Wanting to stop proving how much you can carry is different from actually being able to put something down, and the piece stays mostly in the wanting. What tends to give first when someone actually sets that boundary, the workload itself or just the guilt about it?
This is such a good question. I think, at least for me, the guilt gives way before the workload does. The workload doesn’t magically disappear the moment I set a boundary; sometimes there are still things that genuinely need doing. But the guilt is the bit I’ve had to learn to stop carrying alongside everything else. And once I started putting things down anyway, I realised how much of what I thought I had to carry was actually something I had simply become very good at carrying. There’s a big difference.
That distinction really stayed with me, not everything we carry is ours because it has to be, sometimes it’s simply because we became good at carrying it. I think that’s the harder part to notice, and probably the part that takes longest to unlearn.
Yes. I think that’s the really sneaky part of it; sometimes we’re not consciously choosing to carry something anymore; we’ve simply become so good at carrying it that we stop questioning whether it still belongs to us.
And perhaps that’s why letting go can feel harder than it sounds. It means noticing the things we’ve automatically picked up, asking ourselves whether they’re actually ours, and then learning that we don’t have to be the woman who always carries them.
I think midlife gives us a beautiful opportunity to start putting some of that weight down.
Wanting to stop proving how much you can carry is different from actually being able to put something down, and the piece stays mostly in the wanting. What tends to give first when someone actually sets that boundary, the workload itself or just the guilt about it?
This is such a good question. I think, at least for me, the guilt gives way before the workload does. The workload doesn’t magically disappear the moment I set a boundary; sometimes there are still things that genuinely need doing. But the guilt is the bit I’ve had to learn to stop carrying alongside everything else. And once I started putting things down anyway, I realised how much of what I thought I had to carry was actually something I had simply become very good at carrying. There’s a big difference.
That distinction really stayed with me, not everything we carry is ours because it has to be, sometimes it’s simply because we became good at carrying it. I think that’s the harder part to notice, and probably the part that takes longest to unlearn.
Yes. I think that’s the really sneaky part of it; sometimes we’re not consciously choosing to carry something anymore; we’ve simply become so good at carrying it that we stop questioning whether it still belongs to us.
And perhaps that’s why letting go can feel harder than it sounds. It means noticing the things we’ve automatically picked up, asking ourselves whether they’re actually ours, and then learning that we don’t have to be the woman who always carries them.
I think midlife gives us a beautiful opportunity to start putting some of that weight down.