Maybe you know exactly how they're feeling before they tell you. You notice the shift in their voice, or that weird energy in the room, or the text that's a little shorter than usual. You can tell something's wrong, and before long, part of your attention is already over there trying to figure out what happened and what you can do about it.

If they're hurting, you want to help, and if they're struggling, you can probably see 17 different ways things could get better.

If they're making choices you know are going to hurt them, it can take everything in you not to grab them lovingly by the shoulders and say, "Can you please see what I see!?"

Oh hey there, it's me. Ask me how I know. 😅

And maybe it goes further than that. Their mood changes yours, and conversations keep replaying in your head long after they've ended. What you actually want to say gets softened because you already know how they might react. Sometimes you tell yourself you're fine with something when you're ... not. And you've become so good at understanding why they're behaving the way they are that your own hurt keeps getting explained away.

Sometimes you're holding onto the person standing in front of you, and sometimes you're holding onto who you know they could become.

And in the middle of all that loving, understanding, anticipating, hoping, helping, and holding ... Where did you go?

I don't think loving deeply is the problem because some people really do enter our lives and take up an unfathomable amount of space in our hearts. We see them, we sense what they're carrying, their happiness matters to us, and their pain affects us. Their possibilities can become so vivid that we ache for them to experience everything we can see. That's part of the beauty of loving another being!

But there's a difference between being deeply affected by someone and becoming responsible for them. And holy shit, that line can get all kinds of blurry.

This Path is about finding it again.

Not so you can love less, or become detached, or stop caring, or master some perfectly enlightened version of boundaries where nothing anyone does ever affects you. 😂

I want to explore what happens when you come back into the relationship, too. Your feelings, discomfort, desires, limits, instincts, and YOUR life.

Across these seven pieces, we'll move through what we carry for the people we love, the futures we can see for them, the things we sense, the boundaries we sometimes struggle to trust, and the grief of loving someone when love can no longer mean holding on in the same way.

Because you're allowed to care immensely, and your own life belongs inside that care, too.

Begin here, my friend.

1. The woman cloaked in gray

The recognition: When does caring about someone become carrying what belongs to them?

Let's start with something I know very well: feeling someone else's feelings like they've been automatically assigned to me. 😅

Someone you love is hurting, struggling, overwhelmed, or making choices that scare you, and suddenly you're carrying it around way after the conversation ends. You're thinking about it in the shower. Driving around (or for me, that happens when I'm doing the dishes) rehearsing what you could say. Trying to solve a problem they may not've even asked you to solve.

Care can subtly become carrying. So let's start by looking at what's currently in your arms, and asking whether all of it actually belongs there.

Read The woman cloaked in gray →

2. Holding the vision

The responsibility: Can you believe in what’s possible for someone without making their becoming your responsibility?

Ohhhh, this one. 😅

Sometimes you can see so clearly what could be possible for someone you love. Who they could become. What might open up if they finally chose themselves, left the thing, faced the thing, healed the thing, believed in themselves, or took the damn leap.

And maybe you're right!

But there's a painful difference between seeing someone's potential and living in relationship with their potential instead of the person standing in front of you.

You can believe fiercely in who someone could become, but they still get to decide whether they become that version or not.

Expand into Holding the vision →

3. The path love walks with us

The discernment: How do you honor what you sense about someone without deciding you know their path better than they do?

This gets especially complicated when you're intuitive. Because sometimes you really do sense something. You see the pattern, have the dream, feel the knowing, and something inside you lights up with THIS IS IMPORTANT.

So ... now what?

I don't think honoring what we sense requires pretending we didn't sense it. But it also doesn't automatically give us authority over someone else's life.

This piece lives inside that tension: trusting what comes through you while remembering that the person you love still belongs to themselves.

Journey to The path love walks with us →

4. The stranger in the garden

The boundary: What happens when your discomfort matters before you can prove that something is wrong?

Have you ever tried to argue yourself out of your own discomfort?

They're probably fine. I'm overreacting. I don't have a good enough reason to feel this way. Maybe I'm being unfair. I don't want to make them feel ___.

Meanwhile, your entire body's saying, "NOPE."

