The quiet cost of being the reliable one
"That's okay, I'll do it."
"Leave it with me."
"It'll be quicker if I just do it."
"If I want anything doing properly, I'm better off doing it myself."
Do you recognise yourself in any of those?
We have all said them. We can all catch ourselves saying them, and usually in the exact moments when we are already harried, already stretched, already a bit overwhelmed.
Which is interesting, isn't it. At precisely the point when the load is heaviest, our instinct is to reach out and gather more of it towards ourselves. To take it on. To take personal responsibility for all of it.
Where it gets sticky
An occasional swoop is not the problem. We all do it, and sometimes it genuinely is the right call.
The crunchy point, maybe even the sticky point, arrives when we notice we are doing it frequently. Constantly even. When taking responsibility for everything has stopped being a choice we make in a pinch and has quietly become the way we move through our whole lives.
I know this pattern intimately, because I lived inside it for decades.
I spent a childhood taking responsibility for most things. I was called a ‘responsible girl’ so often that it became a description of who I was rather than something I occasionally did. And of course I was proud of it, young little Rose was genuinely proud. Praised for being so grown up, so dependable, so reliable, and I took that praise and built a whole identity out of it.
The annual appraisal that I have never forgotten
By my late twenties and early thirties I had been so responsible, so hyper independent and so reliable for so long that something in me had started to flinch.
I can remember the exact annual appraisal where I really noticed the flinch. It was on a normal, fresh, sunny and bright April day when my manager sitting across from me, said the words “ Rose you’re just so reliable, so conscientious, we can always count on you Rose, you’re such an asset to the team.”
Of course, my manager meant it as a compliment. They meant it as encouragement, as recognition, as reward. And I remember sitting there feeling a bit sick to my stomach and thinking, “mayday, mayday, get me out of here.”
At the time I could not have told you why this supposed praise and recognition felt like a trap door opening underneath me. But with hindsight it is perfectly clear. Simply put, I had burnt myself out being responsible. I had constructed an entire life on the assumption that it was all up to me, that I had to take care of everyone and everything and being publicly congratulated for it felt less like a reward and more like a life sentence.
I hear this in the coaching room constantly
I have worked with a great many clients who describe some version of the same thing.
Years, decades, sometimes an entire life so far, spent making sure they did everything themselves and did everything for others. Holding real pride in being the responsible one, the independent one, the one you can rely on. They got things done. They did not ask for help. They made things happen. They looked after everyone around them.
And here is the irony, or perhaps it is simply the inevitability. People carrying this pattern very often end up in professions built on offering care and nurture to other people. Take my clients for example, they were nurses, therapists, teachers and doctors.
So they were not only sorting everything out at home. They were also doing it professionally, all day, and then coming home to do it again.
What this actually costs
Where does that leave someone who has spent a lifetime being responsible for everyone and everything? Someone who learnt in childhood that they need to be the one who sorts things out, helps, cares, nourishes?
Well…burnt out, often quite lost and frequently, underneath it all, a little resentful, which then produces its own layer of guilt and shame because they quite naturally ask themselves ‘what kind of person resents caring for the people they love?’
The reason is not mysterious. They have poured care into everyone else, help into everyone else, nourishment into everyone else. And when did they care for themselves? Help themselves? Nourish themselves?
For most, it was a secondary concern. Sometimes a tertiary one. Very often it was never actually addressed at all.
It makes complete sense, then, that a life spent sorting things out for other people whilst never being the one who asks for help tends to arrive somewhere unpleasant. Perhaps in stress that will not switch off, insomnia, chronic symptoms, broken sleep, chronic pain and illness that seems to come from nowhere. The particular acrid flatness and drain of burnout.
You are the one carrying everything. You believe everything is up to you. That is an enormous weight of responsibility and pressure, and we are simply not built to carry it alone.
The disservice nobody intends
Here is the part that tends to land hardest with clients, so I will say it plainly.
When you focus entirely on other people, when you assume you must take responsibility for them and place their needs permanently ahead of your own, you are doing them a disservice as well as yourself.
You remove their opportunity to work things out. You remove the moment where they might have discovered their own capability. You quietly teach the people around you that you do not need anything, which makes it very difficult for them to offer.
Nobody is winning. This way lies exhaustion, burnout and unhappiness, for everyone involved.
What if we spread it out
What if the responsibility could be shared?
What if it genuinely, truly is not all up to you?
Sit with that for a second and notice what happens in your body. After what may initially feel like a surge of uncertainty at a new way of being and doing things, let it settle and then gently enquire with yourself again “what if…?” and most people then feel something loosen across the shoulders or the chest, a weight leave the pit of their stomach, the release of a sigh they did not know they were holding. A lightness.
That response is information. Pay attention to it.
How to begin
This is not a personality transplant. It is a set of small, repeatable shifts. Remember practice makes permanent.
Take an honest inventory of your resources. And not just practical ones but also include actual people in your life who are willing and able to support you, most of whom would be glad to be asked. Write them down. Most of us dramatically underestimate this list.
Stop assuming responsibility is yours by default. You do not have to swoop in like Superman or Wonder Woman and save the day. Give people the space and the time to work things out for themselves. They can always ask if they need support, and if they do ask, you can choose then what you would like to do, deliberately, rather than by reflex.
Turn the care inwards first. Think of the pride you take in a profession of service, or in the care you give as a parent or a carer. All that skill in noticing what someone needs, in nourishing them, in showing up. This is a wonderful skill that you already have. So now apply it to yourself first and foremost, with the same seriousness and dedication that you have when you apply it to everyone else.
Remind yourself, regularly, that it is not all up to you. You have choice. You have agency over how much you take on, and over how and when you ask for help. Nobody is designed to do it all on their own, and nobody should have to.
The thing worth remembering
Being responsible is not a flaw. It is a genuine strength and it has almost certainly served you and the people around you well.
The trouble is only ever when it becomes the single setting you have, applied constantly, in every direction except your own.
You are allowed to put some of it down. You are allowed to ask. You are allowed to be someone people look after too.
It really is not all up to you.
Something to sit with
· When did you first learn that being reliable was how you earned your place?
· Who in your life would gladly help if you asked, and what stops you asking?
· What are you currently doing for someone that they are perfectly capable of doing themselves?
· If it genuinely were not all up to you, what would you put down first?
If you recognised yourself in this and you would like company whilst you unpick it, this is very much the work I do. Find out more at bloomandflourish.co.uk, or come and say hello on Instagram @rose.bloomandflourish.