you are not their therapist. you are tired

on emotional labour, identity collapse, and the cost of being everyone’s safe place

if you don’t define yourself for you, you will be swallowed whole by others. not in one clean bite, but slowly, over years. they’ll take you in teaspoons. you will offer yourself in servings. polite, invisible, easy to digest. they’ll dissolve your edges in the acid of expectation until what’s left of you is soft enough to be shaped into something useful. they’ll say you’re so easy to be around, so understanding, so endlessly accommodating. you’ll nod and shrink, and piece by piece, you’ll disappear into their comfort. gradually absorbed, processed, broken down into the parts of you that make their lives easier. you will be metabolised into function. until even you forget what you were before you became convenient. being swallowed in this way isn’t painful, it feels like being held, like being needed. until one day you wake up starving and realise you haven’t been fed in years.

you’re the first to notice what no one else sees, to hold what no one else is willing to carry. you explain them to themselves, you explain them to others. and no one asks if you’re okay because your competence has become its own kind of camouflage. research on high interpersonal sensitivity shows that children raised in highly stressful and unpredictable environments often become experts at emotional attunement. they’re not naturally empathetic, but they have learned that attunement is safety.

there’s a line between empathy and self-erasure, and it’s hard to find when the boundary between you and others has always been blurred. hypervigilance wears the mask of compassion. you help because you were taught, explicitly or not, that your worth lives in your usefulness. that if you are not needed, you are nothing. this is the foundation of enmeshment, when love is earned through function.