She Poured Into Everyone and Wondered Why She Was Drowning
I watched her do it my whole childhood. I didn't realize I'd taken notes.
I’ve been thinking about the women I watched growing up.
There is one woman in my life who absorbs the world. The emotional labor of keeping everyone else regulated while quietly coming undone, because nobody is looking that closely. She stays in things out of obligation and carries other people’s weight until it shows up in her body as fatigue, or even as disease.
I’ve been watching her my whole life and taking notes I didn’t realize I was taking.
The patterns you inherit from watching the women around you don’t arrive labeled. They don’t come with a note that says this is not yours, return to sender. It feels like personality, or even like just who you are.
And the scariest part of doing real healing work is the moment you notice that some of what you thought was you... was actually her. Or the environment that shaped you before you had any say in the matter.
The Wound That Doesn’t Have a Name
My therapist asked us to go deeper in one of our sessions than we’d ever gone together.
It started when she gave me homework. “See if you can locate the memory with the most charge,” she said. “The one most connected to the anger your liver is storing.”
She’d been noticing something I couldn’t quite see from inside myself: that my physical body was holding something my conscious mind had set aside.
I went in certain that I already knew the answer. I had it mapped. The incident, the person, the wound. I’ve been doing this work long enough to feel like I know my own terrain.
I was wrong.
What surfaced was my sister.
I’ve always said she treated me like a punching bag while I was growing up. Anyone familiar with our dynamic is probably nodding right now — even the family members who discovered my Substack.
I’d had it filed under sibling stuff. Under the mental category of things you brush under the rug, suck up, and move past, because that’s what you do with siblings. You survive each other and call it childhood. You don’t call it harm.
Except it is harmful. It’s a real wound. And sitting in that reflection, I realized I had never treated it like one.
The resentment I found wasn’t small or faded. It was sitting there intact. I was completely aware of what had happened, but I’d never had the right container for it. We have frameworks for parents who hurt us. For partners who betray us. For strangers who harm us. The language exists, and the cultural permission to grieve those wounds exists.
We don’t really have that for siblings.
There’s no clean script that says: the person who grew up in the same house as you, who shared your parents and the specific rhythm of that particular childhood, can also be a source of suffering that deserves to be acknowledged as such. Instead, we get: that’s just how siblings are. We get: she didn’t mean it. A hundred small dismissals that stack until the wound never gets air.
That gap in language is exactly where resentment lives. Silently. For years. Until your therapist sends you into deep reflection and your body tells you the truth, your mind has been tidying up for decades.
I’m sitting with this right now. I’m still figuring out what to do with something that’s been there so long it started to feel like dried concrete.
When Being Good at This Stops Being Enough
Given how much I write about healing, I know I don’t say this enough.
I’ve been doing this work for years. Actively, intentionally, with real commitment. Therapy, somatic work, healing modalities, energetics, books, practices, and even the painful conversations I didn’t want to have but knew I needed to.
Which is exactly why what my therapist said this month landed the way it did.
She told me, with total care: you’ve intellectualized your healing so well that it’s become its own kind of bypass.
She’s right.
I can articulate a wound with the vocabulary of someone who has read every relevant book, done every relevant exercise, and sat in every uncomfortable feeling long enough to label it accurately.
What I’d been doing, though, was translating.
Translating experience into language, language into understanding, understanding into a kind of fluency that felt like healing but was actually just... very sophisticated filing.
The sessions where I left feeling clear, feeling like I’d moved something I’d moved it into better language. The understanding was real, but the release hadn’t happened.
There’s a specific trap that comes with being emotionally literate. You get good enough at processing that you can perform processing without actually completing it. You can sound healed, feel healed, present yourself as healed, and still be walking around with something unresolved sitting in the exact same body it’s always been in.
Your body doesn’t read your journal. Your nervous system doesn’t care how many accurate insights you’ve written in it.
The energetic charge was still there. It took getting completely quiet, dropping the narration entirely, and just feeling my way back to the origin. And there, my unresolved feelings about my sister remained. It was carrying the weight of a wound I’d never officially given a name.
I think about this when I look at the woman I’ve been watching my whole life. She isn’t unaware. She has her own understanding of what’s happening around her. She just doesn’t have the tools, or the permission, or maybe the safety, to do anything other than manage it internally and keep going.
