Last night I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there with my brain refusing to switch off, so at some point I ended up doing what I often do when that happens: randomly jumping from one YouTube video to another. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I wasn’t trying to understand my life or have some profound revelation at two o’clock in the morning. I was just scrolling. And then, somehow, I watched two videos one after the other that felt like being slapped in the face. Not because they told me something completely new, but because they put words around something I had perhaps understood intellectually without ever really seeing it from that angle.

The first video talked about what happens when a relationship slowly starts replacing your life. Not dramatically, not overnight, and perhaps that is exactly why it can be so difficult to notice. From the outside, your life can still look like your life. You work. You see people. You go places. You make plans. You do all the things you normally do. But somewhere underneath, the centre begins to move. You wake up thinking about that person. You check your phone. You analyse a conversation. You wonder why they said something, why they didn’t say something, why they behaved in a certain way. You talk about them with your friends. You wait for the next message. Your attention, little by little, stops belonging entirely to you.

One idea in the video stayed with me: before, you were planning; now, you are interpreting. Before, you were choosing; now, you are reacting. Before, your energy went into your dreams and your projects; now, an enormous amount of it goes into trying to understand or predict another human being. And suddenly I realised how frighteningly easy it is for someone to become the protagonist of your life without you ever consciously deciding to give them the role.

Then I watched the second video.

And this one punched me directly in the stomach.

It began with an idea I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since: what if you feel more alive when that person contacts you than you do while you are actually living your own life?

Fuck.

Because that is a very different question.

It is easy to ask why we stay attached to somebody who has hurt us. It is easy to analyse the relationship, their behaviour, our behaviour, attachment, childhood, trauma, patterns, abandonment, all the things that might explain why something became so difficult to leave. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand those things. But this video asked something else entirely: if that person disappeared tomorrow, which parts of you would light up? Not which parts of you would continue functioning. Which parts would actually come alive?

And I think that distinction between functioning and feeling alive is enormous.

You can have a functioning life. You can wake up, work, pay bills, make things, exercise, cook, see friends, organise your house, answer emails, make plans and book trips. You can be incredibly capable. But none of those things automatically answer the question: what makes me feel alive?

Because intensity can feel a lot like aliveness. Waiting for a message is intense. Being wanted is intense. Uncertainty is intense. Desire is intense. Fear is intense. Relief is intense. Missing somebody is intense. Reconnecting after believing you have lost them is incredibly intense. And when one person becomes the place where all of those enormous emotions happen, perhaps it becomes very easy to mistake the intensity of the relationship for the intensity of being alive.

That was the part that hit me.

Maybe the question isn’t only how to remove somebody from the centre of your life. Maybe the question is what you put back in the centre when they are gone.

The second video talked about expanding your life rather than spending all your energy continuing to analyse the relationship. The idea was that when your life becomes bigger, the relationship becomes smaller. Not because the other person has changed, and not because you have finally found the perfect intellectual explanation for everything that happened, but because they are no longer the only place where something inside you catches fire.

I think that is what illuminated something for me last night.

I don’t want to spend my life trying not to think about somebody. That still puts them at the centre. I don’t want my life to become a recovery project organised around another person either. I want to turn the question around completely.

What makes me feel alive?

Music makes me feel alive. Creating something that didn’t exist yesterday makes me feel alive. Walking through a city with headphones on makes me feel alive. Travelling makes me feel alive. Photography makes me feel alive. Making clothes makes me feel alive. Discovering something new makes me feel alive. Having an idea at completely the wrong time and needing to write it down immediately makes me feel alive. Standing behind a DJ console makes me feel alive. Apparently, buying a ticket to Japan after trying to get there for fifteen years makes me feel very fucking alive.

And perhaps I need more of that.

Not distractions. Not things to keep myself busy enough that I don’t think. A bigger life.

A life with so many things inside it that no single person can become the source of all its intensity. A life where love can be part of what makes me feel alive without becoming the only place where I can find that feeling. A life where somebody can leave and their absence can hurt enormously, but it cannot take my entire sense of being alive with them.

Maybe that is the part I had been missing. I kept thinking that moving forward meant making this person smaller in my mind. Maybe I don’t have to concentrate on making anyone smaller.

Maybe I need to make my life bigger.