It was after eleven at night, and I was sitting up in bed with the nightstand light on dim. The TV was off. The rest of the apartment was dark. Just me and the phone, scrolling through the day’s messages.
I’d been at my folks’ house earlier that evening, and somebody had asked me to handle something. I don’t even remember what it was now. It wasn’t anything major. It was just one more thing someone needed from me, and I said yes because that’s usually what I do. The person asking wasn’t wrong to ask either. I knew I’d figure it out. I always do.
Sitting there, going back through the day’s messages, I noticed how many of them were people leaning on me for something. It had been like that for a couple of days. Underneath the tiredness of it, a smaller thought landed:
Who does the person everyone goes to go to?
I opened WhatsApp and typed something into a status. I don’t remember the exact words. Just the feeling underneath them: that I’d been carrying a lot of other people’s stuff lately, and I didn’t have anywhere to put down mine. I posted it into the general nowhere of a status update, because there wasn’t a specific person I meant it for. If there had been, I would have sent it to them.
I’ve been the person everyone goes to for as long as I can remember. Family. Work. Friends. The one who plans the trip. The one who fixes the thing. The one who listens without needing something back.
I don’t say any of that out loud. Not to the people who ask me for things. Not to the people who love me. Not to anyone, really. Because saying it feels like complaining, and it isn’t a complaint. Being the go-to isn’t something I resent. It’s how I’m built. I like being useful. I like being trusted. I like being the one people know they can call.
There’s real satisfaction in solving things, pride in being dependable, and something quietly affirming about being the person people think of first when things get complicated.
The truth is I didn’t just get assigned this role. I helped build it. Someone asked. I handled it. They asked again. I handled that too. Eventually people stopped wondering whether I could help and started assuming I would know what to do. Somewhere along the way, competence became part of who I am.
So the trust people place in me didn’t happen by accident. I earned it.
But there’s a specific loneliness to it that nobody around you sees, because from the outside all they see is that you’re capable. They see you show up. They see you figure it out. They see you handle it. What they don’t see is the moment after, when everyone else has put their stuff down and gone back to their lives, and you’re still holding what you helped them carry, plus your own, plus the small quiet weight of knowing there’s no seat across from you where someone’s waiting to take it.
You know this if you’re the one people call.
You know it when the phone lights up, and you already know who it is before you look, and you already know what they want, and you already know you’ll say yes. You know it in the trip everyone’s excited about, that you organized alone. You know it in the group chat where everyone waits for your take before they decide. You know it in the family text thread where three people could handle a thing, and only one gets asked. You know it in the friend who calls when everything is falling apart, because you’re the person they know will answer.
The people who lean on you aren’t wrong to lean on you. They lean on you because you’ve shown them you can carry it. That’s the trade. You built the trust by being trustworthy, and now the trust is a room they walk into every time they have something heavy to set down.
The problem is you built the room. You’re always in it. When it’s your turn to walk in and put something down, nobody’s there.
Who does the person everyone goes to go to?
It took me a long time to hear that question correctly. For years I thought it meant nobody cares about you. It doesn’t. I have people. Good ones. People who love me and would show up if I asked. That was never the shortage.
The shortage was subtler. Different people occupy different places in my life. Someone for work. Someone I send something funny to. Family for certain things. Someone else for advice, or a laugh, or an errand. Between all of them, most of my life is covered.
But that’s different from having one obvious person who occupies for me the role I seem to occupy for so many others. It’s the difference between having people and having a person. When something happens, there isn’t that automatic instinct of I need to tell ___. No single name goes in the blank.
That’s the honest asymmetry. It isn’t grief. It’s just the shape.
That night, after I posted the status and put my phone down, I started talking to God. Not because there was nobody else, but because there were things I didn’t know how to hand to anybody else.
There are things I can take to the people who love me. But there are things no person, no matter how much they love me, can ultimately carry for me. Those things I take to Him.
He isn’t a replacement for the people in my life. He’s what’s underneath them.
That’s the quiet load underneath being everyone’s person. Sometimes it takes a while to realize that having no obvious place to put the weight isn’t the same as having nowhere to take it.
You’re everyone’s person.
He’s yours.
Charles W. writes essays for Built From It, a body of work on the perspective you earn from actually living and what you build from it. Read more at builtfromit.com.
Every Sunday. Free, forever.
