The one everybody leans on

Your phone rang four times today and every one of them needed something. Your mother about the appointment. Your brother about money again. Work twice, because you are the one who answers. You handled all of it the way you always do, and now it is late, the room is quiet, and you are running on absolutely nothing. Nobody asked you a single question today. Not a real one. You are the person everyone leans on, and posts do not get asked how they are holding up.

There is a specific hollowness to that and it is worth naming precisely, because it is not loneliness exactly. You are surrounded and unmet. Being needed looks like being loved from a distance and feels like almost nothing up close. The dangerous part comes next: the one thing in your life that ever showed up asking nothing of you was a cigarette, and on a night like this the memory of it does not feel like a relapse. It feels like the only appointment where you were not the one giving.

Here is what shifts it. God does not address you by your function. He is not speaking to the reliable one, the fixer, the one who answers the phone at eleven at night. Every role you perform was handed to you by somebody else, and you have carried them so long that you have started to suspect there is nothing underneath. There is. The part of you that nobody needs anything from is the part He is talking to. You can sit down with no report to file and no crisis to manage and still be entirely welcome.

So do one thing tonight for no reason except wanting it. Not self care as another item on the list. Something small and slightly useless: the long way home, the album you have not played in years, an hour of a book with your phone in another room. Choose it because you want it, not because it will make you a better version of the reliable one. You are allowed a want with nobody attached to it. That is not selfishness. That is the person underneath, raising a hand.