The other day I realised I had been carrying something that was not mine for weeks.
It was not a conscious decision. It was one of those burdens that pile up without you seeing them: someone else’s worry, a responsibility nobody asked me to take, a “should” I had been repeating to myself for too long.
The strange thing is that when I identified it, I did not even know when I had picked it up. It was just there, on my shoulders, like a coat too heavy that I had put on one cold day and had not taken off when the heat came.
Letting it go was not easy. There is a part of me that confuses weight with importance, that believes that if I do not carry, I do not care. But caring is also knowing what is not ours. Caring is, sometimes, setting a kind boundary and saying: this is not mine.
I let it go. My shoulders slowly lowered, as if my body also breathed with relief.
I do not know if I will pick it up again one day. I hope not. But if I do, at least now I know how it feels to set it down.