I can love you very much and care about you deeply, and still keep my distance to protect my own mental health, peace, and sanity. For the past few years, I’ve taken medication to help me stay balanced and stable, and since childhood I’ve dealt with mental health struggles that never fully go away.

If I make a mistake or do something wrong, I have no problem facing it, addressing it, and sitting with the discomfort that comes from that kind of disagreement or conflict. But if you’re someone who seeks conflict without real justification, just for the sake of it, or if you’re reactive and create problems out of thin air, I’m not going to try to fix that for you. Not anymore anyway. What I will do is simply stop engaging about the topic.

That doesn’t mean I love you less. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you. It means you’re creating unnecessary conflict or discomfort in my life, and neither of us needs to entertain that. If you insist on carrying on that way, I’m going to step back. I’m not interested in conflict. Life gives me enough of that already.

I wake up every day with pain in my neck and my back. I deal with high blood pressure and I’m keeping an eye on a potential heart issue. Hopefully it’s nothing serious, but between that and the mental health work I do every day, plus the physical pain, I don’t have room to take on more. I can’t simply decide to stop engaging with my own pain and make it disappear. It’s there, and I have to deal with it. But I don’t have to keep engaging with a person who is behaving in a way that’s toxic or causing problems in my life, especially over something small. That’s true no matter who you are or what role you play in my life.

I’ll say it again. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean I love you less. It means that if we’re going to stay close, you have to come correct. You have to understand where I’m at right now. I’m already carrying a lot, physically and emotionally, every single day. Why would I choose to add more stress to that, especially when the trigger for it is so minor? We already deal with difficult people the moment we step out the door, at work, in daily life. Why would I choose to keep that energy in my personal life too? I can’t do it.

So understand this. I love you. I will always love you. I want to help you, genuinely. But you have to get a handle on your emotions and yourself, so that we can actually have a healthy relationship.