I Think I Have Become So Necessary to My Family’s Function

Dear Delyara, I know what I hold. Meals, schedules, clothing, moods, forms, memory, emotional weather, small preventions, soft landings. If I stopped doing what I do, the family would feel it quickly and concretely. And yet my own interior life can disappear in the middle of all that usefulness so easily that I sometimes only notice it by accident — in resentment, in sudden tears, in how much I need silence, in the way a tiny domestic inconvenience can carry far more emotion than it should. That tells me something. That I am still here. And not receiving enough room. I don’t want to become only function. I don’t think I have yet. Still, I can feel the risk of it. And that risk scares me.