Siddharth Kumar

The last couple of months stripped me in ways I didn’t see coming. I lost my self-esteem. I felt like I was falling to the bottom of an endless pit of pain. I questioned my self-worth and, at times, whether I was worthy of love at all. There were moments when believing what I felt seemed like betrayal.

These two months taught me more about life than the rest of my years combined, not because something dramatic happened all at once, but because everything I had been avoiding showed up together. I realised I didn’t actually know what love was. Or maybe I knew parts of it, just not the part that requires you to be whole enough to give without quietly bleeding yourself dry. What I thought was love was also tangled up with attachment and familiarity, and when the trust broke, it shook something much deeper than the relationship itself.

I’ve had to accept something uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for my own life. No one else can fix it for me, no one else can carry my weight forever. People stay as long as it’s bearable, and when it isn’t, they do what they need to do to survive. Everyone has their own version of the story, and that’s the only version that matters to them. I wish some people had believed in me a little more or stayed a little longer, but wanting that doesn’t change the reality. Maybe expecting it was me asking for something I couldn’t have offered in return anyway.

For years, I kept plugging my pain with denial, distraction, and attachment. Whenever the emptiness showed up, I found something to chase. Goals, work, plans, responsibility. Real problems kept coming up that needed immediate attention, problems that threatened survival in very real ways, so I learned to push everything else aside. Somewhere along the way, not dealing with the void inside me became a coping mechanism. I convinced myself that if I just kept fixing things and moving forward, the hollowness and depression would stay buried.

It didn’t.

When I finally reached for love, I think I hoped it would save me from facing myself. Not consciously, but in the way exhausted people hope. I tried to offer love when I didn’t really have it to give. I had intention, care, and effort, but my cup was empty. I was pouring from a place of need, not fullness, and that’s not sustainable for anyone. When trust broke, it didn’t just hurt because of what was lost between us; it hurt because it confirmed a fear I already had about not being enough.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

One silver lining in all this was the friends who showed up for me when things got really bad. Some listened without trying to fix me. Some stayed on calls longer than they needed to. Some helped in practical ways when I was overwhelmed and barely holding it together. That support mattered more than I probably ever said out loud, and I’m deeply grateful for it. At the same time, I can see now that even that kind of care can’t replace the work I was avoiding. No amount of support from others can do your inner healing for you.

Losing what I thought was love hurt because it exposed everything at once. It took away the last distraction and left me face-to-face with the emptiness I’d been managing instead of healing. It also left me carrying the weight of broken trust, trying to understand how something that felt safe could suddenly feel so unstable. It forced me to admit that making my material life better didn’t mean my heart was okay. I forgot that my heart too needed attention.

I don’t think I lost love as much as I lost an illusion. The illusion that someone else could fill the gap I refused to look at. The illusion that effort and attachment were the same as love. Now I’m left with the part I can’t escape anymore. Learning how to sit with myself, take responsibility without self-blame, rebuild trust slowly, and actually start filling my own cup before trying to pour into anyone else.