THE MOST LOVING THING YOU CAN DO IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK
For most of my life I believed that loving people meant carrying things for them.
If someone I loved was struggling, my instinct was to get underneath it. To absorb what felt too heavy. To make it smaller, softer, more manageable so they didn't have to feel the full weight of it.
I was good at it. And for a long time I mistook that skill for love.
It wasn't. Not fully.
It was love mixed with something else. A quiet, deeply held belief that the people I cared about couldn't handle their own experience without me intervening. That my job was to stand between them and their discomfort.
What I've come to understand — slowly, and not without resistance — is that this isn't protection.
It's a subtle way of saying: I don't trust you to move through this.
And the people we love deserve more than that.
Real love doesn't remove the hard thing. It sits with you inside it.
There is a profound difference between being present with someone in their pain and trying to fix it, manage it, or take it away. One of those is love. The other is fear, fear that they can't handle it, fear that their discomfort means something about you, fear that if you're not managing the outcome you're not doing enough.
But here's the truth:
Your presence is the gift. Not your management.
When you sit with someone, really sit with them, without rushing to resolve, without needing it to look different, you give their nervous system something it cannot get from advice or protection.
Safety. The felt, embodied understanding that this feeling is survivable. That they are still loved inside of it. That they are still capable of moving through it.
That's what love actually looks like. Not rescue. Presence.
And when you finally understand that the weight was never yours to carry, that believing in someone enough to let them carry their own journey IS the love, something releases in you too.
You were loving them all along.