I have more tools than she does. And for a long time, I thought that meant I was doing it differently.
This month, I’m realizing I’ve been doing it more eloquently. Which is not the same thing.
The Leverage He’s Holding
While all of this was unfolding internally, something was playing out in the external world at the same time.
An ex contacted me to request that I ship his belongings, and I arranged it. I did so in good faith, believing that closing a chapter with dignity matters.
What happened next I want to tell you carefully, because the point isn’t him. The point is what I’m recognizing in myself as it unfolds.
He received the shipment and decided the terms had changed. New demands arrived, items that were never part of our original agreement now needed to be sent.
No surprise, given his character. He sent a 10% partial payment. And when I didn’t comply, he landed on the one thing he knew I couldn’t be indifferent about: my baby videos. Footage of me from birth through age six. The recordings of a childhood I can only partially remember, the ones I use to fill in the gaps. He somehow has them in his possession, and he made it clear, in the way people make things clear without saying them directly, that they wouldn’t be sent back unless I kept meeting his terms.
I gave him a week. All I asked was that he pay what he still owed and return the videos. I heard nothing.
Those videos are unlikely to be returned. A version of my earliest self is now with someone else, being held as leverage by someone whose only remaining currency is what he can withhold.
Sitting in that grief, I can see the architecture underneath the whole situation. There’s something in me that gives too much too early. That offers consistency in exchange for reciprocity that may never come. That stays in an imbalanced exchange longer than wisdom suggests, because some part of me still believes that if I act with enough integrity, it will eventually be matched.
That belief isn’t a flaw. It comes from somewhere real. I’ve been watching a woman extend good faith as a default posture my entire life. I learned that you close chapters with dignity even when the other person won’t. I learned that your goodness doesn’t get rationed based on whether someone deserves it.
Those aren’t wrong lessons. They’ve made me who I am in ways I’m genuinely grateful for.
But somewhere in that same education, I also learned to keep extending after the extension should have stopped. To treat my own integrity as the one variable I could control in a transaction where the other person had already stopped honoring the agreement. To pay costs that were never actually mine.
Right now, I’m interrupting that pattern. And living with the cost of having stayed in it as long as I did.
The Purge
I’m packing up my house as I write this letter. Literally right now, this week.
Half a trailer of stuff is already gone. Ten bags donated, and more are coming. I’ve started listing items online to sell, which has turned into something I didn’t expect: a kind of sport. The negotiating, the haggling, the small exchanges over a lamp or a piece of furniture. There’s something genuinely energizing about it.
But the real learning isn’t in what leaves easily.
It’s in the objects I keep picking up and setting back down. The things that aren’t valuable in any practical sense but carry something. A residue of who I’ve been, or who I was trying to become, or who someone else needed me to be. They belong to chapters I’ve closed in my mind but haven’t fully released in my body.
(My body, again. My body is the theme of this entire season, apparently.)
The clearing I’m doing in my physical space and the clearing I’m doing in therapy aren’t separate projects. They’re the same project. The question beneath it all is identical: what am I holding past its time, and what would it actually feel like to set it down?
The baby videos are the sharpest version of that question. There’s something I want back that I will probably never recover.
What my therapist helped me see is that this capacity to keep trying, keep extending, keep believing in the eventual fairness of an unfair situation, wasn’t born in that relationship. It was already in me when I arrived at it. It came from the notes I took watching the women I love absorb things and keep going, year after year.
She absorbs because she has to. The cost of not absorbing in her world is real. I’m not sitting in judgment of that. I’m sitting in recognition of it.
I have different options than she does. More language, tools, and access to the interior life in ways that weren’t available to the women who came before me.
With that comes the responsibility to actually use them.
Where I Am Right Now
I’m still sorting through what stays and what goes, in my house and in my patterns. I’m still learning what it feels like to set down something I’ve been carrying so long I stopped noticing the weight.
This isn’t a resolution letter. It’s a recognition letter.
I’m recognizing the pattern and where it formed.
There’s a gap between knowing something and living differently inside of it. I’m standing in that gap right now, packing boxes, sitting in meditation, writing this letter at the end of a month that has asked a lot of me.
What pattern are you recognizing in yourself right now? I want to hear it, if you’re willing to share.
Until next time,
🖤 Joni @ The Rebirth Files
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