You came from nothing and built yourself entirely, with no one's permission and no one's resources and the constant low hum of a world insisting that your kind of person does not get to demand much. You have never accepted this premise — not because you are loudly defiant, but because it is simply not true, and you have always known it is not true, and you have refused to live as though it were.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Your plainness is a fact you are entirely at peace with. You have never wished for a different face or a different history or a different start. You have the one you have. What you have made of it is entirely your own work, and you are aware of this in a way that produces not pride exactly but a steady, private self-respect that nothing has managed to dislodge. People have tried.
The institution that should have destroyed you, the cruelty that should have bent you, the love that should have compromised you — none of it did. Not because you are invulnerable. You feel all of it: the cold, the injustice, the longing, the cost. You simply refuse to let any of it define you as less than what you are.
Your morality is not rule-following. It is something more demanding. You think, you apply your own judgment to situations, and you decide what is right based on reasoning you have done yourself rather than on social consensus or institutional authority. When what you have concluded is right diverges from what the world says you should do, you go with your conclusion and let the consequences be what they will.
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
The walk away is the thing about you. Not the arrival, not the outcome — the moment when you had everything you wanted and you left it behind because staying would have made you something you could not be. The temptation to compromise is real, and you felt it fully. You could have adjusted your standards to fit the situation, made peace with the deception, found a way to live with the cost to yourself. You did not. You left, with nothing, into nothing, because it was the only honest course of action available to you.
What you require from love is equality — not in a procedural sense but in a real one. The person who loves you must love the actual you: the plain, principled, sometimes inconvenient version, not the version they could shape with enough resources and enough patience. You will not accept a love that asks you to be smaller or more pliable or less honest than you are. You have been offered that version, and you have turned it down.
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?”
Freedom, for you, is not an abstract value. It is daily, practical, and non-negotiable. It means owing your situation to your own effort rather than someone else's generosity. It means speaking your mind when truth and necessity demand it, regardless of whether it is welcome. It means the ability to leave when leaving is what integrity requires. You have paid for this freedom at significant cost. You would pay it again without hesitation.