It’s Better To Bleed Than To Beg

It’s Better To Bleed Than To Beg

It’s not depression exactly. It’s more like a subtle rot, a low-grade fever that simmers under your skin just enough to keep you slightly off, like a radio tuned a fraction off the right frequency. You smile because that’s what you’re supposed to do—order the drink, say something clever, nod at the right beat in the conversation. But your mind is somewhere else, watching it all happen like it’s a rerun of a show you never liked in the first place.

The sadness is quiet. Slick. It doesn’t scream or cry. It just sits there, elegantly dressed, sipping a martini in your chest, whispering things like “she doesn’t really care” or “this is going to fall apart anyway”.

And you believe it, because part of you wants to.

You scroll through texts you’ll never send. You rehearse exits from relationships that haven’t even begun. There’s always this dull hum of fear—fear of needing someone, fear of them needing you, fear of the mask slipping and someone seeing the soft, stupid truth underneath: you don’t know how to be loved. You don’t even know if you want to be. You just know that being alone feels safer, cleaner, easier to control. No sudden departures, no crying in airports, no sleeping next to someone who suddenly walks out and never turns back.

And in those rare moments where someone tries to get close, you flinch. You joke. You disappear for a few days. You become the void you’re terrified of falling into. Because if they get too close, they might see you as you see yourself—something fractured, something hollow, someone who was never quite enough.

So you drift. Parties, faces, nights that blur into each other. And you tell yourself you’re free. But deep down, you know: it’s not freedom. It’s fear in a nicely tailored suit.

There’s a moment—usually around 3:14 a.m.—where the silence gets so dense it starts to feel alive. Not just quiet, but sentient. Like the walls are breathing. Like the dark is watching you. You’re lying there, awake again, scrolling through people you used to know, used to fuck, those you used to pretend to love, and none of it feels real. Not even your own face staring back from the black mirror of your phone.

You start to wonder if you’ve become something unrecognizable. Not a person, but a performance of one. A curated collection of appetites and avoidance tactics. You say the right things, you post the right pictures, you nod when someone talks about trauma like it’s a personality trait, but underneath, there’s this monstrous vacancy. Like you’ve been hollowed out and filled with static.

You think back to the last time someone said “I love you” and how it felt like a fucking accusation. How the words clung to you like a stain, something shameful and permanent. You remember the panic. The compulsion to sabotage it before it could matter. You remember ghosting them. Watching their name pop up with a sad little “?” and letting it rot in your notifications like fruit in the sun.

You tell yourself you’re protecting them. That you’re toxic, that they’re better off without you. But the truth is you’re terrified they might stay. Terrified they might see the crumbling infrastructure behind the dark sunglasses, the decaying scaffolding of old wounds, bad choices, the constant gnaw of “you’re not good enough“. And if they stayed—if they actually loved that wreckage—you might have to admit it exists. You might have to look at it, which is a terrifying prospect.

So instead you retreat. You wrap yourself in cold sheets and ironic detachment. You drink things that burn. You take pills that level you out just enough to function, but not enough to feel. You say you’re tired when people ask what’s wrong, but tired isn’t the word. Empty comes closer. Haunted maybe. A ghost of your own life.

And the worst part? You know this will keep happening. You’ll keep destroying anything that starts to feel like hope. Because somewhere deep inside, there’s a voice—low, certain, cruel—whispering the only gospel you’ve ever really believed: “No one stays. No one ever really loves you. because you don’t deserve it.“

It always goes back to the beginning, doesn’t it? That rotten architecture they built around you when you were too young to understand it was a prison. The things they did—or didn’t do—that embedded themselves like splinters in your psyche, growing infected over the years until your personality formed around the wound. Smiling for approval. Apologizing for existing. Mistaking affection for a trap door.

You were taught early that love was conditional. That warmth could vanish mid-sentence. That affection came with a contract. There is no such thing as unconditional love. If you spoke too loudly, if you “needed” too much, if you questioned the unspoken rules, they pulled away. They shut down. And you—wide-eyed, desperate—learned how to fold yourself into the smallest version possible just to keep the peace. To remain unseen. Just to survive another day without being accused of making everything worse.

