She never over-functioned to be liked.
She never stepped in to be chosen.
She never carried weight to avoid being left.
Her body was trained for something far sharper:
Prevent disaster.
Prevent collapse.
Prevent irreversible harm.
Prevent the kind of pain that destroys lives beyond repair.
Her over-functioning was not people-pleasing.
It was protection.
It was vigilance.
It was the impossible assignment she took on long before she had language for it:
Not on my watch.
Not if I can stop it.
Not if there is any way to shield someone from breaking in the places that never heal.
She wasn’t saving people to be liked.
She was saving them from the outcomes she could not bear to witness…
She watched the world too closely.
She saw the cracks before others noticed the first fracture.
She lived in a constant state of anticipation because she feared catastrophe.
If she didn’t over-function, the damage would be unbearable.
If she didn’t intervene, someone might shatter.
If she didn’t hold the line, >the bad ones< might get away with their cruelty.
If she didn’t stand between chaos and consequence,
the world would become too painful to look at.
This wasn’t anxiety.
It was a moral vow her nervous system cemented into her body:
“If I do not act, the world will harm itself and I will not survive watching it happen.”
That is what her body learned.
That is what her spine learned to meet.
That is what her breath held every day.
Over-functioning wasn’t her way of belonging.
It was her way of preventing annihilation…
the collapse she could not metabolize,
the heartbreak she could not absorb,
the violence she refused to normalize.
Until one day, something subtle shifted.
Someone around her faltered…
not catastrophically, not fatally, not beyond repair…
and for the first time, she didn’t rush in.
Her body reacted instantly:
the surge of adrenaline,
the lift in her chest,
the tightening in her back,
the old reflex screaming,
“If you don’t hold this, something unthinkable will happen!”
But she took a breath… and stayed still long enough to see the truth surface.
Nothing collapsed.
No one died.
No irreversible damage happened.
No monster rose out of the shadows.
The world did not end without her interference.
And her body… that conditioned guardian,
that lifelong protector,
that spine that carried too much…
felt a truth of reality she had never known:
She was never meant to prevent the world from breaking.
She was meant to stop breaking herself trying to hold what was never hers.
Her over-functioning had been the way she kept the world from becoming too painful to endure.
But slowly, she could feel the truth rising from underneath the armor:
The world’s suffering is not her job to prevent.
Human cruelty is not her job to correct.
Other people’s self-destruction is not her job to interrupt.
Reality is not hers to sanitize in order to survive it.
She was never the one holding the world together.
She was the one refusing to stop bracing long enough to see… that the world was not asking her to carry it.
Her body softened…
not because life became gentler,
but because she finally understood:
Over-functioning was the way she kept her soul from shattering at the sight of other people’s pain.
… she finally saw the truth that had been waiting behind every overstep, every intervention, every sleepless scan of the horizon:
The world is allowed to break without it being her responsibility to stop it.
People are allowed to choose badly.
Consequences are allowed to unfold.
Pain is allowed to do its work.
Truth is allowed to reveal itself
without her contorting herself to soften the impact.
And she finally saw the one thing her system had been avoiding…
The breaking she tried to prevent was never hers to manage.
And the pain she feared was never hers to absorb.
Her over-functioning had nothing to do with LOVE…
Every soul is already in a relationship with God.
Their breaking and their healing are happening in that relationship… not hers.
She finally understood…
Compassion holds a person in their experience.
Terror tries to edit the experience itself…
…
When you leap in from terror… you step between them and what their life is trying to show them.
You are not stopping pain… you are replacing God with yourself.
And we are not built to hold that….
…
And in her next exhale, she let go.
~mk