What It Cost Me to Always Be the Easy One

admin February 27, 2026

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“When you say yes to others, make sure you are not saying no to yourself.” ~Paulo Coelho

I grew up as the first-born daughter—the responsible one, the helper, the one who didn’t want to cause trouble. I learned early how to be “good.” Good meant quiet. Good meant easy. Good meant not needing much.

What I didn’t realize then was that I was learning how to abandon myself.

School was hard for me in ways I didn’t know how to explain. I struggled with reading. I struggled with focus. I struggled with keeping up—especially compared to my younger sister, who could read something once and seem to understand it instantly.

I stayed up late studying. I rewrote notes. I worked twice as hard to get half as far. No one ever said the words dyslexia or ADHD to me. Back then, girls like me didn’t “have” ADHD—we were labeled sensitive, scattered, anxious, dramatic, emotional, or “just not trying hard enough.”

So I tried harder. I pushed. I overworked. I internalized the belief that something about me was defective—that ease was for other people. And because I was the oldest, I didn’t want to be the difficult one. I didn’t want to be the problem. So I worked quietly. I struggled silently. I stayed small with my needs.

Self-abandonment doesn’t start with dramatic sacrifice. It starts with tiny moments of choosing everyone else’s comfort over your own truth. By the time I became an adult, that pattern was deeply wired.

Then I became pregnant for the first time. I didn’t tell many people at first. I was careful with my joy. Cautious. Hopeful in a quiet way.

When I miscarried, the loss felt invisible to everyone but me. There was no baby shower to cancel. No nursery to dismantle. Just an empty space where a future had briefly lived.

I told myself to move on. I told myself it “wasn’t the same” as losing a child. I told myself not to make it a big deal. But grief that isn’t allowed to be felt doesn’t disappear. It gets buried in the body.

Not long after, I became pregnant again. And then again. By the time I became a mother, I already knew how to override my own fear. How to function through pain. How to stay composed when everything inside me was trembling.

When my first child was born, I didn’t say, “I’m overwhelmed.” I said, “I’ve got this.”

When my second child arrived far too early and was taken straight to the NICU, I didn’t say, “I’m terrified.” I said, “Tell me what to do.”

When my body started breaking under the weight of stress, exhaustion, and fear, I didn’t say, “I need help.” I said, “I’ll push through.” This is what first-born daughters do.

We choose harmony over honesty. We choose being needed over needing. We choose peace—even when the cost is ourselves.

The NICU days blurred together. Hospital parking tickets. Beeping monitors. Wires and alarms. A breast pump on the kitchen counter. A toddler at home needing dinner and bedtime stories. And because I didn’t qualify for leave and we couldn’t afford for me not to work, I went back to my job almost immediately.

I didn’t have a choice. I had used up my leave, my wife was still in college, and I was the only thing standing between my family and a total financial freefall. I was the income. I was the insurance. So I carried it all.

For years, I looked like I was handling it. But inside, I was fraying at the edges.

Every January—the anniversary of that trauma—my nervous system would just ignite. I told myself I had “seasonal depression” or just “bad winters,” but the truth was that my body was keeping a tally of everything my mind was too busy to process.

Trauma doesn’t always look like a dramatic flashback. Sometimes it’s just a quiet, relentless obsession with keeping everything “just right” because you’re terrified that if you let go of one thread, the whole world will end. Eventually, that bill comes due. You can’t keep disappearing for the sake of everyone else and expect to have a self to come back to.

Eventually, the cost of abandoning myself became impossible to ignore. Burnout settled into my bones. Anger simmered under my skin. Resentment followed me like a shadow.

The shift for me didn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happened in a thousand tiny ones—each time my body asked me to slow down and I ignored it, until eventually it stopped whispering and started shouting.

The true cost of this “reliability” became terrifyingly clear during my second pregnancy. I was in a hospital bed, physically fragile under the weight of preeclampsia—a condition where my body was literally under attack by my own blood pressure. In that moment, the world should have shrunk down to just me and my breath. Instead, I was playing the “Calm One.”

I was on the phone talking my wife off a ledge over a biology class. I was managing my mother’s frustration over a toddler’s tantrum in the background. I was absorbing their angry tones and their anxiety, acting as a human shock absorber while my own blood pressure climbed.

I chose not to take it personally because I was too busy ensuring they didn’t fall apart. Twenty-four hours later, my body could no longer sustain the pressure, and I was forced into an emergency premature delivery. My body had been shouting, but I was too busy listening to everyone else.

When I finally began to listen—to my body, to my grief, to my long-buried exhaustion—I realized something heartbreaking and liberating at the same time: Self-abandonment once kept me safe. Now it was keeping me stuck.

Listening to my body also meant circling back to older grief I had minimized for years, including my miscarriage.

For the first time, I let myself feel the miscarriage instead of minimizing it. I let myself grieve the years of undiagnosed struggle in school. I let myself grieve the young mother who never got to rest. I let myself grieve the little girl who learned that needing less was safer. And instead of judging those versions of me, I met them with compassion. I didn’t fail them. I protected them the only way I knew how.

Choosing myself didn’t happen all at once. It happened in small, shaky ways. I paused before saying yes. I let people be disappointed. I named my needs without apologizing for them. I spoke when I would have stayed quiet. I rested when I would have pushed through. I made space for my emotions instead of swallowing them.

I remember one specific Saturday. The house was a disaster, the laundry was a mountain, and I could feel my family’s eyes on me, waiting for me to manage the chaos of the day. Usually, my script was to push through the exhaustion until I eventually snapped at everyone. This time, I just paused.

“I’m going upstairs to lie down for an hour,” I said.

My heart was pounding like I was confessing to a crime. I walked away and left the laundry on the floor. I let my wife handle the toddler’s inevitable snack-time meltdown. I let them be disappointed in me. And the world didn’t end. I got some pushback, mostly because I had broken the easy status quo, but it didn’t matter.

Sitting on my bed, staring at the ceiling in total silence—not thinking about a to-do list for once—felt like a revelation. Choosing yourself doesn’t have to be loud or selfish. It’s a quiet, steady realization that your peace is just as non-negotiable as everyone else’s.

Slowly, the patterns that had once ruled me began to loosen. The emotional eating softened. The resentment faded. The anger lost its edge. I began to feel joy without waiting for the other shoe to drop. I could look at my children and feel presence instead of panic. Gratitude instead of fear. Love instead of constant vigilance.

I am still a work in progress.

And for the first time in my life, I am deeply okay with that.

If you are the first-born child who learned to be small…

If you are the one who worked twice as hard just to keep up…

If you were never identified as struggling because you internalized everything…

If you learned to disappear to keep the peace…

If parenthood magnified every old wound you never had time to heal…

Hear this: You are not broken. You were brilliant at surviving. But survival is not the same thing as living.

You are allowed to have needs. You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to rest without earning it. You are allowed to say no without explaining yourself. You are allowed to be cared for, not just relied upon.

You don’t have to choose yourself loudly. You just have to choose yourself consistently. Even gently. Even imperfectly. Even one small boundary at a time. You don’t disappear all at once. And you don’t come back to yourself all at once either. You return in pieces. In breaths. In honest sentences. In moments where you stop and ask: What do I need right now?

And then—slowly—you begin to answer yourself.