Keep the change

I once knew someone who told me, almost offhandedly,  that he always kept a mental ledger in his head. A running tab of what he’d given, and what he’d received. In every relationship. Every friendship. Every romantic entanglement. Every favor, every time someone showed up late or forgot something. All tallied. All accounted for.

He didn’t say it with bitterness… just as a matter of fact, like it was normal. Like this was how everyone operated, if they were honest.

I remember nodding, maybe even laughing politely, but it set off some personal red flags. Not because I hadn’t done it myself in smaller moments (I’m sure I have)  but because I couldn’t imagine living that way - measuring people like that, tallying up every interaction and weighing every moment of intimacy like currency.

After that, I started disengaging. I never said why, I didn’t think he would understand. Just drifted, quietly but deliberately. Because something about that moment shifted how I saw him… or maybe, more truthfully, the version of him I’d built up in my head. The idealised version. The one who gave freely, who cared deeply, who didn’t need to keep score to feel secure.

And maybe that was unfair of me. Maybe he was just being honest about something we all do, silently. Maybe I distanced myself because I couldn’t reconcile who he actually was with the version I wanted him to be.

I think, in his own way, he was trying to be fair. To protect himself, maybe even to relate better by keeping things balanced. But I’ve come to realize that we had completely different worldviews. His was a world of ledgers and ledges, of keeping track to stay steady. Mine isn’t. In mine, what’s freely given returns in its own time and shape. I stepped back out of the understanding that we were building on different blueprints. Not everyone is meant to stay. Some people come into your life to show you the kind of world you can’t live with, and in doing so, help you name the kind you can’t live without.

But part of me still believes: there’s a difference between the human impulse to want fairness and turning connection into calculation. I don’t want to live in a world where kindness is transactional. I don’t want to be valued only when I’m even.

So much in the world is already conditional. I don’t want my relationships to be, too.

I think what concerned me wasn’t just the ledger itself, but the worry that I might start keeping one myself. That if I stayed in that dynamic long enough, I’d begin to see every message, every silence, every absence as a data point. A balance sheet of care.

And I don’t want to live like that.

I want to be the kind of person who gives without counting, who trusts that, in the end, it all evens out. That what’s given freely doesn’t go to waste, even if it doesn’t come back the same way.

Maybe that’s idealistic. But I think we all need places where we’re not being measured, where presence is enough, where we’re not reduced to a number. In a world that constantly asks, What do you offer? What have you earned? What do you owe? 

I don’t want the value of my presence (or anyone’s, for the matter) to be weighed and tallied. I want connection to feel mutual, human, and free from the constant math of give and take. For something real. I know this makes me vulnerable. I’ve been burned. But I’d rather bleed than calcify.

So I did the only thing I knew how to get the point across: I tipped the scales, gave more, and hoped he would pay it forward.

Love, Vx