Letting go Of The Role
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I am stepping out of the role
that never came with a contract
but demanded full-time devotion.
I resign as carrier
of what was never mine to hold—
the unprocessed griefs,
the deferred reckonings,
the choices wrapped carefully
in my capacity to absorb them.
I will no longer translate
your intentions into decency,
your silences into explanations,
your harm into something
that sounds survivable
when spoken aloud.
I am done buffering impact,
standing between consequence and comfort
like a human shock absorber,
trained to soften every blow
at my own expense.
I am not your rescuer.
I have learned the difference
between help and erasure.
I am not your conscience,
the borrowed moral compass
you consult only
when the cost becomes inconvenient.
And I am no longer the glue—
the quiet adhesive holding together
structures that refuse to support themselves,
the unseen labour that keeps collapse
from being noticed.
This is not abandonment.
It is redistribution.
I am returning weight
to where it belongs.
Allowing gravity to resume
its rightful work.
You may feel the heaviness now—
the drag of unchosen accountability,
the unfamiliar strain of standing
inside your own decisions
without a witness
to reframe them.
That is not cruelty.
That is physics.
What I am reclaiming
is not freedom from you,
but fidelity to myself.
I am choosing the life
that does not require my disappearance
to function.
I am choosing the family I found—
built not on obligation,
but on mutual regard.
On love that does not require translation.
On presence that does not demand
my undoing.
They do not need me to fracture
in order to belong.
They do not ask me to carry
what is not mine.
They meet me whole.
And so I go—not loudly,
not bitterly,
but finally relieved of roles
that confused endurance
with purpose.
I am no longer holding the world together
with my hands.
I am using them now
to hold the life
that holds me back.
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