Not Built To Bear It All.

I didn’t set out to learn anything profound that evening. I was just tired—mentally wrung out from hours of Neuroanatomy. My brain felt thick, wobbly, the words in my textbook blurring together like ink spilled on wet paper. So, in an attempt to trick myself into productivity, I turned to YouTube, intending to watch a simple explainer on the reticular formation. A straightforward distraction. But before I could even settle into the video, my eyes caught something else—a video showing a shimmering pearl of glass, suspended in slow motion.

It was a scientific demonstration, one of those experiments designed to make the laws of physics feel like magic. Curious, I went on to search about it and I found something,they called it Prince Rupert’s Drop—a teardrop-shaped piece of glass, forged in fire and rapidly cooled in water. The result? A structure so deceptively strong that it could withstand the force of a hammer, but so precariously balanced that the slightest pressure at its fragile tail would obliterate it into dust.

And just like that, I forgot all about the reticular formation. Not entirely because I was curious. Because I knew this. I was this.

I had spent my whole life being the one who could take the hammer blows. The friend who absorbed every tearful phone call, every whispered confession, every moment of someone else’s world caving in. The one who always knew what to say, how to hold people together when they felt like they were falling apart. The reliable one. The strong one. The unshakable one.

Until, of course, the moment came when I needed steady hands to hold me. And I realized no one had ever thought to check where my own fractures lay. Till I discovered alone one night,that despite being the napkin to wipe others’ tears, mine would only ever pool around to drown me.

There’s a certain loneliness in always being seen as the strong one. People assume being an ‘amazon’ is your natural state, not something you’ve had to construct, carefully and deliberately, like a bridge straining under the weight of too many crossings. They come to you for shelter, not realizing they are leaning against walls already riddled with quiet cracks. They press and press and press, until one day,somewhere in the deepest, most hidden part of you—something gives way. And just like Prince Rupert’s Drop, you don’t break in halves or fissures. You shatter.

I remember the hundreds of moments my own tail have snapped. It was never an earthquake of a moment, or an hurricane or tornado,nothing grand or catastrophic. Just a simple conversation. On one instance,I had been feeling off for weeks, drained in a way I couldn’t articulate, and I finally mustered the courage to admit when someone asked how I was doing, “I don’t think I’m okay.”

My ‘friend’ barely looked up. “You? Please. You’re fine. You always figure it out. Don’t think about it too much.”

And just like that, the fracture reached its breaking point.

It wasn’t the words themselves, but what they implied—that my struggles didn’t register, that my pain was too out of character to be acknowledged. That I was expected to bear everything, endlessly, without cracking. That somewhere along the way, my strength had stopped being an attribute and had become an obligation.

The physics of it all makes sense. Prince Rupert’s Drop owes its deceptive strength to trapped tension, layers of stress frozen in place. But tension is not infinite. There is always a breaking point, a threshold beyond which even the strongest structure cannot hold.

I think about that now as I write this, about how we move through life convinced that endurance is the ultimate virtue. We tell ourselves to push through, to bear it, to hold firm. But what if survival isn't just about how much weight we can carry? What if it’s also about knowing when to set it down?

Because the truth is, no one was built to withstand endless force. Not glass. Not people.

And if no one thinks to ask where your fractures lie, maybe it’s time to stop waiting for them to notice. Maybe it’s time to speak, even when silence feels easier. The act of acknowledging our own fragility—without shame, without fear—is not weakness at all, but the highest form of strength. The actual of weeding out people who are oblivious to the fact that friendship is reciprocality is the highest form of self aware.

Yesternight , I thought about the people who turn to me in their lowest moments—the ones who call when they need comfort, the ones who crumble in my hands and trust me to hold them together. And yet, when the weight is mine to bear, they find some flimsiness to it all. They dismiss it. You? Struggling? Their disbelief is almost laughable. As if pain is something reserved for a certain sect of humans, as if I have outgrown the right to break.

And so, I’ve learned to keep quiet. Not because I don’t feel it, but because I know how the script plays out. Either they think I’m exaggerating, or they say the words they think I need to hear, rehearsing what chat AI would tell me if I told it my problems , not realizing they feel so pathetically empty . Or worse—they simply don’t ask. They assume I’ll figure it out, like I always seem to do.

But I refuse to carry people who cannot carry me. The kind of friendship that only flows in one direction is not love; it is labor. And I am tired. Tired of holding up walls for people who would not shield me from the rain. Tired of breaking quietly so that others never have to feel the discomfort of my fractures.

So I let go. Not in anger, not in bitterness—just in the understanding that some people are only meant to take, never to give. And in their absence, I find something absolutely expected: solace.

Maybe giving and giving out pieces of my heart is part of what leads to recurring burnout.

Even unbreakable can shatter. But sometimes, the real tragedy is not in the breaking. It’s in never letting anyone see the cracks before it happens. Or worse,being willing to let them see but they are choose to slip on their shields when you need them.