A warm cup of tea sat on the table between us. Afternoon light came through the window, and a string of small lights glowed softly against the cooling brightness outside.

“I know you wanted to talk about ‘the child’ today,” the therapist said. “We can start wherever feels easiest.”

What followed was not really a story about one argument, or one meal left uneaten. It was a long excavation of guilt: guilt after forcing someone out of a home, guilt about failing to be gentle, guilt about wanting a life centered on creation rather than endless caretaking, and guilt about refusing the moral script that says you must never leave someone who is suffering.

The expulsion

A little over a week earlier, I had thrown “the child” out of my place.

It happened explosively. There was no real buffer, no slow conversation, no careful transition. Afterward, when they pleaded, I gave them half a day to find somewhere else to stay. Fortunately, they did. But I still believed the suddenness and force of what I had done had hurt them.

They had already moved out, yet their computer was still at my apartment. That meant the relationship was not actually over. At some later date I would still have to sort out their belongings and mail them back. I would have to face this person again.

The therapist reflected back two kinds of distress at once: first, my unease about the harm I may have caused; second, my anxiety about the fact that the connection had not fully ended.

They asked what I meant when I called my own action “violent,” and why that word bothered me so much.

How a bowl of noodles became the trigger

The immediate trigger was simple: the day before, the child had not eaten the food I made.

In my family, food had to be respected. My father often told me that cooking was hard work for my mother, and wasting food was not allowed. I learned to finish whatever was served at home, whether I liked it or not. I’ve written before that I never really liked that system. It made eating feel pressured. But once I became the caretaker instead of the cared-for one, I found myself repeating the pattern anyway.

At the time, the child had been having a somatic depressive episode. They were lying in bed all day and not eating. The cold shredded-chicken noodles I had made the previous day had already sat in the refrigerator overnight. If they were not eaten that day, I would have to throw them away.

The child had arrived at my place unannounced on July 23, and by then had already been there for around three weeks. During that period I had also been teaching myself how to cook. Because they were in a difficult financial situation, I inevitably had to think about feeding them too. Cooking therefore stopped being just a personal exploration. It turned into a daily obligation.

Groceries cost money. Cooking, dishwashing, and the larger burden of domestic care were forms of unpaid labor that could not really be measured by money. At minimum, I wanted the food I made to be eaten gladly. But the child had always been careless with food. Even when ordering takeout, they often threw away half of it. I understood that poor appetite could come from physical or mental struggles, but I still found it hard to accept when it happened to food I had cooked with my own hands. To me, it felt like negative feedback.

So that morning I told them: “I can’t take care of you anymore.” I told them they had to leave that day.

When they refused to pack up and go, I packed their things myself, put them outside the door, and tried to drag them out.

What the noodles really stood for

The therapist said this was not just a story about a bowl of noodles. It touched something much deeper.

I had moved from the role of passive recipient—someone raised under rules about food and duty—into the role of active caregiver. And in doing so, I had unconsciously recreated the same pattern that once burdened me. I wanted my labor and care to be fully accepted and valued, in the same totalizing way I had once been expected to accept what was given to me.

What hurt was not simply that the noodles were uneaten. It was that my effort did not receive the response I needed from it.

The therapist suggested that what I was calling “violence” might also have been a desperate reassertion of boundaries. In that moment, I could no longer bear the responsibility of care, nor the experience of giving without the response I wanted. Throwing the child out may have been an extreme act of self-protection.

They asked: what exactly was I trying to defend in that outburst?

The answer came quickly. Yes, it was a rebuilding of boundaries. But I also had to admit something darker: I had not truly considered how hard it would be for a person without stable housing to find another place to stay. In that sense, I had not fully taken responsibility for their physical safety.

Behind that was a specific pattern of thought. I felt they had not respected my unpaid labor, nor the time and life I had invested in them. I could have spent that time and energy on things that mattered more to my own existential project—writing, composing music, pursuing experience, making meaning. Instead, I had ended up taking care of someone to whom I was not related by blood, in a way that was half-voluntary and half-not. And I felt that the other person’s way of living, and their understanding of me, could not justify what I was spending.

I felt my life was being depleted.

“My life was being depleted”

The therapist paused on that phrase.

To say that one’s life is being depleted is heavier than saying one’s time is being wasted. It means that time and energy are being felt as existence itself. If I see my life as something that should be directed toward creative work and chosen experience, then having it absorbed by caregiving without reciprocity becomes not just frustrating but existentially threatening.

At the same time, there were clearly two parts of me in conflict.

One part defended my own existence and boundaries. Another part felt human responsibility toward another person.

I have long wanted a living space in which “all other people have nothing to do with me,” so I can focus on my own creation. Yet I had allowed a cohabiting arrangement, and then unpaid care work, and then emotional entanglement. Why had I allowed that depletion to happen in the first place?

Why I let people in

At the start, the decision to live with others was driven mainly by economics.

