Moodshop · free to read

You're allowed to be tired of being the strong one

Everyone comes to you. That started as a compliment and turned into a job description somewhere along the way, and nobody asked whether you had applied.

You're good at it. That's the trap. Competence gets rewarded with more of the thing you're competent at, so the steadier you are, the less anyone thinks to check on you. Being fine is the most expensive reputation you can have.

So you run the calculation automatically now: is this a good time to fall apart? It never is. Someone always needs something. There is always a version of the week where your collapse would be inconvenient, and you keep finding it.

Here's what nobody says to you, because you have never given them the opening: you are allowed to be a person who needs things. Not in a crisis. Not once it gets bad enough to justify it. Now, at ordinary tiredness, for no reason more dramatic than that you are tired.

The people who lean on you are not as fragile as you are treating them. Most of them would carry you for a week without thinking about it. You have just never let them, so they never learned how — and you have mistaken that for proof that they can't.

You don't have to announce anything. Just stop assuming your turn comes last automatically. It doesn't. It's only there because you keep putting it there.