Not Every Weight Is Poison

I wouldn’t touch the word “toxic” so easily.

There are relationships that really do poison a person. There are people after whom you no longer know if you’re tired or if you’ve just spent too long swallowing something that was never supposed to be yours.

Not much romance there. You leave, if you can. You save what can be saved.

But something feels off to me in how we’ve started calling everything by the same name.

Someone is exhausting. Someone is scared. Someone asks for too much because they don’t know how else to ask. Someone repeats themselves, someone broods, someone walks into the room with all their unresolved things and drops them in the middle of the table like a wet coat.

And then we, tired of the world and of ourselves, say: toxic.

It sounds tidier. Smarter. As if we’ve understood something, and maybe we’ve just found a word that lets us not stay another five minutes.

I’m not saying you should stay everywhere. God forbid, that would be the old horror in a new coat: endure, keep quiet, understand, be the bigger person while your life falls apart in your hands.

Not that.

I think that maybe, in that lovely intention to protect ourselves, we started throwing out what wasn’t destroying us.

It was only throwing us off.

And closeness does throw us off.

Not always badly. Sometimes it’s just inconvenient. It moves your plan. It ruins your mood. It wants an answer when you don’t feel like answering. It wants presence when you’re already spent. It wants the other person not to be the decor of your peace but an actual being next to you.

And an actual being is never entirely practical.

Not every discomfort is a sign to leave. Sometimes it’s just the place where a relationship stops being comfortable and starts being real.

It’s easiest to love people while they’re light.

While they’re funny, grateful, stable, they carry their sadness nicely and don’t spill it on us. While they know how much is too much. While they don’t ask the question, we have no strength to answer.

We all love people like that. It’s no achievement.

It’s harder when someone becomes difficult, but not cruel.

When they’re not dangerous, just lost. When they’re not a manipulator, just a child in an adult body, hurt by something again, so now it makes noise because it doesn’t know how to do it any softer.

That’s where you get confused, and even psychology doesn’t always help, though we pretend it does. We stick a label on, and suddenly everything looks solved.

Boundary. Energy. Pattern. Projection. Mental hygiene.

Useful words.

Until they become an alibi.

Because you can protect yourself without being cold. You can leave without humiliating the person you’re leaving. You can say “I can’t” without turning the other person into a diagnosis.

We forget that now, somehow.

As if it’s not enough to say: I’m tired. I don’t know how. I don’t have the capacity. It hurt me. I can’t be there as much as you need.

No, it has to sound more serious. It has to smell professional. It has to show that we’re self-aware, not just people running because they’ve had enough.

And I understand that. Really.

Sometimes you’ve had enough. Sometimes it’s too much.

I wouldn’t want us to turn life into a sterile room where no one is allowed to cough.

I wouldn’t want closeness to become a non-disturbance agreement.

Love me, but don’t need me. Be there, but don’t have a bad day. Count on me, just not when you actually need to.

That’s not peace anymore.

That’s just a neatly arranged absence.

Maybe maturity isn’t about enduring every difficult person.

Maybe it’s about telling the difference.

Who breaks us. Who only tires us. Who uses us. Who calls us because they don’t know how else to get through the day.

It’s not the same.

And maybe that’s where a more honest kind of closeness begins. Not the kind that endures everything, or turns endurance into character. Just the kind that pauses before the verdict for a moment.

Long enough, maybe, not to call poison everything that was hard to swallow.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.