You Were Trained to Carry It

Here's a number that came out this year and it's been sitting in my chest since I read it. Sixty-five percent of women founders say they're burned out. For men it's thirty-seven. Same title, same pressure, same market. Nearly double the burning. And the wellness industry looked at that gap and said, well, she needs better boundaries. She needs to delegate. She needs a self-care ritual and a morning routine and maybe a child-free vacation. As if the reason you're on fire is that you forgot to schedule the rest.

That's not it. I want to tell you what I think it actually is, because I've been carrying the same weight my whole life and I finally know where I picked it up.

They keep calling it invisible labor. The mental load. The stuff that never makes it onto a task list but keeps the whole thing running. Who's low on their meds. Whose birthday is Thursday. Which client sounded a little off on the last call. Whether the thing you shipped is going to land wrong with the one person it always lands wrong with. Men aren't tracking most of that, and it's not because they're lazy. It's because nobody trained their body to. And the productivity people skip the next part entirely. A lot of us didn't get trained to track it either. We got trained to survive by tracking it.

Let me name what was happening in the body, because this is the whole thing.

When you grow up in a house where the adults aren't safe, or aren't steady, or aren't there, a child does not get to be a child. The nervous system reassigns her. She becomes the one who reads the room before she reads the alphabet. She learns her mother's face like weather. She keeps the little ones fed, the peace kept, the danger clocked, because the price of missing it was real and she paid it once and never forgot. That's called parentification, and it wires straight into the hypervigilance circuit. Cortisol up, amygdala scanning, attention permanently outward, on everyone else's state, all the time, forever. It is exhausting and it is also the thing that kept her alive. So it stays. It does not know the war is over.

And then that little girl grows up and builds something. And she is so good at it, because a founder who can feel a deal going sideways before anyone says a word, who tracks forty moving pieces and never drops the one that matters, who senses her team's mood and adjusts before the mood becomes a problem, that woman looks like a genius. She is a genius. She's also running the exact same scan she ran at seven years old, and no one ever told her she was allowed to stop. So she carries the business and the household and the mother's meds and the friend's divorce and the client's fragile ego, and she calls it being responsible, and the world calls it being reliable, and her body calls it Tuesday. Of course she's burning at sixty-five percent. She's been running the fire since before she could spell.

Here's the pivot, and it took me forty-some years to feel it instead of just know it. The over-responsibility is not a virtue and it's not a flaw. It's a survival adaptation that outlived the emergency. You were not born wanting to hold everyone. You were trained to, in a place where holding everyone was the only way to stay safe. And the cruel joke of the self-care industry is that it hands you one more thing to be responsible for. Now regulate your nervous system. Now do the breathwork right. Rest, but productively. They took the one place you might have set it down and turned it into another job.

So have you. If you're reading this with a tight jaw and a list running in the back of your head that never once turns off, you know exactly what I mean. You've been carrying it so long you think it's your personality. It isn't. It's a load-bearing wall you built as a kid, and you've been mistaking it for your spine.

I'm going to be honest about where I'm standing. I have not figured this out. This is not a lesson from the far side of the mountain, because I'm not on the far side, I'm on the climb. Just this week I caught myself managing three people's feelings that were not mine to manage, and I did it on autopilot, and I only noticed because I was so tired I couldn't hold my own on top of theirs. I still don't fully know the line between being loving and being everyone's emergency exit. I'm working it in real time. Some days I put it down for an hour and it feels like the floor is falling out.

That's the question I'm still asking, out loud, with you. What is actually mine to carry? Not what I'm capable of carrying, because that's everything, that was always the problem. What's mine.

This one's for the oldest daughters. The ones who raised somebody. The founders who are the reason everything runs and the reason they can't sleep. You were trained to carry it, y'all. Trained. Which means, slowly, scared, one wall at a time, you're allowed to learn something else.

Pick up the pen. Write down what's yours. Then look, really look, at everything you've been holding that never was.