There are people who will use the best of you against you.

There are people who will receive all the love and strength from your healing heart and still reproach you for not having more to give.

There are people who will look to your integrity and say you are at fault for their harming you.

There are people who will flail and cry out that no one’s helping them while their erratic movements push away your outstretched hands, draw out your kind and patient direction, draw you into the water beneath them.

You are the strong ones, the competent ones, the rocks, the mothers, the fathers, the warriors, the nurturers, the caregivers. You are the ones without whom “everything would fall apart.”

And that is a truth that is also a lie that keeps you trapped. You who learned to set aside your wants and needs, to shelter your vulnerability while caring for everyone else’s, you have learned to believe the wellbeing of those around you depends on you.

You have learned, through disappointment, not to expect much of others. You have learned that your plate can only be filled after everyone else has had enough, only to find others took more than their share and there is not enough for you.

You have forged an identity around this suffering, a self-righteousness that is poor compensation. Your Self has been buried beneath the mighty weight of obligation, a burden you cannot help but carry and others seem all too willing to avoid. 

If you are the only one “keeping it all from falling apart,” then “it” should not be together. 

We need you to stop doing our work. 

We need you to let us struggle more.

We need you to stop saving us at the expense of your joy, to stop resenting us for the burdens you are unwilling to put down.

We need you to let us grow strong enough to carry our own weight, by no longer letting it weigh you down.

We need you to learn from our neediness, to finally tend your heart and draw the circle around its home. To know that no one’s wants and needs are rational, and yet they are worthy of care. To know that your wants and needs are worthy of the care you give to us.

We need you to stop resenting us for giving more than we give back. We need you to match your giving with what you receive.

We need you to know your limits and abide them, and not yield to our incompetence, our pleading, our helpless desperation, so that finally we will learn the secret.

The secret you have always known: there is no one who knows the right thing to do. There are only those willing to accept the consequences of doing. 

We are in the last days of the age of emperors and martyrs. Now comes the age of radical community, of interdependence, of one precious and irreplaceable Self in community with others, equal in worth and dignity.