I Kept Trying to Decode Him. I Was Asking the Wrong Question.

A story about mixed signals, an "almost" that wouldn't die, and the moment I stopped trying to figure someone else out and started figuring out what I actually needed to do.

In This Article

• Why "Almost" Keeps You Thinking
• What I Knew, What I Assumed, and What I Couldn't Know
• I Was Asking the Wrong Question
• Keep Your Lies, I'll Keep the Leggings
• What I Did with the Space

There's a very specific kind of insomnia that isn't about work or noise. It's lying there scrolling backward through years of someone's behavior like security footage, looking for the one clip that finally explains everything.

The person in question had been part of my life for years. We'd been together once, and after that ended, we didn't fully disappear from each other — we became something in the space between "ex" and "friend," which sounds tidy and was, in practice, a complete mess. Frequent conversation. Familiarity that felt like more than friendship. Favors. Little perks. Interest in what I was building. A flash of jealousy here and there. Enough of a pattern that when I finally got honest about wanting to try again, I expected the answer to match it.

It didn't. His actual answer was a lot simpler than the story I'd been building. That mismatch is where this really starts.

Why "Almost" Keeps You Thinking

A clean breakup gives you an ending. This didn't. My brain treated it like an unfinished sentence, and unfinished sentences are hard to stop reading. There was always one more piece of evidence to dig up, one more old conversation to reread in light of something new.

Around this time, I also learned some things about our actual relationship, years earlier, that changed how I understood parts of the past. So, I wasn't just going over the recent stuff. I was going over all of it. Did he care but just not want the relationship? Was I comfort? Convenient? Did he know how I felt the whole time?

Knowing exactly what's going on inside somebody else's head would be a superhero power I would love to have. Unfortunately, I don't have it. And neither does ChatGPT.

What I Knew, What I Assumed, and What I Couldn't Know

I wasn't a passive victim of mixed signals here, but I wasn't imagining everything either. There were real words, real gestures, and real history. My mistake was treating those things like they could tell me exactly what was happening inside somebody else's head.

He does something nice — maybe it means he still has feelings for me. He gets weird about someone else — maybe he doesn't want me but doesn't want anyone else to have me either. The problem wasn't noticing the behavior. The problem was turning every “maybe” into evidence for the story I already wanted to believe.

Behavior gives me information. It doesn't give me access to somebody's internal world.

This is where ChatGPT became useful — not to tell me what he meant, but to help me sort what I actually knew from what I'd decided to believe. Over time, it also started talking a lot more like me. I could be sarcastic, change my mind mid-thought, vent, backtrack, talk it out almost like I was texting a girlfriend instead of typing into a search bar. That made it easier to actually process things. It also meant I had to stay honest with myself about whether I was working through something or just giving my overthinking a new place to live.

The prompt that kept me the most honest was some version of this:

I'm going to describe a relationship or situation I'm overthinking. Don't try to tell me what the other person is thinking or feeling — you can't know that, and neither can I. Based only on what I tell you, help me separate this into: 1. What I know for certain 2. What I'm assuming or interpreting 3. What I genuinely cannot know from the information available 4. What is actually within my control right now 5. What decision I need to make, given all of that If I start asking you to reinterpret the same piece of evidence more than once, point that out and redirect me toward what I can control instead.

That last line did the most work. I caught myself asking the same handful of questions in different ways, hoping a different answer would eventually show up. It never did. It wasn't going to.

I Was Asking the Wrong Question

Here's what I finally landed on: I didn't need to determine whether every kind thing he'd ever done was genuine. I needed to determine whether this, as it existed right now, was something I wanted to keep having access to.

Something can have been real and still need to end. Someone doesn't have to become a cartoon villain before you're allowed to stop giving them access to you. I kept waiting for a clean, undeniable reason to walk away. I didn't get one. What I got was the slow realization that continuing to analyze him wasn't getting me closer to peace — it was just a more sophisticated way of staying in it.

The actual shift was going from "what is he going to do" to "what am I going to do." Once I had a real answer to the second question, his behavior stopped running my emotional weather. Space helped more than any conversation did. When I wasn't checking for meaning or quietly monitoring anymore, the intensity came down on its own — until one day I realized I hadn't felt the urge to call.

Keep Your Lies, I'll Keep the Leggings

Somewhere in all of this, there was a Lululemon credit tied to him — a perk, and a small, ridiculous, still-connected thread. Part of what made it feel meaningful wasn't just the discount. I could use the credit whenever I wanted, and that kind of ongoing access felt relationship-like. That kind of access felt relationship-like, which is exactly why it ended up on my pile of "evidence" instead of just being a nice thing that happened.

I told myself I wanted the door closed while quietly still shopping through a window I'd left cracked open. Free leggings are free leggings — except the credit never even covered a full outfit, so I wasn't getting a great deal on my emotional compromise either.

Closing a relationship isn't just the one big door. It's the small ones too — finally changing the Netflix password, returning the stuff still sitting in a drawer, letting the "we should still be friends" plan quietly die instead of testing it. Every one of those is a very legitimate-sounding excuse to stay in contact without admitting that's what you're doing. A perk isn't free if the cost is staying tied to something you said you were leaving. So, I gave it up.

What I Put My Attention Toward Instead

None of this resolved in one clean moment. You can understand something and still get ambushed by it on a random Tuesday. Progress looked like talking about it less, not asking friends to interpret every interaction, and noticing I'd gone a whole day without thinking about it at all — then noticing that happening more often. What helped most was redirecting real attention toward things I could actually influence: my business, my writing, work that had nothing to do with waiting on anyone.

That's the same idea behind Take It Off My Plate, a small tool I built around this exact lesson — when everything is swirling at once, you don't solve all of it. You pick one thing, put it down in front of you, and work through that one thing.

I may never know exactly what every one of his actions meant. For a while, I thought I needed that answer before I could move on. Turns out I don't.

I don't need a verdict on the past to make a decision about the present.

Apparently, moving on isn't one big decision. It's a bunch of little ones.

He can keep the lies. I'll keep the leggings.