I Am Still Reliable, and That Is Part of the Problem

Dear Delyara, If I were worse, someone might notice. If I forgot more. Dropped more. Lost my temper more visibly. Missed things. Cried in public. Stopped replying. Failed harder. But I don’t. I still manage. I still show up. I still make the lunches and answer the emails and pay the bill and buy the birthday gift and remember the library book and move the wet laundry to the dryer. Reliability is making my suffering easy to overlook. Even for me. That’s the dangerous thing about burnout when it happens inside a woman who has been praised her whole life for carrying too much gracefully. The world keeps rewarding the very thing that is hollowing her out.