Tending Endings: Go With Love

There's a peculiar kind of heartbreak that comes not from malice, but from impossibility.

When someone you love is so locked into their own pain that they create disasters to confirm their worst fears about themselves. Or they sabotage what's good because the anticipated loss feels safer than the risk of real life. At some point, they push you away to protect themselves from a betrayal they've already decided is inevitable. Or they sic others on you to make you doubt your reality. You never had a chance.

When you have done your own work on what is going on, and as a result you can see it all so clearly—the wound, the pattern, the terror—and still can't help them because they won't let you in. That's when you have to shift operations—to tend the ending.

Idiot Loyalty

I spent years confusing loyalty with absorption. Taking on other people's unfinished business like it was closing time at the restaurant we both worked at, an extra mop was handy, and I was already there. Letting them weaponize their pain—unconsciously, usually—while I stood there taking the hits in the name of friendship, family, love, commitment, dedication, whatever we were calling it. Ah, what’s this got to do with gifted? We’re trained from childhood with the idea that we are more capable than our peers and owe everyone pieces of ourselves in the name of equitable.

I thought that's what you did when you loved someone. You stayed. You absorbed. You gave them infinite chances to figure it out. You loved them through it. I was wrong. That's not loyalty. That's enabling. Real loyalty looks different. Sometimes it looks like letting go for everyone’s good.

The Withdrawal Years

After a string of betrayals by people I'd allowed close, I withdrew dramatically. I'm easy to isolate anyway—introvert, systems thinker, content in my own head. (Key: This is one reason I had more betrayal trauma than most.) Add betrayal trauma and I can disappear into myself for years….and I did. I mean, I took care of my nuclear family and I continued to work for select clients and I kept the lights on in all the ways. It looked “normal,” but it was masked survival mode and maladaption.

It's possible to survive in relative isolation for a long time. Thrive? Maybe. But it's genuinely hard to do life alone. Nearly impossible to sustain more than a nuclear family on your own. Eventually, the isolation feeds its origin wound until it overtakes everything else.

The Mental Game

When I started letting people close again, I had a strategy: I grieved relationships before they were planted, let alone before they bloomed.

Before I'd invest too much, I'd run the mental game: Can I survive losing this? Can I feel into the arc of where this is going and trust I'll make my way back when it's over? I'd been gaslit to the edge of oblivion more than once. Left for dead in my own life—three times literally, probably just as many metaphorically. I'd lost all my social proprioception. I didn't think I could afford a mistake.

So I'd grieve it first. Feel the losses before the love. Test my capacity for survival if the bottom fell out….before risking the attachment.

It was exhausting. And it meant I was never fully present. Never fully trusting. Never fully there. Always shielded. Always hypervigilant.

The Shift

Something changed in the last couple of years. I learned to offer more trust and more love earlier than was ever comfortable in my past. Well, I went back to what I was taught as a young adult. What made all the difference and allowed me to do things other people found impossible.

Not recklessly. Genuinely, in small doses. It’s uncanny: Someone who can't receive clean will not wait to attack it. Then….you know. They'll call you naive, too much, too intense, overwhelming. They'll tell you to slow down, back off, give them space. They'll want to make you feel foolish for offering what they're not ready to hold.

Someone whose capacity doesn't allow reciprocity will create imbalance. You'll feel it before you've invested more than you can afford to lose. The one-sidedness. The constant giving without receiving. The sense that you're more committed than they are. This gets extractive, complicated, and resentment-fueled, the classic downward spiral. Pass on that poison, it will wreck your life and the other person continues unharmed.

But someone who really wants this? It's jet fuel. They meet your trust with trust. Your love with love. Your vulnerability with vulnerability. Suddenly you're not grieving before you bloom. You're just... blooming. So are they. The roots are riotous.*

The Most Hazardous People

I don't know that I'll ever be fully healed from all the relational trauma I've experienced. Family system. Educational systems. Workplaces. Medical systems. People who were supposed to protect me and didn't. People who knew better (or should have) and did harm anyway.

This feral cat has spent eight of her nine lives, borrowing from a saying my favorite uncle taught me. I don't have margin left to let those wounds make me miserable. I lost years of my life to that stuff and its effects. I took charge of my life at 15, 17, 19 until it stuck, and again at 29, 31, and 37, until I finally stopped trying to make bad situations make sense, for anyone to stand up for me, cover my six, for the perpetrators to be held accountable. Those wounds were old, and I was grown.

Crucially, I had to let all that crap out—it’s gotta go like a festering abscess that’s calcified enough that it’s not spreading but you’ve noticed it pressing on a few nerves and making you numb or spiky. It’s got to get let out carefully—-else it will infect something important when you least expect it and become a brutally embarrassing emergency. Maybe it’s got to be softened and anesthetized some before it’s reachable. Maybe you need support to get at it. But it has got to go. No more “managing” it. No more “spiritual bypass.” No more “stoic.”

