Sunday Porch Conversations: The Long Heat

Sunday Porch Conversations · The Long Heat

Not because you got worse. Because you got harder to use.

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It’s 5:40 in the morning and I’m on the porch because that’s the only hour Phoenix gives you in July. It’s already 91 degrees. I’m watering the one plant that’s still fighting, and I’m thinking about a phrase I’ve heard in my office more times than I can count — said in a dozen different voices, but always with the same bewildered ache:

“I’m doing better than I’ve ever done.
So why does everyone seem mad at me?”

Here is the thing nobody tells you when you start healing, and I want to say it plainly because you’ve earned plainness:

Some people loved the unhealed version of you. Not because she was healthy — because she was convenient. She said yes before the question was finished. She apologized for things she didn’t do just to lower the temperature in the room. She could be counted on to abandon herself on schedule, and there are people who built their whole comfort on that schedule.

So when you started saying no — kindly, even — it registered in their nervous system as loss. And in a way, they’re right. Something did die. The arrangement died.

They’re not grieving you.
They’re grieving the access.

Now, here’s the part I don’t get to skip, and neither do you.

I have been on both sides of this. I have been the one healing, watching people go quiet when my yes got slower. And I have also been the one who felt the sting when someone I relied on stopped over-functioning for me — and I called it “distance” and “change” when the truer word was withdrawal. Withdrawal from a supply I never should have been drawing on. It is humbling to realize your hurt feelings are sometimes just an invoice for labor someone was never supposed to be doing for free.

If that lands somewhere tender, sit with it a second. Don’t rush past it. The people pulling away from your healing aren’t all villains. Some of them are just tired people who learned to lean on you because you kept offering your back. The grief runs in every direction here.

· · ·

But here’s what I need you to hold onto, out in this long heat:

The relationships that only worked when you were abandoning yourself were not relationships. They were arrangements. And an arrangement ending is not proof you’ve become cold, or selfish, or “changed in a bad way.” It is proof that you stopped paying a bill that was never yours.

Some of those people will recalibrate. They’ll wobble, and grumble, and then one day they’ll meet the real you and find out she’s actually more generous than the old one — because now the giving comes from fullness instead of fear. Those are your people. Wait for them.

And some won’t. Some will keep circling the place where the old you used to stand, waiting for her to come back.

She’s not coming back.

I’m not going to tie a bow on this one, because there isn’t one. Healing has a body count, and it’s usually made up of arrangements you were told were love. You’re allowed to grieve them. Grieving them doesn’t mean you were wrong to heal.

The sun’s fully up now and the porch is done for the day. The heat doesn’t break here for another two months — and you and I both know some seasons are like that. You don’t get out of them. You get through them, one early morning at a time.

If no one has said it to you lately: I’m proud of the version of you that’s harder to use.

With warmth from the porch,

Kristi

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