Pieces of Me

The minute I stepped outside my front door, I stopped being a private citizen.

A congregant on the corner. A familiar face at the bus stop. A phone call before 8 am. It didn’t matter that I was tired. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had breakfast or that my mind was still somewhere between sleep and the day ahead.

The moment I crossed that threshold, I belonged to everyone else.

I answered to many names in those years.

Daughter. Mother. Friend. Caregiver. Leader of Women. The Problem Solver. Renegade. Hussy and The Holy One. I wore them all — some titles were given to me, some sewn on quietly by expectation or projection, some I picked up myself because no one else would.

I told people I met outside the church: if you want to reach me, call me there. That’s where I am.

While I said it matter-of-factly, I didn’t hear what I was actually saying — that I had no life outside of those walls. That my entire identity had been absorbed into one role. That if you wanted to find me, you had to go to the place where I existed for everyone else, because there was nowhere I existed just for myself.

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I want to be honest about what those years gave me, because the cost means nothing without the gift.

It didn’t feel like work. Not for a long time.

There is something extraordinary about watching a woman find her footing in real time — seeing her discover a solution she didn’t know she had, or receiving one she desperately needed. To do that work in a spiritual context, in community, with purpose and meaning woven through every day — it was everything I had ever wanted, bundled into one place. I had done pieces of this work in different rooms over the years. Here, it was whole.

I loved it. I was built for it.

Until I wasn’t.

Or rather, until the weight of carrying everyone else’s interior life, on top of my own, became something my body could no longer sustain in silence.

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The heaviest role wasn’t the one with the title.

It was Daughter. Caregiver to an aging mother whose mind was leaving her slowly, steadily, without mercy. It was the unspoken weight of the congregation’s women — their needs present even when unvoiced, their struggles something I absorbed whether I meant to or not. For a season, I spent mornings crying before work, heavy with the sadness of the stories I held. It was the grandchildren who came early into the world and needed everything I didn’t even know I had to give. It was the son I had raised who still needed a level of mothering, the relationship I was trying to fit into the margins of a schedule that had no margins.

I didn’t feel I had options. I felt a call. And with the call came obligation — to give everything, because it was God-given work and I was needed, and being needed felt like purpose.

What it cost me was myself.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Quietly, steadily, the way you don’t notice a slow leak until the room is already flooded.

I didn’t start figuring out who I was until after I left. What I thought. What I wanted. My own views on everything — including God. I had been so absorbed into the community, so defined by what I gave, that the individual self had receded. Not entirely. But enough that when I finally had silence, I had to learn myself all over again.

When someone asked “how are you” during those years, my role answered. Without hesitation. Without even consulting me.

I was losing myself. And on some level, I knew: if I didn’t claim myself again, I might lose the desire to.

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I still carry caregiving. I always will. But I carry it differently now.

I am conscious of it. I choose it. I am not unconscious — giving it away to anyone who holds out their hands. I know now that my care is a gift, and gifts are given with intention, not obligation.

And I have made a decision that has changed everything:

I am my own primary caregiver.

The same devotion I gave to the congregation, to my mother, to my grandchildren, to everyone who needed me — I am learning to give it to myself. Not instead of others. Not selfishly. But first. Because the world, I have learned, will still spin without me. People have the ability to care for and choose their own lives.

Just as I do.

Matthew 22:35–37 tells us to love the Lord with all our heart and our neighbor as we love ourselves. But notice — loving yourself is the standard, not the afterthought. When we put community before self, as we so often do, we are ignoring the very spiritual principle we claim to live by. My first obligation is to love myself — not as an event, but as a practice.

If Week 1 was black and white — the void, then the open space — Week 2 is blue. The deep, interior blue of finally seeing clearly what you’ve been carrying. Blue is not sadness. Blue is depth. Blue is the color of honest reckoning.

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There is one name I never set down. One role that was never a burden, never a cost, never something I performed for anyone else.

Teacher.

That is my true calling. The love of my life. The thing I am, no matter what else I become or release. I will always be a teacher of something — no matter how large or small the room, no matter how many or how few are listening.

But I learned something essential on this side of the threshold:

I am a teacher. But I am not everyone’s teacher. Not every moment is a classroom. Not every person is my student. Some things I keep for myself now — thoughts, wisdom, knowing — held close, offered only where they are genuinely desired.

Teach always. But teach with discernment. With respect. With empathy for those who actually desire to be taught.

That distinction — between the calling and the compulsion — is the difference between a gift and a burden.

Teacher was always a gift.

The others — the ones I wore like a coat I couldn’t take off — those I am learning, slowly and without guilt, to hang by the door.

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Who answered when someone asked how you were — you, or the role?

The answers you seek are within you. May you have the courage to name them.