Samurai Dog

You hold the line. When something goes wrong you get quieter and more useful, you take the practical end of it, and you narrate none of that to anybody. People rely on you in a way they have never had to put into words, which is exactly how you prefer it to stay.

What you have actually built is a situation in which nobody knows to ask. You never request anything, so people assume you are fine, and then you resent them for an assumption you constructed and have maintained for years. You treat asking for help as a failure of form rather than an ordinary transaction, so the help arrives late and usually from somebody who guessed. The people who love you are standing outside a door you have never once opened, being quietly graded on whether they can work out the code.

Ask for one thing this month. Out loud, specific, to a named person, with no attached explanation about how you would normally handle it yourself. You will find out that the asking was the part you were afraid of, and that whoever you asked had been waiting to be let in.