The Shadow of Being Reliable

Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash

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For those of us who grew up in households where hypervigilance provided a sense of safety, we learned to adapt in order to maintain a stable environment. That meant becoming a version of ourselves that could easily sense the needs of others—and then immediately procure whatever was necessary. A misplaced item, a calming word, a disappearing act.

If those around me had everything they needed in the moment, then I could breathe.

As an adult, I realize that I’ve built an entire life on the premise and structure of reliability. Subconsciously, I’ve crafted my persona around being the strong one, the safe one, the responsible one, the one who is utterly dependable. However, reliability can have a dark side as well.

This shadow aspect is that I also developed a belief that I need to handle everything, regardless of my own mental capacity or physical ability. I simultaneously became the Greatest Executor of All Time and the Greatest Pivoter of All Time, easily accomplishing tasks and switching mid-stream or as soon as the previous task is complete.

As a teen, I was captain of every athletic team while pulling straight A’s in Honors classes. My first job was as a 12-year-old cashier at a ceramics studio. I became a CEO at 23 and pushed through for 14 years, even though I was dying inside. The reliable employer, vendor, partner, friend, and adult child.

But the cost of reliability is often invisibility. People rarely ask how you are when they’re so accustomed to your strength and steadiness. Almost no one sees the cracks beneath the polished surface. They don’t notice when you’re exhausted, or when the weight of carrying everything for everyone has hollowed you out.

And when you’re that reliable, you start to wonder: Do people love me for who I am, or for what I do for them?

The irony is that no one asked me to be this way; I constructed this persona because it enabled me to survive my formative years. Decades later, I’m finally on to myself.

Looking back, I recognize reliability as an adaptive strategy—my nervous system’s way of ensuring safety in unpredictable environments. By attuning to others and over-functioning, I minimized conflict and maximized connection. The problem is that what once kept me safe has become overdeveloped. My nervous system doesn’t know how to stop scanning, responding, and carrying. And the cost is my own capacity to feel fully, rest deeply, and trust that others will show up for me.

The truth is, reliability isn’t inherently bad—it’s a beautiful quality that I love about myself. But when it calcifies into an identity, it leaves little room for softness, for neediness, and for humanness. The shadow of being reliable is that it can keep you from being real, from accessing and expressing intense emotions, and therefore from integrating experiences in any meaningful way.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself what it would mean to live and be loved outside of my usefulness. What would it mean to let someone else carry the bag, make the call, notice my silence? What would it mean to trust that I am still worthy even when I am not the dependable one? Who am I at a soul level without the label of reliability?

I don’t have most of these answers, but I do know one thing: the strong one deserves to collapse. The dependable one deserves to be held. The reliable one deserves to be unreliable, every now and then.

I know I’m not the only one with this lived experience.

So many of us—especially those shaped by chaos and dysfunction early on—have built lives on being the steady ground for everyone else. But maybe this moment in history is asking us to do something different: to soften, to rest, and to reclaim the parts of ourselves hidden beneath the weight of responsibility.

Maybe reliability, in its truest form, is learning to be honest about what we can’t or won’t carry any longer—and then communicate that.