I Used to Carry My Own Suitcase. Here's What That Cost Me.

I used to be the girl who wouldn't let anyone put my suitcase in the car.

Not the driver. Not my friend. Not the person standing right there with two free hands, offering.

I had it. I always had it.

Now I'm the girl who doesn't know where her passport is or what time her flight leaves tomorrow. Someone else is tracking it. And I'm fine.

I call this my soft girl era. But softness isn't really the point. The point is bandwidth.

I needed that bandwidth back for something scarier than letting someone take care of me. I needed to grow my business.

The thing nobody tells you about being capable

Somewhere along the way, holding everything myself stopped being a choice and became a reflex.

I didn't decide to be hyperindependent. I just noticed, years in, that I couldn't put anything down. Not a suitcase. Not a task. Not a worry that belonged to someone else.

And I want to name something clearly, because I think a lot of us miss it.

That control was trauma too.

Not the loud kind. Not the kind that shows up in a file with a diagnosis attached. The quiet kind that looks like competence from the outside and feels like exhaustion from the inside.

If you learned early that no one was coming, you built a system. The system worked. That's the hard part. It worked so well that you stopped questioning it.

What the research actually says

There's a name for this pattern in Black women specifically, and it's not a pop psychology term.

Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé's peer-reviewed research introduced the Superwoman Schema, published in Qualitative Health Research in 2010. Her work identified five recurring features in the Black women she studied:

1. An obligation to present as strong

2. An obligation to suppress emotion

3. A resistance to being vulnerable or dependent

4. A drive to succeed despite limited resources

5. An obligation to help others

   
   

Read number three again.

Resistance to being vulnerable or dependent.

That's the suitcase. That's not a personality quirk. That's a documented, studied adaptation. And Woods-Giscombé's later work has linked this pattern to real physical outcomes, including sleep disruption and stress-related health concerns.

You are not dramatic. You are not making it up. There is literature on this.

The cost is not what you think

Here's what I expected therapy to do. I expected it to help me stop feeling bad.

That's the version most of us are sold. Something hurts, you go, it hurts less, you leave.

But that's not what happened.

What happened is that I started noticing things I'd been quietly giving up. Not big dramatic losses. Small ones. Ideas I never developed because I was too depleted to think past Tuesday. Help I turned down that I actually needed. Rest I didn't take because rest felt like falling behind.

If I hadn't stopped and course corrected, that control would have kept taking from me. Things I didn't even notice I could have.

That's the part that gets me. You can't grieve what you never knew was available.

Therapy is not just repair work

Somewhere we decided therapy is for people in crisis. You go when it's bad enough. You go when you're broken.

I want to offer a different frame.

Therapy is also about getting the life you want.

Not just ending the bad feeling. Building the thing on the other side of it. The business. The relationship where someone else carries something. The version of your life that has room in it.

For me, putting things down wasn't the loss I thought it would be. It was the only way to free up enough capacity to build something new.

What you're actually deciding

Putting something down isn't losing control.

It's learning what to hold onto so you can grow.

That's the whole thing. It was never about becoming a person who can't handle her business. I still can. I just stopped handling all of it, all the time, alone.

The suitcase was never the point. The point was what I couldn't reach for because my hands were full.

If this sounds familiar

At Odile Psychotherapy Service, we work with Black women across New York and New Jersey who are tired of being the strong one.

You will not have to explain the weight of it before the work begins. We already know. That's the starting line, not something you have to spend three sessions building up to.

Our clinicians work from a trauma-informed, culturally responsive lens, with modalities including EMDR, psychodynamic therapy, CBT, and somatic awareness.

You don't have to be in crisis to deserve support. You just have to want more room in your life than you currently have.

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