My mother told us never to depend on a man.
Not once, and not as a sit-down talk. From the time we were eleven or twelve, over and over, to all three of her daughters.
Don't you ever depend on a man.
You depend on yourself, because you never know. A marriage can come apart and you have to be able to walk away from it, not stay because you can't afford to leave. Or he dies, and it's you and the children and whatever you can earn.
My father wanted us educated too. Both of them pushed all of us toward degrees and independence, and I don't want to make him the villain of a sentence he wasn't in.
But my mother's version came from somewhere specific, and I think I understood that even at eleven.
Where we're from, a girl married and was provided for. That was the arrangement, and it wasn't offered as one option among several. So every time she said it, she was telling her daughters to step out of a life she was already standing in the middle of, and to be able to do it without asking anyone's permission first.
She wasn't handing us her fear. She was handing us the exit she didn't have.
And it worked.
I left at seventeen. I put myself through school. I built a company with two partners. I have never in my adult life needed anyone to cover anything for me.
That was the assignment, and I completed it.
What nobody mentioned was the rest of it.
For seven years, I sat in an EO forum with a small group of other founders.
That is what the thing is for. You meet every month. You say what is actually happening in your business and your life. The other people in the room have usually been through some version of it. It is confidential and serious and, for seven years, I took it seriously.
Then my business contracted.
The contraction itself was brutal, but I have written about that part before. The fear. The decisions. What I haven't written much about is what I did with myself while it was happening.
I disappeared.
By then, disappearing had already started to become familiar. There had been a period of cyberstalking before that, which I haven't written about here, and after it started I pulled back from people. I stopped going out as much. Stopped responding to messages. Stopped engaging with friends and colleagues the way I normally did. My world got smaller without my making an explicit decision to make it smaller.
Then the business started contracting, and I went further.
I would get through the workday because there were decisions to make and people depending on me. Then I would go home and sit on my couch.
That was pretty much it.
I didn't want to go out. I didn't want to explain what was happening. Messages would come in from friends and I would leave them unanswered. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes months. People I loved would reach out and I simply wouldn't engage.
It wasn't that I had decided everyone was unwelcome.
I just couldn't see what I would say.
Or maybe more accurately: I couldn't see what saying it would accomplish.
And then I told the forum I was leaving.
They told me they could help me.
This is the part that bothers me now.
I want to be precise about what happened, because the easy explanation would be shame. There was probably some of that. I had built something successful and it was contracting dramatically, and I didn't particularly want to sit in a room and narrate that.
But shame isn't the interesting part.
The interesting part is that seven years of people who had been through hard things, in a room built precisely for this, told me out loud that they could help me, and I could not see how.
Not what they meant. How.
They said it to my face and my mind went straight to: and then what?
They can't bring back what I lost.
They can't make the decisions for me.
They can't tell me which people to let go.
They can't know whether I'm making the right call.
They can't make any of this not be happening.
So what exactly are we going to do in that room?
I couldn't answer that question.
Nobody could help me.
That sentence felt completely factual at the time.
In some ways, it still does.
What I wanted was to run away and handle it myself. Or, more honestly, to disappear from having to explain it at all.
I know what I'm probably supposed to say here. That of course they could have helped. That being witnessed is help. That perspective is help. That somebody sitting beside you while you go through something is different from going through it alone.
Maybe.
I believe those things intellectually.
But if I'm being accurate about how my brain works when something is actually wrong, none of those things register immediately as help.
Help, to me, is something that changes what happens and alters the outcome.
And if it can't change what happens, I honestly don't know what to do with it. I'm not proud of that. I'm also not sure I can argue my way out of it.
Maybe that's the part I actually inherited. More than the independence.
I want to say that I've worked it out since.
I haven't.
The ordinary version of this is somehow worse, because nothing is even at stake.
I'm in YPO now.
There are WhatsApp groups full of people with extraordinary networks and experience, and every day somebody asks for something.
