I’ve Got It. Unfortunately.

Travel does something to the mind…eventually.

For me, it takes a while. I am a constant worker, so even when I am technically away, some part of my brain is still answering, planning, organizing and making sure everyone has what they need. My body may be looking at the sea, but my mind is still running a small administrative office.

Then, after a few days, something begins to soften. I stop checking the time quite so often. My thoughts wander a little more. I start noticing what I may be going through, what the people around me are carrying and the things I have been too busy to hear in myself.

This summer, one thought kept coming back to me: what if some of the qualities we consider our greatest strengths are actually survival skills we learned a long time ago?

The older I get, the more I realize that all of us develop certain ways of being in order to survive. I don’t mean survival in the dramatic sense. I mean emotionally—to feel loved, accepted and safe in the families and circumstances we were born into.

I’m not sure we consciously choose these skills. I think we simply discover what works.

Some of us learn to be independent. Some learn to achieve. Some become caretakers and make sure everyone else is okay. Others become funny, agreeable, invisible, perfect or endlessly productive.

Whatever works, we repeat.

Over time, those skills become part of our personalities. They shape our relationships, our careers and the way we move through the world. Often, they help us build beautiful, meaningful lives.

The problem is not the skill itself. It is that nobody tells us when we may no longer need to use it quite so much.

This summer, while traveling with my family, I began to notice one of mine: independence.

Whenever something came up, a change in our plans, a decision that needed to be made, some small logistical problem, my instinct was not to ask anyone else what they thought. Before I had even considered including them, my mind had already decided, I’ll figure it out.

It was not a big dramatic realization. It was more like catching myself doing something I had done a thousand times and suddenly wondering why.

For most of my life, I would have called independence one of my greatest strengths. And in many ways, it is.

I grew up with loving parents who gave me so much, but there was not always a roadmap for the life I wanted to build. I learned to create one myself. I learned to make decisions, adapt, trust my instincts and keep moving forward, even when I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going.

Those skills served me very well. They helped me build a career I love, a marriage rooted in partnership and a family that means everything to me. I am genuinely grateful for them.

But standing there on vacation, surrounded by people who love me, I realized that I wasn’t carrying everything because I had to.

I was carrying everything because that was what I knew how to do.

And honestly, I had become so efficient at it that I barely noticed.

Maybe your version wasn’t independence. Maybe it was being useful, agreeable or endlessly productive. Perhaps you learned that making everyone else comfortable kept the peace, or that achievement brought attention and praise.

Maybe you became the funny one because humor lightened the room. Maybe you became the person who never needed anything because needing things felt complicated. Maybe you became the capable one because nobody else seemed interested in the position.

We all find something that works, and then we keep doing it—often long after we understand why.

As children, these adaptations are incredibly smart. They help us navigate the world we have been given. They allow us to find love, stability and some sense of control.

But as adults, perhaps they deserve another look.

Not because they were wrong. Not because we should be angry with ourselves for having developed them. And certainly not because we should dismiss the lives they helped us build.

I think we simply have to ask whether we still need them in the same way.

I had always called mine independence. More recently, I have wondered whether some of it is what people now call hyper-independence—the quiet belief that being capable also means never needing anyone.

I don’t mean that as a diagnosis. I mean the very familiar reflex of saying, “I’ve got it,” before checking whether I actually want to have it.

It is making the plan, carrying the bags, finding the answer and absorbing the stress because you know you can. And then, occasionally, feeling slightly annoyed that nobody helped with the thing you never asked them to help with.

This is where I am trying to catch myself.

I don’t think the answer is to become less independent or ambitious. Those qualities are part of me, and I value them. I am simply beginning to understand that independence can include asking for help. Being capable does not mean I have to be responsible for every outcome, and trusting someone else to handle something does not make me less strong.

Sometimes it just means I can sit down.

The same may be true for achievement, caretaking or perfectionism. We do not have to throw away the qualities that helped us. We may just need to stop asking them to run every part of our lives.

Maybe growing older is not about becoming someone entirely new. Maybe it is about recognizing the ways we have been protecting ourselves all along and deciding which of them we still need.

I am still independent. I suspect I always will be. But I am trying to notice the difference between doing something because I genuinely want to and doing it because I never considered that someone else could.

I am trying to leave a little more room for people to show up for me.

This is still a work in progress. I do not suddenly ask for help beautifully, receive it graciously and wander off into the sunset carrying nothing but a linen bag. My instinct is still to solve the problem.

But now, every once in a while, I pause.

And that pause feels like something.

Some versions of ourselves save us. The difficult part is recognizing when they have done their job and when we might finally be safe enough to let them rest.

—xx Sasha