Nobody is coming to look after you (and why that’s the best news you’ll get this year)

No one can know you’re hungry but you.

That sounds obvious until you sit with it. Nobody else can feel your tiredness. Nobody can tell that your shoulders have been up since nine, or that you’ve needed a break for two hours, or that the thing you agreed to is quietly draining you. All of that happens inside you, and the only person with access is you.

Which means that if you’re waiting for someone to notice and look after you, you’ll wait forever. Not because the people around you don’t love you. Because they can’t see in.

I waited for most of my life. I was the one who looked after everyone — the fixer, the provider, the one who said “no problem, I can carry it” — and underneath the costume was a person quietly hoping that someone, eventually, would look after him back. Notice he was tired. Ask if he was alright and mean it. Take something off his plate without being asked.

It never happened. And I’ll tell you why it never happened: I’d made sure it couldn’t. I’d built a version of myself that needed nothing, and the people around me believed it, because that’s what I’d shown them. You can’t be rescued from inside a Superman costume.

Here’s what I eventually understood. Nobody is coming. And that isn’t a tragedy. It’s the most freeing thing I know.

Because it means the job is mine. Not “I’ll have to do it alone” — that’s the old, resentful reading. The real reading is: I’m the only one who can, so I’m allowed to. I’m allowed to eat when I’m hungry, lie down when I’m tired, go home when I’ve had enough. I’m allowed to say “I need to eat something before we go” and then eat something before we go. I’m allowed to let people down, in the small, liberating ways that a person with needs sometimes has to.

That last one is the hardest. Letting people down. Not being Superman. For someone whose whole identity was built on carrying everything, putting one thing down feels like the costume tearing — because a lot of us learned, young, that we had to earn our place by being useful. Not be here for free. Be here because we were needed.

You don’t have to earn the air. You never did.

Boundaries, in the end, are just this: accepting that nobody else can look after you, and doing it yourself, out loud, without apology. “We’re going to be a bit late — I need to eat first.” “I can be with you in half an hour.” “Not tonight.” None of that is selfish. It’s the only way your needs get met, because you’re the only one who knows they exist.

And the strange thing is what happens to the waiting. Once you start looking after yourself, the ache of hoping someone else will — the one you didn’t know you were carrying — just goes. You’re not waiting any more. You’ve got your own back.

If you’ve spent years quietly hoping to be rescued, none of that was weakness. It was a child’s hope that never got answered, still running. It’s not your fault. But you’re the adult now, and the adult can do what the child couldn’t.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online — ten minutes of coming back into the body and hearing what it needs. Come and try a session, and see how you feel afterwards.

— Adam