Why Carrying Other People’s Growth Can Leave You Exhausted
The Weight of Other People's Potential
Photo Credit: Delmaine Donson via iStockPhoto.com
By: Jamila Gomez
There is a particular kind of woman who can look at a person and see exactly who they could become.
She sees the talent the person keeps wasting. The business they keep talking about but never start. The relationship they could have if they would just deal with the thing they refuse to deal with. The version of them that is standing right there, just underneath the surface, waiting. And because she can see it so clearly, she starts to carry it. She believes in the potential harder than the person does. She invests in it. She speaks to it. She keeps showing up for who they might be.
If that is you, you already know how heavy it gets.
Because seeing someone's potential is not the same as them choosing to live it. And there is a specific kind of tired that comes from believing in a person more than they believe in themselves. You end up doing the emotional work for two. You hold the vision steady while they keep setting it down. You make excuses for them, to other people and to yourself, because you can see the good that the rest of the world has not earned the right to see yet.
A lot of us learned this early. We were the ones who saw the best in a struggling parent, a difficult sibling, a friend who kept making the same choice. We learned that loving someone meant holding onto the picture of who they could be even when the person in front of us was not living up to it. And that felt noble. Sometimes it was. But somewhere along the way, the seeing turned into carrying, and the carrying never seemed to end.
Here is the hard part. You cannot want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. You can see the door. You can describe the door. You can stand at the door and hold it open for years. But you cannot walk a grown person through it. And every hour you spend trying is an hour you are not spending on the potential sitting inside you.
That is the part nobody says out loud. While you are busy being a believer for everyone else, who is holding the vision for you? Who is looking at your half-finished thing and reminding you what it could become? Often the answer is no one, because you have trained the people around you to expect you to be the strong one, the steady one, the one who sees clearly. They lean. You hold. That is just how it goes now.
So let me offer a gentler way to think about it. Seeing someone's potential is a gift. But it is supposed to be an offering, not a sentence. You can name what you see in a person and then let them decide whether to pick it up. You are allowed to love people exactly as they are right now instead of as the project you are quietly managing. You are allowed to stop auditioning for the role of someone's savior.
And you are allowed to point that same vision back at yourself. To look at your own life with the generous, hopeful, believing eyes you have been pointing at everyone else for years. To finally become the person you keep seeing in other people.
Because the truth is, you have been carrying other people's potential for a long time. It might be time to set some of it down and pick up your own.
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