“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
My grandmother had just died. My sister and I had come from the room where her body still lay, and we were standing in the elevator in silence when the doors slid closed. My sister looked at me and said, “Now you’re the last strong one in this family.”
It was comforting to hear her words. I felt proud. And then, almost immediately, something else. My stomach clenched. I just wanted to stop the elevator, run away, and never look back. My sister wasn’t telling me something new. She just gave words to something I had known within for a very long time already, and some part of me recognized I wanted out. But I didn’t know how. Yet.
To understand why those words landed the way they did, you have to go back to a hallway. I was six, maybe seven, standing outside my mother’s room. She had come back from the psychiatric hospital some months before. I had waited for that. I had pictured it, the return, the reconnection, life going back to normal, even though by that time I had forgotten what normal actually looked like.
And then she came home, and she closed the door. Behind it, I could hear her typewriter. She was writing a novel.
I knocked politely. By then I had already learned to be polite about my own needs. The answer came quickly: “No. Don’t disturb me.” I recognized the specific tone of her voice. I had heard it before, when she would tell me I was “too much” for her.
So I left. I don’t remember feeling angry. I remember feeling like I understood. Like it made sense that the door would be closed. Like the right response was to take care of myself and not ask again. That decision, made somewhere in a hallway at age six or seven, became the blueprint for the next four decades of my life.
My mother’s absence, even when she was physically present, had started earlier.
When I think back to the days before she was committed to the psychiatric hospital, I mostly remember waiting for her to make some time for me. I remember her telling me to stop crying because it was too much for her. Accusing me of stealing a ring from her, which I didn’t, simply because she had misplaced it. Yelling at my father that I was too strong-willed, and she couldn’t deal with me anymore.
They were all signs of a woman about to break down under the weight of her own psyche, but I didn’t understand that then.
When I was about five years old, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a severe psychosis. Honestly, I don’t remember much from those days. My sister had been born a few months before. My grandmother suddenly appeared to take me from school. My grandparents took me and my baby sister in, and suddenly I was in a different city, a different school, with no friends. Something in me must have decided then that I was, in some essential way, on my own.
When she came back, I wanted to believe things would be different. The closed door told me they weren’t. So I became useful. I took care of my little sister. I kept an eye on my father. I monitored the atmosphere in our home the way a small meteorologist monitors weather, always scanning, always adjusting, always making sure nobody would need to worry about me because I was already worrying about everything else.
Later, when my parents divorced and my mother settled elsewhere, I took care of her too. Every two weeks, I traveled with my sister by train to visit her. Never knowing what to expect. Carefully checking for signs of a manic episode. Walking on eggshells not to trigger her.
And when I decided at the age of fourteen not to visit her anymore, I kept track of her from a distance, over the phone. For years. I can’t remember ever being anything other than a mother to her. Never her daughter.
Being strong for everyone didn’t feel like something I had to do then. I thought of it as who I was. It felt like a necessary job. But one that came with a strange sense of safety. As long as I was the one holding things together, there was a role for me. A reason to be needed. And being needed felt, if I am honest, a lot like being loved.
What I didn’t understand then, and what took me decades to see clearly, is that I had also built a prison inside it. Because deep down I believed that if I stopped being strong, everything would fall apart. Not just for the people around me. For me too. Because who would be there to catch me? I had decided, at six years old, standing in that hallway, that the answer was no one.
So I kept going. The wish to be useful and remarkable pushed me through life. I worked two decades as a professional actor. Went back to study and earned a PhD at forty-five. Started a whole new career at a university. Got married, had two children. A life that looked, from the outside, like someone who had it all together. And in many ways, I did. But I was also the person who answered every call, who showed up when asked, who said yes before checking whether I had anything left to give.
The body keeps score, they say. Mine kept very careful records.
Years later, my sister was going through a hard time. Whatever was going on in my own life dropped to the background. Just one clear focus: the strong one switching on. But this time my body pushed back. I felt suddenly cold to the bone. My head started spinning. Nausea. Even if I wanted to spring into action, I couldn’t. I lay down in bed for hours, not because I decided to rest, but because I had no other option.
Lying there under the blankets, trying to get warm, something shifted. My body had made the decision my mind couldn’t make. It had said, “Not today.” And for the first time, I let that be enough. It felt like a relief. The next day, I discovered that my sister had managed. Also without me.
The real turning point came on a vacation. My mother called. She wanted me to come over as soon as I got back and “finally” take care of her. She listed the things she expected of me, things daughters did. When I tried to hold her off, she told me stories about other people’s daughters who did those things. And suddenly, when she paused, I said, calmly and almost surprising myself: “I’m not like that.”
I knew, as I said it, that it wasn’t true. Not in the way she meant it. I had been exactly like that for decades.
I had called every day for years, just to let her vent. I had watched for signs she might need to be hospitalized. I had been, in many ways, more of a parent to her than a child.
But I also knew that what I said was true in the way that mattered to me. I was no longer going to prove otherwise. Not today. Not for this. I hung up and felt something new: relief. The relief of setting something down.
What I’ve come to understand, slowly and imperfectly, is this: Being strong wasn’t only imposed on me. I chose it too. It gave me something I desperately needed: a role, a sense of security, a way to stay close to people I loved without risking the kind of vulnerability that had already cost me so much. Seeing that clearly, without blame and without shame, was the most important part of changing it.
The process since then hasn’t been about becoming less strong. I am still strong. That is genuinely part of who I am. What has changed is what the strength is for. It no longer has to be the price I pay for belonging. It no longer has to prove I deserve my place.
What I’m learning instead is this: I can be present with people I love without taking over their struggle. I can let someone I care about sit with something hard without rushing in to fix it. I can trust that they are capable, that my absence from the role of rescuer is not the same as abandonment.
And slowly, in the space that opens up when I stop managing everything, I am discovering something I didn’t expect. There is room, finally, for someone to ask how I am doing. And room, for the first time, to actually answer.
The decision I made in front of that closed door was not wrong. It was the best a six-year-old could do with what she had. But I am not six anymore.
I was never only the strong one. I’m also the one who gets to be held.
About Femke E. Bakker
Dr. Femke E. Bakker is a political psychologist, certified meditation teacher, and TEDx speaker. She is the creator of the Selfgentleness Perspective, a practice of radically accepting yourself as the most important person to consistently deserve your own gentleness. She writes and teaches for self-aware adults who keep getting pulled back into self-criticism and people-pleasing, even after years of inner work. Find her at drfemkebakker.com.
