What do Dora the Explorer, a horse, and the number five have in common?

They were three of the birthday cakes I made for my daughters – by hand, from scratch – across the years I was also working full-time, finishing a PhD, training for half marathons, and holding a home and a family together.

Reading that back, it sounds exhausting. At the time, it felt like proof of something. The cakes had to be homemade. If something needed planning, doing or holding, I was the one to do so – and some part of me was glad to be.

It took me longer than I’d care to admit to notice what was sitting underneath the pride: a thread of obligation and resentment I’d rather not have felt, and a sense, never quite spoken, that I was carrying all of it alone.

What I couldn’t see, for the longest time, was the cost of all that holding. By filling every space, I’d left none for anyone else to step into. The people closest to me never got the chance to carry what I’d taken on as mine – and so I carried it all, sure no one else would, or maybe even wanted to. The signal that something was off was the resentment itself. And it was mine. I had authored the very situation I was busy resenting.

Yours may look nothing like cakes. It might be the report you take back to rewrite, the call only you can be trusted to handle, the decision that never quite leaves your desk. The shape is the same wherever it lands – the certainty that if you don’t hold it, no one will, and the reach to do it yourself before anyone else can.

In an organisation, the cost of this compounds. The one who holds everything becomes the place the work waits – the reason nothing moves when they step away, the bottleneck no one names because it wears the badge of reliability, responsibility, expertise. Dedication, from the inside. But from a few feet back, a ceiling: the team can only grow to the size of what that one person is willing to put down.

We tell ourselves a story of dedication, and it isn’t false. We carry the load because we care, because it is genuinely faster to do it ourselves. That truth is what keeps it invisible – the more reasonable each act of holding on, the less it looks like a pattern at all.

It helps to give this its name. Call it a string – something that pulls us into a behaviour, even as we feel that we are the one choosing it. This particular string of indispensability is hard to see because the world rewards it: the person who carries everything gets praised for it, and is rarely the one anyone thinks to stop. And so the string stays hidden in plain sight, wearing the face of virtue.

The shift begins with noticing – catching the resentment or the obligation as it arrives, and asking what it is pointing at. Often it points at something we would rather not own: that the frustration we feel about no one else stepping up belongs, at least in part, to a gap we never actually left open.

And often, making room is not a tidy exchange. We step back, and others don’t always step forward – at least not straight away. The space sits empty for a while, and the pull to fill it again is almost physical: the slower, rougher version of the thing, the ball dropped, that we could have – would have – caught. Making room means tolerating that. It also means knowing the difference between leaving space and simply walking away – between trusting someone to grow into it and abandoning them in it. That discernment is the work, and it’s harder than carrying everything ever was. Which is partly why so few of us do it.

This is one string among many. Once we feel it in a single place – a home, a team, one relationship – we start to recognise its shape elsewhere. The same hand that fills every gap in one part of our lives has usually been filling gaps somewhere else for far longer.

Where are you still the one who carries it all – and who might grow into the space, if you let it go?