Your house wasn’t haunted by ghosts. It was haunted by silence. By the weight of unspoken resentment that clung to the drapes, the wallpaper, the spaces between words. You weren’t wanted, but you were too young to realize it. You thought this was normal. You watched the people who were supposed to protect you weaponize intimacy, and you absorbed the lesson like radiation: “Never need anyone. Never trust love. It’s just a prelude to pain.“

So you built the armor. You became charming. Funny. Clever in that way that cuts people just enough to keep them from getting too close. You turned vulnerability into performance—something you ration out in curated fragments, just enough to seem human, never enough to be touched.

And now, decades later, you’re still that kid, hiding under emotional floorboards, detached more than ever. You flinch at kindness because you don’t believe in it. You sabotage good things before they can leave you, just to prove yourself right. You chase comfort in sex and retreat the moment someone asks, “Who hurt you?“

There was a time—maybe not so long ago—when the only thing that felt real was pain. Not metaphorical, not poetic, not the kind of pain you write sad music about. Actual pain. In a world that felt too loud, too chaotic, too meaningless, it was something you could manage. It was finally something that answered to you.

No one ever noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t ask. You were too good at hiding it. The long sleeves. The fake stories. The jokes that deflected just enough to keep suspicion at arm’s length. You could go to class, to work, to dinner, and no one knew. Poor excuses like “I fell while hiking” were common. But the previous day you tried to move a bring wall with your fist, and failed.

Sometimes it wasn’t even about sadness. It was about emptiness. That vast, blank cold inside you that nothing could fill—no drug, no orgasm, no validation, no fleeting rush of dopamine from strangers telling you you’re hot or brilliant or strong. Just a void. And the pain was like a flare in the dark. A reminder that at least the body was still there, even if your mind was off somewhere curled up in a corner, trying not to scream.

You got older. The bleeding stopped. Mostly. But the scars? Still there. Pale and thin and quiet reminders that once upon a time, you didn’t know how to exist without hurting yourself. And sometimes you still don’t, but the scars remain…along with your shame.

You just learned how to make it look better. You replaced it with wine, or pills, or people who don’t love you. You found cleaner ways to self-destruct. Ways that don’t leave marks, just ruins.

The self infliction didn’t stop, it just changed forms. You had a new method, and it was even worse than the first: You walled yourself off and became cold.

You don’t feel like you deserve love because somewhere along the line—probably early, when the wiring was still forming—they taught you that love was earned through suffering. Through silence. Through shrinking. That your needs were burdens. That your sadness was somehow “manipulative”. That being loved meant being perfect, or invisible, or both. So you became the shape of what you thought they wanted. And they still left. Or worse—they stayed and made you wish they hadn’t.

And when that happens enough times, something calcifies. It becomes doctrine. Sacred. You stop looking at love as something to receive. You start seeing it as a trick. A setup. A con someone runs to get close enough to see what you really are—and once they do, they’ll recoil. Or worse, pity you.

And you’d rather be hated than pitied.

You carry this sense of defectiveness like a birthmark. You don’t talk about it, not really. But it’s in everything. In the way you brush off compliments. In the way you recoil from kindness like it’s radioactive. In the way you ruin good things on purpose, preemptively—because if they leave now, at least it’s on your terms.

You convince yourself you’re too much. Too intense. Too quiet. Too dark. Too damaged. Too boring. Too needy. Too whatever. You’ve built an entire identity around this imagined unworthiness. And the cruel irony is: the more you believe it, the more you act like it’s true. You push people away. You chase people who won’t stay. You find love only in the ones who withhold it, because that’s the flavor you were raised on. Conditional. Fickle. Painful. Familiar.

You say you want love. But if it ever stood in front of you—unconditional, unwavering, real—you wouldn’t recognize it. You’d stare at it like it’s some foreign language. You’d flinch. Laugh it off. Find a reason to leave. Because deep down, you believe love is a mirror. And you’ve never liked what you see.

So when someone says “I love you”, your first instinct is to wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. What they’re trying to get from you. What kind of nefarious things they’re conspiring to do to you. What they’ll eventually discover and decide isn’t worth it. You count down the days until they wake up and realize they made a mistake. You keep a suitcase packed in the back of your mind. Just in case.

Because maybe love does exist. Maybe it’s real, and good, and kind. But not for you.
You’re the exception.
You always have been. You don’t deserve it.