I used to take pride in how much I could carry on my own.
How much I could manage without ever asking for help.
How I could survive, build, fix, and hold it all together—without leaning on a single soul.

But I’ve come to realize that what looked like strength was actually armor.

Hyper-independence is tricky like that. It gets celebrated in our culture—especially in women. You’re called strong, capable, reliable, even unstoppable. People admire your hustle, your resilience, your ability to keep going. But they rarely ask why you had to become that way in the first place.

For me, it started in childhood.
A slow, quiet kind of shaping.

When your basic needs aren’t consistently met, you learn early on that you can’t rely on anyone to catch you. So you stop falling—or at least, you stop showing it. You pick yourself up, brush it off, and figure out how to keep going—alone. Not because you want to, but because the alternative feels even scarier. Depending on someone who might let you down again? That kind of disappointment starts to feel like a threat to your survival.

I didn’t grow up with the kind of safety net most kids are supposed to have. There wasn’t always someone checking in. No consistent hugs, no warm dinners, no dependable presence to tell me I didn’t have to do it all myself. Instead, there was chaos. Inconsistency. A few moments of love tangled up in long stretches of emotional neglect. I became the adult in the room long before I ever understood what being a child was supposed to feel like. I learned to problem-solve, regulate, and anticipate the needs of others—before I even learned how to recognize my own.

So it makes sense now, why asking for help feels so unnatural.
It’s not just a bad habit. It’s a survival skill that got hardwired into me.

Even now, as a grown woman, there’s still a voice in my head that whispers: Don’t bother anyone. Don’t be a burden. Handle it yourself.
And I do. I handle everything.
The job, the house, the finances, the emotions, the planning, the logistics—the holding-it-all-together.
Because I can. Because I always have.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not tired.

Recently, someone told me, “You like results. I like peace.”
And that line hasn’t left me.

Because they’re right. I crave results. I crave movement. I crave resolution. Not because I’m impatient or controlling, but because the unknown has never felt safe to me. I learned to tie my worth to output. I feel secure only when things are done, settled, wrapped up, handled. Peace, to me, comes after the work—not before. And being with someone who finds peace during the process, who doesn’t need to fix everything right away, who’s comfortable in the stillness I once found threatening—it makes me pause. It makes me reflect.

It’s not just about pace.
It’s about wiring.
And that wiring runs deep.

Therapy has been a mirror I didn’t know I needed.
It helped me name the things I had only ever felt as tension in my chest or tightness in my jaw.
It helped me see how deep these patterns run.
My therapist gently peeled back the layers and asked the questions no one ever had before:
Why is it so hard to let someone help you? What does it mean if you lean on someone and they actually show up? What part of you is still afraid they won’t?

And suddenly, I wasn’t the strong one in the room. I was the little girl who didn’t know how to be vulnerable.
Who didn’t know how to trust that if she let go, someone would catch her.
Who had learned to be enough for everyone else—but never learned how to let someone be enough for her.

That’s the thing no one tells you about hyper-independence:
It’s lonely.
It feels like being the hero in your own story—with no audience to clap for you.
It’s checking every box, fixing every problem, and still crying in the shower because you don’t know how to say, “I need help.”
Because even when help is offered, you don’t know how to receive it—at least not without guilt, shame, or the overwhelming need to immediately earn it.

But I’m learning. Slowly.
To pause before I jump into solution mode.
To take a breath and say, “Actually, I could use some help with this.”
It feels awkward. Unnatural. Sometimes even painful.
But I’m trying.

Because I deserve softness too.
Because I don’t want to live a life where the only love I accept is the kind I earn by carrying everything alone.

There’s courage in asking for help.
In trusting that the right people will show up.
That love isn’t measured by how much you carry—but by how safe you feel to set things down.

And maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to believe that I don’t have to hold it all anymore.
Maybe peace and results don’t have to be at war.
Maybe I can have both.
Maybe I’m allowed to.