The Kind of Love That Comes With Conditions

I grew up learning the kind of love that came with conditions.

They say friends are your chosen family, but they do not say that we are likely to recreate the environment we grew up in through those we choose.

Though it took me 27 years to lift the rock and look beneath it, looking back, I can now see the pattern clearly.

My first friend, Maya, was the only other girl in our kindergarten. In time, that became leverage for her blackmail.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting on the pink chair in the playroom when I heard Maya say,

“I want to sit on that pink chair.”

“But I am sitting on it right now,” I replied.

Maya stared.

“The blue one there is empty,” I said, pointing to it.

She kept staring, her lips pressed thin against each other.

“I won’t be friends with you if I don’t sit on that chair.”

At the time, I thought, “Who cares? It’s just a chair.”

But it wasn’t just a chair.

It was the beginning of how I started learning to erase myself for the sake of being chosen.

What began with a chair became the last chocolate ice cream, then my favourite bracelet, leaving me, in the end, with a feeling of incongruence.

I cried to my mother.

“Just say no,” she said.

I couldn’t.

Not when saying no meant losing the other.

As a person who mastered self-deception, I loved my chosen family so much that I did not allow myself to wake up from dreams that slowly turned into nightmares.

Maya and I remained friends until I graduated from high school. Being anxiously attached did not help. I invented burdens in my mind, countless and undefined, finding ways to link the problem back to myself.

Until my health worsened and life taught me that unprocessed emotions can stagnate, turning into a physical illness later.

Back then, I could still walk, but not without hating every cell in my body that struggled to keep me upright, while people asked if I was drunk or about to faint.

I wasn’t able to speak about any of it until I started writing on here. First a word, then a sentence, then a paragraph, until it turned into a way of healing my trauma through self-disclosure.

I let it all be seen.

My heart.

My illness.

What remained unseen.

And what I didn’t want to be seen.

Unfiltered.

In time, that became a voice that allowed me to speak freely, without the fear of judgment until one night, a shadow of a former pattern appeared during a fight after I woke up from a nap. I was met with messages carrying the frustration of unmet expectations. I found myself trying to explain my anxiety about my hands going shaky in the future, as an evidence of my “lacking” presence.

Hearing, “How many children do you have?” right after revived the sense of misalignment I had been carrying for weeks that was strengthened by hearing his words that said, “You say you’re depressed, I call that my life.”

I had to show him the mess I was living in, a flat that could have been thrown away altogether, to justify that I was indeed severely unwell.

The argument resolved, releasing the tension that was built reciprocally over the past few months.

Yet, I couldn’t help but to notice a feeling in my body that I couldn’t quite name the following days.

Why were we comparing traumas, as if whoever was doing worse could rightfully interrogate?

Tracing my steps back to where it all started, I realised life was asking me to outgrow a pattern.

All my life, I longed to be chosen but people kept choosing me in ways that served themselves. The fault was not theirs, while I kept overlooking that I could’ve chosen myself.

Others were just mirrors, reflecting back my inner state.

Every new relationship carries its cause, an invitation to be courageous enough to claim it and weave it into your life.

I took a step back and started observing until I realised maybe for the first time, the voice of compliance wasn’t winning.

Earlier in my life, I kept avoiding conflict.

What I needed was to wake up and not allow what once was to blur my vision of what is.

I realigned and I asked myself honestly:

What am I carrying forward? What am I leaving behind?

Slowly, I began to see that these cherished moments were keeping me stuck in repeated patterns of a self that no longer served the path of my becoming.

My intention was never to discard the friendship but to be present in it by acting based on my own judgement instead of subtle demands.

I would have still been there, but I wasn’t allowed when I didn’t meet his terms and I can only accept that because that too, is a choice.

Now, I choose.

I choose those who see me as I am, not as they need me to be.

Those who nourish my voice instead of silencing it.

Because love, whether rooted in friendship or romance, is not about possession.

It is about freedom.

And the real freedom begins when you are around the people you choose, not the ones who merely remain.

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