all my life, i have never been anyone’s favourite. not the favourite child whose name softened in their parents’ mouth like a prayer, while the kitchen smelled faintly of coffee and something baking. not the sibling tucked in the warm center of the couch while i sat at the far edge, my knees grazing the cold armrest. not the friend whose absence was noticed in the middle of a crowded room, where laughter spilled like music and i stood just outside its reach.

my best friends always had other best friends. i was never the name someone muttered like a charm when they were afraid, never the one who could make them leave a room without thinking twice just to stand beside me. there was always another, the first in their eyes, the one they sought before me.

i told myself it was fine, because life is not meant to be a competition. but there is a small and stubborn part of me, a part i wish i could cut out like a thorn from my own skin, that notices every time i am the second choice. it registers the way i am kept on the edges, the way my presence feels optional. the way my chair is always a little further from the center of the table, the way my name is the one people remember only after the laughter has moved on. it is the quiet humiliation of being almost enough but never entirely.

even when i began to date, the feeling followed me. it lived in the pauses between their sentences and in the faint glaze of their eyes when they were somewhere else in their mind. i could feel that i was not the air they breathed or the gravity they could not escape. i was liked, maybe even cared for, but not in the way that sets the whole body on fire. i was a warm presence, pleasant to have, but not the axis around which their world spun.

and i think that’s what i’ve been searching for. to be someone’s person in the way that feels unwavering and deliberate, a choice made each morning and each night without hesitation.

there is a peculiar ache in being overlooked. psychologists might call it an attachment wound, the hairline crack in the foundation that appears early, when the mind learns in silence that your belonging depends on performance. philosophers might call it the human condition, the tug-of-war between our longing to belong and the unchangeable truth that we are born and die alone.

i think of it as standing at the edge of a circle of firelight, feeling its warmth without being invited in, knowing one step could change everything. but no one calls your name. the ache of being almost.

humans are not designed for neutrality. our brains are wired to find connection, to cling to a tribe, because once our survival depended on it. but survival is a different kind of hunger than love. in love, in friendship, even in family, there is a secret hierarchy. we all have that one person we would abandon everything for, and we all want to be that person for someone else.

when you are not, you learn to watch with forensic precision. you hear the way someone’s voice doesn’t just lift but catches on a higher note, as if pulled upward by an invisible string, when another name appears on their screen. you notice the soft rush of breath before they answer, the small widening of their eyes, the way their smile arrives a fraction faster. you see how quickly they respond to certain people, how they retell someone else’s story with more light in their eyes than when they tell yours. you start collecting scraps and convincing yourself they are enough, even as you know they never will be.

because crumbs are never enough. they never are.

there is something intoxicating about mutual favourite-ness. a friendship or love where you are the first thought when the day begins and the last before sleep, where the bond is so steady there is no room for calculation or doubt. you simply know.

i have never known that. i have known almost. the near-miss intimacy of someone who looked at me as if i might be it, until they didn’t. the brief season where i thought i was their person, only to realise i was the warm-up act for someone else. the taste without the meal.

maybe that is why i blurred the lines in my relationships, turning lovers into best friends and best friends into something that felt like more. i did not want just a partner, i wanted a co-conspirator, a witness, a safe harbour. someone who would hold my hand and look out at the world with me, someone who would remain even if everything else crumbled.

when my relationships ended, what i mourned was not the romance, not the rituals, not the future we pretended to sketch. i mourned the imagined favourite person, the hope that they might have seen me as theirs too.

perhaps the longing is childish, perhaps selfish, to want to be the one instead of one of many. but it feels older than language. the human heart is not only a muscle but a compass, and it spins restlessly toward the place where it belongs.

and belonging is not simply inclusion. it is being wanted, entirely and without condition.

sometimes i wonder if i am chasing a mirage, if the idea of a “favourite person” belongs in stories and films rather than in real life. life is tangled, love is scattered, and few people have the luxury of giving their whole devotion to one. maybe no one truly is someone’s favourite in the way we dream.

but then i see it. i see the way some friends finish each other’s sentences as if they are sharing a single breath, the way some couples lean toward each other without thinking, their bodies speaking a language older than their words. i see it in fleeting moments that feel like rare wildlife sightings, and it reminds me that i am not asking for too much. i am only asking for something rare.

psychology tells us that the self is formed in the mirror of other people. when my reflection is missing in someone else’s eyes, i feel like a ghost. present but not touched. when someone sees you as irreplaceable, it is like being handed proof of your existence written in permanent ink. when no one does, the absence echoes, and you try to fill it with achievement, with busyness, with declarations of self-love you recite like spells but never fully believe.

i tell myself i am enough alone, and on certain days i even believe it. but deep down, there is still that stubborn voice whispering: no one chooses you first. and until that happens, i will feel like i am standing in the cold just beyond a half-open doorway. the smell of dinner drifting out, voices and laughter spilling into the night. my shadow stretching across the threshold while my feet remain on the porch. waiting for someone to open it and say, it has always been you.

so until someone else chooses me without hesitation, i will choose myself. maybe the lesson is that i was always meant to be my own favourite. the one who knows my scars and secrets, the one who never walks away.

if no one else ever crowns me their most beloved, at least i will have learned to wear the crown myself.

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