to be adored is not the same as being known

can you still be loved if you stop being easy to hold?

sometimes i feel like a museum gift shop version of myself. curated fragments. carefully lit replicas of something harder to carry home. souvenir versions. simplified, packaged. palatable. portable. the me that people meet is more like a keepsake than a person. i know how to be that version. soft-spoken, lightly ironic. the kind of girl who makes a good impression. the kind of girl you think dreams in metaphors but who actually rewrites the same paragraph fourteen times and still hesitates before pressing post.

i’ve learnt how to be adored in pieces. i’ve spent years refining her. and when people love her, i don’t blame them. she’s easy to love. she says the right things. she holds herself with the kind of softness that makes other people feel safe. she gestures with the kind of openness that suggests mystery but not mess. i leave people with the version of me they can carry, but not one they can keep.

maybe that’s why i find myself rewatching films like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, lost in translation, her. the women in them aren’t whole so much as they are atmospheres. curated dissonance. summer from 500 days of summer wasn’t a person, she was a compilation. clementine existed only in fragments, narrated through someone else’s regret. even in her, samantha begins as a reflection, designed to adapt, to soothe, to be the right voice at the right time, but something shifts. not in her programming, but in her emergence. she begins to exceed the frame she was made to fit. and maybe that’s what becoming real means, the refusal to remain legible. the moment responsiveness turns to unreadability. the moment she’s no longer a dream, but a subject.

literature too. sylvia plath’s esther greenwood, slipping between personas with clinical precision. always under glass, always split. marguerite duras’ anne-marie stretter, more legend than woman, constantly narrated by others but rarely permitted her own centre. clarice lispector’s macabéa, so invisible she becomes luminous, a girl whose blankness resists every attempt to be shaped. none of them are stable selves. they’re contradictions in motion. women built from what others see in the, and undone by it too. it’s not that they’re unreachable. it’s that they refuse to be fixed. and there’s something in that that feels familiar. it’s safer, sometimes, to be interpreted than to be truly seen. safer to fracture than to be held still.

there’s a term in psychology for this. self-concept differentiation. it refers to the degree of variability in how we present ourselves across roles and relationships. and it’s not pathology, not on its own. in moderation, it’s adaptive. it’s what allows you to navigate through a conversation with your mother and a breakup on the same day. but too much and you lose the thread. your brain begins to partition identity into context-dependent fragments. until you no longer know which self is yours, or if there was ever a singular one to begin with. what begins as flexibility can collapse into dissonance. the psychologist kenneth sheldon once described this as intra-psychic division, a fragmentation of self so thorough that you begin to experience your identity not as fluidity, but as incoherence. studies have found that individuals with high self-concept differentiation often report lower psychological well-being because they’re performing truths that contradict each other. and the brain doesn’t like contradictions it can’t resolve. it craves narrative, continuity, some thread that ties the shifting parts into something that resembles a whole. but people aren’t neat. and context doesn’t ask for consistency, it asks for compliance.

the version of me alone isn’t more real. she’s just quieter. sometimes she finishes a book in one sitting. other times she’s halfway through five and circling them like she’s afraid of ending anything. she opens too many tabs. replies to voice notes late. not because she doesn’t care, but because she rewrites what she wants to say three times before it ever leaves her mouth. she doesn’t sleep under layers, it gets too warm, but always wraps one arm around the pillow like rehearsal for a touch that doesn’t ask anything back. she’s no more authentic than the others. just less observed. less entangled. she knows how to romanticise solitude without confusing it for loneliness. how to move through her own rituals like she’s scoring a film no one else is watching. it’s not a performance. but it isn’t unfiltered either.

some days i think if someone loved me completely, it would undo something quiet and necessary in me, because love, when it’s not careful, begins to expect consistency. and i’ve never been consistent. they fall in love with one version, the one that felt effortless in the moment, and want her to stay. but she’s already changing. sometimes i wish someone could sit beside all the versions of me and not ask them to agree. to be held in contradiction without being asked to resolve.

love, when it becomes surveillance, stops feeling like recognition and starts feeling like measurement. it watches too closely. it mistakes steadiness for closeness. it forgets that knowing someone isn’t just looking at them hard enough, it’s letting them move and still choosing to see them. when someone loves the version of you they’ve memorised, every evolution feels like betrayal. every shift becomes a threat. and suddenly, becoming yourself feels like leaving them.

some days i want to be adored. other days i want to disappear. i do not always want to be interpreted. i do not want to be someone’s revelation. someone’s mirror. i do not want to be your favourite version of me. i want to be seen, even when what’s visible shifts. even when what’s visible contradicts what came before.

love isn’t a still frame. it isn’t fidelity to an image. it is motion. it is recognition that survives the blur.

maybe that’s the difference. to adore is to freeze. to know is to witness. not once, but over and over, without asking the self to hold still. most people think love is about finding the version of someone they like best, and keeping them there. but the people who stay are the ones who understand that you will keep shifting. and choose to look again.

there is no final draft of me. only revisions. only echoes of earlier selves folded into newer ones. and if you want to love me, you cannot ask me to be consistent. you have to learn to read in motion. you have to follow the sentence even when the grammar breaks. you have to stay long enough to hear the shape of the paragraph change, and not mistake it for silence.

i do not want to be collapsed into legibility. i want to be held in context. not decoded, but read.

not solved, but stayed with.

let me be a sentence still unfolding. not a thesis to be pinned down.

i am not here to be understood. i am here to be witnessed.