But I had overlooked a cultural factor. In our culture, especially in intimate relationships, financial accounting is often blurry. In Shanghai there is somewhat more emphasis on clear boundaries and not owing each other too much—splitting bills, keeping things relatively even. But in the broader East Asian setting, many people live with a much stronger sense of “what’s mine and yours is shared.” That cultural logic gradually pulled the arrangement beyond the tidy economic framework I had imagined.

I remembered the first time the child moved into my home: January 25. At that time they were still living with another tenant next door, “Rabbit.” Two or three days later, there was a day when they shyly treated me to a meal and said they wanted to build a good relationship with me.

On February 4, we established a partner relationship in the context of polyamory while we were in Hangzhou. At the time, they already had another partner, who lived in Shanxi. In fact, the child had originally come to my place because that partner could not take them in.

But I could already sense that their understanding of polyamory was shallow. By March, they even had a private group chat with friends where they discussed my ideas about polyamory behind my back and said they did not understand them. Around that same period, their relationship with another partner had somewhat improved.

Later, they stayed with me long-term while frequently calling that other partner. They often argued over the phone, and the emotional spillover landed in my living space. As a highly sensitive person, I felt that this seriously disrupted the atmosphere of my home.

Around late April, we ended the intimate relationship, though I still allowed them to keep living with me. Then in May they left for the first time and went to Shanxi to live with that other partner.

Care, money, and the terms of exchange

From February to May, their financial situation was relatively okay. They often paid for meals, and I felt that this visible financial contribution partially compensated for the care I was providing, including the opportunity cost of my housing. That was one reason I kept allowing them to stay.

But when they came back again in July, things were different.

They had once again been driven out by the partner in Shanxi, but now their financial condition had worsened. They no longer had the ability to compensate me economically.

Even so, I still felt a latent responsibility to care for them. We had once been partners. There seemed to be no one else in the world able to look after this person. In a society with an inadequate safety net, it felt like respecting life itself required me to step in.

There was another motive too. I had deliberately chosen an unconventional life. I was not going to follow the standard social timeline of settling down, marrying, and having children. Because of that, I wanted at some point in my life to experience the role of caregiver in another form. I wanted to better understand some of what my parents had gone through, and to understand more deeply the pressure unpaid labor places on women.

So the caregiving was never only about pity, or only about affection, or only about money. It was also part of my attempt to understand life through lived experience.

Why the guilt was not about “cost” after all

At first the therapist interpreted my distress as grief over the immense cost of that experience. But that was not quite right.

I clarified that, as an existentialist, I was actually grateful for the experience. It gave me growth. It gave me material for becoming. I did not need repayment. I had already decided to cut my losses. I could take responsibility for my own choices.

What still disturbed me was something else: I might have harmed the other person while making those choices.

That was where the guilt lived.

Once the child had found a safe place to stay, my guilt about physical safety became relatively mild. The harder thing to live with was that I had not ended the cohabitation in a gentler, more caring way.

But there was also a brutal practical truth: the child only went looking for another place to live under extreme pressure. If I tried to ask gently, they would plead, stall, and insist there was nowhere else for them to go.

I knew this because I had already tried.

The deeper structural problem

From there, the conversation widened.

This was not only about one person. It was about a recurring structure in my life: many people around me seem to press their lower-level needs onto me—survival, safety, immediate stability—and expect me to help carry them, while ignoring my higher-level needs, especially self-actualization.

Those lower-level needs are hard to ignore. If someone lacks housing or food, it is morally difficult to look away. But life only happens once. Everyone has limited time and energy. If I can meet my own lower-level needs relatively easily, why should I spend large portions of my life meeting other people’s, especially when doing so prevents me from pursuing the higher-level things that matter most to me?

Why do they assume this is naturally my responsibility?

The therapist called it a structural dilemma, and that felt accurate. What I was up against was not only interpersonal friction but a conflict between freedom and responsibility. I knew I had the freedom to decide what to do with my life. Yet when another person in crisis entered my orbit, that freedom seemed to collapse under moral pressure.

The therapist suggested that what I called violence might have been less an act of cruelty than an act of defending my own survival and freedom. The thing I found intolerable was not simply that I had been harsh. It was that, in that situation, harshness seemed like the only effective tool left.

That landed immediately.

Exactly.

The real source of the guilt: having no third option

That was the turning point.

The pain was not primarily that I made the wrong decision. The pain was that I had felt forced into using a method I did not believe in.

I wanted to treat people with care. But under actual conditions, I felt that only a blunt, ugly, forceful act could protect my living space and my boundaries. That made me feel as if my freedom had been taken away. I had to become someone I did not want to be.

The question then shifted. It was no longer: why did I end the relationship? It became: why was there no third path?

Could there have been a way to protect my boundaries without resorting to what I experienced as violence?

I had already tried gentleness

I said I believed I had tried.

