我可以扛，但我也不可以扛

For most of my life, I believed love required strength.

Not the soft kind people write poems about, but the practical kind. The kind that wakes up early, works longer, solves problems before anyone notices them. The kind that carries more than its share and does so quietly, because that is what responsible people do.

I learned early that if something needed to be held together, someone had to hold it. So I did.

I carried expectations. I carried stability. I carried the quiet understanding that if I faltered, other things might falter with me. Over time, strength stopped being a skill and became an identity. I became the dependable one, the one who could absorb pressure without complaint.

And when you live like that long enough, something strange happens.

Being loved begins to feel unfamiliar.

Not because you don’t want it. But because you are no longer sure what version of yourself would exist if you stopped carrying everything alone. Strength becomes the role you know how to perform. Letting someone hold you begins to feel less like intimacy and more like losing your footing.

So when love arrived, I met it with hesitation.

Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t know how to be loved without becoming someone else. Someone softer. Someone who might fail the people who depended on me.

It wasn’t love I feared. It was the possibility that I might not be able to carry both love and responsibility at the same time.

Looking back now, I see how limited that understanding was. Strength and being held were never opposites. I simply didn’t know that yet. I only knew how to survive by carrying.

Someone once told me something simple, almost casually.

“You give me a feeling like… 你可以扛，但你也不可以扛.”

At the time I heard it as comfort. A small permission to rest.

Now I understand it was something deeper than that. It was a correction. A reminder that endurance is not the same thing as living, and that even the strongest people are not meant to hold the world indefinitely.

It took me a long time to learn and admit that.

我可以扛，但我也不可以扛.

I can’t carry an empire by myself, I can’t build one by myself either.