I didn’t wake up one morning hating anyone. Well, I hate everyone before coffee, but that’s not the point.
There wasn’t a screaming match. There wasn’t some dramatic betrayal. There wasn’t a single text message that ended a friendship.
After twenty grueling months of quietly carrying more than I admitted, it took a complete blackout over Fourth of July weekend for me to realize I had been watering the wrong plant.
Also, I threw out two pounds of breaded cutlets and about two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries. We even had an MTV Unplugged session by candlelight.
Nirvana who?
I messaged a couple of my friends either that evening or the next day because I didn’t have internet, and my cell reception in my apartment was practically nonexistent. My refrigerator had become an expensive biology experiment, my apartment was still dark, and life, in all its audacity, refused to pause.
Somewhere between trying to reconnect with the outside world and carrying the emotional weight of everything that had been quietly piling up long before the blackout, I realized I wasn’t just exhausted.
I was depleted.
I was met with a few text messages saying, “Sorry to hear that.” Not a single “Do you need anything?” or “Is there anything I can do?“
Not that I expected anyone to solve my problems.
I didn’t.
Some messages weren’t opened until four business days later. I eventually deleted them for my own sanity.
Call me childish.
Je m’en fous.
The deleted messages were noticed, and the conversations resumed as though nothing had happened. No acknowledgment. No “Hey… are you okay?“
I’ve never believed friendship means fixing everyone’s problems. Sometimes all you can offer is a text message that says, “How are you holding up?” More often than not, that’s enough.
Maybe I’m wired differently. I don’t think friendship is measured by how many birthdays you remember or how many years you’ve known someone. I think it’s measured in the follow-up. It’s the second text. The check-in. The, “Hey… how are you doing today?”
Those little gestures tell people they haven’t been forgotten.
Gestures matter. They always have.
Some losses don’t announce themselves with funerals. Sometimes they arrive disguised as ordinary Tuesdays, unread messages, or a blackout that quietly rearranges your perspective.
Sometimes It Isn’t About One or Two People
This isn’t an article about villains. Life isn’t that neat.
It’s about something many of us do without even realizing we’re doing it. We pour ourselves into friendships, projects, relationships, volunteer work, businesses, workplaces, committees, hell, even group chats that should have died in 2019. We convince ourselves we’re investing. Sometimes we are.
Other times, we’re watering somebody else’s houseplant while ours is sitting in the corner looking like it just survived the Black Death.
Before you know it, you’ve forgotten what you looked like before you became everyone else’s emotional Swiss Army knife.
It Was Never About the Effort
Here’s the irony: it was never the effort that exhausted me. Most of us don’t mind showing up for the people we love. We don’t mind listening, remembering, checking in, or giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Those things don’t usually break us.
What breaks us is never stopping to notice how much of ourselves we’ve quietly handed away.
You know how they drain a body before embalming?
It felt a little like that.
Except nothing had died.
At least, nothing I had noticed yet.
Looking back, I don’t think I was running out of energy.
I think I was slowly running out of myself.
The Question That Changed Everything
Somewhere during all of this, and I honestly couldn’t tell you the exact moment because these realizations never arrive on schedule, I caught myself wondering when I had become so comfortable putting myself at the bottom of my own list.
Nobody asked me to do that.
There wasn’t a board meeting where I was unanimously elected President of Keeping Everything Together. Looking back, it happened the same way most habits do: quietly enough that, after a while, you stop noticing they’re habits and start calling them your personality.
I simply got really good at watering.
Watering the Wrong Plant
Now, before the gardening community starts sharpening their pitchforks, I should mention that I don’t actually own a garden. I live in New York City. The closest I’ve ever come to landscaping is yelling at pigeons that pay entirely too little rent for my fire escape.
Humor me anyway.
Imagine spending every day tending to the same plant. You water it, rotate it toward the sunlight, trim the dead leaves, and quietly admire your handiwork. Then one afternoon your eyes wander a few feet to the left.
There’s another plant.
It’s been there the whole time.
The soil is dry. The leaves are curling in on themselves. You reach over to move it, and half the damn thing stays in your hand.
That’s the thing about neglect. It has terrible manners. It doesn’t bang on your front door demanding your attention. It doesn’t leave passive-aggressive Post-it notes on the refrigerator. It just waits. Patiently. Silently. Until one day you realize something has been dying in the same room you’ve been standing in all along.
Loving People Doesn’t Mean Losing Yourself
Here’s the part I wish somebody had told me years ago.
Being dependable is a wonderful quality.
Being endlessly available isn’t.
Somewhere along the line those two ideas started holding hands, and I never questioned whether they belonged together. They don’t.
I don’t think there’s anything noble about abandoning yourself in the name of loyalty. It’s just a slower, quieter form of neglect. The kind that doesn’t leave bruises or broken bones. It simply convinces you that whatever belongs to you can wait another day.
Until one day it can’t.
Final Thought
I’ve spent years watering other people’s plants. I don’t regret caring. I don’t regret believing in people, and I don’t regret showing up. I’d still choose to care because that’s who I am. What I won’t do anymore is assume there will always be enough of me left over at the end of the day.
Maybe that’s why this realization bothered me so much. It wasn’t because somebody disappointed me. People disappoint each other every day. It was because I had become so accustomed to checking the soil in everyone else’s garden that it never occurred to me to look over my own fence.
The scary part is that I don’t even remember when I stopped. It didn’t happen after some catastrophic event. It happened so gradually that neglect started feeling perfectly ordinary.
Funny how that works.
You can walk past the same dying plant every single day until one afternoon you finally notice it isn’t dying anymore.
It’s dead.