“Dear Woman,
Sometimes
You’ll just be too much woman.
Too smart,
Too beautiful,
Too strong.
Too much of something
That makes a man feel less of a man,
Which will start making you feel like you have to be less of a woman.
The biggest mistake you can make
Is removing jewels from your crown
To make it easier for a man to carry.
When this happens, I need you to understand,
You do not need a smaller crown--
You need a man with bigger hands.”
~Michael E. Reid
When I first came across this quote about two years ago, I felt like I had just been broken into a million pieces by a man who made me feel that I was never good enough. I read the words of the quote over and over, hoping that maybe if I read them enough times I would start to buy into the words that were staring back at me. As much as I tried to assume the role of the mature woman with perspective who is the target of this quote, two years ago, the words that I read over and over couldn’t have felt further from the truth. And tonight I sit, two years later, revisiting the words to this quote that once felt foreign to me, feeling heartbroken and numb, looking at myself in the mirror, ironically sent back to the place of gut wrenching self-analysis by the same man who put me there two years ago. But tonight when I read the words in this quote, fighting back tears and forcing myself to get my eyes to sift through the words one at a time, I feel different. They resonate with me. I feel like a woman with the dignity and strength to pick up the pieces, and to know with confidence that when I read the words in front of me, I actually believe them.
Two years ago, I was a newly graduated tiger roaming around the big city, with not an inkling of an idea how to navigate this complex world that surrounded me. Even with a Princeton degree in hand and blonde hair to toss over my shoulder, I felt small. In the fashion world, I always felt like I wasn’t thin enough. When I’d step into a venture capitalist’s office, I felt like I wasn’t smart enough. When I’d stand on the sidelines of runway shows during fashion week, I felt like I was never pretty enough to survive in that world. In the midst of fending off my own internal battles and pondering whether to run a fashion company or to chase my high school dream of becoming an economist, I met this guy. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life, and for the first time, I had no idea what the formula was to get what I wanted.
While I did everything in my power to make him a priority, I never was to him. In my eyes, he was the guy for me, but in his I was just another girl who he could string along to get what he wanted. No matter how hard I tried to be the person that I thought he wanted to be with, I never felt like I was good enough. Here I was willing to do whatever it took to give us a real shot, to try to make it work, and he constantly gave me every excuse in the book as to why we couldn’t be together. He couldn’t have a girlfriend right now. He needed to focus on work. The list goes on. But he didn’t want to lose me in his life. Or so he said. So he kept me there, on his own little leash, always an arm’s length away. And against my better judgment, that’s where I stayed.
After putting as much effort into my appearance as humanly possible and hiding my nerves in a face full of makeup and a ballgown, I mustered the strength to ask him to a society gala that I had been nervously anticipating for about a month. When the night ended with tears running down my face and a feeling of blatant rejection like I had never experienced before, I probably should have taken that as a pretty clear indicator that he wasn’t that into me. When I went home the next day and buried myself in my covers, I knew that I had hit rock bottom. I had been pining after a guy who constantly made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. Like I was never enough for him. For the first time in my life, I didn’t understand what else I could possibly do to get him to feel about me how I did about him. In attempt to savor any remnants of my dignity that remained as far as he was concerned, I decided to give it a rest. In the midst of my self-designated period of ‘reconnecting with myself,’ I stumbled across the quote that I included above.
As I read the words after feeling constantly rejected by this guy that I was completely falling for, I did everything in my power to try to believe it - to believe that I was strong, and pretty, and that maybe he was actually the one who wasn’t good enough for me, rather than it being the other way around. But as I stood looking at myself in the mirror day after day, I genuinely didn’t believe it. I knew that deep down in my heart, I wasn’t my best self. That I had more to offer and that there were plenty of ways that I could improve the way that I looked and to improve upon my intelligence. Part of me wanted to change for myself. But the majority of my desire to make the changes that I made in my life stemmed from trying to please him, from trying to be the girl that I thought he might finally want rather than just being the girl that I was.
I told myself that if I could work hard enough to be skinnier, or smarter, or prettier than I was, that maybe he would finally come to see things differently. After a brief stint of gauging on macarons in Paris, I told myself that I was going to do everything in my power to become my best self. For months on end I pushed myself to lose weight. I spent hours at the salon trying to make my hair look better, to try to fix my eyebrows, to make my nails look perfect. I focused on getting back to all of the things I used to love - to reading the Economist and The Wall Street Journal, to geeking out over graphs and math models to try to get myself back on the right track. To try to be someone that I thought maybe one day he could love.
