i would sell my soul / for a soul worth keeping🗡

WHAT A SHOCK WHEN THEY TELL YOU IT WON'T HURT AND YOU ALMOST TURN INSIDE OUT WHEN THEY BEGIN.

I spent so long thinking this is just what it takes to be loved; a life of servitude, guilt and pain. Sending a child into the world believing this sets them up for domestic abuse for their whole life.

You learn young how to stretch a meal— how to split a single "good job" into portions small enough to last for years.

At first, you don’t notice the empty chair at the recital, the game, the graduation— you’re too busy scanning the crowd for anyone who might clap just for you.

Then comes the craving: teachers who praise like parents should, lovers who worship like it’s penance, strangers on screens who say "you matter" in exchange for pieces of yourself you didn’t know were currency.

You collect "I love you"s like loose change, hoard them in jars labeled "proof", but the hole in your chest has no bottom— it swallows compliments whole and still growls for more.

You mistake obsession for affection, hands that take for hands that give, because no one taught you the difference between being wanted and being valued.

You apologize for existing while begging the world: "See me, see me, see me—" as if visibility could fill the hollow their neglect carved, as if enough strangers saying "stay" could drown out the echo of your own family’s "go."

The cruelest lie? Thinking you’re the exception— that everyone else was born knowing how to love themselves without a manual, while you’re still tracing the letters of your own name like it’s a language you haven’t earned.

But here’s the truth they never handed you: That hole isn’t yours to fill. Those hands weren’t yours to hold. That love— the kind that stays without being asked, the kind that doesn’t keep score— was never theirs to give.

(One day, you’ll stop setting the table for people who never come. One day, you’ll realize you were always the feast.)

Even if the attention is abusive, you can end up feeling grateful because to someone starved for it, being ignored can feel worse than anything else. Knowing abuse will be mixed with attention can work like a drug on your system and you can't resist.