The mature responsible good girl is often incredibly lonely and this is a reality few actually want to accept. It creates too much disruption in the way we construct our lives. As she grows up somewhat ahead of others and then also behind them, because becoming overly responsible at a very young age has not given her the opportunity to go through important social and developmental stages, the shame, secrecy and emotional isolation intensifies.
Whole families and communities can come to depend upon her hyper maturity as a woman while never fully integrating her, not realising there is an unmet little girl inside who has never been allowed to learn and fail and grow. She has never really been allowed to be a child, or a teenager or a young adult.
I found myself searching through my twenties and thirties for what was wrong with me (as others put it) but the inner experience was more like: why am I always the ground and not the figure? Why do I feel so unseen even though I can be so unusual as person? The self was hard to extricate from being the background in the lives of others, even though the self itself seemed to at times stand out so starkly. At times I felt like useful, indispensible furniture; like an antique rocking chair, a family heirloom, idiosyncratic but essentially useful.
This feeling of always being on the outside and yet simultaneously always dependent up on is still very hard to describe. At various points I would break through and years of grief would pour out to say: I am also here, how could you never see that? And immediately the relationship would be over.
I would feel too much, too grotesque in my need to be heard and the other person would disappear or swiftly attempt to coax me back into the “infrastructure” role through guilt. I don’t know which response was worse. The only option left would be exile and I would take it over and over again. This made me exceptionally good at being alone. Self-reliance became mask, shield and sword but it also became a haven where I could exist as I am, atleast in my own company.
Interpersonally however I realized that no one asks what the road wants, whether the bridge is exhausted, whether the foundation would prefer to go elsewhere. Its subjective invisibility is part of its function. So the moment infrastructure acquires relational consciousness, it becomes grossly inconvenient
I found myself swinging between two locations in the eyes of others: the ever-present caregiver, the rock on which others built their emotional lives and then the baffling traitor the abandoner the person who exploded all of a sudden and went “crazy”. It’s a particular caregiver-scapegoat swing that I find quite a few women stuck in especially those who only had those two roles available to them in childhood. It’s a positional oscillation that feels impossible to remove myself from. I still haven’t figured out how to get off it yet.
The caregiver works hard to gain permission for the scapegoat to exist in the dark, until she is exhausted and cracks and then the scapegoat is suddenly visible. The caregiver isn't merely hiding the scapegoat. She is financing her. She is continually accumulating enough goodness that perhaps one day she will be allowed some selfishness, anger, need, difference, desire.
Except the account never becomes sufficiently full.
There is never enough accumulated goodness to purchase personhood.
Eventually the disallowed self appears anyway. She is exhausted, furious, needy, sexual, ambitious, separate, whatever else she happens to be; and because nobody has encountered her incrementally, she looks like a completely different person.
That is much more perplexing than the popular therapeutic jargon of “I didn't set boundaries early enough.” When the self finally emerges, everyone experiences it as theft.
I have a long list of relationships that ended because they saw me as simply someone who changed all of a sudden and they retreated because they had no idea who this person was.
The image that haunts me at night is one where someone I love looks at me in horror when I say “I can’t” “I’m tired”,” No I want a different life than this”. It’s a troubling look that that in my mind sounds like “I thought you were a safe place, a mother figure, where has this monster come from.”
In that moment of bad mothering, I continue the legacy of so many women before me. All these women who feel monstrous for not being able to provide the exquisite seamless care they believe is solely their responsibility and that they hope will buy them care for themselves. But it never does.
The resultant exile of this cycle has forced me towards a painful but important third position.
The third position is a term I’m borrowing from psychoanalytical theory, building on post-Klienian thinkers like Britton (2017) and Bion (2023) refers to an observational and reflective stance that emergence from stepping back from an immediate emotional clash of two polarized or binary positions. It offers a psychological space where one can perceive relationships and differences without destroying or merging into the other.
Holding the third space requires substantial effort. It necessitates the humility of accepting that the cycle exists and that I have no solutions quite yet. It’s a space filled with shame, anger and unbearable grief. The third space may require physical movement, a different location, a shift in the body and a redirecting of the mind.
Initially the scapegoat can save the self by saying: Fine. Then I will have nothing to do with any of you. There is dignity in that. Sometimes there is necessity in it. However, it can also preserve the binary. I am either absorbed into you or entirely outside you. I am indispensable or gone. Mother or monster.
I wonder if I will grow older to expect the same from other women and punish them back into place as well. The cycle seems to have a force to it I can’t quite buck at times. I may also expect perfect patriarchal mothering from the women in my life. A mothering that requires the death of the self so that the other may survive, and a resultant glorification of that sacrifice that should tide us through, But it doesn’t.
The third position, therefore, isn't simply the place exile leaves me in.The third position is the attempt to stop needing exile in order to have a self. It’s a space to hold vigil for the unborn self, miscarried and never allowed to exist in patriarchal relational spaces that have no space for her. After the grieving, it could be a space to conceive again.
