The Holiday I Finally Stopped Believing in Love

There is something uniquely violent about being alone on a holiday.

Not the quiet, but the contrast.

The way the world performs abundance while you sit with nothing but your own pulse and the sound of other people being chosen somewhere else.

Today is full of tables I was never invited to.

Meals cooked with love I was not worthy of.

Traditions that apparently did not include me.

I did everything right.

I loved. I showed up. I gave more than I should have.

I bent myself into versions that were easier to accept.

And still, here I am.

Alone. Again.

So don’t tell me love is unconditional.

Don’t tell me family is everything.

Don’t tell me holidays are about togetherness.

They are about who gets kept.

Being alone today didn’t just hurt my feelings.

It rearranged something fundamental in me...something shut its doors.

Because when you are left behind enough times, your body stops interpreting it as coincidence.

It calls it data.

Love, apparently, is something other people receive effortlessly.

Love is a language I speak fluently and am never spoken back to.

Love is a promise I kept and a myth that was never kept to me.

I didn’t lose faith today.

I ran out of evidence.

I watched everyone else be held while I sat with crackers and grief and the quiet humiliation of realizing that no one noticed my absence because my absence was expected.

That’s the part people don’t say out loud.

Some of us are not missed.

Some of us are convenient.

Some of us are tolerated until it requires effort.

And holidays expose that with surgical precision.

So yes, this changes me.

It teaches me to stop waiting.

To stop hoping.

To stop handing my heart to systems that have proven they will drop it every single time.

I don’t believe in love the way I used to.

The shiny version. The safe version. The “it’ll all work out” version.

I believe in survival now.

In tending my own fire.

In building warmth where no one offered me a seat.

If you’re reading this alone today, know this:

You are not broken.

You are not unlovable.

You are living in a world that distributes care unevenly and calls it fate.

And tonight, I am not healing.

I am not forgiving.

I am not grateful.

I am telling the truth ... feral, bare handed, and without apology.

Some of us didn’t get love this holiday.

And pretending that doesn’t change you would be the biggest lie of all.