@laurenmitchell1280: I was the one people called. Work crisis. Relationship collapse. Someone needed a place to stay. Someone needed to be talked off a ledge at 11 PM on a Tuesday. I showed up. Every time. I was good at it. Here’s what I didn’t notice for years: I hadn’t been asked how I was doing in a very long time. Not really asked. The surface version — “how are you?” — yes. But not the kind of question that waits for a real answer. Being the capable one is a position. And like most positions, once you occupy it long enough, it becomes invisible as a choice. It just becomes who you are. The problem with that: you stop getting to be someone who isn’t okay. Because the capable one is always okay. That’s the job. I spent years being consistently, reliably fine. While running a quiet deficit that nobody could see — including me — because I was too busy attending to everyone else’s. What I eventually understood: the compulsive helping wasn’t generosity. It was a strategy. A very effective one for ensuring people stayed. For ensuring my value was never in question. You can’t leave someone you need. The cost of that strategy is that you NEVER find out whether they’d stay anyway. … The body that operates in constant output — giving, solving, holding — without adequate recovery runs into a depletion that sleep doesn’t fix. Not burnout in the dramatic sense. The quiet version. Where rest doesn’t restore. Where sleep is technically occurring but not repairing. The body has habituated to a baseline of overextension so thoroughly that it no longer registers it as stress — just normal. This isn’t about nurses or social workers. It’s about anyone who has spent years ensuring everyone else is okay while quietly skipping their own maintenance. The body doesn’t give extra credit for the reason. It just keeps the account.

laurenmitchell

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Thursday 28 May 2026 00:11:56 GMT