On giving too much of myself, and the boundary I had to learn to set.
I’ve been a caretaker for as long as I can remember. Anyone who has known me at any point in my life would tell you the same thing.
In every home I’ve ever shared with someone, I was the one who cooked, who cleaned, who did the laundry, who quietly took the initiative to make life easier for whoever was around me. As a kid I cleaned up after myself without being asked. I gave away things that meant something to me if I thought it would make someone else happy. That instinct started early, and it never really left.
It grew, over time, into something bigger than chores and gestures. I became the person people came to when they needed advice. When they needed to vent. When they needed someone to listen without judgement. And for a long time I was genuinely happy to be that person.
But somewhere along the way, being needed started to feel less like a gift I was giving and more like a weight I was carrying.
* * *
As the magazine grew, as my social media following climbed toward 800,000, the parasocial side of things amplified everything I already knew about myself, except now on a scale I never could have anticipated.
Most of the messages I receive are lovely. Kind. Asking nothing of me at all. But they’re often outweighed, sometimes by the hundreds in a single day, by people emotionally unloading on me. People telling me, in detail, that they’re lonely. That they don’t want to be single. People asking if I’ll talk to them, listen to their problems, lend them money. People asking if I’m single myself, as though my willingness to listen meant something else entirely.
People seem to find caretakers easily. They sense the open door from a distance, the same way I once sensed it in myself as a kid who couldn’t help but tidy up after everyone.
For years I tried to respond to as many of them as I could. To listen, to guide, to be useful. And after more than a decade of that, on top of a lifetime of doing the same thing in my personal relationships, I started to feel like a punching bag. Like someone who was putting energy out into the world and getting almost nothing back. Most days, not even close.
* * *
I started researching, reading, trying to understand myself better. Why people felt they could come to me so easily. What it was that I was actually offering, and what it was costing me to keep offering it.
And somewhere in those years of feeling depleted, I started resenting people. Quietly, then less quietly. I started to feel like the world was full of takers, full of people who saw me as a resource rather than a person. For a long time, that’s genuinely what I believed.
And then it hit me, slowly, and then all at once.
Most people aren’t trying to use anyone. Most people are just trying to get through their own lives, often lonely, often struggling, often desperate for someone who will simply listen. They aren’t walking through life looking for someone to take advantage of. They’re walking through life with their own door closed most of the time, and when they find one that’s open, they don’t always stop to think about what it costs the person standing on the other side of it.
They’re not bad. They’re just not thinking about my door. They’re thinking about their own room, and how badly they need somewhere to put down what they’re carrying.
Which meant the responsibility was never really theirs to manage.
It was mine. To close the door. To decide, deliberately, when to open it again.
* * *
I want to be clear about what this didn’t mean.
It didn’t mean I stopped being a caregiver. I still dote on my partner. I still spoil our dog. I still answer messages, just not all of them, and not on anyone’s schedule but my own.
It didn’t mean I became cold, or hardened, or distrustful of everyone who reached out. It meant I finally set boundaries that protected my mental health, my time, and the parts of myself I actually had left to give.
I can still be a good person without making myself available to everyone who asks. I can still be kind without responding to every single message. I can still be a caretaker without giving until there’s nothing left, which is exactly what used to happen, every single time, before I learned where my own line was.
* * *
This is my life. I get to decide who gets my energy. I get to decide who I help, and when, and how much. And once that finally settled into place, something I didn’t expect happened.
With more time, more focus, and fewer people draining me without giving anything back, I found I could actually help the people I cared about more deeply than I ever had before. I had room for real conversations, the two-way kind, with people who actually wanted to know me and not just take from me. I had energy left over to raise money for causes that mattered. To volunteer where I actually wanted to volunteer, not where guilt told me I had to.
I learned that I can still do an enormous amount of good in this world.
I just get to do it on my own terms now.
And that, more than anything else I’ve figured out in the last fifteen years, has let me become the best version of myself I know how to be.
Whose door have you left open without meaning to?
You’re allowed to close it. You’re allowed to decide when to open it again.