The Risk of Being the Steady One
Balancing dependability with self-preservation
People rely on me to be the steady one.
In work, in parenting, in crisis. I’m the one who doesn’t fall apart. The one who finds a plan, asks the right questions, makes things okay again. Most days, I don’t even think about it. It’s just how I move through the world. And mostly, I’m grateful to be able to show up that way for others.
But lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to the weight of it.
What happens when you’re always the steady one? When your needs stay quiet because someone else’s are louder? When your exhaustion gets mistaken for composure? When even your burnout looks productive?
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to walk without carrying so much. To take a path where I’m not responsible for holding everyone else up. To stop pretending calm comes naturally when it’s actually the result of years of quiet effort and constant recalibration.
You learn a lot when you’ve been through chaos. Especially early in life. You figure out how to lower the temperature, how to read the room, how to manage outcomes that were never yours to manage. Over time, people start seeing that as who you are instead of what you learned to do.
Even when things are stable, you keep scanning for what could go wrong next. And when you don’t find anything, you wonder if you missed something.
It’s not always about trauma. Sometimes it’s a skill you earned. A kind of wisdom. The ability to stay clear when things get hard. But even then, you can forget that steadiness is something you’re allowed to share.
When you’re the one holding everything together, it’s easy to stop checking in with yourself. You can get so used to managing the moment that you forget to ask if you even want to be in it. You start believing your role is to be the calm one, even when you’re quietly unraveling.
I’m learning to separate steadiness from silence. To let composure have limits. To trust that I don’t have to be the strong one all the time for people to trust me.
There’s no prize for pushing through quietly. No bonus points for hiding fatigue. Calm should be a choice, not a performance.
So if you’ve been the one people count on, I hope you give yourself room to rest. Not because you’re falling apart. Just because you’ve been walking a long road, and you’re allowed to pause.
Even steady people get tired. And even on the right path, it’s okay to put the weight down for a while.
More questions, stories, and rabbit holes await...
→ File Under Maybe • Bluesky • Threads
