“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many people are stronger in the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
My grandmother died recently. My sister and I had come from the room where his body was still lying, and we were standing silently in the elevator when the doors closed. My sister looked at me and said, “Now you are the last strong person in this family.”
It was reassuring to hear his words. I felt proud. And then, almost immediately, something else. My stomach clenched. I just wanted to stop the elevator and run away and never look back. My sister was not telling me anything new. She just put words to something I had known for a long time, and some part of me recognized that I wanted out. But I didn’t know how. As yet.
To understand why those words landed the way they did, you have to go back a long way. I was six years old, maybe seven, standing outside my mother’s room. She came back from the psychiatric hospital a few months ago. I had waited for him. I had pictured it, withdrawal, reconnection, life getting back to normal, even though by that time I had forgotten what normal actually looked like.
And then she came home and closed the door. Behind it, I could hear his typewriter. She was writing a novel.
I knocked politely. By then I had learned to be polite about my needs. The answer came immediately: “No. Don’t bother me.” I recognized the distinctive tone of his voice. I’d heard this before, when she’d tell me I was “too much” for her.
So I left. I don’t remember getting angry. I feel like I understand. As if it was understood that the door would be closed. Like the right response was to take care of myself and not ask again. That decision taken in a corridor at the age of six or seven became the blueprint for the next four decades of my life.
My mother’s absence, even though she was physically present, had already started.
When I think of the days before his psychiatric hospitalization, I mostly remember waiting for him to make some time for me. I remember him asking me to stop crying because it was too much for him. Accused me of stealing one of her rings, which I did not steal, only because she had lost it. Yelling at her father that I was too strong-willed, and she couldn’t deal with me anymore.
They were all signs that a woman was about to break under the weight of her own mentality, but I didn’t understand it then.
When I was about five years old, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for 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 take me from school. My grandparents took me and my little sister with them, and suddenly I was in a different city, at a different school, where I didn’t have any friends. Then something inside me must have decided that I was, in some essential way, on my own.
When she came back, I wanted to believe that things would be different. The closed door told me they were not. So I became useful. I took care of my younger sister. I kept an eye on my father. I monitored my home environment the way a little meteorologist monitors the weather, always scanning, always adjusting, always making sure no one would have to worry about me because I was already worrying about everything else.
Later, when my parents got divorced and my mother settled somewhere else, I took care of her too. Every two weeks, I would travel by train with my sister to meet him. Never know what to expect. Carefully checking for signs of a manic episode. Walking on eggshells won’t trigger it.
And when I decided at the age of fourteen to no longer visit her, I kept track of her from a distance on the phone. For years. I don’t remember ever being anything other than a mother to him. Never his daughter.
Being strong for everyone didn’t seem like something I had to do at the time. I thought about who I was. It felt like a necessary task. But one that came with a strange sense of security. As long as I was the one to put things together, there was a role for me. A reason is needed. And feeling needed, if I’m honest, is like being loved.
What I didn’t understand then, and what took me decades to see clearly, was that I had also created a prison inside it. Because deep inside I believed that if I stopped being strong everything would fall apart. Not just for the people around me. For me also. Because who will be there to catch me? At the age of six, standing in that hallway, I had decided that the answer was no.
So I kept going. The desire to be useful and remarkable has driven me throughout my life. I worked as a professional actor for two decades. Went back to study and earned a PhD at the age of forty-five. Started a brand new career at a university. Got married, had two children. A life that on the outside looked 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 to see if I had anything left to give.
They say, the body keeps score. My records were kept very carefully.
Years later, my sister was going through difficult times. Whatever was going on in my own life went into the background. Just a clear focus: strong switching on. But this time my body stepped back. I suddenly felt chilled to the bone. My head started spinning. nausea. Even if I wanted to take action, I could not do so. I lay in bed for hours, not because I decided to rest, but because I had no other option.
While lying under the blanket, trying to get warm, something moved. My body made the decision that my mind could not. It said, “Not today.” And for the first time, I let it be enough. It felt like a relief. The next day, I came to know that my sister had passed. Even without me.
The real turning point came on holidays. My mother called. She wanted me to come over as soon as I got back and “finally” take care of her. She listed things she expected from me, things that daughters did. When I tried to stop him, he told me stories about other people’s daughters who had done these things. And suddenly, when she stopped, I said calmly and almost to my surprise: “I’m not like that.”
Like I said, I knew it wasn’t true. Not the way she meant it. I was exactly the same way for decades.
I called her every day for years, just to get her to vent. I kept an eye out for signs that he might need to be hospitalized. I was, in many ways, more like his parents than a child.
But I also knew that what I said was true in a way that mattered to me. I wasn’t going to prove otherwise now. Not today. Not for this. I hung up the phone and felt something new: relief. The relief of setting something up.
What I’ve come to understand, slowly and incompletely, is this: being strong wasn’t just forced upon me. I also chose it. It gave me something I desperately needed: a role, a sense of security, a way to be close to the people I loved, without risking the kind of vulnerability that had already cost me so much. Seeing it clearly, without blame and without shame, was the most important part of changing it.
The process from then to now is not about becoming less strong. I am still strong. It’s really part of who I am. What has changed is what the power is for. It is no longer the price I pay for belonging. Now there is no need to prove that I deserve my place.
What I’m learning instead is this: I can be present with the people I love, regardless of their struggles. I can let someone I care about sit with them without rushing to fix something difficult. I can trust that they are capable, my absence from the role of rescuer does not equate to abandonment.
And slowly, in the space that opens up when I stop managing everything, I’m discovering something I didn’t expect. At last, someone is ready to ask how I am. And for the first time there is actually scope for an answer.
The decision I took in front of that closed door was not wrong. It was the best thing a six-year-old girl could do. But I’m not six years old anymore.
I was never just strong. I am also the one who gets caught.
About Famke E. Becker
Dr. Famke E. Becker is a political psychologist, certified meditation teacher, and TEDx speaker. She is the creator of the Self-Gentleness Perspective, which is the practice of continually acknowledging yourself as the most important person for your gentleness. She writes and teaches for self-aware adults who continue to gravitate towards self-criticism and people pleasing, even after years of inner work. find it here drfemkebakker.com.
