You know who they are.
You do not need me to describe them because the name or the face was already in your mind before you finished reading the title. That specific quality of knowing, the way the body registers certain people before the conscious mind has even finished processing them, is itself information. The nervous system identifies drain long before the intellect finds the language for it.
Maybe they bring you the same problem every week without any movement toward resolving it. Maybe every conversation with them ends with you carrying something they came in with. Maybe they need a kind of reassurance that no amount of your reassurance has ever satisfied, which means they are back next week needing the same reassurance again. Maybe they create situations that require management and you are consistently in the vicinity when the management is needed, not because you seek it but because you are reliably there and reliably capable and the path of least resistance for a person who creates chaos is toward the person who cleans it up.
Whatever the specific form, the outcome is the same. You leave interactions with this person with less than you had before. Not slightly less. Meaningfully less. The kind of less that colours the hours that follow, that sits in your chest in a particular way, that makes you feel that something has been taken from you without your full consent.
And then you feel guilty about feeling that way. Because they are struggling. Because being drained by someone who is struggling feels like cruelty to name. Because the culture you work in says that good colleagues support each other and good women especially take care of the people around them and who are you to put a limit on that care when someone is clearly in need.
This is the guilt that keeps you in the drain.
—
Let me say something clearly.
Caring about people is not the same as being responsible for their regulation. Being a good colleague does not mean making yourself available as an emotional infrastructure for someone else’s unresolved patterns. Having compassion for a person who is struggling does not mean accepting unlimited access to your energy as the price of that compassion.
There is a difference between supporting someone and carrying them. Support is directional. It moves toward resolution. It involves doing something with someone or for someone that changes the situation in a meaningful way. Carrying is not directional. It is circular. You absorb the problem, you hold the problem, you return the problem softened, and then the problem comes back next week in the same form because you absorbed it rather than redirecting it.
A person who drains you is not always doing so maliciously. They are often doing so because they have learned, through experience with you specifically or with women like you more generally, that bringing their chaos or their need or their emotional weight to you will result in it being received and held. That learning is real. The dynamic it creates is also real. And it will continue for as long as you continue to be the room that receives it.
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Here is what you are not responsible for.
You are not responsible for their emotional regulation. That is something they have to develop, or work on in therapy, or address in conversation with their manager, or take responsibility for in whatever way corresponds to the actual source of the difficulty. Your containing of it is not the same as their addressing of it. And the longer the containment continues, the longer the addressing is postponed.
You are not responsible for their professional functioning. If they consistently create situations that require management, the management system exists for that purpose. Their manager. HR. Whatever structure the organisation has for addressing performance or behaviour issues. These structures exist because individual colleagues are not equipped or paid or supported enough to manage the professional functioning of other adults. The appropriate escalation of a persistent problem is not abandonment. It is accuracy about where the resource to address it actually lives.
You are not responsible for their feelings about your boundary. When you reduce your availability to someone who has been draining you, they will likely feel something about that reduction. Some version of rejection or abandonment or frustration. Those feelings are real. They are also not yours to manage. You did not create the drain. You are not obligated to maintain it to protect them from the discomfort of your no.
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What does it actually look like to stop carrying someone else’s weight at work?
It looks like redirecting rather than absorbing. When the problem they bring you belongs somewhere else, you say so. Not unkindly. Not with a lecture about appropriate channels. Simply: I think this is one for your manager. Or: have you tried bringing this to HR. Or, for the smaller things: I am not the best person to help with that, but I think you might find it useful to try this instead. The redirect is not a rejection. It is an honest assessment of where the resource lives.
It looks like limiting the duration of interactions that consistently drain you. You are allowed to end a conversation. You are allowed to say I need to get back to my work now in a tone that does not invite further conversation. You do not need to explain the limit or justify it. I need to get back to my work is a complete sentence.
It looks like not being the first person to fill the silence. Draining people are often draining because they have learned to wait. They wait until someone who is uncomfortable with the weight in the room moves to pick it up. You are allowed to leave the weight where it fell. You are allowed to let the silence stay. The silence is not your responsibility either.
—
The guilt will come. Let it come.
Guilt and wrong are not the same thing. You can feel guilty about a limit that is completely appropriate. The guilt is the enforcement mechanism of a social expectation that was never fair to you in the first place. The expectation that you will absorb what others cannot hold. That you will be the room that everything finds its way to. That your capacity is communal property.
Your capacity is not communal property. It is yours. And you are allowed to decide what it is spent on.
The colleague who drains you is not your problem to fix. They are someone else’s problem to fix, or their own problem to fix, or a problem that requires the appropriate organisational resource to address. What they are not is a problem you are required to quietly absorb for the sake of being the kind of woman who makes herself available to everyone who needs her.
That version of availability has a name. It is called depletion. And you are done being depleted.
