Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

I miss writing.

I was thinking about that on the drive home from an appointment this afternoon, when I just sat down and journaled because something was on my mind. Lately, there hasn’t been much room for that. My priorities right now are studying, doing a full audit of the seminar, and working on the book. Writing the book takes so much mental effort that by the time I’m done, there usually isn’t much left for writing just for fun.

Tonight, I got home and started making myself a salad. I had chicken cooking on the stove, and while I waited for it to finish, I picked up my phone and started scrolling through Instagram. I wasn’t looking for anything, just standing there in the kitchen killing a few minutes, moving past the usual mix of workouts and people’s dinner plates. Then I came across a post about being in a “give what I get” era. I read it, scrolled past it for a second, then went back to it.

the “give what I get era”

The words were, “I’m in my give what I get era….match the effort, I will give what I get back, protect my peace, demand consistency etc.”

There was a time when I would have read that and thought, yeah, exactly. There’s something satisfying about the fairness of it. If someone gives you very little, give them very little. At face value, I mean…. it sounds reasonable and protective. But life has given me enough reasons to question whether fairness is always the same thing as caring for people well.

the story I write

Over the last year, I’ve had to confront how quickly someone else’s behavior becomes tangled up with my own hurt. There was a stretch a few months back where one friend went quiet. There wasn’t disagreement, no explanation, just fewer texts and shorter answers. I sat with my phone one night, rereading our last few messages as if they were evidence, trying to find the line where I’d done something wrong. I never found one, but weeks later I found out she’d been dealing with something at home she wasn’t ready to talk about. It had nothing to do with me. I had built an entire case against myself, and it was all fiction.

My mind fills in the blanks because uncertainty is uncomfortable, and apparently my brain has never met a blank space it didn’t want to aggressively populate with the worst possible explanation. I’m trying to learn how to leave some blanks blank.

The truth is that I have no idea what another human being is carrying unless they choose to tell me. I’ve watched people laugh, work, post, coach, parent, travel, and move through all the ordinary pieces of life while privately carrying something devastating. I’ve learned things about people after the fact and realized that while I was interpreting their absence or changed behavior one way, they were living through something I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I have been that person too.

discernment is not keeping score

I still believe patterns, reciprocity, and consistency matter. I’m not suggesting people ignore one-sided relationships or spend their lives excusing those who repeatedly show they’re unwilling to invest. There are relationships where the imbalance becomes clear over time, and there are moments when protecting your peace means accepting what someone has consistently shown you and walking away.

But there’s a difference between discernment and keeping score. I don’t want to measure every relationship with a calculator and make sure nobody receives one ounce more than they’ve technically earned through equal effort. Someone else’s difficult stretch can’t automatically determine who I become in mine. Generosity is part of who I am, and I don’t want to lose that simply because someone else temporarily has less to give.

matching effort

I’ve also had to admit something else. Sometimes “matching effort” is a convenient way to protect myself from the vulnerability of caring. If I only ever give exactly what I get, I never have to risk very much. I can always point back to that scoresheet and declaratively announce I was being fair. There’s safety in that, I suppose, but I’m not convinced it’s how I want to move through relationships with people I genuinely care about.

There have been times when people I love have had more to give than I have, and times when I have carried more of the friendship. I’ve disappeared into my own shit before and left someone wondering where I’d gone. I’m so grateful that every person in my life didn’t immediately decide to match my effort when I had nothing left.

I want to give from who I am without needing someone else’s behavior to reassure me about my worth. Giving someone space doesn’t have to mean assuming something is wrong between us. Missing someone doesn’t mean they’re responsible for fixing the ache that comes with it. I want to let people have complicated lives that exist outside of me because they do.

it’s not always about me

Not everything is about me, even when it affects me deeply. Someone can care about me and still be overwhelmed, love me and still have very little available for a while, and go quiet because of something happening entirely inside their own life that I may never know about. That doesn’t mean I tolerate anything indefinitely. It means I want to get better at sitting with uncertainty instead of filling the blank space with the assumption that what they’re able to give says something about how much I matter.

Protecting my peace is not always about matching everyone else’s energy. Sometimes it means choosing to give from who I am. And by that I mean recognizing that when someone I care about has less to give, I don’t need to meet them by giving less too. Not because I owe them anything, but because today I can. We won’t always meet the people we love at exactly fifty-fifty. When it’s my turn, I want to be someone who does.

Luke 6:31 (NIV)

God, help me give from who I am, not from what I receive in return. Give me discernment, boundaries without being bitter, and enough grace to remember that everyone is carrying a story I may never fully know. Amen.