When we were still partners, I often told the child my dos and don’ts. One representative example involved physical touch: when touching me, I wanted a grounded, gentle pressure, not a feather-light approach, because that feels unbearably ticklish. What frustrated me was that they never remembered.

I also kept trying to invite them into my inner world. I wanted them to understand my music and poetry, or to revisit places from my childhood with me while I told stories about growing up. They kept refusing that invitation.

If I could do it over again, I said, I probably would not enter an intimate relationship with them at all.

Back then, though, I found it hard to reject another person’s goodwill. As someone practicing polyamory at the time, I tended to think that if someone extended affection and I had the ability to accept it, then refusing it would be a form of hurting them.

I no longer think that.

But once the relationship had already developed to that point, I genuinely could not imagine a better way out.

The therapist then reframed the problem: perhaps the real issue was not how to end badly structured relationships more gently, but how to recognize them earlier and avoid entering them in the first place. The point of failure may have been at the beginning, not the end.

And perhaps the guilt also contained regret toward my earlier self—the self who could not refuse goodwill.

FOMO and the fear of missing possible lives

I agreed, at least partially. If I had refused at the beginning, the harm to the other person might have been smaller.

But another problem remained unresolved: FOMO.

Not just in love, but more generally, I am afraid of missing chances to experience more within a finite life. That fear had made it hard to say no. Turning down a relationship once felt like turning down a possible world.

The therapist connected this to existential freedom. Fear of missing out is the shadow side of choice. To choose one path is always to surrender others. Real courage may lie not in trying to seize every available possibility, but in choosing consciously and taking responsibility for what that choice excludes.

From that angle, the experience with the child, painful as it was, had still taught me something essential. It revealed my boundaries more clearly. It showed me how FOMO can guide me into life-draining entanglements if I am not careful.

The unresolved economic layer

Just when the conversation seemed to be settling, I realized there was one more piece that mattered.

Economic calculation had been there from the start.

When I accepted cohabitants, and when I entered this relationship, I did so partly for financial reasons. I hoped that if I provided housing and emotional care, the other person would provide more economic support in return, helping offset my own not-very-comfortable finances.

But as I had already explained, the child’s financial condition worsened until I was the one covering even their daily meals.

This is where culture becomes another pressure point. We are constantly taught to admire unwavering loyalty through suffering and to condemn people who are “ungrateful.” So even though the child’s earlier payments never fully covered the opportunity cost of my housing, they had still been a visible provider of economic value. Most people, unless trained to think economically, do not perceive opportunity cost behind housing. They only see who pays in everyday life.

That means I feared being judged as the ungrateful one.

Visible money versus invisible cost

The therapist named this clearly: the relationship had also been an unequal economic exchange.

At first, the arrangement made rational sense. I would provide space and care; the other person would contribute financially. But once their finances collapsed, the exchange tilted. I was no longer receiving support. I was becoming the one providing economic support as well.

And yet the pain was not reducible to money. What stung was the likely moral narrative imposed from outside. Other people would see the visible transactions—meals paid for, small expenses covered—and not the invisible ones: opportunity cost, unpaid domestic labor, emotional bandwidth, disruption of atmosphere, creative energy drained away.

The therapist asked a hard question: in this situation, did I need recognition from the outside world, or recognition from myself?

Which had more authority—the ordinary accusation of “ingratitude,” or my own lucid awareness that my time, energy, and existential direction were being consumed?

When asked whether this fear of being seen as ungrateful was itself another external constraint on my freedom to choose, I nodded.

Guilt as a signal, not a verdict

The final movement of the conversation brought everything together.

The therapist suggested that my guilt did not have to be treated as proof that I had morally failed. It could instead be heard as a signal.

It signaled that I still wanted to meet the world with care and respect, even under pressure. It signaled that being forced into a method I hated violated something important in me. It signaled loyalty to my own integrity.

At the same time, the therapist did not romanticize what had happened. The act still felt violent to me. But it could also be understood as a rupture necessary for self-preservation—a break made in order to reclaim time, space, energy, and creativity.

The real lesson was not that I should simply stop feeling guilty. It was that in future relationships I need to detect the danger signs sooner: the mismatch in values, the inability to communicate, the emotional spillover into my environment, the asymmetry between visible and invisible labor, the pressure of FOMO, the seduction of “being needed,” and the cultural story that says endurance is always morally superior to departure.

By the end, my unease had softened.

Not because everything had been excused. Not because I suddenly believed I had acted perfectly. But because the shape of the conflict had become clearer.

What haunted me was not only that I may have hurt someone. It was that I had reached a point where I saw no path except one that violated my own values.

And perhaps that recognition matters.

It means the task ahead is not endless self-punishment. It is learning how to choose earlier, refuse earlier, and build boundaries before desperation turns them into force.

When the session ended, night had fully fallen outside. The city lights were on. The small string lights by the window seemed brighter now.

I said that my anxiety felt lighter.

And for the first time since it happened, that felt true.