Hey, my name is Rubi. I’m 23, and I started this diary to gather my thoughts and process them better.

Hm.

I used to describe myself as carefree. Very chill. The kind of person who could walk into someone’s life knowing I might only be there for a little while. I’ve always been curious about people. I loved getting to know them, learning their stories, seeing the different versions of themselves they carried.

But then, eventually, they would show me their rawest form.

The parts they usually kept hidden. The feelings they didn’t know what to do with. The parts of themselves that needed to be held by someone else.

And as soon as they started emotionally depending on me, I would distance myself.

I don’t know why I always felt like that was my cue to leave. As if someone letting me see them deeply meant I had somehow been given a responsibility I never asked for.

Maybe I just didn’t know how to hold someone else’s emotions without feeling like they were becoming mine.

I wasn’t taught to care for people’s emotions. My mom raised me to be independent, and I think somewhere along the way, I turned independence into emotional independence too.

I learned that if I could carry my own burdens, then everyone else should be able to carry theirs.

But why did I have to carry mine alone?

And why did someone else needing me feel like a burden instead of an invitation to connect?

I think I’m starting to realize that I never actually dealt with my own emotional load. I just became really good at suppressing it. At putting things away before they had the chance to hurt. At convincing myself that I was okay because I knew how to keep moving.

Maybe that’s why I thought I was carefree.

Maybe I wasn’t carefree at all.

Maybe I was just disconnected.

I’m actually not as chill as I thought I was. I have anger. I have sadness. I have fear. I have attachment. I have longing. I have feelings that I never really learned how to sit with.

I just had never experienced myself this way before.

And maybe that’s what I’m doing here now.

Learning myself, slowly.

Feeling the things I spent so much time avoiding.

And finally realizing that being independent doesn’t mean I have to carry everything alone.