While I set out on my personal journey to better myself for him, about part-way through, I realized that I was doing it for myself as well. While I tried to play it cool and be moderately nonchalant when I reconnected with him after my little makeover, of course I still had feelings for him. They’re not just something that you can throw away. As time passed, we became something remarkably civil - and while part of the old me still remained, I slowly felt myself starting to change. As I started spending more time with him, I couldn’t help but ponder what it would feel like to be more than friends again. And as I changed, so did he. He seemed different.
I never knew if it was me reading signals wrong or overanalyzing every little thing, but I really felt like there was finally something there between us. One night when we were walking on the sidewalk after he took me to a special dinner for my birthday, it seemed like he was trying to hold my hand. But I wasn’t sure, so I pulled away. And when I’d see him, the tension between us was suddenly through the roof, and I had no idea how I was going to possibly continue to tame what I was feeling. For once the signs somewhat seemed to be there. He started to look at me differently. But I couldn’t tell for sure. And given all of the progress that I’d made, there was no way that I was going to make a complete fool of myself as I had in the past.
I couldn’t take the uncertainty anymore. But I also had no idea how to move forward in any direction. Given that his thirtieth birthday was coming up, I decided that it might be a good time to show him how I really felt. I mean, I had already gone through the trouble of losing ten pounds, becoming blond(er) than I was, and doing all in my power to constantly maintain my composure, so I thought there wasn’t much left to lose by attempting a grand gesture. I had never done anything like this before, had never put my heart on the line like I did that night. I was so nervous that I couldn’t sit still all day at work. I had been planning this for months. Given we were in ambiguous territory, the night held the potential to end in two ways: it would either be the best birthday he’d ever have, or it would be yet again another humiliating evening for me, far worse than any degree of humiliation I had ever experienced before.
After buying a new dress and getting dolled up just to impress him, I stood there in the hotel lobby waiting for him, hoping for the best. My heart was in my throat wondering how he would react to the night that I had planned, which may or may not have ended up with us being more than friends again. While I was mentally and emotionally hyperventilating the entire evening, the night was everything I had hoped for, and it seemed to be for him as well. Unless he would have felt too guilty embarrassing me after everything I had planned and was doing his best to hide his real emotions, he really seemed to enjoy the night and everything that came with it. And the way he looked at me when he looked into my eyes the next morning, made me think that just maybe, he loved me too.
That night was hands-down one of the best nights of my life, but I didn’t really know where we stood after that. I put myself out there and he seemed to respond well to it, but I was fairly surprised when nothing seemed to change after that. I had never put so much continuous effort into anything in my life, and for just once, I wanted something about whatever this thing was between us to be easy. I wanted him to believe in me like I believed in him, and to be there for me like I needed him to be. As the holidays came around a few weeks later, this was the last I had heard from him. And I couldn’t help but wonder if the night that meant so much to me meant nothing to him at all.
Two years of building one of the most emotionally and intellectually intense connections I had ever experienced in my life, and he just removed himself from my life with no explanation. As the last year passed, I wondered when he was going to contact me again. Deep down in my heart I knew that after everything we had been through, all of the nights of wondering what was possibly going on in his head would be worth it, because one day things would become simple. I had no idea that when he wished me a happy new year about a year ago, that he never had the intention to speak to me again. Coming off of such a high that felt mutual, I wouldn’t anticipate something like that, even from him. During the past year, I’ve constantly wondered when the day would come when he would contact me again. Letting my thoughts run rampant, I would daydream about how he might surprise me with a trip to Paris or do something spontaneous to tell me how he really felt about me once he was done with his project at work and was ready to give us a real shot.
While I’ve continued to battle with whether I should try to hold on to my feelings for him or to do everything in power to let them go, I’ve found myself simultaneously clinging to the past while everything else in my life has been moving forward. I genuinely believed that he would want to be with me for good when the timing was right, that he’d finally come to see in me what I saw in him all along. But as another New Year’s Eve passed and I had yet to hear a word from him, I knew that I couldn’t sit around waiting anymore, waiting to wonder how I should feel about the remnants I had left of him and about everyone else in my life waiting on me to make that decision.
