The most exhausted person in your family is rarely the one with the worst relatives. It's the one who became the shock absorber at twelve.
This is a deeply insightful and personal reflection on the phenomenon of parentification, a concept that describes the process by which a child takes on emotional or practical responsibilities that exceed their developmental stage. The author uses their sister as a case study to illustrate how this dynamic can play out in families, and how it can lead to exhaustion and burnout for the child who becomes the emotional infrastructure of the family.
The author begins by describing their sister, who is the most reliable and capable member of their family, but also the most exhausted. Despite having fine relatives, the sister's exhaustion has nothing to do with how difficult their family is, but rather with the role she was assigned at the age of twelve, which she has been performing for twenty-three years without a clear mechanism for resignation.
The author explains how the role is usually assigned in childhood, often without anyone noticing it's being assigned. It happens in small increments, as a child takes on more and more responsibilities, until they become the small functional manager of the family's emotional weather. The child becomes attuned to mood, learns to anticipate, and develops a near-professional level of emotional competence by the time they're fifteen. The family rewards this competence by relying on it more, which produces more competence and more reliance.
The author discusses the particular window in which the role tends to get permanently installed, around the age of twelve. This is when the cognitive equipment for adult-level emotional work first becomes available, and the child starts being treated as a more sophisticated participant in family life. In a family where someone has an unmet need, the twelve-year-old's new equipment makes them useful in a way they weren't before.
The author describes what this kind of exhaustion looks like, as the responsible one does not look exhausted from the outside, but rather capable and on top of things. The exhaustion is happening underneath, as the constant low-grade hum of doing two things at once: being present at the family event and managing the family event. The responsible one cannot simply attend something; they are always also producing it, and this producing is invisible and supposed to be invisible.
The author explains why resigning from this role is almost unthinkable for most people who have it. The first reason is identity, as the role has become so fused with their sense of self that they cannot easily imagine being a different kind of person. The second reason is the family system, as the family has been organized around the responsible one's labor, and if they resign, the labor has to go somewhere. The third reason is that the responsible one has often built their primary relationships around being the responsible one, and to stop being competent is to risk being abandoned.
The author offers a description of what it looks like when the responsible one starts to decline specific instances of the role, in small ways, and how the family adjusts to this change. The author emphasizes that the permission to resign has to come from within, as the family is not going to release the responsible one, and the responsible one has to give it to themselves.
The author concludes by saying that the role is not a life sentence, but a job that can be resigned from, and that the exhaustion is not the person's fault, but it is not going to lift on its own. The role has to be slowly, deliberately, partially set down, and the author offers a hopeful message that recovery is possible, even if it starts with small, partial declines that do not produce catastrophe.
