That’s the thought running across my mind.
And strangely enough, I don’t mean it in the way I once would have. There is something different about saying it now. Something almost dangerous in how powerful it feels.
I feel more in charge of myself than I have in a long time. More aware of what I bring into a room, what I tolerate, what I notice, what I remember. And I keep thinking: if a man isn’t the best for me, then why would I settle for second best?
Maybe there is no reason to.
Maybe there never was.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how strange the world has become; how much of life is built on narrative.
I just watched Verity, and it left me thinking about how little we actually document anymore. We don’t journal the way people once did. We don’t preserve our thoughts in real time. We don’t always feel safe enough to write down what happened, what we felt, what we saw, or what we knew.
And even when we do, there is always the question of whether someone else will believe it.
So instead, we become our own evidence.
Our habits.
Our patterns.
Our hobbies.
The things we obsess over.
The things we protect.
The people we love.
The people we hurt.
The things we repeatedly choose.
The things we repeatedly avoid.
Sometimes the only way to understand someone is to look at the life they have been quietly building when nobody was watching.
Because narratives can spiral.
A story gets told.
Then retold.
Then interpreted.
Then repeated by someone who wasn’t there.
And eventually, the version that traveled the farthest becomes the version everyone believes.
It reminds me of something my English instructor, Mr. Fritz, did with us in college.
He started with one word.
He whispered it to the first person.
That person whispered it to the next.
Then the next.
And we moved through the classroom in a maze—desk to desk, row to row—until that single word had traveled through an entire room full of people.
By the time it reached the last person, there was almost no guarantee that what they heard resembled what Mr. Fritz originally said.
And that was the lesson.
Not just that people hear differently.
But that information changes simply by traveling.
One mouth.
One ear.
One interpretation.
One memory.
One tiny mistake.
Then another.
Then another.
And somewhere along the way, something that started as truth becomes something else entirely.
The fascinating part is that we never know exactly where it changed.
So we go backward.
We look for clues.
We search for the moment the word began to transform.
We ask ourselves:
Did I hear that correctly?
Did you hear that correctly?
Or are we both just repeating what we think we heard?
And sometimes I think that is exactly what life is.
A giant whisper game.
Which is why Verity hit me differently.
If I had to rank the movies that have stayed with me lately, The Notebook would probably still have first place. Gone Girl is somewhere close behind. His & Hers has that strange, adjacent feeling—similar, but different enough to stand on its own.
And then there is Verity.
Right now, Verity is sitting at the top.
Not because it was the most romantic.
Because it made me question everything.
It layered so many things together—motherhood, obsession, perception, sexuality, marriage, storytelling, manipulation, fear, and the terrifying possibility that the person telling the story may not be the person who actually lived it.
And beneath all of that was something incredibly sensitive to me:
children.
Because there are things mothers will endure that other people will never fully understand.
There are places a mother will go.
Things she will sacrifice.
Things she will survive.
Just to remain present for her children.
And I thought that was beautiful.
But I also noticed something else.
How often men seem to love the idea of a woman without taking the time to actually study her.
They love the fantasy.
The polished version.
The sensual version.
The passionate version.
The woman who looks perfect from across the room.
But perfection has a strange way of becoming invisible.
The more perfect you make someone, the less you actually see them.
And eventually, the woman who appears to have everything becomes the woman you somehow don’t feel compelled to explore anymore.
Because you think you’ve already figured her out.
Maybe that’s why I don’t want to be someone’s fantasy anymore.
I want to be understood.
I want depth.
I want someone to notice the details that aren’t obvious.
The things I don’t announce.
The things I do when I’m nervous.
The things I become passionate about.
The things I protect.
The things I remember.
The things that hurt me.
The things that make me laugh when nobody is watching.
I want to be explored beyond the surface.
Because there are so many of us in this world who are not meant to be understood in one glance.
We are entire landscapes.
And maybe that’s what I’ve been realizing lately.
There really is no best man.
The best man is a woman.
And tonight, that woman is me.
I’m driving down Fair Oaks Boulevard, and the night feels almost cinematic.
The temperature has fallen to 79 degrees after being nearly 100 just a couple of hours ago. The heat is still trapped somewhere in the pavement, but the air has finally softened.
I’m listening to Pretty Issue, and it has been playing in my head every chance I’ve gotten for the last week.
There is something about the way the song sounds like a man romanticizing a woman—words crossing over themselves, intimacy wrapped inside uncertainty.
And tonight, those words are floating through the car while my own thoughts are louder than the music.
So I turn the music down.
I’m driving through what feels like a tunnel of trees.
No cars around me.
The streetlights aren’t working along parts of the road.
Instead, everything is illuminated by reflections—the road catching little pieces of whatever light exists around it.
The pavement is smooth.
There aren’t many stop signs.
Not many interruptions.
For almost a mile, it feels like the road simply keeps going.
And I keep thinking about how strange it is that something can look so quiet while your mind is making so much noise.
The world outside is almost still.
My mind isn’t.
Maybe that’s why I’m thinking about weather.
About El Niño.
About La Niña.
About how the atmosphere can shift and how something happening thousands of miles away can eventually become something you feel against your own skin.
The planet is changing.
The climate is changing.
The atmosphere is changing.
And sometimes the numbers don’t even look dramatic.
But the impact can be enormous.
A tiny shift.
One degree.
One letter.
One vowel.
One word.
One missing piece of information.
One person repeating something slightly differently than they heard it.
And suddenly the meaning has changed completely.
That’s the frightening part.
Small doesn’t mean insignificant.
Sometimes the smallest alteration creates the largest consequence.
And lately, I feel like I’m living inside a horror story that keeps adding chapters.
Not a room full of monsters.
Just people.
Men.
Situations.
Things I’ve had to protect myself from.
Things I’ve had to defend myself against.
And I keep wondering:
How many is enough?
How many times does a woman have to recognize danger before she starts wondering if danger is simply part of the curriculum?
God forbid there is one more.
Just one more man.
One more situation.
One more person I have to protect myself from.
Then what?
Do I graduate?
Does life finally hand me a certificate and say,
Congratulations. You’ve learned enough.
Or does the race simply continue?
Because maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along.
Racing.
But I don’t even know what I’m racing toward anymore.
And maybe that is the wrong question.
Maybe the question isn’t:
Who wins?
Maybe the question is:
What am I willing to lose just to say I won?
Because I’m not interested in winning a man.
I’m not interested in being chosen by someone who barely studied me.
I’m not interested in being somebody’s perfect fantasy, only to become invisible once the fantasy wears off.
And I certainly don’t want second best.
But tonight, driving through the dark with Pretty Issue playing softly and my thoughts shouting over it, I realize something:
I don’t need there to be a best man.
I need there to be a woman who knows her own worth well enough to stop competing for a position she was never supposed to audition for.
Maybe that’s the real plot twist.
Maybe the best man was never the prize.
Maybe the best thing in the story was the woman who finally realized she didn’t need to be won.
She needed to choose.
And the verdict? The ultimate decision?
I’m choosing me.
Again, and again.