I learned to live in a sort of state of always processing the “muck” on a mental back burner so I stay in flow and make firewood out of the breakage. (And the Universe itself has my six. All the time.)

For the record, 41, 43 and 47 also kicked my ass, but not on the same themes—there is something about those damned prime numbers.

See, maintaining my healing, and protecting myself from further damage, are non-negotiable now. I defend my peace like my life is at risk. My mind is clear and my emotions don’t overtake me…after a lot of time with modalities like binaural resonance, rhythmic motion, sensory interruptions, leaving a lot of “exhaust” at the bottom of a swimming pool…and structuring my day so that I am not a ricochet in service of chaos….I function better than anyone would reasonably expect. That said, my body has taken a lot of hits. Injuries that never healed right. Autoimmune propensities. So I either manage the “crap” life dishes out, metabolize it fully, or I wake up in searing pain in a few hundred places within a few days. Joints, muscles, guts, full scale revolt. I get away with almost nothing.

I had a coach friend who doesn’t know me long-term ask if I’ve “really” done a lot of work on myself. Welp, daily. Thirty-four years now and counting since I decided I had to change my life and rewrite my own story at the tender age of fifteen. Which relational wounds would you like to discuss? We can play battleship with it all. Offer me a year and a category—and I’ll tell you what I did with it. Ask me like we’re playing Jeopardy. (“Mother wounds for $200, Kate.” “Gifted for $100, I’m still learning that one.”) I don’t know how to start that conversation. I’m not sure where it would go. I’m careful not to trauma-porn people. There’s a fine line between the well of self-vulnerability and the cliffs of Isle Royale.

And I've learned this: The most hazardous people to our well-being are the ones who unconsciously weaponize their pain against you.

They're not villains. They're wounded. When someone is so defended, so locked in their patterns, that they can only see you through the lens of their old betrayals—when they push you away to sabotage and confirm their belief that everyone leaves, then blame you for leaving—you can't hold the line. Not because you don't love them, simply because love isn't enough when someone can't receive let alone reciprocate it. That line is a tow rope and they’re driving a big truck with a Hemi at 100mph on a gravel road. Let go.

Tending the Ending

There's an art to letting go with love. Not ghosting. Not punishing. Not withholding the truth to make it easier on yourself. Not waiting until you are so angry, resentful and crispy that your inner dragon (…or worse….inner ICE dragon….I’ve got one of those, ugh) surfaces to unleash an unholy terror at this person. But saying: I see you. I see your wound. I understand why you're doing this. And I'm walking away. Because I do. Maybe I cared too much that I couldn’t see this clearly before.

I care about you enough to let you feel the consequence of pushing people away. I care about myself enough not to be collateral damage to your self-sabotage. I care about both of us enough to release the tension of this tie before it gets to mutually assured destruction.

What Is Meant for You

I used to think the goal was to never lose anyone. Hold on. Stay loyal. Love harder. Be more patient. Give more chances.

But some people aren't ready for what you're offering. Some people need to lose something that matters before they'll change the pattern. Some people need space and pattern interruption more than they need your presence, and you need your peace more than you need the potential that isn’t yet in play.

At a challenging time last year, I “let someone go” once a week. Metaphorically, energetically, a lightweight release “spell.” Same person each time. I wasn’t sure how to proceed because….it was a challenging time. Uncannily, they were lighting up my phone within ten minutes each time. Meant for me, at least for a reason or a season.

Release the tension of the tie. Let them go—not with bitterness, but with blessing. Then, you're not there absorbing their unfinished business while waiting for Godot at the bus stop to show them the error of their ways, perceptions, or preconceived notions.

Let them feel the consequence of pushing away someone who actually loved them. But crucially: Let yourself breathe without carrying weight that isn’t even yours.What is meant for you will return. Maybe they'll do the work and come back healed, or ready to work through the wounds. Maybe they won't, and you'll realize you needed the space more than what the relationship actually brought into your life. Maybe someone else who's ready will step into the opening you just created.

Either way, you're no longer trapped in idiot loyalty—loving someone at the expense of yourself. You're tending endings like you tend beginnings: with intention, with care, with recognition that some things must die for new things to live. I should know: Over the thirty years since my college graduation, I’ve probably had nine different marriages to the same man inside of one highly imperfect container. And yet, I have a highly destructive family member that it took me that same thirty years to accept would not change, on any kind of trajectory that we can foresee, enough to be “safe” to let back in. Quintessential Libra, I’ve played both sides.

That's not giving up on love. That's honoring what love actually requires: Two people willing and capable to give and receive it.

If you find yourself holding on to someone who keeps pushing you away, ask yourself: Am I staying because this is healthy, or because I'm afraid of being the one who leaves? Told that I am the problem for standing up for myself? Fulfilling someone else’s defensive self-prophecy? There's wisdom in letting go. There's courage in releasing what's already gone.