Before you dive in, I need you to know one thing: this isn’t a story about the people who hurt me. It’s a story about the woman who finally stopped hurting herself to keep everyone else comfortable. I spent years believing love meant giving until I had nothing left, unaware that love without boundaries eventually becomes self-abandonment. If you’ve ever grown exhausted carrying every relationship on your back, constantly choosing everyone else while fading into the background, I hope you find a piece of yourself in these pages. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about healing, and accepting that sometimes becoming whole requires disappointing the people who benefited from your brokenness.

I’ve been listening to a song lately that I used to play on repeat in my early twenties. I have to admit, I didn’t truly understand it back then. I sang those lyrics at the top of my lungs without grasping what they meant, but it randomly popped up this morning after years of me forgetting it existed. As the words filled the room, they hit me in a way they never had before. For the first time, I related to every single line.

The song speaks about losing yourself so you can learn to love better, about releasing the fear and anxiety that dominated the way you loved. Funny enough, I’ve always known 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” Yet, despite knowing Scripture, I somehow convinced myself that loving through anxiety and self-sacrifice was normal.

The truth is, when you give yourself wholeheartedly without establishing boundaries, people will inevitably take advantage of you. The artist goes on to say that despite giving so much of herself with the purest intentions, those intentions were never met with sincerity in return. That stopped me in my tracks because I realized she wasn’t just singing about love; she was singing about me.

It’s easy to hear a song about love and assume it’s about a romantic relationship, but my lack of boundaries extended to everyone: family, friends, an ex-best friend, and virtually anyone who crossed my path. If you’ve ever met me, you met the very essence of my name. You met Lerato. You met love itself. But back then, I believed that to make you feel cherished, I had to be completely selfless. I lived that way for a long time, giving until I had nothing left.

It broke my heart to realize that while I gave constantly, none of it was ever reciprocated. From family to friends, when I was drained dry, they were sitting with plenty, and not a single person offered to share. When I ran out of encouraging words to motivate myself, nobody was around to speak life back into me. No one was there to water my garden while I was busy tending to theirs. To make the sting sharper, some even poured salt in the wound by saying, “Well, I never helped you because you never looked like you needed it.”

I never asked for help because I never wanted to worry anyone. First-born daughters will deeply understand this: I didn’t want anyone worrying about me because everyone was already depending on me. That heavy burden built up intense anxiety, not just the fear of failing myself, but the fear of failing the generations of women coming after me.

Looking back, I was so naïve. I spent so much time worrying about the women who would come after me, but never about the women who would come from me. I ignored my responsibility to become a healthy version of myself for my future daughters. Once again, I had placed myself on the sidelines.

I thought I had to be the one to break generational curses, to carry the family name with pride, to be the first to leave certain things behind, even if I had to crawl every step of the way. But the moment I got tired of carrying people on my back and finally stopped, they couldn’t handle it. How dare I choose myself? How dare I say no?

For years, I wrote on this blog while trapped in the mindset that to be loved, I had to perform. I projected an image of total independence, allowing people to believe my heart couldn’t be broken. I convinced myself I was strong enough to absorb their harsh words, take their lazy apologies, and welcome them right back because “I loved them.”

But wait a minute… aren’t you supposed to be careful with my heart if you claim to love me, too? I was careful with you, but you were careless with me. You don’t need a high IQ to realize that relationship was conditional, and I was the fool losing every time.

I had spent years absorbing mistreatment, naively believing it made me easier to love if people never had to watch their step around me. That belief was rooted in childhood. I grew up feeling like I constantly had to walk on eggshells around adults. Unconsciously, I decided I never wanted anyone to feel that way around me. So, I became the person who made room for everyone else’s emotions while suffocating my own. I confused being an “emotionally safe space” with having no boundaries. In trying so hard not to make others uncomfortable, I became comfortable with my own suffering.

When I finally realized I didn’t actually love myself, it hit me like a ton of bricks. If I sat down and made a list of everything I loved, my own name wouldn’t have even made the page.

Everything came to a head in December 2024. At 3 AM on a rainy morning, after a heated six-hour argument, God took off the masks. For six hours, I had tried to make someone understand how much they had hurt me. I finally stood up and said, “You crossed a boundary, and it hurts.”

It didn’t matter to them. I had never taught people that mistreating me meant losing access to me. When they apologized days later with, “I was stressed out and took it out on you,” it meant nothing. Why was I the punching bag for their stress? I woke up that morning and realized I was done. I stopped trying to fix it. I completely checked out.

That breaking point was necessary. It forced me to face the reality that I had to dismantle everything I had built. I had to unlearn every survival mechanism that kept me caged.

I had to face the uncomfortable truth that my hyper-vigilance might have even pushed away gentle souls. When soft, kind people came into my life, I panicked because I was only accustomed to pressure. When they listened, the silence felt unnerving. I had to unlearn the belief that I always needed a shield up, terrified that if I dropped it, people would see I was just a girl who deeply missed the chance to be a child.

That little girl had to grow up far too fast, but now, she is reclaiming her soft world. My favorite colors are pink and red. I love butterflies, polka dots, and fluffy toys. I had to completely lose that old, performative version of myself to finally come home to who I really am.

If you’ve been a longtime reader, you noticed the heavy silence here. This is my explanation. I had to put myself on trial in my own courtroom. I had to unlearn being the “favorite,” because being the favorite is just a gilded cage for a people-pleaser. There is no trophy at the end of that path.

