There’s a photo of me from about four years ago. I’m at my daughter’s birthday party, standing at the kitchen counter, cutting the cake. I’m smiling. The table behind me is perfect—the kind of perfect that takes longer than it should and approximately zero help from anyone else.
I remember that day. I remember being so tired I could feel it behind my eyes. I remember making the frosting from scratch because I promised myself I would. I remember thinking, as I carried the cake out, that I just needed to get through this and then I could rest.
I never rested. There was always something next.
I look at that photo now, and I don’t see a good mother or a capable woman or someone who has it together. I see someone who has confused doing everything with being worth something. And I see how long I’d been doing that before I ever realized it.
I’m still in the middle of untangling it. But some things have gotten clearer.
I said yes so many times, I forgot I was allowed to say no
It started small. The volunteer sign-up at school. The extra project at work that nobody else wanted to take. The favor that turned into a standing commitment. Each one reasonable on its own. Each one something I said yes to because saying no felt like a failure of character—like proof that I wasn’t the person I was supposed to be.
At some point, the yes became automatic. I stopped even running it through any kind of internal check. Something was needed, and I provided it. Someone asked, and I agreed. The capacity to consider whether I actually wanted to, or whether I had anything left to give, had quietly gone offline.
I didn’t notice it happening. I just noticed, one day, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said no to anything. And I didn’t know how to start. Even the idea of it felt selfish—like the no would reveal something about me that the yes had been carefully concealing.
The list was never going to end, and I kept adding to it anyway
I am very good at lists. Detailed ones, organized ones, and the particular satisfaction of crossing something off. For years, I told myself this was a strength. I was organized. Efficient. On top of things.
What I didn’t understand was that the list was not a tool. It was a symptom. It was what happened when you’ve decided—somewhere deep and mostly unconscious—that your value is measured by your output. That a day only counts if you can point to what you produced.
The list was never going to end because I was the one generating it. I wasn’t working toward a finish line. I was running on a track I’d built myself and kept extending, just ahead of wherever I was, so I could never quite arrive. And every time I got close to the end of it, I’d find three more things that needed to be on it. Because the alternative—a day with nothing left to cross off—felt somehow worse.
I thought if I just got through the week, things would slow down
This was my most reliable lie to myself. Just this week. Just until this project is done, this season is over, and this particular stretch of difficulty passes. And then things will ease up, and I’ll sleep, and I’ll have time, and I’ll feel like myself again.
The week always ended. The next one always looked the same.
I said this to myself for years. Seasons changed, circumstances changed, the specific contents of the week changed—and the feeling never did. I kept mistaking the symptoms for the problem. The week wasn’t the problem. The belief underneath the week was. The belief that rest was something you earned by finishing, and that finishing was never quite something you got to.
Nobody asked me to do all of it—I just never stopped
This is the part that’s hardest to sit with. Because it would be easier if there were someone to blame. A partner who took too much. A job that demanded everything. A system that left me no choice.
And those things are real—the load that falls on women is real, the inequality is real, the expectation that we will absorb whatever isn’t being handled by anyone else is real. I don’t want to minimize that. But if I’m fully honest about my own particular version of it, a significant portion of what I was carrying I had picked up myself. Things nobody had asked me to hold. Standards nobody had required me to meet. A version of enough that I had invented and then worked myself half to death trying to reach.
Nobody had asked me to make the frosting from scratch. Nobody had told me that my worth depended on how much I could hold at once.
I had decided that. And I had kept deciding it, quietly, every day, without ever stopping to examine whether it was actually true. The load was real. But I was also, in ways I didn’t want to see, its architect.
I kept waiting for someone to notice how much I was carrying
Underneath all the doing was something I didn’t want to admit even to myself. I wanted to be seen. Not praised exactly—though honestly that too—but seen. I wanted someone to look at everything I was managing and say, I know. I see it. That’s a lot. That’s too much.
Nobody said it. And for a long time, I told myself it was because they didn’t care, or because they were taking me for granted, or because I was invisible in some fundamental way that confirmed my worst suspicions about my own worth.
But the truth was more uncomfortable than that. I had gotten so good at making it look manageable—at presenting the finished version, the functional version, the version that had the cake on the table and the smile in place—that there was no visible signal that anything was wrong. The whole performance of competence was also, I realized, a performance of not needing anything. And you cannot ask to be seen and simultaneously make yourself impossible to see.
I was waiting for a rescue that I had made structurally impossible. And the resentment that built around that—the low, grinding sense that I was doing all of this alone—was something I had, in large part, created the conditions for myself.
I thought doing more would eventually make me feel like enough
There was a logic to it, even if I couldn’t have articulated it then. If I did enough—enough for my kids, my job, my family, my home, my friendships—then at some point the internal math would balance out. I would have earned it. The feeling of being enough. The permission to stop.
It didn’t work that way. The more I did, the more there was to do. And the feeling I was chasing—that quiet, settled sense of having done enough, of being enough—never arrived. Because it was never going to arrive through doing. I understand that now. The gap I was trying to close with output wasn’t an output problem. It was a belief problem. And no amount of crossed-off lists was ever going to touch it.
The day I got sick was the first day I actually rested
It was a bad flu. The kind where getting vertical felt like a whole thing. And I was on the couch for three days and did nothing—not because I’d given myself permission, but because I had no choice. And somewhere in the second day, underneath the fever and the misery, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Relief.
Not about being sick. At the stopping. At the fact that nobody expected anything from me because it was physically impossible for me to provide it. The illness had done what I couldn’t do for myself—it had given me permission to stop.
That was the thing that scared me most when I recovered. Not that I’d gotten sick. That I’d needed to get sick to rest. That my own body had to override the system I’d built because I didn’t know how to override it myself. That the only acceptable reason I could find to stop was incapacitation. And that for years I’d been waiting for exactly that—a reason good enough to finally put the list down.
I’m still learning that my worth isn’t a function of my output
This is where I still am. Not at the end of the work—somewhere in the middle of it, on a good day, remembering what I know, and on a harder day falling back into the list, the yes, the just get through this week.
What’s changed is that I catch it faster now. I notice the list getting longer than it needs to be, and I can name what’s driving it. I notice the yes forming before I’ve considered whether I mean it. I notice the exhaustion, and I don’t always call it strength.
It’s slow work. Unlearning something you built over decades doesn’t happen cleanly or quickly. But I’m doing it. Not perfectly. Without a spreadsheet. Without crossing it off at the end of the day.
Just doing it, imperfectly, and letting that be enough.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
