I was the strong one for most of my adult life. The one who kept going. The one who didn't fall apart in front of people. The one everyone brought their problems to because I seemed to know what to do with them.
It is worth saying that being the strong one is not a personality. It is a job. Somebody handed it to you early, and you turned out to be good at it, which is how you kept it.
The trouble with being good at a job is that nobody ever takes it off you.
Some of us handled the hard things by becoming so extraordinarily useful to everyone around us that we never had to look at our own boxes.
Some of us handled it by making ourselves very, very quiet.
And some of us handled it by going on a 17 year spiritual journey that has so far resulted in no external change whatsoever.
All 3 are the same move wearing different clothes. Each one puts the attention somewhere other than the thing, and each one works, which is exactly why we are all still doing it.
But here we are. Everything life has thrown at us, we handled it. Not always elegantly. But we handled it.
The bill for handling it arrives later, and in a form nobody warns you about.
It is not a collapse. A collapse would be straightforward and somebody would notice. It is narrower than that. It is that you gradually stop being able to tell anybody you are struggling, because the sentence no longer exists in your register, and on the rare occasion you try it, it comes out as a joke or as a logistical problem.
Here is what the ordinary week looks like.
Somebody asks how you are and you say fine, and you are not lying, because fine is the word you use for this. You handle 4 things before 9am that other people would call a day. You are the one who gets rung at 11pm, and you are glad to be, and some small part of you is keeping count.
You get offered help and you decline it, politely, instantly, before you have checked whether you wanted it. That is the one to watch. The speed of the no is the whole diagnosis.
And in the evening, when there is finally nothing that needs doing, you find you cannot do nothing. Because being needed is load bearing, and if nobody needs you for an hour you are not entirely sure what is left.
The other tell is how you are with other strong ones. You spot each other immediately and you never once ask. Two people who both do the asking and neither of whom can be asked will talk for 2 hours about nothing.
It is worth being fair to the job, because it was not a mistake. Somebody had to hold it together and you were the one who could, and a great many things turned out better than they would have done. The problem is not that you were strong. The problem is that the arrangement was never reviewed, and you are still running a system that was designed for a situation that has ended.
What people try first is doing less. Saying no. Boundaries, usually announced, usually to everybody at once.
It tends to hold for a fortnight. Not because the boundaries were wrong, but because doing less does not touch the actual mechanism. The mechanism is that your worth lives in the doing. Take away the doing and nothing is solved, you have simply removed the evidence.
The second thing people try is finding somebody stronger to lean on. Which is not daft at all, and it lasts until that person has a bad week, at which point you take the job back without anybody mentioning it.
The third thing is deciding to be more vulnerable, as a project, with a plan and a reading list. That one is almost funny. It is the strong one strategy applied to the problem of being the strong one.
The work is not to stop being strong. The work is to discover that you can be both. Strong and supported, capable and cared for, resilient and real. Not one or the other. Both at the same time.
Both at the same time is easy to agree with and hard to do, so here is what it looks like on an actual Tuesday.
Somebody asks how you are and you wait a second before answering. Not to produce a confession. Just long enough to find out whether fine was true.
Somebody offers to do something and you say yes to the small thing. Not the big thing. The lift, the kettle, the 20 minutes. The small yes is the one that teaches your body that being helped is survivable, and the big one is far too much to learn on.
And when you notice you are being useful at speed, you ask the quiet question. Is this needed, or is this where I go when I do not want to feel something.
The part nobody mentions is that it is uncomfortable rather than lovely. Being looked after, when you are not used to it, does not feel like relief. It feels like exposure, and the first instinct is to start helping the person who is helping you. That passes. It passes faster if you know in advance that it is coming and that it is not a sign you have got it wrong.
None of that is dramatic and it is not supposed to be. The whole pattern was built out of small moves, so it comes apart in small moves too.
There is no version of this where you stop being the person people ring. That is not the aim, and it would be a loss. The aim is that you are also on the list.
That's what coming home to yourself actually looks like.
More like this.
The quiet cost of coping so well https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/i-worked-so-hard-not-to-feel-overwhelmed-so-why-am-i-still-holding-everything
The emotional declutter, the conversations you've been avoiding and what they're costing you. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-emotional-declutter-the-conversations-you-ve-been-avoiding-and-what-they-re-
The relationship audit, the most important list you'll ever make. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-relationship-audit-the-most-important-list-you-ll-ever-make
The Reset Letters are where I write this down each week. One letter, nothing to do. resetletters.substack.com.