I'm Like A Bird
On my desire to be free and the casualty of closeness
The reason I keep my distance isn’t the reason people think I do, but it’s closer to the one I used to tell myself before I knew the truth. Back then, I came to believe a story. One I mistook for something that could fill the space I didn’t know how to name, that distance was strength, that detachment meant self-preservation. But I don’t hold people at arm’s length because I don’t care. I hold them there because I have learned slowly, over time, that closeness is not always gentle, that intimacy is not always safe, that to be known is to be vulnerable in ways I am not always sure I can afford.
Maybe that’s because closeness has never felt like safety to me, not even as a child. I never feared being alone. I feared being known too much. And so, I’ve spent my whole life learning how to disappear in plain sight.
People often mistake composure for coldness, and sensitivity for something loud or expressive. Mine is quieter. It takes the shape of overthinking, of observing too closely, of crying in private when no one’s around to make sense of it.
I have the added complexity of being a highly sensitive person. Which, above all, means thinking about everything deeply. It makes someone like me, well, thoughtful to a fault. And inclined more than most to both science and spirituality. Having automatic empathy also means I cry easily. But while I tend to process things mentally with speed and clarity, my emotions arrive more slowly. They unfold in layers, sometimes long after the moment has passed. Which is why I don’t always have an immediate emotional response, or even the words for what I’m feeling. It’s only later that I begin to understand, to connect, to let it move through me fully.
I know all of this might come as a surprise to most, especially those who know or have known me in some capacity. People think I’m distant, that I have a thousand walls between me and the world, that I move through life untouched by the weight of emotion. But the truth is, I feel everything. And I feel it deeply. So deeply that I often don’t know where to put it. And yet, for all that I feel, I’ve never found it easy to show. Because feeling isn’t the same as expressing.
My style of devotion isn’t loud or obvious, but it’s steady and sincere. It shows up in strange and specific ways. If someone I care about needs something, even if it’s small or trivial, I’ll drop everything to make it happen and chase it to perfection. I’ll call them out on their defences when I need to, and ask them to do the same for me, because I’d rather our relationship be genuine and clear than cautious and curated. I’ll try to validate what people feel, even when I don’t fully understand it, because I know how quietly painful it can be to feel unseen. I’ll give people room to become who they’re becoming, without holding them hostage to who they used to be. And maybe none of it is perfect. But it’s how I show up. It’s what I know how to give.
I never knew how to say “I love you” and have it sound like enough, or how to say it back when someone said it to me. I spent years quietly wondering if I was built wrong, if I simply wasn’t made to love like others did: to feel it and give it with the same unthinking ease they seemed to carry. But as I grew older and my emotional world expanded, I realised that how I expressed love was just different. I’d always loved through presence, through integrity, and through effort. And it was especially hard when love was expected of me and came dressed in overt gestures or direct expression. Saying “I love you” felt too easy, too casual, like I was doing something so sacred a disservice. Only recently did I realise that the absence of ‘I love you’ from me was never the absence of love. It was the reverence of it.
But it hurt. It ached to know that the people I loved couldn’t always see it for what it was. I often felt like the love I carried inside me, vast and unspoken, never quite reached them the way I meant it to.
This is how I’ve always loved. And maybe that’s why people don’t always see it, because it doesn’t come dressed in easy and familiar declarations. It’s quieter, slower, and easier to miss. So I’ve learnt to ferociously guard it. And maybe that’s why I’ve always needed space, to keep it from being misunderstood, or mistaken for something it’s not. Maybe that’s why so much has stayed inside. Because even when I’ve tried to let it out, it hasn’t always known where to go. This is the cost of loving in silence, of feeling everything but rarely giving this inner world a path outward.
My emotions stack up like books with nowhere to shelve them. Love becomes a secret I tuck behind my ribs. Grief settles in my shoulders over time, like dust in the corners of an abandoned room. Anger burns quietly in my fingertips, never quite managing to reach my voice.
I’ve become an archivist of unshared feelings, cataloguing and preserving, rarely displaying. Akin to making photographs that I never share with the world. Sometimes, I wonder if they’ll eventually take up too much space. If one day, I’ll open my mouth and everything I’ve ever swallowed will come pouring out, sudden and unfiltered.
I’ve seen what happens when people give too much of themselves away. I’ve seen love turn to expectation, vulnerability turned into something weaponised. And I have learned. I have learned that needing too much from someone gives them power. That emotions, once fully revealed, can be measured, dissected, and manipulated. That once someone believes they ‘know’ you, they start to believe they have a say in who you are allowed to be.
So I keep my distance. Not because I want to be alone, but because I want to be free. Because I’ve fought too hard to be my own person. I’ve built myself with too much intention to risk someone else taking parts of me and deciding what they mean. This selfhood wasn’t inherited or accidental. It was carved out in quiet moments of introspection, in deliberate choices to honour my instincts even when they seemed inconvenient to others, in walking away from people who couldn’t see me clearly. In doing so, I’ve learned to trust my own interpretation of my experiences.
And yet.
There are nights when I wonder what it would feel like to believe, just for a moment, that I could be held without being owned.
I see others fall into each other with such abandon. Their walls crumbling between them, their boundaries negotiable. They make it look so easy, this trust, this surrender. And I wonder if my caution is wisdom or wound. If what I’ve called self-protection might actually be fear calcified into principle.
Perhaps there must be a middle ground I haven’t found yet.
A way to be known without being defined. A way to open my heart whilst still being free. To let someone close enough to see me without letting them colonise my depths.
This is the paradox I keep circling: how to stay open without being undone. How to let someone in without losing the shape of myself. I haven’t found the balance yet. But I’ll keep looking. And until then, I’ll fly with my carefully measured distance, accessible but untouched.
This distance I maintain is far from permanent. Some people have proven they can handle small pieces of me without breaking them, so I’ve let them closer. There are times when the risk of not being known hurts more than the risk of being misunderstood. And in those moments, I try. I offer what I can. I let myself be seen in fragments. Because, after all, my boundaries were never meant to shut people out completely. They were meant to keep me whole.
This, I think, is how I’ll change. Not by swinging between total isolation and complete exposure, but through careful sharing. A gradual unfolding. A trust that expands and contracts as needed.
It’s hard to admit, but I do long for closeness, the kind that doesn’t ask for shape. The kind that lets me shift, stay, and still belong.
But for now, I stay in motion. Visible but never pinned down.
What I haven’t said lives where I do, in the open air, in slipstream, just beyond reach.
Flying, still, because I’ve never known another way to be. Because I’m like a bird in more ways than I knew.
beautiful! hope you find your sense of freedom