For the past few days, I haven’t wanted to talk to anyone. I don’t want conversations, questions, opinions, advice, problems to solve or people needing something from me. Even a message on my phone can irritate me at the moment, and at first I wondered if I was simply exhausted by what has happened recently. But I think it is bigger than that. I think I am feeling the accumulated weight of years of having to deal with almost everything on my own.

For at least four years, I have been dealing with illness mostly by myself. I go to hospital appointments alone. I sit in waiting rooms alone. I receive bad news alone. I organise appointments, collect medication, follow treatments and come home alone. When I am in pain, I still have to work out how to manage my life. When I have a fever and barely have the energy to move, I still need food in the house. There is no magical moment when being ill means that the rest of life stops and somebody else takes over. Things still need to happen, and most of the time I am the person who makes them happen.

And that is only the illness. There has been everything else too.

People often tell me that I am strong. I know they usually mean it as a compliment, but lately I have started to understand why that sentence makes me so angry. Because I am not saying that I am incapable of doing things alone. I know perfectly well that I can do things alone. That is exactly the fucking problem. I have demonstrated so many times that I can cope, organise, survive, find solutions and keep going that my ability to do those things can easily become the justification for leaving me to do them alone.

But being capable of going to hospital alone does not mean I wouldn’t have wanted somebody sitting beside me. Being capable of receiving bad news alone does not mean I didn’t need someone to hold my hand afterwards. Being capable of getting myself food when I am sick does not mean it wouldn’t have felt wonderful for somebody to say, “Stay there, I’ll bring you something.” Being capable of solving a problem does not mean I should always have to solve it. And surviving something alone does not mean that being alone was what I needed.

There is something particularly cruel about being called strong when strength was never really a choice. Sometimes strength is simply what happens when there is nobody else there to carry anything. You carry it because the alternative is dropping it. You organise things because otherwise they do not get organised. You get yourself to the hospital because otherwise you do not get there. You pick yourself up because nobody is coming to pick you up. Eventually people look at everything you have managed to carry and say, “See? You’re so strong.” And part of me wants to scream: Yes. I know I can carry it. I am asking why I always fucking have to.

And then there is another part of this that I am only beginning to understand. Somehow, being the person who can manage everything alone has never stopped other people from expecting me to be there for them. I can go through the worst moments of my life largely by myself and then, when the crisis is over and I am completely empty, there are still messages, questions, requests, problems and expectations waiting for me. I am supposed to recover quickly enough to become available again. Strong enough to survive alone, but apparently never exhausted enough to be left alone.

I think I have reached my limit with that.

Right now I do not want to be useful. I do not want to solve anything. I do not want to carry anyone. I do not want to explain myself. I do not even want to have to justify why I need peace. I want to find out what happens when I stop automatically responding every time somebody needs something from me. I want to know what happens when my own exhaustion matters before somebody else’s disappointment. When I can see a message and decide that it can wait. When I can say no without immediately calculating how that no will affect everybody else.

This does not mean I want to become cold. I don’t want to stop loving people, helping people or being generous. Those things are part of me and I don’t want to lose them. What I want to lose is the idea that loving people requires me to constantly abandon myself. I want to stop confusing being needed with being loved, and being capable with being invulnerable. I want relationships in which strength does not mean solitude and generosity does not mean depletion.

Maybe this is why I need so much silence right now. I don’t think I am withdrawing from life. I think I am withdrawing from being permanently available to everyone else. After years of directing so much energy outwards, I want to see what happens when some of it stays with me.

I already know that I can survive alone. I have proved that more times than I ever wanted to. What I want to learn now is that I shouldn’t always have to.