So gathering the courage to contact him as I had so many times before, I sent him a text that I must have proofread twenty times before sending, even though it was only about four words long. A year of daydreaming about when he was going to perform some grand gesture to whisk me away on some spontaneously romantic adventure ended in the harsh realization that all of this time that I was waiting for him to be ready to be with me, he was busy seeing someone else. And here I thought he was preoccupied trying to move his investment project forward so that we could finally be together, when his preoccupation clearly lied elsewhere. So I suppose that he never had any intentions of contacting me again at all. After a year of allowing my mind to come up with all sorts of reasons as to why he may have stopped talking to me so suddenly, the answer I found lied entirely contrary to everything I ever thought I knew about his character. Rather than having the respect to have a conversation with me a year ago after everything I had done for him, he blew me off without a word.
Without knowing what to do or how to handle what I’d just found out, I instantly remembered all too well what it felt like when he hurt me before, time and time again. After running as fast and as long as I possibly could, I reread this poem earlier this evening. As I sit here reading the words of this poem that I’ve stared at all too many times before, I know in my heart that I’m not the girl that I was two years ago when I first stumbled upon it. As I looked in the mirror after my spontaneous evening run brought on by this special occasion, I saw a woman who I was proud of. I saw a young girl who once started running to lose weight to please a man, who had turned into a woman who has made running a hobby that she genuinely enjoys. I saw a girl with a fresh tan, blonde hair, and a mind full ideas. I saw a girl with eyes that showed more promise than any man would ever deserve. As I cleared every reminder of him out of my room and let the last tear that he’ll ever cause me to fall, I realized that how he looked at me or what he thought of me was no longer my concern. And in the midst of the emotional confusion and heartache making me wonder if I should have left things ambiguous, holding on to the hope of everything I wanted forever, I knew all too well that I was the only one with the power to finally set me free.
So why am I telling you all of this? As a Princeton graduate, a former entrepreneur, and a current PhD student, most people in my life look at me as if I have things all figured out. But the reality is, that I don’t. Every day is a chaotic and wonderful new adventure, and I'm still in the process of figuring it all out. I’ve always liked economics because there are a clear set of rules. There are guidelines that dictate which way the curves should move, and life exists within the bounds of rationality. But real life doesn’t come with a manual. It doesn’t come with a clear set of rules. People are incredibly irrational in their behavior. And love is no exception. Sometimes no matter how hard we try or how much effort we possibly expend trying to be the best person that we can be, there is always someone who will see us as ugly to make themselves feel prettier or who will speak condescendingly to us to make them feel better about themselves. That is no excuse to be anything other than the person that you are.
Never change for anyone. Never try to be someone else simply to please another person when you are perfectly fine the way that you are. Never let someone tell you that you’re not good enough, simply because they are not on your level. Never let someone make you feel like you’re one of many. Never let a man make you feel like you’re just another girl. Never chase someone who has you running in circles with no clear destination in mind. Never wait for someone to decide whether or not you’re worthy of being with them. Never let yourself accept excuses as truth. Learn to see what’s in front of you, no matter how much it hurts. Never let someone convince you that you need to be anyone other than exactly the person that you are. Because as you’re chasing a man in circles, waiting for him to throw you a bone, you must stop and realize that he’ll never let you stop running.
So here I stand, completely vulnerable. Simultaneously the most heartbroken I’ve ever been, and the most autonomous I have ever felt. Because instead of looking backwards, holding on to the remnants of what I once thought was and the hopes of what I thought would be, I’m finally looking forward. While it took me two years, many tears, and more anxiety than I can put into words, I have finally come to realize that it was never really about me. No matter what I did, I was never going to be good enough for him. He was never going to see me as the right level of pretty or the right level of smart to suite his ever-changing needs. But as I look in the mirror tonight, finally mentally free of the notion that it is any of his concern, I know that never again will I apologize for being my imperfect, quirky, nerdy self. In the process of bending over backwards to please a man who has never jumped over a puddle for me, I’ve come to find what I was looking for all along: the woman who knows exactly who she is and the understanding that comes with the reluctance to be anything other than that person.