CHILEN MOYA is the author of I Was an Unwanted Child, But I Always Loved Myself, a memoir exploring resilience, identity, and self-love.
I grew up knowing I was unwanted, not because anyone ever said the words out loud, but because no one stayed long enough to need to.
I was left behind as a child in the Dominican Republic, passed quietly between relatives while my mother moved on with her life. When we were eventually reunited years later, the reunion did not bring the warmth or safety I had imagined.
My mother was present in body but distant in every other way. Love, I learned early, could exist in theory without showing up in practice. No one explained what any of this meant, but children are excellent translators of silence.
I learned that love was conditional, temporary, and earned through usefulness. I learned that asking for too much, affection, reassurance, attention, was a risk. And I learned, most dangerously, that abandonment was something to expect rather than something to question.
As an adult, I told myself I had moved on. I was independent, self sufficient, capable. I traveled. I built a career. I prided myself on not needing anyone.
But the truth revealed itself quietly in my romantic relationships. I was drawn to men who were emotionally unavailable, men who admired me from a distance, who needed me in moments of crisis, who loved me best when I asked for nothing.
I confused intensity for intimacy, longing for connection, and patience for devotion. When love felt uncertain, I felt strangely at home. I did not see this as repetition at the time.
I saw it as chemistry. In one relationship, I found myself waiting endlessly for clarity, for commitment, for effort. I minimized my needs and magnified his potential. When he pulled away, I leaned in. When he disappeared, I blamed myself for wanting more.
Somewhere deep inside, a familiar voice whispered, Of course this is how love feels. Of course you have to work for it.
It took me years to recognize that I was not unlucky in love. I was reenacting something I had learned long before romance entered the picture. I was trying to resolve my first abandonment through people who were incapable of staying.
The realization did not arrive dramatically. It came during a quiet moment when I noticed how calm I felt alone and how anxious I felt partnered. Love, which was supposed to expand me, kept shrinking my world.
I was abandoning myself long before anyone else had the chance. That recognition was unsettling. It meant that the problem was not just the people I chose, but the blueprint I was following.
It meant that healing would not come from finally being chosen by the right person, but from choosing myself in ways I never had before. Self love, I discovered, is not a feeling. It is a practice, one that feels unnatural when you have never seen it modeled.
At first, choosing myself felt selfish. I ended relationships sooner. I spoke up more. I stopped explaining my needs as if they were inconveniences. I resisted the urge to overextend, to prove my worth through endurance.
Each boundary felt like a small rebellion against the child I once was, the one who believed love required silence. The hardest part was grieving the fantasy I had carried for so long, that someone else could repair what was missing.
Letting go of that hope felt like another loss, but it also felt honest. No one was coming to save me, and perhaps no one ever needed to. Over time, something unexpected happened.
The urgency I felt around love softened. I no longer mistook anxiety for connection. I learned to sit with myself without distraction, without judgment. I became someone I could rely on.
I still want love. I still believe in partnership. But I no longer see it as proof of my worth or the solution to my wounds. Love, I have learned, is something you invite into a life you have already built, not something you wait for in order to begin.
Being an unwanted child shaped me, but it does not define me. I am no longer trying to earn my place in someone else’s world. I am learning, instead, how to stay in my own. And that, finally, feels like love.
BY CHILEN MOYA
