Older, Not Elder

They call it resilience, don’t they? When a girl learns how to carry everything without complaint. When she doesn’t crumble, doesn’t ask, doesn’t flinch. When she shows up, again and again, not because it’s easy, but because no one else thought to do it first.

I am the eldest daughter.

And that role, unspoken but deeply felt, is something I learned to inhabit before I even had language for it. I didn’t grow up in chaos. I had what I needed. But what I lacked was space, the emotional kind. The kind that lets you be small and soft and unsure without feeling like you’ve dropped the ball for everyone else.

No one told me to take responsibility. I just did. It was instinct, born of observation and expectation. The subtle way adults leaned a little too heavily on my competence. The unspoken trust that I would handle it, that I would “just know.” And I did. I always did. Because I didn’t see another option.

My childhood wasn’t taken, it was redirected. Where others were allowed to explore, I was steady. Where others wandered, I calculated. I didn’t daydream much. I made lists. I organised. I anticipated everyone else’s moods like weather patterns and adjusted accordingly.

But let me be clear: I was not a victim of my own maturity. I built my own island, and I built it well. I lived alone there, yes, but I learned how to thrive. People sent over care parcels from the mainland, love, encouragement, the occasional check-in. But I kept the island running. I kept me running. I did not crumble, and I did not resent. I learned to offer care freely, without needing it returned, not because I didn’t think I was worthy, but because I was raised to believe I shouldn’t need.

And that made me powerful.

I know my worth. I always have. I am not waiting to be rescued, not aching for someone to fix what was never broken. What I am is a woman who learned to carry more than her share, and who carries it well. But there’s grief in that too, quiet and clean. Not for what I lacked, but for what I deferred. For the childhood I lived responsibly, instead of wildly. For the moments I traded in exchange for being the steady one. The capable one. The lighthouse.

It was never about being unloved. It was about being relied on before being understood.

Sometimes I look at the girls who came after me—the younger siblings, the cousins, the friends—and I feel a strange, aching pride. I protected their softness at the cost of my own. I shielded them. Not with dramatic sacrifices, but with a thousand small, thankless acts. I made sure they kept their lightness. Their laughter. Their ease.

And I never once expected anything back.

That’s what no one understands about women like me. We didn’t become this way because we needed to prove something. We became this way because someone had to hold the line. We carried the emotional weight so others could move freely. We took the lead not because we were desperate for control, but because we knew—instinctively—that if we didn’t, things might fall apart.

Still, it catches me off guard sometimes. That flicker of envy when I see someone resting without guilt. When I watch someone fall apart without the need to justify it. I don’t want to be helpless, but I do wonder what it would’ve been like to be held before I had to hold.

Not because I don’t believe I’m worth it. I do. I’ve worked hard to know my value. I don’t confuse silence for weakness or softness for fragility. I’m proud of the woman I’ve become—composed, discerning, intentional. But the truth is, strength learned in solitude has a particular cost. Not loneliness, exactly, but a kind of emotional self-sufficiency that becomes hard to dismantle, even when someone finally offers you a safe place to land.

And when they do, because they do, I have to fight the reflex to say, I’m fine. Because I am. But that’s not the point.

The point is, I shouldn’t have had to be. Not always.

So this is for the eldest daughters who never collapsed under pressure, who became the reliable one without resentment, who know their worth not because it was handed to them, but because they built it brick by solitary brick. This is for the girls who became women too soon, not broken, not bitter, just impossibly good at managing what should never have been theirs to manage.

I like to think of a saying “If they wanted to, they will” and I resonate with that because when I wanted to, I did.