Self-Sufficiency Is a Myth that Must Die
I had a call with a boss once—our first real one in months. She said, “You’re so self-sufficient that I forget to check in.” She meant it as praise, but it wasn’t.
It’s a pattern I know well. I get labeled “independent,” which is true but also isolating. People assume I don’t need support, when what I actually crave is deep mentorship. Not management. Mentorship. Someone further along the path who can stretch me, challenge me, see me even when I don’t ask to be seen.
Self-sufficient. Type A. Capable. The Little Red Hen of every room. The one who can do everything. The one who figures it out. The one managers forget to check in on. The one bosses and family and friends assume is “fine.”
If you’re that person, people don’t ask how you’re doing. There’s no mental health check-in. No “Are you okay?” No “Do you need support?”
And even when you ask for help, people often don’t believe you actually need it.
Years ago, a holistic astrologer told me something that has proved unsettlingly accurate:
“Even when you ask for help, people won’t believe you need it, because you are so self-sufficient,” he explained. “It will take you breaking down for anyone to understand.”
That has rung true for 46 years now.
It takes a breakdown for anyone to realize I need support. And break down I have.
And this is why I’ve come to hate the idea of self-sufficiency.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know this already: I love community. I believe in it deeply. Last night, I sat in a living room in Amman with 10 women—strong, feminist, take-no-shit women from different cultures all over the world—and we talked about the book we’d just read together: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq.
Over and over, we came back to the same thought: So many of the women in this book would have been so much better off if they’d just had one person. One person to support them. One person to check in on them. One person to be on their side so they didn’t feel like they had to navigate life all alone.
And then we asked the better question: What if they didn’t just have one person, but a whole community?
Today at lunch, a friend told me she’s thinking about her next phase. She recently left a job and is asking all the big questions. What comes next? What does she want? What does she build now?
And she kept saying one thing: “I don’t want to do it alone.”
We have so much reverence for self-sufficiency. For doing it on our own. For being the visionary. For starting something from scratch and owning it entirely.
Maybe self-sufficiency isn’t strength so much as a habit. A habit that we thought was keeping us safe. Maybe real strength is letting people in, even when you know how to do it yourself.
But we don’t actually have to do this alone. In fact, we’re not meant to.
We can’t all be visionaries in isolation. We can’t all create in a vacuum. We don’t all need to carry the full weight of an idea, a transition, a life—by ourselves.
We need teams. We need collaboration. We need other people—especially other women—who see us, reflect us, challenge us, and steady us.
Self-sufficiency might look powerful from the outside, but it’s often lonely on the inside. And too often, it becomes the reason no one shows up until you’re already on the floor.
I want to kill the myth of self-sufficiency.
This is what I do professionally as a coach. But more than that, it’s what I love doing as a human: connecting people to people. Building webs instead of pedestals.
We are not meant to white-knuckle our way through life. Let’s stop worshipping self-sufficiency and start choosing community instead.
