“Doesn't everyone's?”
“No.”
The simple answer hit me like cold water.
“Julian, what if I told you your worth isn't tied to how much you can do for other people?”
“I'd say you don't know me very well.”
“I'm getting to know you.” He leaned forward slightly. “And what I see is someone who's been carrying an incredible burden since he was barely an adult. Someone who stepped up when the adults in his life couldn't. That takes remarkable strength.”
I nodded.
“But strength and hypercompetence aren't the same thing. Taking care of everyone else while ignoring your own needs isn't sustainable.”
“It's worked for years.”
“Has it? Let me ask you a question: do you think your father needed help, back then?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “He had a breakdown. He needed help.”
“Did he take it?”
“No. He wouldn’t let any of us near it. Everybody tried. He’d rather have left than let one person help him carry it.”
“He’d rather have left than be carried,” Dr. Matthews said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about your father before. Before your mother died.”
That was easier. That I could talk about all day. “He was the best man I ever knew. He was a king in our house. Present, every day. Protected us, provided, loved my mother out loud where we could see it. He was an artist, he built a record label from nothing, and he taught useverything. How to move, how to be men, carry ourselves, how to work. My brothers and I especially are the men we are because of what he put in us before it all fell apart. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be that. The man he was.”
“From everything you’ve told me, you are that man. You stepped into his shoes at nineteen and you carried everything he carried and more. You are your father’s son in his strength.”
“That’s the point.”
“Mm.” He let a moment go by. “Can I explain something, and you can do what you want with it.”
“Okay.”
“You’re your father in his strength. You see that, and you’re proud of it, and you’ve built your whole identity on it. You stayed. You are the opposite of the man who walked out.”
I nodded.
“But there’s a second way you’re also like him, and it’s the one you can’t see, because seeing it would cost you the first one. You also left.”
“Ididn’tleave.”
“Your body didn’t. Your father left the family.Youleft yourself. You keep every person you love at the exact distance where you can protect them, and they can never reach into you. Your father’s absence was a door he walked out of. Yours is a door you’ve been standing behind. You think staying makes you his opposite. I’m telling you it’s the same wound. He refused to be carried and he left. You refuse to be carried and you stayed. Same refusal. Different exit.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“You agreed your father needed help and wouldn’t take it,” he said. “That the not-taking-it is what cost your family its father. That’s a version of the thing you’re doing to yourself.”
“It worked,” I said, and even I could hear it come out thin. “For eighteen years it worked.”
“Did it.” He didn’t raise his voice. “Julian, that kind of carrying is a bow bent all the way back. You can hold a bow there a long time. But it doesn’t hold forever. Eventually the tension gets to be too much and youhave to let go… or it breaks. And from what you’ve told me, it looks like it’s already started to.”
