"Let's catch up for lunch soon."
I've read that message enough times to know how it ends. Soon never comes. If I don't send the next text, there's no lunch at all, so for a long time, I was always the one who sent it.
It was never just one person. I had a mate tell me how much he enjoyed our weekly lunch runs. But that only ever happened because I was the one messaging him to grab lunch. When I didn't send that message, not once did he say let's go. If I didn't reach out, I wouldn't hear from him at all, not until I reached out again. It wasn't just him either. Same story in a few places. If I didn't reach out, nothing happened.
I didn't dwell on it long. Once I saw it in one place, I saw it everywhere, including in myself. I'd been handing out the best of me to anyone standing close enough to take it. The first text, the long message, the patience, the benefit of the doubt. I called it being a good person. A lot of it was just being an available one.
Here's what I didn't expect: seeing it clearly didn't make me colder. It made me sharper. I can tell early now. I can feel, pretty quickly, who's going to meet me halfway and who's going to let me carry the whole thing and call it a friendship. So I stopped chasing the lunch that was never going to happen. I stopped sending the third message after the first two went nowhere. Not out of spite. Just because I finally understood my reaching out was worth something, and I'd been giving it away for free.
None of that came to break me, though it took me a while to see it. It came to teach me something I didn't have yet. How to read people early. Less patience for one-sided effort. The confidence to stop explaining myself to someone who was never going to get it anyway.
Here's the lesson: the answer was never to be less good. Not to care less, love people less, or hand out less of the warmth that's yours to give. It's to be wiser about who gets access to it. Not everyone standing near you has earned the best of you. Some people earn all of it, and most earn a little. Saving your best for the people who actually reach back isn't you going cold. It's you finally deciding who gets access.
See you next Sunday.
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