I Sometimes Feel More Like the Emotional Utility System of My Family Than a Fully Separate Person Living Inside It

Dear Delyara, Power, water, gas, internet. That’s what I feel like some evenings. Always there. Always carrying. Only noticed sharply when something fails. I know that sounds harsher than love allows. It’s still true in feeling. I make things run. I absorb mood. I anticipate need. I soften collisions. I remember. I translate. I keep everybody connected enough to function. And because I do those things so consistently, it can become easy — for them, for me — to experience me more as infrastructure than as a living woman with her own interior weather. That hurts. Not because they don’t love me. Because systems can be loved and still overused. I don’t want to become only that. Some days I can feel how close I am.