Dear Drew

“I wasted years trying to understand someone who never tried to be understood.”

Dear Drew started as a letter to him that I eventually made into a song. It is about finally seeing the entire relationship without trying to soften it, explain it away, or turn his choices into something I could understand.

For a long time, I thought if I could understand why he kept pulling away, I could understand what I needed to do differently. Eventually, I realized I was asking the wrong question.

I was fully invested while he was still looking around. I was building something while he was comparing, questioning, keeping his options open, and leaving one foot outside the relationship.

The line, ‘I was giving you something real, you were shopping while I stayed,’ captures that realization for me.

But one of the hardest parts was not simply feeling unchosen. It was that every time I started accepting the relationship for what it was and creating distance, he would come back just enough to restart my hope.

So I kept interpreting his return as proof of love.

Looking back, I understand that someone coming back does not necessarily mean they have finally chosen you. Sometimes they miss the comfort. Sometimes they miss the familiarity. Sometimes they do not want to lose access to someone who has always loved them.

And that became even harder to accept when he came back into my life while there was already someone else. I thought his return meant something had changed. Instead, it became the final piece of information I needed to see the pattern clearly.

That is why ‘I was always too real for you’ does not mean I think I was somehow better than him. It means I was asking for something real: honesty, commitment, emotional intimacy, accountability, and a relationship that existed outside of convenience.

I was not willing to live permanently in the gray.

The bridge is where the song finally stops trying to understand him: ‘I wasted years trying to understand someone who never tried to be understood.’

There comes a point in healing where understanding someone’s wounds stops being useful if you are using that understanding to excuse what those wounds are doing to you.

I can understand him. I can believe he cared about me in the ways he knew how. And I can still acknowledge that what he was capable of giving me was never enough.

The final ‘Dear Drew, don’t come back this time’ is different from every goodbye before it. It is not asking him to finally understand what he lost. It is me understanding what I can no longer accept.

And closing the door myself.

— Caitlin