I stared at his photos a little too hard. He knew how to take photos that made women like me stop scrolling. I usually paused longer at each photo than I meant to. Well groomed, everything carefully curated — dinners, brunches, travel, work. He was solo. No significant other, no siblings or parents in any photos. You could not tell the type of company he kept. There was nothing to show the shape of his real life. So I assumed one thing: he was single.
The other part of my brain — the one that acts as an FBI agent — introduced a second theory. The photos on his feed seemed too intimate to be taken by a casual friend, or so I thought. Someone who was either hidden, or he had decided to curate his feed carefully enough to serve as a thirst trap for thirsty females who were hungry for his attention. Either way I was intrigued.
I found myself attracted to him for whatever reason. It was a dangerous attraction. I started building stories and a whole life with him in my head. But looking back, I was auditioning for a man who wasn't casting. It was the beginning of the problem. I was already reading too much into a man who had not actually done anything.
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Let me explain.
In hindsight, he was familiar. He reminded me of an ex. Handsome, well put together, calm. And when a person is familiar, it makes me nervous — because familiar means I might make the same mistakes that ended the last relationship. Falling in love too hard was one of them.
Somehow I felt this new man was sent to teach me a lesson. You know how there are cycles of events that continue as a loop, and you can't leave the loop until you break a habit or a pattern? It's like when you keep dating the same type of man in a different body. Healing does one thing: you realise that after learning lessons, anything that comes after becomes a test. It is to make sure you do not repeat the loop.
"I had slipped into a performance posture with someone who had not earned that power."
He did what was familiar to men that I had met and left. He dropped the ball. He had two different occasions to come through, and both times he spoke game but could not play. He always had a great idea, something to do, somewhere to go — but he could never follow through. The first time, I told myself it was a mistake. The second time I had to admit it was a pattern. No matter how hard my heart tried to justify his actions, my brain told me it was time to let go. Once you discern a pattern, it becomes the antidote to falling for familiarity.
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Then while journaling through my disappointment, the book of Esther came back to me differently.
Vashti was removed from her position and a replacement search for a new queen began. Women from far and wide went through months of intensive beauty preparation to audition for the role. With all that preparation, the king chose Esther. Here is what struck me: Esther asked the caretaker what the king liked — and that became her preparation. Esther did not approach the moment casually. She paid attention to what mattered.
When preparing for a new season, you need to shed old things — old behaviours, old pain, old habits. There is healing that needs to be done. Deep introspection. If you don't do this, you will carry the old season into the new one and produce the same results.
I had done the work. The healing, the shedding, all of it. So when this new familiar man came around with subtle red flags — that didn't make him a bad person, just not my person — I was able to discern clearly. He might be a good catch. But he was the one who was supposed to audition for my approval. Not the other way around.
The old me would have shrunk herself for his approval. Performed to prove herself worthy. He was doing less than the bare minimum — and I was supposed to accept it because?
"The moment I realised I needed to stop auditioning was when I rewound the sequence of his actions and found out I was the casting director all along."
He was not eligible to play the role.