Usefulness gets you looked at.
By the time I was grown, I had built an entire personality on that foundation, and I wore it proudly, the way you wear anything you’ve mistaken for a virtue.
I was the responsible one.
The dependable one.
The one who could be counted on.
I collected those descriptions like medals, and I never once noticed that every one of them described what I did for other people, and not one of them described who I was to them.
There is a specific loneliness in being praised only for your usefulness, and it is a loneliness that hides very well, because from the outside it looks exactly like being valued.
I could not see the difference for three decades.
I doubt I would have seen it that afternoon either, if the difference had not finally been printed on my phone in fourteen cold words.
Every emergency, somehow, became mine.