This dream made me think about all the times we wait for enough evidence to justify a boundary ... as if discomfort has to present an effing PowerPoint that's been seen and approved by five other people before we're allowed to listen to it. 😂

What if you don't have to prove that something is wrong before your experience gets to matter?

Read The stranger in the garden →

5. When love goes first

The grief: What are you allowed to feel when loving someone can no longer mean holding on in the same way?

And then there are the relationships where loving deeply doesn't save us from having to let go. This one's tender!

Love can ask us to make a choice our hearts would never willingly choose. The future we desperately wanted may not get to happen, or we accompany another being as far as we possibly can and discover there is a place we cannot follow.

That doesn't make the love disappear. Sometimes letting go and loving are happening at the exact same time.

Follow your heart into When love goes first →

6. The human price

The belonging: What have you been giving away because some part of you believes it's the price of being loved, wanted, or allowed to stay?

This dream caught me doing something I didn't even realize I was doing! Because sometimes nobody actually asks us to abandon ourselves ... we volunteer. 😅

We make ourselves easier, more helpful, more palatable, less difficult. We swallow the thing we wanted to say, ignore the little no inside our body, offer more than anyone asked for, or accept something that doesn't feel right because questioning it feels riskier than going along.

And underneath all of it can be one very human fear: What if being fully myself costs me my place here?

This dream made me wonder how often we pay for belonging with pieces of ourselves that were never actually the price of admission.

Drop into The human price →

7. The immortal things

The remembrance: What if loving something deeply was never a promise that you would get to keep it?

There are ordinary moments we don't know are important while we're living them. We take the picture because the light is beautiful. We notice a familiar sound, a tiny ritual, the way someone we love does that one particular thing. We assume there will be another morning, another conversation, another chance to notice.

And thank God we don't always know.

Because maybe our work isn't to live bracing ourselves for the last time. Maybe it's to become available enough to our lives that when something beautiful asks us to notice it, we do.

This story changed the way I think about what it means for something to remain with us.

Read the immortal things →

Where this Path leaves us

Loving deeply changes us.

Of course it does! When someone matters to us, their happiness matters. Their pain can move through our bodies. We remember tiny details about them, worry about things they may have already forgotten, imagine futures on their behalf, and sometimes want so badly for them to experience everything we can see is possible.

I don't want to make any of that wrong because that capacity for love is precious. But I keep coming back to one question: How do I remain present to myself while loving you?

Maybe relationship gives us a thousand different ways to practice that?

Someone we love is hurting, and we have to figure out how to sit beside their pain without making ourselves responsible for taking it away. We see someone's potential so effing clearly that it takes time to realize their becoming still belongs to them. Something feels wrong inside us long before we have an airtight case for why, and we're asked to take that feeling seriously anyway.

Grief teaches its own version of this when the love remains vast and the relationship can no longer exist in the form we desperately wanted to keep.

The beautiful news is that none of this requires loving less. I think it asks for a love spacious enough to include the person who is doing the loving.

You.

Your feelings still belong in the room when someone else's are big. A no is real before another person understands it, and understanding where someone's coming from doesn't erase what their behavior is doing to you.

You can see who someone could become without building your life around whether they ever do. You can deeply miss someone and also know you can't go back. Disappointment, boundaries, leaving, staying, asking for something to change ... all of these can exist in a relationship where love is still very much alive!

Love doesn't automatically answer the question of what happens next. And maybe that's part of what makes this so damn challenging.

Inside all of these relationships with partners, friends, family, pets, people we've lost, people we've released, and people we're still figuring out how to love, there is a ground beneath your own feet.

You get to stand there.

From that place, you can reach toward another person, witness what they're moving through, and offer what genuinely belongs to you to give. And their choices can remain in their hands while you continue tending to the life in yours.

Some relationships will change you forever. A person might walk beside you for decades or share only a tiny stretch of the road and still leave fingerprints all over your heart. There will be beings you love whose lives move somewhere you cannot follow, and memories that continue carrying tenderness long after an ending.

Through every form love takes, you remain someone your love gets to include–that's what I want to remember most.

I can love you with my whole heart + remain here with myself, too. 💗