Nobody Worries About You
A Friday reflection
Good. Last Friday established the voice and set the standard — raw, clinical, personal, landed hard. This one needs to hit a completely different nerve. Different entry point, different texture, same uncompromising honesty.
Here it is:
TITLE: Nobody Worries About You
SUBTITLE: A Friday reflection
BODY:
There is a specific category of person nobody worries about.
You know who they are. Competent. Reliable. The one who handles it. The one who shows up. The one who, when asked how they’re doing, says fine with such convincing efficiency that the person asking feels genuinely reassured and moves on.
I have sat across from these people in clinic for twenty-five years.
They are the most at-risk people I treat.
Not because they are fragile. Because they are so functional that nobody — including themselves — registers the cost of the functioning. The body absorbs it quietly. The personality reorganizes around it. The marriage accommodates it. The calendar fills around it. And slowly, over years, the gap between what is being performed and what is actually happening underneath grows wide enough that the person themselves can no longer remember which one is real.
I asked a patient last week — a man who runs a team of forty people, two companies, and a household — when was the last time someone took care of him.
He sat with that question for a long time.
I don’t think that’s a thing that happens to me, he said finally.
He said it without self-pity. That was the disturbing part. He had simply organized his entire existence around a version of himself that doesn’t require anything from anyone — and called it strength.
It is not strength.
It is the most sophisticated cage I know.
The person who never needs anything has not transcended need. They have buried it somewhere load-bearing. And the body — the tireless, loyal, exact body — keeps meticulous records of everything that was stored there instead of felt.
Nobody worries about you.
That might be the most important thing to worry about.
— Kambiz