I was never in a fight. But somehow, I was always in the middle.
That’s the thing about families built on unresolved pain—there’s always someone who ends up being the emotional middleman, the buffer, the peacekeeper, the designated absorber of everyone’s unmet needs.
In mine, that person was me.
Not officially, of course. No one handed me a title or a job description. But slowly, silently, the weight shifted. And by the time I looked up, I was holding what didn’t belong to me.
It started with the way things were handled—or rather, avoided.
When my parents fought, they didn’t resolve. They scattered. One would sulk, the other would rage, and we—the children—learned to make ourselves small or useful. The more chaotic the environment, the more I tried to be the one who soothed it.
Then came the moments when one parent would pit us against the other. My mother needing loyalty. My father needing sympathy. Neither acknowledging that we were children, not mediators.
By the time we were adults, the dysfunction had simply evolved. Sharpened. Deepened.
When my mother left my father without a word, she didn’t say it to me. She knew I wasn’t speaking to her. But she knew that by default, it would fall on me to deal with the mess. And she was right.
When my father came to stay with me, it wasn’t a request. It was a collective silence dressed up as agreement. The eldest decided. The youngest stayed quiet. And I—I said yes by saying nothing. I hosted a man who had once laughed when my mother kicked me out, who had watched me unravel and called it “normal.”
Everyone had a reason to bow out. The eldest had her kids. The youngest had her silence. They both had husbands. I had… no one.
When I tried to say I was overwhelmed, my younger sister reminded me that others had it worse. When I said this was unfair, she said I could just refuse. No one said, “You’re right. This isn’t yours to hold.”
That’s what triangulation does. It makes the person in the middle seem unreasonable when they finally collapse under the weight.
It wasn’t just the emotional load. It was the role itself. The assumption that because I wasn’t married, because I didn’t have children, because I was “available,” I had to be the one to catch the family’s emotional debris. That I owed it to everyone else to be the landing pad.
When I pushed back, I became the problem. The sensitive one. The dramatic one. The one who “hangs on to the past.”
But I am made of the past. We all are. And pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it stopped affecting me.
I see it now—how triangulation shaped every relationship. How I was pitted against my older sister in silent comparison. She with the money and the solutions. Me with the boundaries and the questions. How my younger sister stayed in the grey zone, agreeing with everyone just enough to stay untouched.
It created fractures. Between me and them. But also within me.
Because how do you know what you feel when you’ve spent your whole life absorbing everyone else?
So I stepped out. I cut the lines. I blocked the phone calls. I chose to break the triangle, even if it meant breaking connection.
Because if the only way to stay in the family is to abandon myself, then it’s not family. It’s performance.
And I’m done performing.
This instalment? It’s me naming the system. So I can stop living in it.
I wasn’t built to be the buffer.
I’m here to be a whole person.
Even if that means being alone for a while.