I think years of over-functioning have made me measure my value by how useful I remain while hurting

Dear Delyara, I know how to keep going. I know how to answer, show up, carry, provide, soften, remember, absorb. Those abilities have made me admirable in certain rooms and indispensable in others. They have also quietly taught me that as long as I can still function, my pain becomes easier for people — and for me — to minimise. That is a dangerous lesson. Because usefulness is not worth. And yet I can feel how deeply my body still treats them as cousins. If I am still useful, I must still be basically okay. If I am still holding things together, then perhaps I have no right to say I am fraying. If the work is done and the children are fine and the house still runs, maybe my suffering becomes optional language rather than urgent truth. I want to unlearn that. I just see now how well the world rewarded it.