You do NOT have taste You have tunnel vision, and you keep mistaking it for admiration.You see me and stop looking. That’s the problem.

We walk into a room together and the decision is instant. Not discussed. Not questioned. Attention snaps into place like it was waiting for permission to ignore everyone else. You speak to me first. You laugh louder at my words. You lean in my direction as if the rest of the room suddenly faded.

And I feel it before I even turn my head.Someone else is already being edged out.

I don’t have to look to know it’s happening, but I always do. I always check. I see the pause where they should have been invited in. I see the way their body shifts, like they’re adjusting to a space that no longer includes them. I see how quickly presence turns into distance without anyone ever moving. That’s when the attention starts to feel wrong.

Don’t get me wrong — I know what it feels like to be chosen. I know the ease of it. The warmth. The way things flow when the world decides you’re worth listening to. I won’t pretend I don’t feel it. I’m human. But there’s something deeply unsettling about being favored when the favor is uneven.Especially when I can see exactly who it costs.

I start noticing everything. Who gets interrupted. Who gets waited for. Who people make space around. Who becomes background noise. It’s subtle enough that no one feels guilty, but obvious enough that it leaves marks.And somehow, I’m standing at the centre of it.

I try to stop it. I really do. I widen my stance, pull conversations outward, shift focus, make introductions, give credit. I do all the polite, careful things people say you should do when you’re aware of your privilege. But the world doesn’t like to be corrected. It resists. It tightens its grip.

The more I try to share the light, the more it insists on staying where it is.

And then the guilt arrives  not dramatic, not loud, just steady. The kind that settles in your chest and doesn’t leave. The kind that makes you hyper-aware of your own presence. I start wondering if being near me feels like standing too close to something that burns but only warms one person.

That’s when the thought I hate admitting shows up. Maybe I’m the problem.

Maybe closeness hurts more than distance. Maybe being beside me feels like a constant reminder of what the room has already decided. Maybe the air is lighter when I’m not there pulling all the attention like a magnet I never asked to be.

And that thought is devastating, because it means love starts sounding like absence. It means caring might require leaving. It means something pure is being damaged by something neither of us chose.

I think about the past a lot. About before rooms decided. Before attention ranked us. When laughter was easy and presence didn’t come with a comparison attached. When we existed without being measured side by side.

That closeness was real. I refuse to pretend it wasn’t. Which is why this hurts the way it does.

I’m stuck carrying two truths at once: gratitude for what the world gives me freely, and grief for what it withholds from someone standing right next to me. I enjoy the ease, and I resent the cost. I feel lucky and ashamed in the same breath.

And the worst part is that none of this is accidental. You call it preference. You call it admiration. You call it natural. But what you’re really doing is choosing not to look twice. You’re choosing convenience over fairness. You’re choosing one person loudly enough that another disappears quietly.

And then you leave me holding the consequences.So no , DO NOT tell me I’m lucky.

Luck doesn’t come with this kind of weight. Luck doesn’t make you question your own presence. Luck doesn’t force you to wonder who feels smaller because you walked into the room.

And if this makes you uncomfortable, it should. Because this is what being chosen can look like when no one wants to admit the damage it does. This is what favoritism leaves behind when the attention moves on and the room empties.

Not praise.

Not admiration.

Not even guilt.

Just the memory of a moment when someone was right there. whole, deserving, present  and became invisible because you couldn’t be bothered to look past me.

That’s the part that stays.