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Gaya

Yes, the bills are unsettling. Yes, your siblings need you. Yes, your parents deserve better and you feel personally responsible for giving it to them. Yes, yes. But calm down. Take a breath that isn't about anyone else for once.

You are trying. You deserve a trophy. Nobody asked you if you wanted this job. You just woke up one day, and it was yours. No interview, no salary, np annual leave. Just an endless, unwritten list of things that are somehow always your problem first.

The moment that sibling arrived, something shifted quietly in your direction, and nobody announced it, nobody explained it, it just became true. You were now the example. The responsible one. The one who goes first and figures it out first and holds it together while everyone else is falling apart. Your siblings fought? You settled it. Something needed handling at home? They called you. Your parents were stressed? You absorbed it quietly and returned only calm, because that's what you do, that's what you have always done.

Everyone called it maturity. Everybody was so proud of how responsible you are, how reliable, how solid. Nobody asked what it cost. 

The resentment you feel sometimes, the one you've never said out loud because saying it would make you sound ungrateful, that is not ugliness in you. That is information. You deserve to be taken care of. Not just your family, siblings, or parents. You, the firstborn who has been holding everything together since before they were old enough to understand what holding things together even meant.

You deserve love that shows up for you without you asking. You deserve rest that doesn't come with guilt. You deserve to spend money on yourself without calculating who else needs it first. You deserve to be someone's priority, not just everyone's solution.

It is okay to put your needs first sometimes. Not every time, not at the expense of the people you love, but sometimes, when your body is tired, when your mind is full, when you have given everything you have and the account is empty, it is okay to say: this time, I come first. That is the bare minimum of loving yourself the way you have spent your whole life loving everyone else.

You have spent a lifetime showing up for everyone else. You are allowed to show up for yourself, too. Not instead of them. Alongside them. As one of the people in your own life who also deserves to be taken care of.

You matter, not just the version of you that is useful. The actual person underneath all of that responsibility. That person deserves to be loved, rested, and taken care of, too.

With love,
<br>From a Middle Child Who Sees You.

The moment your sibling was born, your childhood quietly ended. Nobody announced it. Nobody asked. It just became true.

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