Potential Is Not A Promise

I was driving, listening to Olivia Dean and trying to dissociate from reality because life has felt especially heavy lately. The car is usually where I become trapped in my deepest thoughts, and this time I found myself thinking about the versions of people we create in our minds.

Who they could be not necessarily who they are.

We imagine their possibilities, their achievements and all the roles they could someday fill. We see everything they might become if they would only apply themselves, recognize their potential or finally decide to change.

Then we become attached to the idea of who we want that person to be for us even when, in reality, they cannot or will not ever be that person.

Eventually, disappointment settles into the space between who they are and who we imagined they would become. But sometimes those expectations were never spoken aloud. They were never understood or agreed upon. They were simply stories we told ourselves, reasons to stay, wait and give them a little more time to change.

Months into our separation, I was told:

“I am waiting for you to change.”

Change into what?

It was never explained who I was expected to become. I only knew that who I already was had somehow failed to meet needs that were never clearly expressed. Standards had been created without my knowledge, and disappointment followed when I could not become a fictional person who had never existed in the first place.

And then I had to consider the other side of it:

I wasn’t only disappointed by what you were doing. I was disappointed that you weren’t becoming who I thought you could be.

Maybe that person did exist, at least in pieces. Maybe I saw enough glimpses to convince myself that version was real or that it could become real if I waited long enough.

Do we invent these versions of people entirely? Did they change? Or were we simply blinded by love, seeing only what we hoped was there?

There is a difference between seeing the best in someone and refusing to see them accurately.

Loving someone does not require endlessly translating their actions into what we believe they really mean or who we believe they really are. Maybe part of loving someone, and eventually letting them go, is allowing them to be exactly who they have shown themselves to be instead of continuing to wait for who we thought they could become.

Eventually, repeated behavior becomes information.

And, as a reminder to myself: potential is not a promise.

Maybe one day, people can stop being angry that I never became the person they imagined when they looked at me.

And maybe I just needed to finally see you, too.

— KM