I Know How to Be Useful. I’m Less Sure How to Belong to Myself.

When Support Becomes Assumption

I chose two words for 2026: slow and abundance.

Slow made sense right away. Abundance hasn’t.

Not because I don’t want it, but because in so many areas of my life, I move through the world as if my time, energy, and capacity are available to others first. At home, yes. But also at work. In relationships. In the steady churn of being the person who holds, responds, absorbs, and makes room.

For the last two months, every time I’ve tried to get quiet enough to ask what abundance would actually look like for me, something else has come in. A request. A vent. A last-minute need. A problem delivered like information.

The frustration hasn’t just been that I’m busy. It’s that I can’t even get to myself.

I can’t get far enough to define what abundance looks like for me, much less move toward it, because my days keep falling back into the same pattern: making room, adjusting, responding, tending.

I kept thinking: I just don’t get it. Like abundance is something other people know how to access, and I don’t.

Then last week, something clicked.

So much of my life has not really been about me.

Not in the kind of way that makes for a clean story. In the cumulative, subtle ways a life gets built around being useful until you barely notice how little of it belongs to you.

What had always seemed normal suddenly looked like a system.

To be clear, I’m not unwilling to help. In fact, I find it fulfilling. I love that my girls can count on me. And I love being someone people trust with what matters.

I just don’t love how easily that reliability turns into expectation.

And then the whole thing, somehow, became about a cat.

My daughters live together at college, ninety miles from home. Soon after moving in, they adopted a kitten I affectionately call “college kitty.” Their choice. Their joy. Their responsibility.

On Saturday morning, just hours before the first of them left for spring break, I found out their plan for the cat was, apparently, me.

Except it wasn’t really a plan. It was a given. And that was the part that got me.

Not the cat. Not the (slight) inconvenience. The assumption.

Not, “We’re stuck.”
Not, “Can you help us think this through?”
Not even a halfhearted attempt to act like they’d looked into other options.

Just the familiar logic of: Mom will take care of it.

And I felt it all at once: the irritation, yes, but also something older and heavier. The exhaustion of being so deeply counted on that people stop noticing the cost. The loneliness of realizing how often love gets expressed as access.

And I lost it.

It wasn’t burn-it-all-down energy. It was more the way people respond when something lands on an old bruise. What came out was years of feeling expected before I’d even agreed.

“I love being the backstop. I do not love being the dumping ground.”

My girls aren’t malicious. They’re thoughtful—and they’re college kids. They’ve also grown up knowing that, at times, their mother would absorb the gap before they had to.

There was a pause. Then there was a scramble.

They found someone local to pet-sit, avoiding a couple of extra hours of driving on either end of their trips.

And I had to admit that my reaction had very little to do with college kitty.

The Reflex Underneath It

The problem isn’t that people ask things of us. It’s the reflex that says, “This is mine to solve.” It’s the way our minds move to handle it before we’ve even decided.

It’s the urge to say yes because no feels uncomfortable. It’s the underlying belief that if we don’t hold things together, something will fall, and somehow that will become our responsibility.