Does anyone know a great personal stylist?
Looking for a headhunter who can find a product lead.
Need a restaurant recommendation.
Does anyone have a contact at this company?
My guy fell through. Anyone know someone?
Some of them are small enough that it would never occur to me to ask them out loud.
And then, almost immediately, six people answer.
Of course I have someone.
Call her.
Here's the number.
Tell him I sent you.
Meanwhile, I have needed a personal stylist.
I have needed a headhunter for a product leader.
I have needed doctors, consultants, introductions, recommendations, places to stay, people who know people.
And my instinct is almost always the same.
I search.
I research.
I ask ChatGPT.
I call recruiters.
I make a spreadsheet.
I figure it out.
I have access to a network specifically designed to collapse six degrees of separation into one WhatsApp message, and somehow I can still spend three hours trying to solve something somebody else could probably solve for me in four minutes.
I have rarely posted in that group asking for help.
Most of the time, it isn't a decision. The group doesn't enter my mind as part of the solution. The need arrives and converts straight into a task before another person is anywhere in the picture.
Find stylist.
Find recruiter.
Find doctor.
Solve problem.
It doesn't arrive as a moment in which someone else might be useful. It arrives as a thing on my list.
This is my life and I'm handling it, the way you handle traffic.
But that isn't the whole of it, and I know it.
Because when it does occur to me, I hesitate.
Not because I think they'd mind. Because posting it means letting a room full of very capable people watch me not know something.
I don't want to be the one who couldn't work it out. I don't want to be the one who isn't smart enough to have found the answer already.
I'd love to tell you those two things are separate. That there's the version where it never crosses my mind and the version where it does and I flinch.
They're probably the same thing, and one of them just got faster.
Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere. And it had been everywhere for years.
When doctors kept telling me I was fine, I didn't push back. I went around them and found my own way in.
When my father has been in the hospital, I have gone and stayed and slept in the chair, and I do not remember ever asking anyone to come sit with me.
I have close friends I love, and I almost never call them when I need something.
I've watched other women have the ordinary kind of friendship where you just call, on a Tuesday, about nothing, and I have envied it, and I have not built one.
All of that has looked like competence from the outside and mostly from the inside too.
I jump in. I handle it.
I've been praised for exactly this as far back as I can remember. My grandmother used to say it in Arabic, where it lands better than it does here.
Wherever you throw her, she lands on her own two feet.
I don't think my mother did anything wrong.
I think she gave three girls the only protection she had, and it was a good one, and it worked.
Never depend on a man.
Be able to leave.
Be able to earn.
Never be in a position where someone else's choices decide what happens to you.
What she was teaching us was how to get out.
I got very good at it.
What I'm less good at is knowing when staying connected to someone isn't the same thing as depending on them.
I don't know when independence stopped being a financial principle and became a way of organizing every problem I encounter.
Maybe it happened slowly.
Maybe competence is addictive that way. Every time you solve something yourself, you collect another piece of evidence that you can. Eventually the evidence becomes a worldview.
I can handle this quietly becomes this is mine to handle.
Those are not the same sentence.
I'm only beginning to understand how often I've treated them as if they were.
And I'm wary of replacing one absolute with another.
I don't want the lesson of this essay to be ask for help.
There are things nobody can fix for me. There are decisions that are mine alone. Sometimes the people around me really don't know what to do. Sometimes telling ten people about a problem just means I now have a problem and ten opinions.
I value my independence and everything it has given me, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I still want to know that if everything goes sideways, I can take care of myself.
My mother was right about that.
What I'm less certain about is why I've interpreted being able to carry something alone as evidence that I should.
Maybe there was another sentence that belonged beside hers.
Don't ever be unable to leave.
But don't become so good at not needing anyone that you forget to notice when they're already in the room.
I don't know if she could have taught us that.
She'd have had to have learned it first.
Paola
Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.