The other day I caught myself laughing. I was thinking about all the people who once occupied enormous amounts of emotional space in my life, like friends, coworkers, people I wasn’t even dating. People connected to somebody who was connected to somebody else. It hit me that I had spent years carrying emotional weight that wasn’t technically mine.
Then I remembered something Wanda Sykes once joked about. Her theory was that young women care so much because of estrogen. They care about their families, friends, the environment, their employers and coworkers.. literally everybody. Then menopause comes along, estrogen leaves, and suddenly women stop giving a shit. Her punchline was that, when women get older, they basically become men.
It’s obviously a joke. But every good joke hides a tiny piece of truth. Because lately I’ve been looking back at my twenties and thinking,
God.. I cared so much.
Not just about my own problems. Everybody’s. A friend’s toxic boyfriend, a coworker’s family crisis, a cousin’s relationship.. someone else’s relationship and heartbreak. Someone else’s future.
Somehow, they all became my responsibility. Looking back, I don’t know who assigned me that job. I certainly never applied for it.
One memory came back to me today. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
It was my birthday.
My best friend had recently gone through something terrifying with her boyfriend. Police had gotten involved. She showed me her broken nails afterward.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
A week later we were hanging out with her cousins. We were drinking. Playing pool. Laughing.
Nobody even knew it was my birthday until her stepbrother happened to see it on LinkedIn. Everyone was shocked.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
I shrugged. I don’t know.
We all went outside for a cigarette. I don’t even smoke cigarettes. Not really. I asked for one. Finished it. Asked for another. Then another. Then another. Eventually someone looked at me and asked,
“Why are you crying?”
I couldn’t answer. Everyone assumed it was birthday blues. It wasn’t.
My heart had simply reached its carrying capacity.
Around that same time, two psychologists pulled me aside after one of my entrepreneurship classes. They told me they thought I had clinical depression. I burst into tears (once again, without my conscious self’s consent).
At the time I thought they were diagnosing sadness that was never gonna go away. Looking back, I wonder if they were seeing emotional exhaustion, because those aren’t always the same thing.
Another memory surfaced while I was thinking about all this. My mom and brother were arguing with me in the car. I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked to stop the car. They didn’t. So I opened the door while the car was stopped at a red light, got out and started walking home.
Crying.
The person who came after me wasn’t either of them. It was my little cousin. She caught up to me. Looked at my face. And said something I’ll never forget.
“It’s so heartbreaking seeing you cry, because you always act like you’re so tough.”
I hadn’t remembered that in years. I used to think these memories proved I was weak in some way, so I guess I suppressed them. Now, as they surface, I think they prove something else.
I was incredibly kind. Too kind.
I mistook empathy for responsibility.
If someone I loved was hurting, then I would hurt too. As if pain was a group project. It isn’t. Compassion doesn’t require self-abandonment.
Now, I don’t feel embarrassed anymore for the moments my mask slipped off. I don’t try to suppress those memories and forget about them. I don’t pretend that version of me never existed. I also don’t think that younger version of me needed “tougher skin”.
I think,
Someone should have told her she was allowed to put the backpack down.”
She was carrying far too much, and somehow nobody noticed because she carried it so quietly.