For most of my life I have believed I’m not anyone’s first choice. I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because it’s the quiet fact I’ve carried under all my friendships, the lens I’ve viewed them through, and I’ve only recently started to wonder if the lens itself might be wrong. Let me tell you where the belief comes from, because I’ve been collecting the evidence for it since I was young.

There’s a friend I love immensely. When she was in the thick of a hard time, I tried hard to be there for her, to show up the way you show up for someone you love. Then she invited me to a show, a real commitment, at least a two-hour drive each way, and I said yes without hesitating because that’s what you do. But when we got there and met up with her other friend, it slowly dawned on me that I hadn’t been the first person she asked. Someone else had fallen through, and I was the backup. The whole evening had this sense that I wasn’t quite fun enough, wasn’t quite the person she’d hoped to be there with. I still love her. That part never changed. But it landed on the old bruise, the one that says you are the person people call when their real choice falls through.

Then there was the friend I was extraordinarily close to, a man who at times wanted more from me than friendship. I was always upfront that I wouldn’t date him, always honest, and he stayed my friend anyway because what we had was real. And when he had a heart attack, I was the one at the hospital that night. I was the one relaying updates to everyone else, sitting there because I loved him, and it was not romantic and it was not complicated in my heart, it was just love. Yet somewhere along the way, some old acquaintances made comments, the implication being that I was somehow using him, leading him on, that being his friend while not dating him was a kind of cruelty. My love got recast as a wrongdoing right in front of me. I was at the hospital, and somehow I was the villain.

Then there was a friend who, after we’d been close, simply stopped talking to me one day. Abruptly, completely, no explanation. I did what I often do, I chased it, I tried so hard to get her to tell me what I’d done wrong, because surely I’d done something. She never told me. She just dropped me and let me sit with a guilt that had no crime attached to it, which is somehow the worst kind.

Then there was a party, a friend’s milestone birthday, where a man I’d never met, the husband of one of her close friends, started implying to my face that I hadn’t been there for her. And I want you to know that I had a whole life I could have laid on that table. I’d had cancer. I’d been buried in court for years. I was raising three kids essentially alone. That was my capacity, or the lack of it, and it was a real and brutal thing, not an excuse. But I was so blindsided, so taken aback, that I said none of it. I just stood there and let him dig into me, absorbing an accusation I had every right to demolish, because I have never once been quick on my feet when someone comes at me sideways.

I collect these moments. That’s the truth of it. I have a whole file of evidence that I am somehow bad at this, that I fall short, that I’m the friend people can take or leave. And I think part of it is that I genuinely don’t speak the language. There are cues in friendship, especially between women, that everyone else seems to have been handed a manual for and I never got. I was at a concert once and a woman I was with said she was going to the restroom, and it was only much later that I realized that was an invitation, that I was supposed to go with her, that there was a whole choreography happening that I had simply failed to read. I don’t get those things. They don’t come naturally to me. So I’ve spent a lot of years assuming that the problem is me, that I’m defective at friendship the way I once thought I was defective at everything.

Lately I’ve started to actually look at the evidence instead of just collecting it, and it tells a different story than the one I’ve been believing. Because I was at that hospital. I did drive the two hours, backup or not, because I loved her. I still visit the friend I’ve had for fifty years. I’m still in touch, all these years later, with the women who got me through the worst seasons of my working life. When someone lets me love them, I love them deeply and for a very long time. I show up in the moments that actually count, the hospital-room moments, the long-drive moments. What I’m not is anyone’s flashy first pick. I’m not the one who reads the cues and works the room and makes it all look effortless. And somewhere along the way I let those two things get confused, being someone’s first choice and being worth choosing, when they were never the same thing at all.

Other people’s limitations are not a verdict on my worth. The man at the party was wrong and cruel. The friend who dropped me without a word failed a test of friendship, not me. Being someone’s backup for a concert says something about that day’s circumstances, not about whether I was worth bringing. I know all of this now, or I’m learning it, in the slow way you learn to distrust a belief you’ve held your whole life.

It hasn’t fully taken. I still feel the old ache when I realize I wasn’t the first person called. I probably always will, a little. But I’m trying to hold the truer thing alongside it, which is that I have loved people well, deeply, loyally, at hospital bedsides and across long drives and across fifty years, and that a person who loves like that is not bad at friendship. She just never learned to perform it, and spent too long letting the people who couldn’t tell the difference convince her she was less than she was.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like anyone’s first choice. But I’m starting to understand that I was always worth choosing, and that the not-being-chosen was never the same as not being enough.