I Would Rather You Break My Heart Than Break My Own Again

On choosing yourself, tipping the first domino, and refusing to inherit self-abandonment.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with choosing yourself.

We talk about self-love as though it is always soft. As though choosing yourself means bubble baths and boundaries and finally learning how to say no without feeling guilty.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes choosing yourself looks like standing in the wreckage of a life you could have kept if you had just been willing to become smaller.

That is the part we don’t talk about enough.

I recently found myself deeply resonating with Unethical by Faouzia. The story behind the song struck something in me. She has spoken about being asked not to pursue singing—to choose marriage instead. And she chose herself. She pursued the thing that belonged to her.

Not because love doesn’t matter.

Because abandoning yourself in exchange for love isn’t love.

And I think somewhere along my own spiritual journey, I had to confront the same question in a hundred different forms:

How much of myself am I willing to give up to remain palatable to someone else?

There were versions of me who knew how to make themselves smaller.

Not necessarily quieter. Smaller.

There is a difference.

I could still be intelligent, as long as I didn’t make someone uncomfortable with it. I could be intuitive, as long as I didn’t trust myself more than I trusted someone else’s interpretation of me. I could be independent, as long as my independence didn’t make someone feel unnecessary. I could have boundaries, as long as those boundaries didn’t inconvenience anyone.

I could be myself.

Just not too much of myself.

And for a long time, I think I confused that negotiation with connection.

I thought compromise meant finding pieces of myself that I could put down so there would be more room for someone else. I thought love sometimes required making yourself easier to hold.

What I eventually realized was that I wasn’t making myself easier to love.

I was making myself easier to abandon.

Because every time I betrayed something I knew about myself to preserve a relationship, an expectation, a role, or someone else’s comfort, I was teaching myself that everyone else’s relationship with me mattered more than my relationship with myself.

The First Domino

There wasn’t one enormous moment where my entire life suddenly changed.

There was a domino.

One decision.

One moment where I chose differently.

And when that domino fell, it touched the next one. And the next. And the next.

That is the strange thing about changing your life. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re changing your life while you’re doing it.

You think you’re making one difficult decision. You think you’re ending one relationship. Setting one boundary. Saying no one time. Walking away from one thing. Trusting yourself in one moment where every part of your conditioning is screaming that you are making a mistake.

You have no idea that you just tipped the first domino.

I certainly didn’t.

For a lot of this journey, I genuinely wondered if I was doing the wrong thing.

Choosing yourself doesn’t always come with immediate confirmation. Sometimes it comes with loneliness. Sometimes people misunderstand you. Sometimes people who benefited from the version of you without boundaries don’t particularly enjoy meeting the version who has them.

Sometimes you lose people.

Sometimes you sit alone afterward wondering whether you should have just been more patient, more understanding, more forgiving, more accommodating.

And if you have spent enough of your life abandoning yourself, choosing yourself can initially feel selfish.

Because unfamiliar doesn’t always feel safe.

Even when unfamiliar is freedom.

Eventually, something changed.

I stopped asking, How do I make this work?

And started asking:

What does making this work require me to sacrifice?

Those are very different questions.

There are things worth compromising on. There are relationships worth tending. There are moments when humility is necessary and moments when we need to examine our own behavior.

Choosing yourself does not mean believing you are always right.

It means you are no longer willing to disappear.

I can love you without leaving myself to do it.

I can understand your wounds without volunteering to become collateral damage from them.

I can have compassion for why you are the way you are without making your healing my responsibility.

I can want you. I can miss you. I can love you.

And I can still choose me.

That distinction changed my life.

The Life on the Other Side

I look at my life now and sometimes think about all of the things that exist because I stopped abandoning myself.

I own my own business.

I built something from my own mind, intuition, experience, education, creativity, and voice. I created a life that would have been impossible for the version of me who was constantly negotiating herself away.

And that isn’t lost on me.

