To the One Who Stayed: A Valentine to Myself

No roses. No champagne. Just me - still here, still healing, still holding my own hand.

Valentine’s Day used to sting like hell. I’d scroll past the posts, the red roses, the sappy captions written by people who never once had to Google “how to emotionally self-regulate during a Hallmark holiday.” I’d feel a slow ache, sometimes a sharp one, at the reminder that love, at least in the romantic sense, felt distant, deferred, or altogether extinct.

But this year, something softened.

Because this year, I didn’t look outward with longing. I looked inward with recognition. I’ve spent so many years trying to earn love. Shape myself into someone lovable. Make myself smaller, quieter, more agreeable. Then louder, wittier, more appealing. Always adjusting. Always bending. Always chasing.

But the one who stayed? Through the anxiety, the grief, the breakdowns, the disappointments? The one who cried on the bathroom floor and still got up the next day to mother, to mend, to try?

That was me.

And while it doesn’t come with a handwritten card or overpriced chocolate, it does come with something far more lasting: the quiet, unwavering commitment to show up for myself, even when I feel unlovable.

Especially then.

Being your own Valentine isn’t glamorous. It means facing the nights when no one texts back. It means making tea when your throat aches and no one notices. It means not waiting to be chosen, but choosing yourself over and over again, without confetti or applause.

It means understanding that loneliness and self-love can coexist. That independence isn’t the absence of longing, but the refusal to abandon yourself in the name of it.

I still want love. Of course I do. But I want it to add to my life, not patch the holes I’ve already sealed with scar tissue and sweat and grace.

I’m not hardened. I’m not cynical. I’m just done negotiating my worth.

So this year, on this overhyped, overdecorated day of performative affection, I lit a candle, made my favorite meal, and toasted to the one person who’s seen the absolute worst of me and never once left:

Me.

No roses. No drama. Just truth, tenderness, and maybe a little dark chocolate.

Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart.

Please check out the next chapter of my journey, a new blog called Mentally Stable-ish™. It tells the hard truths and hilarity of hormones and hot flashes with humor and honesty. A sweaty and sarcastic, survival guide to menopause, motherhood and midlife mayhem in the modern era.

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