Hey! I'm ... Who Fuckin Knows!

Who Am I When Nobody Needs Saving?

I've been thinking about something lately, and it's one of those realisations that makes you wish your brain would occasionally mind its own fucking business.

For as long as I can remember, I've been preoccupied with the people around me. Their problems, their struggles, their crises, their emotional catastrophes. I'm the person who notices when something is wrong, checks in, steps in, offers support and generally tries to stop everyone else's life from going up in flames. And I've always considered that one of my better qualities. Compassionate, empathetic, caring. Lovely. Someone should give me a fucking certificate.

Except I'm starting to wonder when being someone who helps people became something I actually need to be. Because I think I've become so accustomed to being needed that I genuinely don't know what the fuck to do with myself when I'm not.

When nobody is struggling, nobody needs rescuing and there's no crisis to manage, I feel strangely unsettled. Bored. Empty. Disconnected. Like I've turned up to work and there's no work to do, except the workplace is my entire personality. You'd think I'd be thrilled when everyone around me is doing well. And I am. Mostly. But there's this uncomfortable little voice asking what exactly I'm supposed to do with myself now.

I've spent eight years working in behavioural and residential care, so naturally, spending my professional life managing other people's crises has done absolutely nothing to challenge this particular personality defect. If anything, it's given it a fucking career. I've become very good at recognising distress, managing difficult situations, compartmentalising and putting my own feelings somewhere in the metaphorical filing cabinet marked 'deal with that shit later'. I'm dependable. I'm capable. I'm the person who can handle things. Except apparently nobody thought to teach me what to do when there isn't anything to handle.

But I don't think this started with my job. I think it started much earlier.

My dad wasn't exactly an advocate for emotional expression. I remember being told to stop crying or he'd give me something to cry about. Which, in hindsight, is a fairly spectacular parenting strategy if your goal is to raise a child who eventually becomes an adult with absolutely no idea how to ask for emotional support. You learn pretty quickly that showing distress doesn't necessarily bring comfort. Sometimes it brings more distress. So you swallow it, get on with things and figure out how to deal with yourself.

And I wonder whether I became so good at showing up for other people because I know what it feels like when someone doesn't show up for you.

Throw BPD into the mix, with its delightful complications around identity, attachment and abandonment, and being needed starts to feel like something much bigger than simply being helpful. There's reassurance in it. Security, perhaps. When someone needs you, you know you have a place in their life. You know you're important. You know what you bring to the table. And maybe it's easier to believe someone will keep you around when you feel indispensable.

Which brings me to a rather uncomfortable possibility: maybe I've spent a considerable amount of my life confusing being loved with being useful.

And here's the fucking irony. For someone who has made a personality trait out of looking after other people, I am spectacularly shit at letting anyone look after me. I don't know how to accept help without feeling indebted. Someone does something kind for me and my brain immediately starts calculating repayment options like I've just taken out a mortgage. Emotional support apparently comes with a payment plan, and I seem to have signed up for the premium package.

I can spend hours reassuring someone else that they're not a burden, that they deserve compassion, that they're allowed to struggle and that they don't have to earn the right to be cared for. But let someone offer me that same kindness and suddenly I'm uncomfortable, apologising for existing and wondering how quickly I can make myself useful again. Apparently the rules apply to everyone except me. Very convenient.

I think I've spent so much of my life becoming the person I wish I'd had growing up that I never really considered whether I knew how to let anyone be that person for me.

And perhaps that's the bit that hurts.

Because I know how to be needed. I know how to be useful. I know how to sit with someone else's pain, help them navigate it and remind them that they're not alone. What I don't know how to do is exist without a role to play. I don't know how to feel secure when I'm not actively contributing something. I don't know how to let people love me without feeling like I owe them something in retur

Who am I when nobody needs saving? Am I still important? Am I still worth someone's time? If I'm not fixing something, holding something together or being someone's emotional support human, what exactly am I bringing to the fucking table?

I don't have some beautifully packaged conclusion to this. I'm not about to tell you I've had a breakthrough, bought a journal and emerged from the experience as a fully healed, emotionally regulated adult. Let's not get carried away. But I am starting to realise that perhaps the hardest part of all this isn't learning how to stop saving everyone else. It's learning that I don't have to. That I can be loved when I'm not useful. That I can struggle without owing someone an explanation or repayment. That I can have a place in someone's life without having to constantly earn it by being the person who holds everything together.

I've spent so much time making sure other people know they're worthy of love simply because they exist, while somehow treating that same concept as a foreign fucking language when it comes to myself. Maybe that's where I need to start.

Because being everyone's safe place doesn't necessarily mean you know how to feel safe yourself.

And I'm beginning to wonder whether I've spent so long making sure nobody else drowns that I've completely forgotten I'm allowed to come up for air, too

 S&S

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