There’s something alarming about hearing the same words from different people over different seasons of your life. “Dali, you’re too good.” Every person I’ve ever loved has said this to me, and for the longest time, I thought it was just another version of “it’s not you, it’s me”—that white lie meant to soften the impact of leaving. But when the same phrase keeps appearing, when it becomes a pattern that follows you from relationship to relationship, you start to wonder if there’s something you’ve missed.
I used to dismiss it, convince myself it was coincidence. But recently, those words found their way back into my consciousness after you said something that cut straight through to the heart of it all: “It’s almost like you have a core belief that it’s too good to be true for you. That you don’t deserve something this good. So you shoot yourself in the foot before you even start.”
“It’s almost like you have a core belief that it’s too good to be true for you. That you don’t deserve something this good. So you shoot yourself in the foot before you even start.”
In that moment, everything shifted. I could almost see the contraption of my own self-destruction so clearly that it shook my very core. In the same way people told me I was “too good” for them—I had been telling myself that you were too good for me. What a brilliant, twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Stories We Inherit
We don’t come into this world believing we’re unworthy of love. That’s something we learn, something that gets programmed into us through countless small moments and messages that torpedo us into a belief we shouldn’t have in the first place. It may be true that the culture we experience teaches us that love is conditional, that it must be earned, that real connection is somehow scarce—reserved for the chosen few who fit certain criteria of worthiness.
I think about the stories we consume, the narratives that shape our understanding of what love should look like. We’re stuffed with this idea that real love exists in movies and books, that it’s something that happens to other people, the protagonists who finally choose themselves and follow their hearts toward some beautiful, meaningful ending. But here we are, living in the space between scenes, where there’s no soundtrack swelling to tell us we’re making the right choice, no dialogue promising that everything will work out if we just have courage.
When someone says we’re “too good,” they’re not really talking about us. They’re projecting their own relationship with unworthiness, their own inability to receive love without suspicion. But here’s what I’ve come to understand: we do the same thing to ourselves. We take that external rejection and turn it inward, making it a core belief about what we deserve.
The Safety of ‘Almost’
There’s an unpleasant, subtle fear that comes with realizing you might actually deserve something beautiful. It’s easier, in some ways, to live with longing than to live with having. Longing is familiar—it’s safe because it keeps love at a distance where it can’t disappoint us. But having? Having requires us to be comfortable with the idea that we’re worthy of care without conditions, love without transaction.
I’ve spent years waiting for connections like this one, dreaming of the version of love that sees you completely and chooses to stay. But when it finally arrived—imperfect, complicated, real—I found myself looking for exits, creating distance where there could be intimacy. Not because the love wasn’t good enough, but because I had been conditioned to believe it couldn’t possibly be meant for me.
This is how we cripple our own capacity for joy. We create drama where there could be calm. We choose familiar patterns of emotional scarcity over the unfamiliar space of abundance. We become so accustomed to bread crumbs that a feast feels like a setup for ultimate disappointment and heartache.
“Your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over unfamiliar heaven. Heal, so you can choose differently.”
The reality isn’t that love is impossible—it is that we’ve been programmed to believe it’s impossible for us specifically. That we’re somehow exempt from the basic human experience of being seen, known, and chosen without having to earn it first.
But recognizing the pattern is the first step toward breaking it. When I caught myself in that moment of projection—seeing you as “too good” for me just as others had seen me as “too good” for them—everything suddenly started to make sense. I realized that this wasn’t personal pathology but collective conditioning. We’ve all been taught to protect our own hearts, to reject the possibility that we might deserve tenderness without having to prove ourselves worthy of it first.
The work, then, becomes about unlearning these unhealthy narratives. It’s about interrogating that voice that convinces us we’re “too much” or “too little.” It requires what I can only call radical self-acceptance—the act of believing we deserve care not because we’ve earned it, but simply because we exist.
Choosing Love as Resistance
Love isn’t a Netflix series with a neat finale. It is messier, more uncertain, more real. Love asks us to show up imperfectly, to risk disappointment, to choose connection over the safety of isolation. Love is an act of resistance against every force that has taught us we’re not worthy of it.
Love is an act of resistance against every force that has taught us we’re not worthy of it.
Sometimes I think about how different things might be if we could just accept love when it arrives—not the perfect love we’ve been conditioned to expect, but the human love that’s available to us right here, right now. What if we could trust that we don’t need to be “too good” or “good enough” but exactly as we are, with all our uncertainties and fears and hopes?
The question isn’t whether we deserve love. The question is whether we have the courage to accept it when it shows up, whether we can resist the urge to sabotage what we’ve been waiting for simply because it feels too good to be true.
Maybe the real revolution is in believing that it’s not too good to be true—it’s just good enough to be real. And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what we deserve.
Dali 
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