The turning point came in therapy. My therapist took off her spectacles, closed her notebook, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “You are an enabler. You enable people because you are far more afraid of hurting them than you are of losing yourself. You enable minimal effort while moving mountains for them. You better woman up and start laying down some real rules.”

I looked back at her and said, “Bet.”

And ever since that day, I’ve been happily pissing off a lot of people who used to benefit from my dysfunction.

Setting boundaries is a funny thing when people are used to getting a “yes” from you 365 days a year. They get furious. They throw snide remarks like, “Oh, so you think you’re better than us now?” simply because I stop handing out money or mirror their silence instead of chasing them. They are angry because I raised my standards and decided pain is no longer an excuse to treat me like trash.

If you met me before December 2024, allow me to officially announce that you no longer know me.

Allow me to reintroduce myself:

Hi, my name is Lerato.

I hold people accountable now. I prioritize my peace. I don’t perform for approval, and access to me is an exclusive privilege. I say NO without explaining myself, and I return exact energy. I burn toxic bridges, I know my worth, and I live for me.

Welcome to me.

The thing about being “a lot” is that you don’t start your life that way. You become it slowly, almost quietly, through the way people respond to your fullness. You learn early that there are parts of you that arrive too loudly for certain rooms. Your opinions feel too certain, your emotions too visible, your presence too unfiltered. So you begin the long work of editing yourself in real time. You catch your sentences before they become too sharp. You swallow things you wanted to say because they might take up too much air. You learn how to be impressive enough to be kept, but not so expressive that you become difficult to hold.

And the painful part is that it doesn’t feel like self-betrayal at first. It feels like adaptation. Like maturity. Like learning how to exist in the world without disturbing it too much. You tell yourself that everyone adjusts themselves to belong. But slowly, you begin to realise that what you are actually doing is shrinking. Not all at once, but in small invisible ways that accumulate over time. You become fluent in silence where your truth once lived. You become careful in spaces where you once felt free.

The deepest pain in it is not even the shrinking itself. It is the belief that you have to earn softness from others by first becoming less of yourself. You start to assume that love is a reward for being easier to understand. That being held will always require you to be slightly edited. So you build a version of yourself that is more acceptable. You learn how to smile when you are overwhelmed. You learn how to nod when you disagree. You learn how to carry intensity in private so it does not disturb the outside world.

And somewhere along the way, you start calling that strength.

I used to think that was just how life worked. That I would become someone who existed beside herself rather than fully inside herself. There was a strange comfort in that idea. My life would be simple in appearance even if it was complicated internally. I would have my own space, my own routines, my own thoughts that never had to be fully witnessed. I would love myself quietly, without expecting too much from anyone else. And I told myself that this was enough. That it had to be enough.

But underneath that acceptance was something heavier that I did not always have language for. A quiet grief that came from repeatedly choosing to disappear in order to be tolerated. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being present but never fully met. From always adjusting yourself just before someone else might decide you are too much. From learning to anticipate rejection so well that you begin to reject yourself preemptively.

You start to wonder if your natural state is something that needs correction. If your depth is too heavy to be carried. If your intensity makes you harder to stay with. And even when no one says it out loud, you begin to hear it in the pauses, in the hesitations, in the ways people sometimes look at you like they are trying to decide how much of you they can handle at once.

That kind of learning changes you. It makes you observant in ways that are almost painful. You become aware of yourself in every room. You track your own volume. You measure your emotional responses before they spill too far. You begin to live slightly ahead of yourself, always adjusting, always preparing, always softening.

And then something shifts, not loudly, not dramatically, but in a way that slowly interrupts the story you have been telling yourself about what you are allowed to be.

You find yourself in moments where you are not immediately translated into something more manageable. Where your intensity is not treated as a problem to be solved. Where your emotions are not rushed into smaller versions of themselves. You are simply met as you are in that moment, without the expectation that you must reduce yourself first.

And it is unsettling at first because it exposes how long you have been living under the assumption that your fullness is too much. You begin to feel the weight of all the times you edited yourself before anyone else could respond. All the conversations where you softened your truth so it would not feel too sharp. All the moments where you chose being liked over being honest.

It becomes almost painful in its own way because you start to see the gap between who you are and who you have been trying to be in order to be accepted. You grieve the parts of yourself that you have hidden for so long that even you forgot how they felt in the open. The loudness. The certainty. The emotional honesty that does not apologise for existing.

And that grief is not loud. It does not announce itself. It sits quietly in your chest like a truth you are still learning how to carry.

But slowly, something begins to soften in you. Not because you become less intense or less emotional or less complicated, but because you start to question the idea that those things were ever wrong in the first place. You begin to realise that you were not too much. You were just too real for spaces that needed you to be smaller than your truth.

You stop assuming that love requires editing. You stop believing that softness must be earned through self-erasure. You start to understand that being fully yourself was never the problem. The problem was the belief that you should not be.

So you begin to return to yourself in small ways. You speak without rehearsing as much. You feel without immediately translating your feelings into something more acceptable. You allow your presence to take up space without apologising for it in advance. It is not perfect and it is not constant, but it is real.

And even then, it still hurts sometimes. Because there are moments where old habits return. Where you catch yourself shrinking before you even realise you are doing it. Where you wonder if being fully seen will still cost you connection. Healing does not erase that. It simply makes you aware that you have a choice now.

So yes, I might still be intense. I might still be emotional in ways that overflow. I might still think deeply, feel loudly, and speak honestly even when it is inconvenient. But I am no longer treating those parts of me as evidence that I am difficult to love.

They are just evidence that I am alive.

And I am learning, slowly and painfully and beautifully, that I do not have to disappear in order to be held.