right to be seen at all. I hand out my empathy like it's free, like it doesn't cost me sleep and months and versions of myself I can never fully recover. And the worst of it is that I know. I have always known. I read the signs, I name the flags, I write about it in my journal over morning coffee, and then I do it again. That's not ignorance. That's something far more inconvenient than ignorance.
So here I am, trying to relearn something that should have been instinct. That my trust is not a welcome mat. That my empathy is not a charity. That loving with everything I have is only worth something when it lands somewhere worthy of it. It's not easy. It might be the hardest thing I've ever had to teach myself: to pause before I pour, to ask who has actually earned it before I give it away. But I am tired of burning for people who never even felt the heat.
And if you are reading this, sitting with your own version of this same sickness, maybe the only thing left to do is decide that you are tired of it too. That's usually where it starts. Not with a revelation. Just with exhaustion, and the quiet decision to finally stop.
I don't need a blind admiration. If I need it, I'll get me a dog. At least the dog means it. At least the dog doesn't make me question what's real and what's performance, doesn't keep me up at 3 AM running through every sign I chose to ignore. The dog just shows up. Fully, every time, without an agenda.
And maybe that's the whole point. Maybe the standard was never too high. Maybe I just kept handing it to the wrong species.
Comments
Post a Comment