You are the strong one. The one others come to, lean on, rely upon without a second thought. You have been steady for so many people for so long that it has become your place in every room, the one who holds, never the one who is held. And somewhere in all that steadiness is a loneliness few would ever guess at: that there is no one, anywhere, in front of whom you are allowed to be weak.
It was not imposed on you, exactly. You built it, partly, by always coping, always managing, always being fine, until the people around you learned that you did not need what everyone else needs. And now the strength that everyone depends on has become a kind of solitary confinement, because a person who is only ever strong is a person no one thinks to ask about, and a person no one thinks to ask about is, in the deepest sense, alone.
The particular isolation of the one who holds
There is a cost to being everyone’s steady ground that no one sees, least of all those who stand on it. You have made yourself so reliable that your own needs have become invisible, to others, and slowly to yourself. You cannot remember the last time someone asked how you really were and waited for the true answer. You cannot remember the last time you gave it. The role has closed over you, and you have half-forgotten there is a person inside it who gets tired, and frightened, and who needs, too.
To be the one everyone leans on is to have nowhere, yourself, to lean.
And to lower the strength now feels almost impossible, because you suspect, quietly, that it is the strength you are loved for, that your welcome in people’s lives is conditional on your being the one who does not need. So you keep holding, and you carry what you carry alone, and the gap widens between the capable figure everyone sees and the tired human being no one is allowed to. It is safer, you have decided, to be needed than to be known.
But there is no real closeness in being only ever strong. To be truly met, by anyone, you would have to let someone see the part of you that is not coping, and that is the one part you have never shown. It is a frightening thing, after a lifetime of holding, to imagine being held. It is also, perhaps, the thing you have been most quietly starving for. You have carried everyone. You are allowed, somewhere, to be carried too.
