I know how this sounds, but bear with me. As I look back at my life, I see a pathological people-pleaser, literally unable to put his own needs first before helping others. While I theoretically knew I had a problem with this, somehow I also imagined myself being an endless source of helping hands. But I only have two hands, and I had to learn this the hard way.
About two and a half years ago, I got married to the most amazing woman I have ever met. Life changed forever, and suddenly I wasn’t sharing my life with only myself. Sure, on my travels through life, I had come across some people in need here and there, and I had done what I could to help them through tough situations. Armed with my past experiences, I firmly believed that those would go to waste if I didn’t use them to help others. This worked pretty okay, as long as I still maintained a reasonable emotional (and–more often than not–physical) distance to all of them.
This was a recipe for disaster
Suddenly, this emotional distance was untenable, because in swept this person whom I seemed unable to stop sacrificially (her words, not mine) give of myself to, and not because I felt my past driving me. No, I was madly in love, and I found my own self fading into the background more than ever. Armed with an entirely new kind of high, I began taking on all sorts of new and selfless acts, both personally and professionally. Lest I digress, let’s just say that if I had been putting myself mostly before others in the past, I now went all-in, poker-style. Lo and behold, a ticking time bomb had been started.
Fast forward to last year, and we were getting ready to be a family of three. It was exhilarating to think that one year from then, we could have a new little life in our embrace. Little did we know we’d first have a miscarriage, followed by a successful, albeit insanely difficult pregnancy (with lots of surprises at every corner), not to mention a next-of-kin’s terminal cancer. Being a husband and son-in-law, I assumed the only right thing to do was to take on family crises, while also continuing to do all those other things I had kicked into motion: volunteer mentoring, association board member, choir practice, paid overtime at work (to solve resource shortages), and keep helping others I had known from before, all while getting 3-4 hours of sleep per night for months on end. It’s safe to say this was a recipe for disaster.
My worth is not dependent on what I can do for others
As we got close to the end of last year, I began noticing something I had felt about 10 years prior. I noticed I started loosing my ability to enjoy anything in life (even the prospect of becoming a father!). Everything became a dead end, even things that would usually give me energy when all else fails. And that was my red flag to seek help fast. I did not want to end up in a similar situation from my past, as I now had a pregnant wife that depended on me. And this is when, for the first time in my life, I had to say a hard “no” to most things I had considered vital for my survival. It turns out that when your existence starts hanging in the balance (and you have a burn-out and depression), a lot of things suddenly become very irrelevant, even other people and their problems. It was hard–very, very hard–admitting to myself that I’m incapable of bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders.
As I’m headed towards the end of this year, 2022, I can confidently say that the world didn’t end with me saying “no” to things, and that there are just as many problems in the world as ever. But more importantly, I think what this experience has really taught me is that my worth is not dependent on what I can do for others or if I am able to fix everybody’s problems. Au contraire, my worth is and has always been very much decoupled from my actions, and my idea of selflessness cannot (paradoxically) stem from the need to be validated. At the end of the day, I must remember that perhaps sometimes, I am the one in need of a helping hand–and that I am no less of a man because of it.
Finntrovert 
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