The phrase “an albatross around your neck” comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. In the poem, a sailor shoots an albatross, a bird that had brought his ship good fortune. But luck turns to misfortune, and as punishment, he’s forced to wear the bird’s corpse around his neck while the crew suffers.

It becomes a symbol of guilt, regret, and emotional baggage we carry long after the moment has passed..that invisible heaviness we sometimes live with..

I’ve cried rivers over you. I’ve felt your absence in every part of me, as if a piece of my soul was missing. I missed you with everything I had—my heart, my mind, my body. There were moments when the pain consumed me, and I even hated you for it. I hated how you left, how you made me feel like I wasn’t enough. And for a long time, I wondered if it was all my fault. I questioned everything about myself, every action, every word.

But not anymore.

There came a moment when I finally understood something so powerful that it set me free: it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough for you—it was that I was too much. I loved with a depth you couldn’t meet. I cared in ways that you couldn’t understand. I brought passion, honesty, and strength to the table, and it wasn’t that those things weren’t valuable. They were simply too big for the space you had in your life.

I used to think that I needed to change, to be smaller, quieter, easier for you. But I’ve learned that the problem was never me trying to be enough—it was you not being able to receive all that I am. I am more than enough, and I deserve someone who sees that, who can meet me at my level and celebrate my fullness.

I am enough. I’ve always been enough. And now, I fully embrace that truth