I am reminded that in India, alongside the necessary insistence that daughters must be allowed to live, be educated and be valued, in a country that blatantly prefers sons, there is another, more culturally diffuse defense of the girl child that I have heard repeatedly: have daughters because daughters will take care of you. I have heard versions of it all my life. “I am so glad I had girls; they will look after me.” “A daughter will be your friend and confidante.” “Daughters never really leave you; sons do.”
The value of girl is often understood through her anticipated capacity for care.
There is a strange contradiction in some of the current cultural language in India through which daughters are defended. We insist that the girl child has value, but then rush to demonstrate that value through what she will eventually provide: daughters care for you and daughters stay we claim. The daughter must not be discarded; she is too useful. She will remember the birthdays, absorb the grief, accompany you to the hospital, keep the family together, become your confidante and eventually care for you when you are old.
Her life is defended, but her separateness remains more difficult to tolerate.
This is one of the ways in which the good girl is made. Her existence becomes permissible only through usefulness. She learns that merging will make her valuable and that individuation will make her cruel.
There is a contemporary version of this that sometimes appears even in supposedly liberal language amongst women: “Men may come and go, but your girlfriends will always be there.”
Why?
Why must the women stay?
Don't they require as much respect, dignity, freedom and care as the men who are permitted to come and go?
There is something deeply troubling about imagining women as the permanent emotional infrastructure of other people's lives and then calling that permanence love.
Although I am writing here about the good girl, women do not have a monopoly on becoming infrastructure. Care is organised through class, caste, race, sexuality, migration and economic necessity as much as gender. Entire categories of people become visible primarily through what they can provide. I don't want to flatten those very different histories into one another. What interests me here is something smaller: what happens psychologically when being needed becomes one of the conditions through which a person learns that they are allowed to belong?
So what does the personal rebirth look like? I don’t know. I have been stuck in a long and arduous birthing process for several years now. I do not yet know what it is like to build a life that is neither organised around the needs of others nor protected from them through crushing loneliness. I know more about what it cannot be. It cannot be a life in which I am drowning in other people’s needs with no capacity to shout for help. But neither do I want to have to banish myself in order to become visible to myself. Maybe this is why the third position feels less like an answer and more like somewhere I am learning to live.
The good girl wants to know what she must do next. The caregiver wants instructions for how to do this correctly. The scapegoat is already packing her bags.
For now, I am trying not to give any of them complete control. I am trying to tolerate the much more peculiar possibility that care does not have to make me useful and that stepping back does not have to make me cruel. Another person’s disappointment does not necessarily mean that I have failed them.
The world is desperately in need of more care, not less. My question is not how we abandon care, but how we reorganise it around capacity, consent and recognition. Holding, containing and caring for others is work, even when it is also love. The person doing it needs to remain visible within it. Caregivers need to feel free to see their contributions not only as obligations but as important work that feels adequately compensated and valued.
I cannot in good faith say that all care work can be abandoned instantly and reciprocation demanded immediately. The process of finding the self is long and arduous. The systems are old and enduring and change is slow as we are moving up current. Furthermore discernment is needed to work out when the step back and step down is possible. Have the children grown up? Are the vulnerable somewhat safe? Are the animals well enough to move? Can anyone else step in? Can anyone else foot the bill? Are the preferences of well-resourced adults being communicated to me as needs at the moment and can they reorganise themselves rather than shame me for resting? Do I have enough resources to manage the resulting exile and ostracisation for as long as it lasts?
The caregiver says: They need me. I must.
The scapegoat says: Fuck this. I'm leaving.
The third position asks: What kind of need is this? Whose responsibility is it? What capacity do I actually have? What happens if I don't do it? Who else could? What do I freely wish to give?
That's not detachment. It's discernment.
Before consciousness, the good girl may experience her work as simply who she is: “I'm the responsible one”; “I'm good at looking after people”; “people need me”; “I'm stronger”; “I don't mind.”, “I’m independent” “I can take care of myself”. The social arrangement appears natural because her identity has formed inside it.
Then there is a tipping point where something changes. She begins to realise that what felt like personality is partly labour. Everything she understood as freely given care has become something others budget for. Entire relationships may have organised themselves around an assumption of her continued availability, and capacity to swallow the consequences for others. The question I am left with, to which I have no answers, is “ What happens when feminised care becomes conscious of itself as labour, without ceasing to be love?
Conceivably what comes after the good girl is not the bad girl after all. Perhaps she is simply a person, with limits, capacity, discernment and needs of her own; whose love remains just as deep and whose grief is colossal. The most frightening thing about infrastructure developing a self is that no one , including the infrastructure herself, knows exactly what she will want once she is finally allowed to want.
References:
Bion, W. (2023). Learning From Experience (1st ed.). Routledge.
Britton, Ronald. (2017). Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Triangular Space. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 73. 47-61
