There is a particular compliment that follows certain women everywhere.
She's so capable. She handles everything. I don't know what we'd do without her.
And for a long time, you probably held that compliment close. Let it tell you who you were. Let it be enough.
Because being useful felt like being loved. Being needed felt like belonging. Being the one who handles everything felt like proof — proof that you were worth keeping around, worth noticing, worth the space you took up.
So you kept becoming more useful.
You learned to anticipate what people needed before they asked. You learned to shrink your own needs so they didn't inconvenience anyone. You learned to be steady when others fell apart, capable when others struggled, fine when you were not fine at all.
You became very, very good at it.
And somewhere in all that becoming — you lost the thread back to yourself.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just slowly, the way a room gets dark when you don't notice the light changing.
One day you realized you didn't know what you actually wanted for dinner. Not in a small way — in a way that felt strangely significant. Like the question was asking something much larger than it appeared to be.
What do you want?
And the honest answer was: I don't know. I've been so busy knowing what everyone else needed that I haven't asked myself that question in a very long time.
This is what usefulness costs, when it becomes the whole of you.
It costs your preferences. Your rest. Your ability to receive without immediately thinking about what you owe in return. Your sense of who you are when no one needs anything from you.
It costs the quiet, formless parts of yourself that were never useful to anyone — the parts that just are. That daydream. That wander. That want without reason or justification.
Those parts get quieter and quieter until you can't hear them at all.
And then one day the house is still and everyone is taken care of and you sit down and feel — nothing. A strange, disorienting nothing. Not peace. Not rest.
Just the absence of the function that told you who you were.
I want to say something gently here, to the woman reading this who recognizes herself:
You are not a function.
You are not the sum of what you produce or manage or hold together or facilitate. You are not most yourself when you are most useful. You are not more loveable when you are more capable.
You were a whole person before you learned to be this helpful. Before you learned that making yourself indispensable was safer than making yourself known.
And that person — the one underneath the usefulness — she is still there.
Quieter now. A little bewildered, maybe, by how long she's been waiting.
But there.
Becoming yourself — after years of becoming useful — is slow, disorienting work. It doesn't look productive. It won't make sense to the people who benefited most from your self-erasure.
It will feel, at times, like you are failing at the only thing you knew how to do.
But it is the most important thing.
Not because it makes you more well-rounded or optimized or balanced — not for any useful reason at all.
Just because you are a person. And you deserve to know who that is.
Softly,
Masooma x