“The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong in broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
My grandmother just died. My sister and I came from the room where her body still lay, and we stood silently in the elevator as the door closed. My sister looked at me and said, “Now you are the last strong one in this family.”
It was comforting to hear his words. I feel 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 was not telling me anything new. He was just saying something that I already knew for a very long time, and part of me recognized that I wanted to. But I didn’t know how. nevertheless
To understand why those sounds came out the way they did, you need to go back a hallway. I was six, maybe seven, standing outside my mother’s house. A few months ago he returned from a psychiatric hospital. I was waiting for it. I pictured it, coming back, reconnecting, life getting back to normal, even though by then I had forgotten what normal looked like.
And then he came home, and he closed the door. Behind it, I could hear his typewriter. He was writing a novel.
I knocked politely. By then I had learned to be gentle about my own needs. Came the quick reply: “No. Don’t bother me.” I recognized the certain tone of his voice. I’ve heard it before, when he would tell me I was “too much” for him.
So I left. I don’t remember being angry. I remember realizing that. It seems to understand that the door will be closed. As was the correct response Take care of yourself And don’t ask again. That decision, made somewhere in the 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, began.
When I think back to the days before he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, I mostly remember him waiting to give me some time. I remember her telling me to stop crying because it was too much for her. I’ve been accused of stealing a ring from her, which I didn’t, because she got it wrong. Screaming at my dad that I was too strong-willed and he couldn’t deal with me anymore.
These were all signs of a woman breaking down under the weight of her own psyche, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
When I was about five years old, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with severe psychosis. To be honest, I don’t remember much about those days. My sister was born a few months ago. My grandmother suddenly appeared to pick me up from school. My grandparents took me and my little sister, and suddenly I was in a different town, at a different school, with no friends. Something in me must have decided then that I was in some essential way on my own.
When he came back, I wanted to believe that things would be different. The closed door told me that they were not. So I started working. I took care of my younger sister. I looked at my father. I monitored the atmosphere in our home the way a small weatherman monitors the weather, always scanning, always adjusting, always making sure no one had to worry about me because I was already worried about everything else.
Later, when my parents divorced and my mother settled elsewhere, I also took care of her. Every two weeks, I would take the train with my sister to meet her. Never know what to expect. Being carefully checked for signs of a manic episode. Walking on eggshells doesn’t trigger her.
And when I decided not to see him again at fourteen, I tracked him down from afar, on the phone. for years I can’t remember anything but mother to her. Never his daughter.
Being strong for everyone didn’t seem like I had anything to do then. I thought about who I was. It felt like a necessary task. But one that brought a strange sense of security. As long as I held things together, there was a role for me. A reason would be needed. And feeling the need, if I’m honest, is being liked a lot.
What I didn’t realize at the time, and what took me decades to see clearly, was that I had also built a prison inside it. Because deep down I believed that if I stopped being strong, Everything will fall apart. Not just for the people around me. for me too Because who will be there to catch me? I decided, at age six, standing in that hallway, that the answer is no one.
So I continued. The desire to be useful and significant has pushed me through life. I have worked as a professional actor for two decades. Returned to studies and earned a Ph.D. at forty-five. Start a whole new career at a university. Married, have two children. A life that looks from the outside, like someone who has 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 to see if I had anything left to offer.
The body keeps score, they say. I kept very careful records.
Years later, my sister was going through a difficult time. Everything that was happening in my own life faded into the background. Only one clear focus: launching the powerful one. But this time my body pushed back. I suddenly felt bone chilling. My head started spinning. nausea I couldn’t even sit down to work. I lay in bed for hours, not because I decided to rest, but because I had no other choice.
Lying there under the blanket trying to warm up, something moved. My body made decisions that my mind could not. Said, “Not today.” And for the first time, I let it be enough. It felt like a relief. The next day, I discovered that my sister had operated. That too without me.
The real turning point came on vacation. Mother called. He wanted me to come back as soon as possible and “finally” take care of him. He listed the things he expected of me, the things the girls did. When I tried to stop him, he told me stories about other people’s girls who did these things. And suddenly, when he stopped, I calmly and almost surprised said: “I’m not like that.”
I knew, like I said, it wasn’t true. Not in the way he meant it. For decades I was just like that.
I called every day for years, just to get him out. I saw signs that he needed to be hospitalized. I was, in many ways, more of a parent to him than a child.
But I also knew that what I said mattered to me. I wasn’t going to prove otherwise. not today Not for this. I hung up and felt something new: relief. Relief to set something down.
What I realized, slowly and imperfectly, was this: being strong wasn’t just thrust upon me. I chose it too. It gave me something I desperately needed: a role, a sense of security, a way to be with the people I loved without risking the kind of vulnerability that had already cost me so much. Seeing clearly, without guilt and shame, was the most important part of changing that.
Since then the process has not been getting any less powerful. I’m still strong. It’s truly part of who I am. What has changed is the energy for what. It and I will pay the price for the property. No more proving that I deserve my place.
What I’m learning instead is this: I can be present with the people I love Without taking responsibility for their struggle. I can let someone I love sit through something difficult without rushing to fix it. I can trust that they are capable, my absence from the role of savior is not the same as abandonment.
And slowly, in the space that opens up when I stop managing everything, I’m discovering things I didn’t expect. Finally, there’s room to ask how I’m doing. And the room, for the first time, actually answered.
The decision I made in front of those closed doors was not wrong. It was the best a six-year-old could do with what she had. But I’m not six anymore.
I was never just strong. I am also the person who can be held.
about Femke is unemployed
Dr. Femke E. Bakker is a political psychologist, certified meditation teacher and TEDx speaker. He is the creator of the self-sufficiency approach, a practice of radically accepting yourself as the most important person in order to consistently be worthy of your own decency. She writes and teaches for self-aware adults who, after years of inner work, still gravitate toward self-criticism and folk-joy. Find him at drfemkebakker.com.
