There are songs that find you at the wrong time and burrow so deep into your heart that you can't separate them from the memory of who you used to be.

For me, that was Olivia Dean's "Man I Need" and "So Easy."

When “Man I Need” plays on the radio, it propels me back to a time when I remember sitting in my car, waiting for my phone to light up with his name.  I would think “talk to me, talk to me!!”…desperate for him to just say something—anything—that would prove I existed in his mind. I played out the the lyrics like a prayer: talk to me, I can't leave it alone, you're on my mind.  I thought if I could just get him to open up, I could show him how much I understood him.  How perfectly I could fit into the spaces he left empty….how I can come and slot right in.

And "So Easy"?  That one wrecks me.  

I made it my mission to be exactly what he needed.  I smoothed out my rough edges, silenced the parts of me that might ask for too much, made myself so small and so convenient that loving me would require no effort at all.  I thought if I could just be easy enough, soft enough, accommodating enough—he would finally choose me.

I made sure it was so easy to fall in love with me that I started to sacrifice my sense of self.  I didn't care that I was just an afterthought to him.

I was a last resort—the person he called when he needed to feel good, needed his ego stroked, needed someone convenient to fill the silence.  I wanted so badly to be part of his life.  To build memories with him.  To be the one he thought about when he woke up and the last person on his mind before sleep.  I wanted him to know that he was the man I needed, and that we needed each other.

But the truth?  He didn't want a genuine relationship with me.  He had another woman in mind.  I was just a placeholder.  A convenience.  An afterthought.

Every time I hear those songs now, I'm transported back to that version of myself.  The woman who waited desperately for someone to talk to her.  Who made herself so easy to love that she forgot what loving herself felt like.  Olivia Dean's lyrics are beautiful—they capture a very real ache.  But they're not empowering.  They're not meant to be.  They're the sound of a woman bending herself into a shape she thinks someone will want.

That woman was me.

But she's not me anymore.

That's why I wrote "Afterthought."  Because I needed the other side of the story.  I needed the song that comes after the waiting, after the shrinking, after the desperate hope that if you just try hard enough, someone will finally see you.

The song isn't angry.  It's clear-eyed. It's the moment you stop begging to be chosen and start choosing yourself. It's realizing that you were never an afterthought—you were just standing in the wrong room, waiting for someone who was never going to turn around.

If you've ever been the woman in the Olivia Dean song, the one waiting and hoping and bending yourself into something you're not—I wrote this for you.  Not to shame that version of you, but to tell you: you don't have to stay there.

There's a version of you on the other side.  And she's not waiting for anyone to talk to her.  She's already singing.

Play the song for yourself and see what you think.