What It Costs to Be the One Everyone Depends On
The weight that slowly piles up.
You are not outwardly falling apart. No one would say that you are…You are still showing up, still functioning, still doing what needs to be done. From the outside nothing looks wrong.
But internally, the pressure is building. Quietly. At first without you noticing. Maybe there is a moment you feel it, you recognize the pressure and you push it aside. There’s no time for that. And you keep going, adding one more thing. The cost of carrying everyone else while leaving yourself behind is higher than you may have let yourself believe.
This post is about that cost. Not to overwhelm you. Not to shame you. Just uncover and truly acknowledge what you may have been too busy to see.
The first thing you notice is the tiredness, almost like it is deep in your bones. You go to bed early, you wake up late, or struggle to roll out of bed. A good night of sleep (if you’re able to even get a good night’s sleep) doesn’t come close to fixing it, you never feel rested. This feels like something deeper. It is a depletion that is always there underneath the surface, no matter how much you rest, no matter how early you go to bed. You wake up sluggish, already behind. Already running. Already giving before you have taken a single breath for yourself. Your brain is racing, accounting for all the tasks on the list for today.
You have learned to call it busy. You justify it. It’s just how life is right now. It’s a season, a phase, just for now.
But it is not just how life is. It is what happens when you have been running on empty for so long you forgot what full felt like.
And then there is the resentment.
It lives quietly underneath the giving. Underneath the yes when you wanted to say no. Underneath the it’s fine when it wasn’t. You don’t want to feel it. You feel guilty for feeling it. You love the people in your life, there is no doubt about that. But you struggle to reconcile that love with the slow burn of anger that surfaces when no one notices just how much you are carrying.
So you stuff it. You shove it aside. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. You talk yourself out of that anger and resentment by morning. You may turn it in inward toward yourself, angry at yourself for feeling angry and resentful. Feeling guilty and ashamed that you even felt the anger in the first place.
And it comes out anyway. Usually, sideways. In the sharp snarky word you didn’t mean. In the tears in the car on the way home. In the way you feel so utterly alone even when you are surrounded by the people you love most.
Here’s one thing we often dismiss or ignore, your body has been keeping track. Keeping score.
Your body has been trying to tell you something for a long time. The headaches that won’t quit. The tension you carry in your shoulders, your jaw, your chest. The back pain that sends you to the chiropractor every few weeks, the PT appointments that help for a while and then don’t. The sleep that doesn’t restore. The low-grade anxiety you have learned to call normal.
And maybe the quietest signal of all: you have become so disconnected from your own physical needs that you forget to eat. You forget to drink water. You feed everyone else on a schedule and look up at three in the afternoon and realize you haven’t had a glass of water since morning.
Your body is not betraying you. It is asking, begging, for the same thing the rest of you is asking for.
To be noticed at the very least. To be cared for. To be nourished, nurtured, protected. To matter.
Somewhere underneath all of the busyness, the care for everyone else, there is a feeling of emptiness. You may work hard to avoid it, but it is there and it is trying to tell you something.
It’s not depression exactly. Not crisis. Just a low hum that is always there when things go quiet. A feeling of moving through your days without really being in them. Without being fully present with yourself. A sense that joy has become something that happens to other people, or to a version of you that existed a long time ago.
You used to have things that lit you up. Interests, passions, small delights that were just yours. And somewhere in all the giving, all the holding, all the showing up for everyone else, those things got quieter. And smaller. Until they slipped away and you stopped noticing they were gone.
And underneath all of the depletion, the resentment, the body that aches, the joy that has disappeared, is something even harder to name.
You don’t know who you are anymore.
Not as a mother or a partner or a daughter or an employee. As a person. As a woman. As someone with her own interior life, her own desires, her own way of moving through the world that has nothing to do with what anyone else needs from her.
That is the deepest cost. The one that is hardest, and most painful, to see until you stop long enough to allow yourself to look.
You do not have to keep disappearing or adding more layers to burry yourself.
That is not a small statement. I know it might feel impossible from where you are standing right now. The idea of doing anything differently, of making any room for yourself, can feel selfish or indulgent or simply out of reach.
But you are allowed to put some of this down. Not all of it. Just enough to ask, “who am I underneath all of this? What do I actually need? What would it feel like to tend to myself the way I tend to everyone else?”
Those are not luxury questions. They are necessary ones.
This is the work we do at Still Valley.
We spend four days on the Emerald Coast with a small group of women who have this shared experience. We have created a space where clinical experience and genuine human connection support you while you put it all down.. You are given space to breathe. Space to begin finding your way back to yourself.
Registration for the November retreat closes Friday, October 16th. There are a small number of spots remaining and I do not want you to miss this opportunity to finally do something for you.
If something in this post felt familiar, I would love to talk.
-A
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