Have you ever gone to the doctor complaining of fatigue and never really gotten any answers?
It’s not the tired that comes from too many late nights or a demanding week at work. It’s deeper than that — a bone-level weariness that follows you into the weekend, that sits with you in the quiet moments you were supposed to enjoy, that makes you wonder why you can’t seem to feel rested no matter how much you sleep or how many things you cross off your list.
If you know exactly what I’m describing, I want you to stay with me here. Because I spent years carrying that kind of tired without understanding where it was actually coming from.
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I was a criminal defense attorney for nearly four decades. I built a career around being sharp, capable, and unflappable under pressure. I raised children while managing a demanding caseload. I held my family together through things I won’t fully describe here — addiction, mental health crises, a marriage that eventually ended, years of quietly being the person everyone called when everything fell apart.
And I was good at it. That’s the part nobody warns you about. When you’re good at holding everything together, the world lets you keep doing it indefinitely.
It wasn’t until I remarried last year and moved to a small town in Illinois with my husband — a pastor, which is its own kind of beautiful irony for a criminal defense attorney — that I finally had enough stillness to ask the question I’d been too busy to ask for years.
How much of what I’ve been carrying actually belongs to me?
The Invisible Weight of Over-Functioning
Over-functioning is one of those concepts that sounds clinical until you recognize yourself in it — and then it feels uncomfortably personal.
It looks like being the first person everyone calls in a crisis. It looks like solving problems that other adults in your life are perfectly capable of solving themselves. It looks like managing everyone’s emotions, absorbing everyone’s anxiety, and somehow still feeling guilty that you haven’t done enough.
For mothers of
But here’s what I’ve learned — slowly, painfully, and with more than a few 2am parking lot moments of honest reckoning: when we over-function for the people we love, we’re not actually doing it for them. We’re doing it for ourselves. We’re managing our own anxiety about what might happen if we don’t step in. We’re soothing our own fear of being seen as a bad mother, a cold woman, someone who didn’t care enough.
The rescue isn’t for them. It’s for us.
And recognizing that truth — really sitting with it without immediately defending yourself against it — is one of the most uncomfortable and ultimately liberating things a woman can do.
What We Were Never Taught
Nobody sat us down and explained that our job description was supposed to change when our children became adults. Nobody told us that the same love that looked like showing up for everything when they were seven looks like stepping back when they’re thirty-seven. Nobody modeled for us what it meant to love someone deeply while also holding firm boundaries about what we would and wouldn’t absorb on their behalf.
Most of us learned to mother from women who also over-functioned. Who also believed their worth was tied to everyone else’s okay-ness. Who also disappeared slowly into the needs of everyone around them and called it selflessness.
It wasn’t selflessness. It was a pattern. And patterns, no matter how deeply ingrained, can be interrupted.
The Weight You Were Never Meant to Carry
I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer it honestly — not the answer that sounds gracious and spiritually mature, but the true one.
What are you carrying right now that doesn’t actually belong to you?
Is it your adult child’s financial chaos? Their relationship drama? Their refusal to launch, to heal, to take responsibility for their own life? Is it your ex-husband’s anger, still landing in your nervous system years after the divorce? Is it the emotional weather of an entire family system that somehow elected you the person responsible for keeping the peace?
Whatever it is — I want you to know that you didn’t pick it up because you were weak. You picked it up because you were strong, and capable, and the people around you knew it.
But strong enough to carry something doesn’t mean obligated to carry it forever.
There is a version of your life where you love the people in it just as fiercely — and carry significantly less of what belongs to them.
That version of your life is available to you. Not someday. Not after everything gets resolved. Now.
Your Next Step
If this is landing somewhere real for you, I want to invite you to keep reading this week. I’m going to be sharing more about what it actually looks like to put some of this down — not abandon the people you love, not become cold or distant or selfish, but simply stop carrying what was never yours.
And later this week I have something free for you that I think is going to feel like a long exhale.
Thank you.
You’re welcome!