Hedy Bloem
It sounds like a compliment. She is so strong. She copes with anything. Whatever happens, she handles it.
Here is what it is like from the inside. You are the one people ring when it goes wrong, and there is nobody you ring. You know the details of everyone else’s marriage and nobody knows what is happening in yours. You are told you are amazing on the same day you sit in the car outside the house for ten minutes because you cannot face going in yet.
I did that for years. And the strange part is that I was not pretending. The strength was real. I genuinely could carry it. That is exactly why nobody came to check.
There is a version of this that does not look like carrying at all. In the ordinary rooms I was the accommodating one, smoothing and agreeing and keeping things easy. Then something would actually break, and I would go straight into fight. Clear-headed, decisive, making the calls for everybody while the crisis was on. And in an uncomfortable conversation or an argument I did neither of those. I went quiet, or I got out of the room. Different gears, and every one of them the same job.
Two of mine, so you know what I mean by fight. There was a fire in my home. The children were out, and I went back in to tame the flames, because I could see it getting away from us and reaching the neighbours. The fire department gave me heck for it afterwards. It was instinct, and I did not stop to weigh it up. Years later, when I learned that Kayla, my dog of twelve years, had very little time left, I picked up the phone without hesitating and called everyone who needed to be in that room to say goodbye to her.
Neither of those felt like bravery at the time and I would not describe them that way now. It is simply what this wiring does when something is genuinely at stake. Somebody has to make the call, and the body that has been the strong one for decades makes it before anybody else has finished thinking.
The cost does not land during the emergency. It lands afterwards, in the quiet, where nobody thinks to ask how the capable one is doing.
Almost nobody chooses this. It gets handed over, usually early, usually because there was a gap and you were the one standing near it.
A parent who was ill, or drinking, or simply overwhelmed. A younger sibling who needed watching. A house where the adults were busy managing something and the quickest way to be loved was to be no trouble. A school where you learned that being the capable one bought you a kind of safety.
What forms is not a personality. It is a strategy. Handle it yourself, do not add to the load, and you will be all right. It worked. It kept you safe. And a strategy that worked in childhood does not know when the danger passed, so it keeps running at fifty as if nothing has changed.
This is the part that gets missed, and it is why so many women decide the problem is their willpower.
Two things hold the role in place. The first is inside you. Asking for help does not feel like a mild inconvenience. It feels dangerous, and there is usually a wave of something close to shame that arrives with it. That is a nervous system doing what it learned, and you cannot talk yourself out of it any more than you can talk yourself out of flinching.
The second is outside you. Your family, your friends and your work have all built their arrangements on the assumption that you will carry it. When you put a corner of it down, the system does not applaud. It complains. Not because they are bad people. Because something they relied on moved.
So the answer is not a grand announcement at Christmas. The people who love you will forget it by February, and the ones who benefit most will simply wait you out.
Safety first, and I do mean before anything else. A small daily stretch of something dull that tells the body it is not on duty. Sitting down without a task. Breathing out longer than you breathe in. It sounds far too simple for a problem this old, and it is what makes the rest possible.
Then one honest sentence to one safe person. Not the whole story. One sentence, to somebody with no stake in you being fine. The point is not what they say back. The point is that nothing catastrophic happens.
Then letting somebody help with something you could easily have done yourself, and sitting through a job done less well than you would have done it without fixing it afterwards. That discomfort is the actual work.
Then noticing who moves towards you and who does not. Some people come closer the moment there is something true to come towards. Some go quiet. That information is painful and it is worth having.
You will feel guilty. Reliably, immediately, and it does not mean you have done something wrong.
Somebody will call you selfish, or say it more politely than that. Usually it is the person who was getting the most and noticing the least.
You will want to go back, because the old way is fluent and this way is clumsy. Going back is part of it and not the end of it.
And underneath, more slowly than you want, the relationships that were real get better. There is a version of being close to people that only becomes available when they know something true about you. That is very hard to believe while you are still carrying everything.
If you have been the strong one so long that you cannot remember choosing it, you are not weak for wanting it to stop and you have not failed at anything. You learned a survival strategy very young and then performed it brilliantly for thirty years.
The Over-Giver’s Check-In is free and takes a few minutes. Twenty quiet signs of a life spent holding everyone, and one small step at the end. You can do it lying down and nobody has to know.
You are allowed to put it down. Not all of it, and not this week. A corner of it, quietly, starting today.
Everything on here is based on my own experiences, and the tools that helped me find my way. Take what serves you, and leave the rest. It’s lived experience, never advice, and never a judgement on your life or your relationships. I have not lived your life, and I am not here to pull anything apart. Wherever you are on your road, you’re the one who knows it best, and support is always there whenever you want it.
I am sharing my story, experiences and tools in the hopes that it will help women elsewhere in the world.
For me, it felt more like a habit I picked up over time than something tied to a specific label. I can’t diagnose it or define it. I just know it became a way of moving through the world, and unlearning it takes time.
It was a slow process, but every step helped. And it gave me proof that asking for help doesn’t make you weak or burdensome. It makes you human.
What really matters here is that this is the point where you either give in to the old pattern or break out of it. And yes, that’s easier said than done. You feel the pain of it. You feel the discomfort of choosing yourself.
It ruled my life for a long time. I cared far too much about what people thought of me. That made it even harder to step out of the role. But their reaction is information. It shows you what the relationship was built on. It’s not proof that you should go back to carrying everything. The people who truly care will adjust. The ones who don’t… their response says enough.
That’s easier said than done, of course. The caregiver and over-giver in you has played such a dominant role for so long, just like it did in mine, that losing people can feel like you failed them. It can feel like you didn’t do enough or weren’t enough.
But this, my friend, is not your problem. Their reaction shows you what the relationship was built on. The people who truly care will stay and adjust. The ones who don’t were never really there for you, they were there for what you carried.