Who Holds the One Who Holds Everyone?

1.The Many Faces People See in You

How beautiful do we find a person who understands everyone? We often consider them the ideal person to spend our lives with, build a family alongside, or simply have as a friend. We admire their ability to listen without judgement, their patience in dealing with different personalities, and their remarkable tendency to find an explanation for even the most difficult human behaviours. But have we ever wondered what it actually feels like to be the person who understands everyone?

If you happen to be that person, you would be quite familiar with the irony of how differently people perceive you. Some might mistake your understanding nature for an attempt to seek attention, labelling you a pick-me, while others genuinely consider you a safe place, a vacant shoulder to cry on whenever life becomes unbearable. You become the person people approach when they cannot make sense of their own emotions, the one expected to understand their silences, forgive their shortcomings and make room for their imperfections.

But somewhere along the way, a rather uncomfortable question begins to emerge: who makes room for yours?

We become so accustomed to explaining other people's behaviour that we sometimes forget to acknowledge how their actions affect us.

We find reasons for their anger, excuses for their absence and explanations for their inability to reciprocate the affection we offer. We convince ourselves that perhaps they are going through something, perhaps they did not mean it, perhaps they simply do not know how to express themselves. And while we continue to understand them, we gradually become strangers to our own emotional needs.

2. The Price of Being Everyone's Peace

But perhaps that is not even what bothers you the most. What truly weighs on your heart is the way people gradually decide how much space you deserve in their lives based on how emotionally available you are to them. Sometimes, because you are always willing to listen, because you rarely turn someone away when they need you, people begin to perceive you as someone who is perpetually happy, someone who has somehow mastered the art of living without complaints. They become so accustomed to finding comfort in your presence that they forget you might be searching for comfort yourself.

Your silence becomes an indication of happiness in their eyes, your ability to understand becomes proof that nothing ever hurts you, and your willingness to accommodate everyone creates the impression that you have no emotional needs of your own. Eventually, they arrive at the conclusion that there is nothing particularly wrong with you, that you are doing perfectly fine, and that perhaps you do not require the same attention they so readily seek from you.

But there is something people need to understand: the absence of complaints is not necessarily the absence of suffering. Not everyone knows how to articulate their pain, and not everyone finds it easy to turn their struggles into conversations. Some people have simply become accustomed to processing their emotions privately. They have learnt to listen even when they desperately need to be heard, to offer reassurance when they themselves are uncertain, and to say that everything is alright when, in reality, they are struggling to make sense of their own lives.

And perhaps the greatest injustice is that the more effortlessly you make other people feel understood, the less likely they are to question whether you feel understood yourself.

3.Surrounded by Everyone, Belonging to No One

And perhaps the worst part of it all is that people become so convinced that you are doing fine that they eventually stop making an effort to find out whether you actually are. They assume you have enough people around you, simply because you seem to share a comfortable bond with everyone. You are familiar with so many faces, involved in so many conversations and available to so many people that your loneliness becomes almost impossible for anyone to imagine.

But the reality can be quite the opposite. You might be close to everyone and yet belong to no one. You might have a hundred people who would willingly sit beside you to share their troubles, but struggle to name even one who would instinctively look for you in a room full of their loved ones. You are present in people's lives, but rarely their first choice. You are remembered when someone needs reassurance, approached when someone needs advice and appreciated for the comfort you provide, yet somehow overlooked when it comes to being someone's priority.

You become that familiar shoulder, that dependable source of support, the person whose presence is almost taken for granted. People do not feel the need to ask whether you are available because, in their minds, you always are. They do not wonder whether you might need someone to lean on because they have grown accustomed to seeing you stand firmly for everyone else.

And perhaps that is the loneliest position to occupy: being so deeply woven into other people's lives that everyone knows where to find you, yet having no certainty about where you belong yourself.

The Two Versions of a Person Nobody Knows

And perhaps this is where it begins to affect your mental health the most. You gradually become so accustomed to prioritising other people's problems that you start treating your own as insignificant. You begin measuring your struggles against theirs, convincing yourself that whatever you are going through is too minor to deserve anyone's attention. You tell yourself that other people have bigger battles to fight, that your complaints can wait, and that perhaps you are simply making too much out of something that should not bother you this much.

Eventually, this way of thinking becomes so deeply rooted that you continue prioritising others even when you are painfully aware that very few of them would do the same for you. You become your own worst critic, constantly questioning whether your feelings are valid enough to be expressed. You stop sharing your problems, not necessarily because you have overcome them, but because you have convinced yourself that speaking about them would only add to someone else's worries without changing anything for you. So you learn to keep everything to yourself. You become increasingly selective about what you reveal, until eventually, there is an entire part of your existence that nobody around you knows about.

And this is how you begin to develop two entirely different versions of yourself. There is the cheerful, smiling girl who lightens up everyone's mood, makes people laugh and somehow manages to bring warmth into every room she enters. She is the person everyone recognises, the one who seems to have an endless supply of happiness to distribute. But then there is the other version, the one that exists behind closed doors. The girl who spends her nights crying, struggling to put her emotions into words, sometimes feeling as though she is silently screaming for someone to notice that she is not okay.

And the irony is almost unbearable. Nobody knows what state of mind you were in just hours before they met you. Nobody knows that you could barely bring yourself to sleep after a night of crying, that you had spent hours trying to gather yourself together, or that getting out of bed and facing another day had required more strength than anyone could imagine. Yet, by morning, you are once again the same girl consoling someone else's heartbreak, listening to someone else's worries and offering the very reassurance you had desperately needed the night before.

You become exceptionally good at hiding the evidence of your own suffering, until people begin to mistake your ability to conceal it for an absence of pain.

Perhaps My Loneliness Was Leading Me Somewhere

But perhaps there is another way of looking at all of this. Perhaps, in some unexpected way, this has also been my blessing. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I gradually found myself growing closer to Allah. When you repeatedly find yourself without a shoulder to cry on, you eventually realise that there is always a floor to bow upon. When the words you desperately wish to share with someone remain trapped somewhere between your heart and your lips, you discover that you never really need to find the perfect words when speaking to your Creator.

There is a certain kind of comfort in knowing that you do not have to explain the entirety of your suffering to be understood. You do not have to pretend to be cheerful, arrange your thoughts into sensible sentences or convince anyone that your pain is worth acknowledging. You can simply lower your head, let your tears fall and place before Allah everything you have struggled to carry alone. The things you could never bring yourself to tell another human being are never beyond His knowledge.

Perhaps all those nights when I felt there was nobody to turn to were also the nights when I learnt where to find refuge. And perhaps the very emptiness I once considered my greatest misfortune became an opportunity to discover a connection that did not depend on how cheerful I appeared, how much I could offer or how well I understood others.

Because when you don't have a shoulder to cry on, you always have a floor to prostate.