I would like to formally report that I have, once again, been outsmarted by a person who was not even trying. Don’t judge me. I am already embarassed, because I watched it happen. In real time. With witnesses. The evidence was airtight. The conclusion had been reached, peer reviewed, and cosigned by every functioning cell in my body. And yet there I was, running two completely different relationships with the same human being like I had the emotional bandwidth for that.
One relationship was with who they actually were. The other was with who I was convinced they were capable of becoming. Do not judge me please.
Let’s be clear, at no point in my life have my head and my heart ever agreed on operating procedures. My head is efficient. It reviews the information, identifies the pattern, reaches the conclusion, and moves on. Clean. Unbothered. Already thinking about lunch.
My heart, on the other hand, behaves like a movie executive who is personally convinced that every person deserves a redemption arc, a growth montage, and a sequel where they finally figure it out. My heart will greenlight that project every single time. The budget is unlimited. The runtime is whatever it is.
Now I understand that this is how otherwise intelligent women end up having the same emotional conversation with themselves for three years. We know. We just don’t know know.
Here’s the thing about potential, it never has to compete on reality’s terms. Reality walks in carrying documentation. Timelines. Patterns. Receipts, dated and organized by quarter. Potential arrives with a vision board and a playlist and a highlight reel of every good moment that person ever had, and somehow leaves the room with more believers. For that reason, imagination has been whooping reality’s behind for years, and I say that as someone who has watched it happen from the front row. Repeatedly. With snacks.
But potential doesn’t work alone. It has a partner. A very persuasive, very persistent partner named hope. Hope is potential’s hype man. Potential shows you who this person could be and hope volunteers to keep believing in it long after the evidence has stopped cooperating. Potential draws the blueprint and hope finds the financing. Potential says what if they change and hope says exactly, what if, keep going, we’re not done yet. Together they are an extraordinarily effective team. Together they have kept me in relationships, conversations, and waiting rooms that had no business holding me that long.
I’ve watched a person show me exactly who they were and potential immediately start explaining why that was an off day. I’ve seen someone’s behavior form a pattern clear enough to read from space, and hope is already in the corner drafting a list of extenuating circumstances. A person shows me exactly what they have the capacity to offer, and potential leans over and whispers but you’ve seen what they’re capable of when they’re trying, and hope hands it a microphone.
This is the trap. I am neither foolish nor weak. But the thing is hope doesn’t attach itself to people who don’t matter. It attaches itself to the ones we love, the futures we imagined with them, the versions of them we saw on their best days and decided was the truest version. The story we were certain had a few more chapters left in it. So when potential says there’s still a chance, hope already has its coat on.
Which is why letting go can feel less like a decision and more like a small, private loss. Because you’re not just releasing who they were. You’re releasing the future hope designed and potential kept funding. They were excellent interior decorators. They furnished that place beautifully. And you lived there. You made plans there. You returned there whenever reality felt too sparse, and they always had the lights on when you arrived.
Potential is irresistible precisely because it never has to submit to the inconvenience of reality. And hope makes sure you never stop finding that attractive. Lately, though, I’ve been paying attention to something. The energy required to maintain a relationship with who someone might become is significant. You have to keep feeding it. Keep excusing. Keep explaining. Keep clearing space at the table for someone who has never consistently shown up the way you hoped.
And eventually a question bubbles up. Simple. A little annoying, yet deeply useful. What could I build if I redirected all of that energy toward myself? Instead of focusing on fixing them, waiting on them, hoping they somehow grow into the person I needed them to be, what if I focused that energy on me, my joy, my peace, and the life that has been sitting right in front of me, tapping its foot.
That question has been doing something to me. Because growth has always required an exchange. Every level-up asks for room. Every new season requires you to decide what travels with you and what gets left at the door. You cannot carry every version of your future into the next chapter any more than you can pack your entire closet for a weekend trip. At some point, someone stays behind. The hard part is that who stays behind isn’t always someone bad. Sometimes they were beautiful. Sometimes they meant something real. Sometimes they were a possibility you held so long they started to feel like part of your identity, like releasing them would leave a visible absence where they used to live.
Releasing that future means evicting two very convincing tenants who never paid rent. That deserves to be acknowledged. Mourned, even. Held with real compassion. What it does not deserve is permanent residency. And I’ve had to get serious about that. Because left to their own devices, hope and potential will run my life like an unsupervised committee. So these days when I notice the pattern, and I do notice it now, I call a meeting with myself. It’s not a gentle check-in. It’s an actual come-to-Jesus conversation where I lay the evidence back out on the table and ask myself what I am actually looking at versus what I am choosing to imagine.
Then I put up guardrails.
Because hope is one of the most beautiful things I carry. And it deserves better than being handed over to potential without supervision. Hope needs a co-signer, not a blank check. It needs me to stay in the room and keep asking the hard questions instead of letting potential sweet-talk us both into another extension. These days I’m more interested in building something real than renovating someone else’s potential.
