The strong one - nobody ever asks her how she is
She is the one who holds everyone. So who is holding her?
You are the one people come to.
When something breaks, they call you. When a decision has to be made, they wait for you to make it. When everything is falling apart, you are the one who quietly puts it back together, again, without being asked and without being thanked. You are competent. You are reliable. You are the strong one.
And somewhere along the way, that became a cage.
Think about the last time someone asked how you really were, and waited for the true answer. Not “how are you” tossed over a shoulder. Not the question people ask when they already need something from you. The real one. The one with room in it.
You might have to think for a while.
Because this is the strange thing about being the capable woman: the better you hold everyone else, the less anyone imagines you might need holding too. Your competence reassures them. It tells them they do not have to worry about you, so they don’t. They bring you their fears, their decisions, their messes, and they leave lighter. And you carry it all, and you smile, and you say you are fine, because being fine is a job you were handed so long ago you can no longer remember accepting it.
No one ever allowed you to need things. You were taught the opposite. You were conditioned that love was something you had to earn by being useful, that your worth was measured in how much you could carry without complaint. You became excellent at not needing. So excellent that the people around you quietly built their lives around that assumption.
And for years, it had worked. Until one day, you notice that you are surrounded by people who know you, who rely on you, but not one of them truly sees you. That you are needed everywhere and met nowhere. That there is a particular loneliness only the strong ones know – the loneliness of being the person nobody considers to check on.
I know this woman. I have been this woman. For a long time, I believed that needing nothing and no one was the same as being free, that if I could just be strong enough, carry enough, hold enough, I would finally be safe. I was wrong about that. So I am not writing about her from a distance. I am writing about her from the inside.
Here is what I want you to consider, gently, because I suspect no one has said it to you in a long time.
Your strength was never the problem. It is real, and it is yours, and it has carried you and the people you love through the ups and downs of life. You do not have to dismiss it. You do not have to become small or helpless or any less than the formidable woman you are.
But strength that is never allowed to rest is not strength. It is armour. And armour, worn long enough, stops being something you put on and becomes something you cannot take off. You forget that there is a body underneath it. You forget that body is you – a living and breathing human being with needs, dreams and desires that matter.
You deserve to be the one being checked on. You are allowed to need things. You are entitled to hand over responsibilities. Not because you can’t manage on your own, but because humans are meant to be held, even the ones who do all the holding.
So let me leave you with three questions. Not to answer for me. To sit with, quietly, the way you so rarely let yourself sit with anything.
When was the last time you let someone carry something for you?
What would you say if someone asked how you really are, and you decided to tell the truth?
And who in your life might be waiting for permission to ask, because your strength has convinced them you do not need it?
You do not have to find the answers today. But I would gently ask you to stop assuming that you are the one who always has to be fine.
If something in these words found you, I would love to know. Just reply. I read everything. And I am asking you now, with room in the question: how are you, really?
With love from the Bavarian Alps,
Kathrin
