I've been thinking about you.
Not the version that's doing well. Busier than ever, sharper than ever, with more people wanting more of you than you have hours in the day. I'm not talking to that version.
I'm talking to the one I feel underneath it. The one that goes quiet in the middle of a sentence. The one I sense when you pause just a beat too long before you tell me how good things are.
The slow fade
What happened during those legal battles was brutal. Not just the process. The part that came after. The part where you looked up and noticed who was still there.
Some of the people who needed you when you had something to give, the access, the connections, the momentum, the version of you that was building something and taking people with you. They got very quiet when the building stopped.
Not all at once. That would have been easier to name.
It was gradual. A slower response here. A lunch that never got rescheduled there. The group chat that kept going without you in it.
People didn't leave dramatically. They just quietly recalibrated how much of themselves they were willing to offer now that the equation had changed.
And you had to just absorb that. While also dealing with everything else. While keeping it together. While not letting on how much it hurt to learn, in such concrete terms, what you had actually been worth to some people.
You carried that quietly. Not dramatically, just as a new set of rules you live by now, without quite having decided to.
The forensic debt
There is a name for what prolonged legal battles do to people. Researchers call it Forensic Stress Disorder. Not a single trauma but the grinding, cumulative exposure of having your credibility interrogated, your judgment questioned, your version of events treated as something that had to be proven.
It maps onto the brain like PTSD, but the triggers are different. It's the heart hammering when an unknown number flashes on the screen. The mind scanning for threat in rooms that are perfectly safe. The 3am waking, already running, already three moves ahead of a risk that isn't there.
You aren't overreacting.
What happened was real, it left a mark, and you don't have to have it figured out by now.
Back, but further
Here's what I've watched you do since.
You went back to work. Not just back. Further. Busier than before. More indispensable. And when you talk about it there's a brightness I recognise, the brightness of being needed, of being the one who can do what others can't.
Everyone wants you now.
I'm not questioning what you've built. It's real. I just notice that the question, whether people would stay if you had nothing to give, never has to be asked this way. You rebuilt before it could be tested again.
Just enough
When I'm with you and I try to come closer, you give me just enough to stop me. Not rudely. Gracefully.
You tell me what you think I need to hear. You let me know you're fine, you're doing great, things are good. And you do it so warmly, so convincingly, that I almost can't argue with it.
Almost.
But I can feel the distance being managed. The way you keep the conversation just full enough that there's no room for anything else to enter. The way you've become very good at giving people a version of you that satisfies them without costing you anything.
You've learnt to read what someone needs from you and give them just that. Enough warmth to feel close. Enough openness to seem present. Enough of yourself to make them feel like they have you, without ever actually letting them in.
It's a skill you've honed. Most people don't even notice they're on the outside of it.
I notice.
I understand why. You learnt what presence costs when it isn't reciprocated. You learnt that people will take what you give and leave when there's nothing left. So now you give carefully. Measured amounts. Enough to keep people close enough, not close enough to hurt you.
The trouble is, you're doing it with everyone. Including the people who aren't keeping score.
The part that isn't impressed
When I sit with you and listen to everything that's going well, I feel something underneath it that none of it is touching. It isn't visible. You're too composed for that.
But it's there. In the pause, in the brightness that's just slightly too bright, in the way you're always already moving to the next thing before the current thing has landed.
You're tired in a way that being busy doesn't fix.
And somewhere underneath all of it, I think you miss being known. Not useful. Not impressive. Just known. The kind of known that doesn't require you to perform anything, or give anything, or be anything other than exactly what you are on the days when what you are isn't particularly remarkable.
That kind of known has felt dangerous for a while now.
I understand that too.
When you're ready
I wish you'd had someone with you through all of it. Not someone to fix it or fight it alongside you. Just someone who sat with you in it. Who tried to understand what it was actually like. Who made you feel, on the days when everything was grinding and uncertain and humiliating in ways you couldn't even say out loud, that you didn't have to carry the whole weight of it yourself.
I wish you'd had that.
I think about it sometimes. What it might have meant for how you came out the other side.
Because you did rebuild. And that took something real, a kind of grit and self-sufficiency that not everyone has. I'm not taking that away from you. But rebuilding alone, through sheer will and forward motion, gives you strength and brittleness in the same breath. The same thing that made you capable of surviving it made it harder to let anyone close again. You learnt to need less. And now needing less is just who you are.
Needing less kept you safe. But safe and close don't live in the same place.
You may have stopped believing this, but the version of you that existed before all of this, the one who could walk into a room without calculating everyone's angle, who let things matter without immediately protecting herself from them, she didn't disappear.
She went quiet, because it wasn't safe to be that open anymore. But she's still in there.
I can feel her in the restlessness. In the way you keep moving so you don't have to land anywhere. In how you turn your attention to someone else but can't quite be there with them either. In the need to always be giving something, as if being still without offering anything would make you disappear.
That part of you isn't gone. It's just been waiting.
And here's what's also true: you don't have to find your way back to her alone either. Not because the world has become safer or people have become more trustworthy, but because you get to choose, this time, who sits with you in it.
You don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to be ready to talk about all of it, or any of it. You just have to be willing to let someone be in the room with you.
Not because of what you can do, or what you might give me.
I'm not going anywhere, and I'll be here when you're ready to be soft again.