Girl, You've Got to Be What Tomorrow Needs

I have never once been part of the starting lineup.

I've been the pinch hitter. The one who gets called off the bench when the game is on the line and someone needs a person who can be trusted to show up, swing hard, and not flinch. I've been the fixer, the therapist, the bodyguard, the backup plan personified. For most of my adult life, if you needed someone steady to give advice or get shit done? I got you, boo.

I've known this about myself for a long time. What I didn't know, or maybe just didn't want to know, was how much it had convinced me I was incomplete.

There's something kinda strange, not really lonely but sort of empty, in being everyone's band-aid and no one's cure. You tell yourself it's fine. You tell yourself being needed is its own kind of belonging. And most days, it is. But underneath that, especially as I start this next chapter in life, I've realized that I've been quietly carrying the assumption that I'm just not worth keeping.

My brothers don't buy that. I'm the oldest, so I've spent our whole lives trying to be the example, the one who's supposed to have this whole "adult" thing figured out first. Except they're the ones who call me on my shit, refusing to play along with any sort of sibling hierarchy. Both have a talent for looking at me mid-sentence and saying some version of "that's not the lesson you think it is."

I set out to model something for them. Check all the proverbial boxes. Report back. Instead, I keep getting humbled by two guys who are way more mature than I am most days. And though they're consistently learning what NOT to do from me, instead of what TO to do, at least they're learning - right?

In any case, California has me settling into the idea that I'm always going to be this person who can't quite follow the script, in life and in love.

Out here, I've watched families and relationships take shapes I didn't grow up with a name for, or just didn't see as often, as normal. Chosen families who show up to every life event and never once mention blood. Couples who've been together for years and live in separate houses on purpose. Friends who bought a duplex together instead of waiting for a husband or wife to split the mortgage with. People who are single and thriving and not performing contentment for anyone's benefit, mine included.

All of this made me ask a question I'd been avoiding: who decided the starting lineup was the only lineup that counted?

I don't think anyone decided it, exactly. I think it's just the story we've been telling each other for so long that it stopped sounding like a story. One partner for your whole life. One house in one place. One version of how a relationship "works," filed and notarized. Everything else gets quietly filed under "not yet" or "settling" or, if you're feeling generous, "unconventional."

I'm not knocking that life. Seriously. I've watched people build it with real care, and it suits them the way a well-fitted glove suits a hand. I'm just no longer willing to grieve the fact that I might not be tracking towards that life.

Here's the part that took me embarrassingly long to land on though. Being the pinch hitter isn't a consolation prize. It's a role. A real one, with its own kind of skill. You don't get called off the bench because you're the backup plan for someone else's ambition. You get called because you're the one who can be trusted with the moment that actually matters.

And if that's the role I keep getting cast in, across friendships, across family, across whatever this next chapter of dating turns out to be, then maybe the honest move isn't to keep wondering why I'm not enough.

Because here's the gift hiding inside it, the one I almost missed entirely: if I'm a temporary person in most people's lives, by design or by circumstance, then nobody I let close to me has to be my whole world. Nobody has to check every box, meet every need, fill every position on the field (and, yes, I'm running with this metaphor - get over it). I'm not asking one person to be my everything. That's an unreasonable ask I used to make without realizing I was making it.

My middle brother stood next to me last week at a My Chemical Romance concert, both of us singing along to "Disenchanted." Afterward, he didn't say much, but we both shared a look that was along the lines of "yeah, that one hits different now, huh." It did. It still does. There's a particular relief in hearing someone four years younger than you say the quiet part out loud, that you can love the life you were promised and still walk away from it once you realize it was never actually promised to you. Just implied.

I still feel the emptiness sometimes. I won't pretend that it doesn't hurt on occasion. There's a version of me that watches a couple splitting a grocery list in the cereal aisle and feels something hollow out, quick and quiet, before I can name it. Culture hands you one picture of a finished life, and some part of you keeps checking your progress against it even after you've stopped believing in the assignment.

But I'm learning the difference between actual grief and my default setting. I'm learning that not tracking toward the conventional plan isn't the same as failing to plan at all.

I don't know yet what my version of a lasting relationship looks like. Maybe it's not one person doing all the heavy lifting, literally and figuratively. Maybe it's being at peace with the relationships that faded out over the years. Maybe it's showing up, again and again, for the people who show up for me, and calling that enough because it actually is.

I've spent my whole life being good in a pinch. I'm starting to think that's not a sign that I'm incomplete, but part of the package that is "me." It just means I show up fully, for as long as I'm there, instead of half showing up for as long as it lasts.