Help feels less like kindness, more like a debt with my name on it.

I have pride the way some people have blood. It runs through me, keeps me alive. I have pride stitched into me like a second skin. I hate the feeling of looking weak in front of anyone, even my own blood. I hate the nakedness of being exposed, the way it strips you down to something small. I will suffer in silence, my body begging for mercy, and still not open my mouth. I could be breaking, my body pleading for mercy, and I would bite down on the scream, suffer quietly, because the sound of asking would kill me faster. I have never known what it feels like to ask and have it received as a right instead of a favor. Not once. Because I have watched the way help moves in this world, how it is never free, how it is quietly transactional. Someone hands you their hand but in the other they're already holding the ledger, keeping count. Help becomes a coin, a burden that must be returned, even if no one says it out loud. I do not want that weight, that kind of debt in my life. So I keep my hands in my pockets. I don't call. I don't text, never reach out to anyone. I will walk through fire before I let anyone see me crawl. Maybe that's why I have always been so passionate about my studies, why I've been the straight-A student, relentless overachiever. Only academic success, only undeniable achievement, makes me feel like I can stand in the world without being mistaken for someone timid, needy, or naive. Maybe that's why I am obsessed with achieving something extraordinary, not because I want to shine for the sake of it, but to feel secure, untouchable, unshaken. Because without that, I fear I will always be that child who cannot ask, who cannot bear to be seen as small. And yet, this pride, this constant striving, I have carried for years, it has tired me more than I can admit. It has kept me upright, yes, but it has also hollowed me out. And sometimes, in the quiet, I wonder what it would feel like to set it down, to receive without debt and to feel, even for a moment, unarmed and not be afraid. Maybe someday there will be someone who can slip past the armor, who'll break this pride, someone before whom I will not have to keep up this endless performance, this constant, grinding effort to appear brilliant and worthy instead of breakable. Someone in whose presence I will soften, fold into like a child, effortlessly and without resistance, giving myself away without fear. Someone from whom I can expect without tallying, because it will not feel like a debt to be repaid but birthright, as natural as owning my body, my hair, my eyes, as unquestioned as breathing. Someone whose giving will not weigh on me like a debt, but feel like something carved from my own marrow, something that has always been mine. Someone before whom I can stand utterly bare, not just in body, but in the nakedness of my trembling gloomy dull soul. Or maybe I will always be like this........