Especially as a woman.

Especially as a woman looking backward through the generations of women who came before me.

I think about the choices they had access to. I think about how many women in our family lines were intelligent, creative, intuitive, ambitious, strange, brilliant, or wildly capable and never had the circumstances that allowed them to ask:

What do I actually want?

Not what will keep everyone happy.

Not what will keep me safe.

Not what will make me a good daughter, wife, mother, partner, or woman.

What do I want?

I don’t say that with judgment toward them. Quite the opposite.

I understand that sometimes survival was the choice.

But I also understand that when circumstances change, someone eventually has to make a different decision.

Someone has to tip the domino.

It Ends Here

We romanticize generational healing.

We imagine that breaking a cycle should feel sacred while we’re doing it.

Sometimes it feels terrible.

Sometimes closing a generational cycle means disappointing people. Sometimes it means becoming someone your family doesn’t entirely understand. Sometimes it means refusing roles that were handed to you before you were old enough to know you had a choice.

Sometimes it means looking at something that has been normalized for generations and saying:

It ends here.

And you don’t always get applause for that.

Sometimes you get resistance.

Because systems—familial, relational, cultural, spiritual—develop around predictability. Everyone learns their position. Everyone knows the choreography.

When one person stops dancing their assigned steps, the whole system has to adjust.

That doesn’t mean the person who stopped dancing is wrong.

It means the pattern can no longer continue unchanged.

I think that is what I misunderstood for a long time. I thought resistance meant I had made the wrong choice.

Now I understand that sometimes resistance is simply what happens when something that has existed for a very long time realizes it cannot continue through you.

There is another version of my life that probably could have existed.

A version where I was easier.

Where I swallowed certain things. Where I stayed longer. Where I explained myself more. Where I made my boundaries flexible enough that nobody ever had to experience the discomfort of meeting them.

Maybe more people would have stayed.

But I don’t know that they would have actually known me.

And I no longer want to be loved for how effectively I can disappear.

I want relationships where nobody has to become smaller for the other person to remain comfortable. I want reciprocity. I want people who can stand beside a woman who knows herself without interpreting her sovereignty as rejection.

I want to be able to celebrate someone else’s expansion without believing it diminishes mine.

And I expect the same in return.

Because love that requires one person to shrink so the other can feel large isn’t intimacy.

It’s architecture built around imbalance.

The Heartbreak I Can Control

Choosing myself did not make me invulnerable.

Other people can still break my heart.

People can disappoint me. People can leave. People can misunderstand me. People can decide that who I am is not what they want.

And that can hurt.

But there is one heartbreak I have control over now.

My own.

I would rather have my heart broken by another person than ever break my own heart again by abandoning myself.

Because I know what that heartbreak feels like.

It is quieter than someone leaving.

It happens slowly.

It is the accumulation of every time you knew and pretended you didn’t know. Every boundary you moved. Every truth you swallowed. Every instinct you negotiated with.

Every moment you looked inward, heard yourself clearly, and chose someone else’s comfort instead.

I don’t want to live there anymore.

So I choose me.

Not because I don’t love other people.

Because I finally understand that I am one of the people I am responsible for loving.

And maybe that was the domino all along.

One woman deciding she would no longer abandon herself.

One decision touching another decision, touching another decision, until eventually she looks around and realizes she has built an entirely different life.

Maybe generations of women behind me didn’t have access to every choice I have now.

Maybe some of them survived so I could.

And maybe honoring that survival doesn’t mean repeating it.

Maybe it means taking the life they handed forward and doing something with it they never had the opportunity to do.

Choosing the path.

Building the business.

Using my voice.

Taking up the room my life requires.

Loving people without disappearing inside of them. And refusing to hand the next generation the same wound.

I used to think choosing myself might cost me love.

Now I understand:

Anything that requires me to abandon myself was already costing me love.

It was costing me my own.

And I will not pay that price again.