Have you ever mistaken your hope for someone’s healing? ❤️‍🩹 

Hoping that love might reach them. Hoping that attention might soften them. But it won’t. Because love can’t rewrite what someone refuses to face.

You can’t wake someone who’s using your empathy to stay asleep. And no amount of kindness will ever change a heart that refuses to.

So let this be a truth you no longer ignore: just because you see their pain, doesn’t mean they see your worth. Just because you’re willing to try, doesn’t mean they’re capable of growing. You deserve a relationship where both souls are aware, accountable, and awake, not one where your depths become a battleground for another’s ego.

They will scan you like a mirror, not to understand, but to exploit. Looking for a weak spot, a crack they can penetrate, not to heal, but to control. They will study your flaws, not with compassion, but with calculation. Because for some, closeness is just another strategy; a way to bond through dysfunction and manipulate under the illusion of intimacy. And as they do that, you, the open-hearted person, will silently see their wounds, their masks, their fears and still stand.

One person tries to fix them with love; the other tries to feed them. One operates from ego; the other from unhealed naivety. It never ends well. Because when someone loves through illusion, thinking their light can save someone who is still committed to their shadow, they abandon their own clarity.

When you realize that, that’s when you stop mistaking pain for purpose. You don’t have to be the light in someone else’s storm if it keeps putting out your own fire. You can’t help someone who uses connection as camouflage.