Imagine you’re sitting in your favourite cafe and you spot the most delicious cake on display and it looks quite spectacular. You call your waiter over and place an order for a generous slice and sit in gleeful anticipation.

Now just imagine your waiter comes over with a large plate, embossed with the most beautifully intricate design, and sitting in the middle of this plate are 5 crumbs. Yes. Crumbs.

If you’re like me you’d probably fluctuate between disbelief, confusion and annoyance. You’d think it was a bad joke and be asking your waiter, “Where’s my slice of cake?” Thing is in reality how many of us are offered crumbs in place of cake, in our day-to-day lives,  and accept them without question although we’re secretly hoping deep-down that eventually what they’ve offered will magically manifest from crumbs into cake?

How many of us have found ourselves in a romantic situation where we recognise what the other person wants doesn’t align with what we want from a relationship. How many of us have sat there being presented with a beautiful plate of crumbs and found ourselves trying to do our best imitation of being delighted – which involves wearing a rather pained smile that doesn’t quite reach our eyes. When all we really want to do is use some rather colourful language and storm off from that conversation.

How many of us have endured or continue to endure crumb-like friendships on the promise of cake to come or based on cakes of yesteryear? You could come to the realisation that for whatever reason this friendship doesn’t work like it used to or how you’d hoped and instead of respectfully airing your dissatisfaction or disengaging yourself from the relationship,  you find yourself sitting there like a starved cafe patron, convincing yourself that the crumbs are all you need.

And lastly, how many of us have been the one’s offering crumbs? I have, both romantically and friendship wise, and let me tell you here for free, it still makes me feel like sh*t knowing that the other parties deserved better and also still leaves me bewildered as to why they couldn’t see that they did.

Recently, I had to extricate myself from a frustrating crumb-like situation. Old me would have have let the frustrating situation play out a lot longer than it did. Old me had some mad acting skills that would rival any Oscar nominated actress in any category. Old me would have felt awkward speaking up and articulating my dissatisfaction with settling for crumbs when this world is filled with cake. Old me would probably have believed very deep down that I didn’t deserve cake or couldn’t do better than the crumbs being presented to me *sigh*.

New me decided to create a different narrative. One where I advocated on my behalf for my cake rights. One that, even though it left me feeling disappointed with the outcome, supported my firm belief in my sense of self-worth. This narrative made me proud for standing in my truth.

So the next time you find yourself presented with crumbs, remember that you are deserving of more. So much more. Respectfully decline the offer and exit yourself from that story, stage left – even if you’re tempted to throw some crockery around in protest, lol.

When in doubt, think back to the infamous words of one Marie Antoinette, whose meaning I’m going to unashamedly manipulate for this blog post’s purposes, and proclaim, “Let them eat cake!”….just do it in your head or you’ll get some funny looks, lol.

PS:: I wrote this post late at night during a particular vicious cake craving that I could do nothing about #SorryNotSorry