I wonder how many things we've carried simply because we never stopped long enough to ask whether they were ours to carry.

I think I finally started asking that question because I was exhausted.

I was so worried about figuring out someone else's problems, and so worried that I wasn't doing enough for them, that somewhere along the way I completely neglected myself. Not just in the way we sometimes say, “I need to take better care of myself.” My body was actually shutting down.

It was as if my heart and my mind were in competition with my body. My heart kept telling me to help. My mind kept trying to figure out what else I could do, what I was missing, or what I hadn't thought of yet. Meanwhile, my body was saying, I can't keep doing this.

There was a real fight going on inside of me, and my body was winning.

I had never been very good with boundaries. I didn't really know where helping ended and carrying began, so I kept doing both. But when I finally reached the point where I couldn't do it anymore, my weakness with boundaries flipped completely upside down.

The boundary didn't become a line. It became a slammed door.

I had to completely remove myself from this person because, at that point, I didn't know how to stay connected without picking everything back up again.

I think that's something we don't talk about very often when we talk about boundaries. We make them sound so clean and healthy, as though one day we simply recognize where the line should be and calmly draw it.

That wasn't my experience.

I had spent so long without a boundary that by the time I finally created one, I didn't know how to build a gate. I only knew how to build a wall.

At that point, I needed the wall. I needed to put down what I had been carrying long enough to understand that laying it down didn't mean I stopped loving the person attached to it.

Eventually, I had to learn how to love without solving. I had to learn that I could pray for someone without trying to control the outcome, and I could care deeply about what happened to them while still recognizing that some things belonged between them and God.

That's when the question changed.

Instead of constantly asking myself, “What else can I do?” I started asking God, “Is this even mine?”

I had spent so much time worrying that I wasn't doing enough that I never stopped to consider that I might actually be doing things God never asked me to do.

And I wonder how many of us are exhausted for that very reason. We're carrying people, problems, outcomes and responsibilities because we love deeply and want to help, but somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether they actually belonged in our hands.

Sometimes the question isn't whether we're strong enough to keep carrying it.

It's whether it was ever ours to carry.