You just stopped holding up people who were never going to thank you for it.”

I cried a little, when she said that, sitting on the porch swing in the sun — not from sadness, but from the specific relief of hearing a true thing said plainly by someone who loves you.

Because Evelyn had named, in one sentence, the exhaustion I had lived inside for seven years without ever having words for it.

I had been holding up people who were never going to thank me.

That was the whole weight of it.