Agency, Not Strength

There is another undercurrent to my anger that has been revealing itself as my body slows me down.

It is not hatred. It is not superiority. It is not a desire to hurt anyone.

It is outrage at abdicated responsibility.

I am 52 years old. My body has lived a different life than many of the people around me. It has carried injuries, strain, and survival adaptations that are not visible on the surface. I do not wear my pain as an identity. I did not tattoo it onto my skin or make it my central narrative. So people see me now and assume ease.

They do not see the decades that came before.

And when my body falters, when illness strips away my ability to quietly compensate, something else comes into focus: how many people around me are still living from a place of passivity they never outgrew.

I used to think of it as arrested development. Like people frozen in their teenage years. But that never quite captured it.

What I see now is something more precise.

Frozen agency.

People who learned early that action was dangerous. People who survived by complying, deferring, staying small, and letting someone else absorb the consequences. People who were trained to follow rather than choose.

And they carried that adaptation into adulthood.

This would not bother me so deeply if it stayed contained within their own lives. But it does not. It leaks outward. It becomes procrastination that forces others to scramble. It becomes helplessness that quietly drafts someone else into labor. It becomes “I was just doing what I was told,” long after no one is actually holding a gun.

That sentence, more than almost anything else, activates something visceral in me.

Because it is not neutral.

It is a refusal to stand in agency. It is a transfer of responsibility. It is an unspoken assumption that someone else will carry this.

And historically, that someone has often been me.

Here is where I want to be very clear: I do not believe these people are malicious. I do not believe they are consciously scheming to exploit others. Most of the time, I do not think they even realize what they are doing.

Their nervous systems still associate agency with punishment. Their bodies still experience choice as danger. Passivity feels safer than accountability.

That does not make them bad people.

But it does make them unavailable for shared responsibility.

And that distinction matters.

Because my anger is not about being “strong.”It is about being repeatedly positioned as infrastructure.

It flares when I am physically lifting a 180-pound man off the floor while sick, and no one else steps forward. There is no boundary-setting fantasy available in that moment. I am not going to let a human being lie on the ground because I am angry. My ethics will not allow that.

But that does not mean I am consenting to a lifetime of being the only one who acts.

This is where the anger comes from.

Not cruelty. Not judgment. Exhaustion.

I paid the price of adulthood early. I learned to act because inaction was dangerous. Others learned to survive by freezing. Both adaptations make sense. But they do not carry the same downstream cost.

One produces competence and wear. The other produces plausible deniability.

And when those two adaptations meet in adulthood, conflict is inevitable.

What complicates this further is that when I name my limits or reference my pain, it is often turned against me. My history becomes a convenient explanation for why I am “too intense,” “too reactive,” or “too much.” The very suffering that forged my capacity is used to discredit my boundaries.

That is a second injury.

So let me say this plainly, without cruelty and without apology.

I am no longer available to absorb the consequences of other people’s passivity.

This does not mean I lack compassion. It means I am choosing discernment.

I am learning to ask a quieter, truer question: Is this person capable of agency, or only compliance?

If the answer is compliance, I step back. I stop explaining. I stop hoping they will wake up. I stop trying to convert frozen people into active ones.

Not because they are bad. But because my body cannot afford the cost anymore.

I do not want to hurt people. It does not feel good to me. But it also does not feel good to be hurt. And there is a difference between being gentle and being endlessly available.

I am tired.

I will survive. I always have.But survival is no longer the metric.

Health is.

So this is the line I am drawing, quietly and firmly:

I will help when help is shared. I will act when action is mutual. I will care without carrying what is not mine.

This is not abandonment. It is not punishment. It is not moral superiority.

It is a woman listening to her body, honoring her ethics, and refusing to continue a pattern that has already cost her enough.

"It becomes “I was just doing what I was told,” long after no one is actually holding a gun."