Love, Conditioned: What Survives When We Stop Performing

We learn to love the way we learn to swim-by watching others perform the motions, replicating their form, until the body automates what the mind never had a chance to examine.

Love, Conditioned traces what happens when the strategies that once kept us safe as children become the very thing that isolates us as adults. The accommodation reflex. The preemptive apology. The silence mistaken for peace. The self-awareness so fluent it circles back into avoidance.

These poems move without sentimentality through the territory most people recognize but few name with this kind of precision: conditioned intimacy, the relationships we maintain through habit long after feeling has stepped away, the slow erosion of desire into duty, the friendships held at careful distance because honesty would end them. The choice to stay with someone without certainty-and the decision to call that commitment rather than fear.

This is not a book about healing, and it makes no promises about what clarity costs or where it leads. It is the poetry of living with what you already know about yourself: sharp-eyed, unsentimental, and stubbornly honest about the distance between understanding a pattern and breaking it.

For anyone who has spent years fluent in other people's needs, and is now, slowly, learning to translate their own.