The Cost of Being the Strong One
There’s a certain kind of person people run to when life falls apart.
The calm one.
The dependable one.
The person who listens at 2am while quietly bleeding themselves dry in the background.
Take a Piece of Me was written from that place.
Not from bitterness — but from exhaustion.
The poem explores what happens when somebody becomes everyone else’s safe place while slowly forgetting they deserve safety too. It speaks about emotional labour, survival, and the invisible cost of constantly holding others together.
“Every time I give,
I lose a little more of myself.”
That line sits at the heart of the piece.
Because giving is beautiful. Compassion matters. Being there for people matters. But there’s a point where support stops being mutual and becomes self-erasure. Some people become so used to carrying everyone else’s pain that they no longer notice the weight crushing their own spine.
The poem also challenges the idea that strength means being unbreakable.
Real strength is not endless sacrifice.
Real strength is recognising your own pain has value too.
That final shift in the poem matters deeply:
“Your pain has value —
So do you.
But so do I.”
That is the boundary.
Not cruelty.
Not abandonment.
Just the quiet understanding that self-destruction should never be the price of love.
Stylistically, the poem keeps things stripped back and direct. The pauses and spacing mirror emotional exhaustion — almost like someone speaking between breaths. There’s no over-decoration because the emotion itself carries the weight.
The piece resonates with many people because it reflects something common but rarely spoken aloud: the loneliness of always being “the strong one.”
The friend everyone leans on.
The partner who absorbs chaos.
The family member who keeps functioning no matter what burns around them.
And eventually, the question comes:
Who holds them?
Sometimes poetry becomes the answer to that question.
Not because it fixes the pain, but because it finally names it.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