I never needed anyone (that was the problem)

I’m writing to you from Mexico. When I woke up there was a coffee waiting for me at the door. Someone is going to cook for me. Someone will drive me where I need to go this afternoon. There’s only the sound of birds chirping outside after a stormy night.

I haven’t experienced this kind of care in such a long time. And as much as I’ve been enjoying it, it’s also felt strange.

You should know how I live and how I grew up, because it explains most of this.

I live alone in a rural mountain town outside Palm Springs. There are no stoplights. The nearest real grocery store is an hour drive. I take my own trash out. When I’m sick I make my own soup, standing up, because there’s no reason to sit down for an audience of one.

I run my business alone, too. Every client, every invoice, every session where I hold the full weight of another woman’s history in my hands for sixty minutes and then set it down and pick it up again on Monday.

And my whole life, people have handed me the same words like gifts. “You’re so strong. Capable. So independent. You never need anything, do you?”

I wore those words like a medal. It took me a very long time to understand they were also a diagnosis. Because hyper-independence isn’t a personality trait. It’s what a child becomes when needing someone was never safe.

I’ve told you about my father’s drinking. About being the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrant parents. About learning to read a room before I could read a book. Somewhere around age seven, I also learned that the fastest way to never be disappointed is to never need anything from anyone.

If I don’t ask, no one gets to say no. If I don’t lean, no one gets to move. If I carry it all myself, no one gets to drop it.

I didn’t become independent because I was strong. I became independent because depending on someone felt dangerous. Those are two completely different things wearing the same outfit, and I have spent four decades unable to tell them apart.

This year, my body stopped cooperating with the arrangement.

You know some of this already. The burnout. Then perimenopause. My energy left without asking permission, and for the first time in my life I could not push through, could not out-discipline it, could not out-breathe it. The woman who teaches nervous system regulation for a living could not regulate her own nervous system, and every tool I reached for came back empty.

For months I told myself the same sentence I’ve been telling myself since childhood: I just need to do this better. Eat better, exercise more. I need to try harder. On my own.

It genuinely never occurred to me that on my own was the ingredient making it impossible.

Then I came here, to my Tía Cuca’s house in Mexico.

By the third morning I noticed my shoulders had come down from around my ears, where they’ve lived so long I stopped registering them as tense. I hadn’t done a single practice. No breathwork, no meditation, no protocol, nothing I could put on an invoice.

What happened is that I sat in a room full of people who had me. Who put food in front of me before I asked. Who took the bag out of my hand without saying anything about it. Who did not need me to be the one holding the plan.

And my body, without consulting me first, believed them.

That’s called co-regulation. Our nervous systems were never built to settle in isolation. A baby doesn’t calm herself, she borrows her mother’s calm. She takes the heartbeat, the breath, the low voice, the warm chest, and she uses them like scaffolding until one day she can build the calm herself. That’s how the capacity gets installed. That’s the only way it ever gets installed.

And that capacity does not expire at eighteen. We simply stop letting ourselves use it, because somewhere along the way we decided that borrowing was the same as burdening.

So we buy the app instead. We journal, we take supplements, we cold-plunge, we optimize. All of it is real. All of it helps. And still, it’s one more thing we’re doing to handle it by ourselves.

I know it’s vacation season and most of you have a trip coming up. So I want you to think about the last vacation you took, and whether you came home deeply rested. Or whether you simply relocated your vigilance.

You found the flights. You found the hotel with the good reviews and the restaurant that would accommodate your friend’s gluten free diet. The itinerary lives in your notes app. On the second morning you wake before everyone else in a beautiful room with the air conditioning humming, and you lie there running the scan: Is everyone okay? Is he enjoying himself? Should we have booked the other place? What time do we need to leave tomorrow? And you come home no less tired, and you say the thing everyone says, that you need a vacation from your vacation, and everybody laughs.

A vacation asks you to keep being the capable one in better light. Being held asks nothing of you at all.

I watch this in nearly every woman who comes to me.

They are the most competent people I have ever met, which is precisely the problem. They can handle anything, so everything gets handed to them. They haven’t been in a room in twenty years where somebody else was holding it — at work, at home, at their own birthday party, inside their own bodies.

When I ask them when someone last took care of them, they go quiet. Then they start hunting for an answer that will make them sound less alone. They can’t find one. And that silence, more often than not, is where the real session begins.

This is why I’m so passionate about creating retreats where you can finally experience deep rest and not worry about anything.

There’s nothing for you to plan. No one for you to manage. No performance of okay-ness required at breakfast. Someone else has the itinerary. Someone else made the coffee. The only thing asked of you is that you show up, breathe, and let your body remember what safety feels like when it’s coming from outside of you.

Red rocks. Breathwork. Long silences that don’t ask anything of you. A small circle of women who are also tired of being the strong one.

That’s Sedona, September 2–6.

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I want you to know that you are allowed to receive. That you are allowed to be taken care of. Your family will figure things out for five days. And you are teaching them something, too — that making yourself a priority is what a whole woman does.

So tell me: when was the last time someone took care of you?

xo Ana