The Cost Of Doing It Alone

What if the strength you’re most proud of is also what’s wearing you down? We go straight to the heart of hyper-independence—the kind that looks powerful on the outside but quietly drains your nervous system, your money, and your joy. Through personal stories that span childhood self-reliance, missed boats and year-end spreadsheets, we trace how survival becomes a lifestyle, and how the body starts keeping the receipts through fatigue, tension, anxiety, hormone swings, and flare-ups that won’t be ignored.

We unpack emotional labor—the invisible work of anticipating needs, holding everyone else’s feelings, and saying “I’m fine” when your chest is tight and your jaw hurts. Then we connect the dots to money: why receiving support can feel unsafe, how that leads to underearning and overgiving, and small, doable ways to practice receiving without waiting for a crisis. From clearing physical clutter to invite opportunity, to simple regulation tools that calm the system before the next big meeting, we share grounded steps to shift from isolation to support.

Most of all, we reframe help as sacred. Letting yourself be witnessed doesn’t make you dependent; it makes you human. Cultural conditioning, family roles, and first-gen realities may have trained you to carry it all, but your body is asking for co-regulation and rest. Honor what kept you safe and update your strategy with intuition, boundaries, and softness that doesn’t compromise your strength. If this conversation softened something in you, share it with someone who needs permission to receive, and subscribe for more healing, mindset, and embodiment tools. Ready to stop doing it alone? Leave a review, send this to a friend, and reach out if you’re ready for deeper one-on-one support.

Chapters

• 0:05 Welcome And Grounding Breath
• 2:04 Trained Into Independence
• 4:49 Childhood Stories And Self-Reliance
• 8:16 When Survival Becomes Self-Abandonment
• 9:29 The Weight Of Emotional Labor
• 12:20 Perfection, Anxiety, And The Body
• 14:40 Burnout’s Quiet Symptoms
• 17:05 Receiving, Money, And Worth
• 21:06 Manifesting, Health, And Readiness
• 24:04 Clearing Space To Receive
• 26:44 Support Before Burnout

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Hi Mijita, welcome back to I Mijita, Embracing Your Rices, Reclaiming Your Essentia. Now, if this is your first time here, bienvenida, bienvenido. And if you've been walking with me, thank you for trusting me with your heart, your ears, your healing. Now, today's episode is tender, aren't they all right? But this one specifically, it's honest. And it might feel confronting, but not because you're doing something wrong. Today we're talking about the cost of doing everything alone. Not the hustle highlight reel that you put on Instagram or Facebook, but the real cost. The one your body pays, the one your nervous system absorbs, the one your bank account feels. Ooh, that's a touchy one. The one your spirit carries quietly. And before we go further, I want to say this clearly. We all have our weaknesses, but it's not that. It's because you learned early that no one was coming. There was no hero coming at the end of the story here to save you. So let's take a deep breath together. Inhale through your nose and hold it a little bit and then exhale through your mouth. Because this episode isn't here to shame you, it's here to name what's been invisible. So grab your tecito, whatever you need, water, nourish yourself, and let's get into today's episode. Many of us didn't choose independence. We were trained into it. You became strong, quote unquote, because it wasn't safe to be soft. You became, quote unquote, capable because asking came with disappointment. Or you became the one who handles it all because chaos needed a manager. And that's where you came in. And this is so true, especially for me being a first-gen woman, and especially true for a woman of color, and especially true for daughters who became emotional translators, peacemakers, peacekeepers, providers. Like nobody can do this better than I can. Or if I rest, things will start falling apart. And that's one thing that I would tell myself over and over again. It's like, nope, nadie lo puede ser mi jorcayón. Like, I gotta do it because nobody can do it better than I can. Or the this last one is if I rely on others, I'll be let down. And back to the whole hero story of nobody's gonna come in their shining armor and save me. I am not gonna have my principe azul or my yeah, knight in shining armor come and save me, right? It's sometimes that's reality. Is we are kind of in the survival mode that we need to figure shit out on our own. And not to say that's not good, it's just it provides this wiring in our body where it's really hard to undo, especially at a young age. So, as I mentioned before in previous episodes, when I grew up, I was the oldest of two sisters, and at five years old, I had to take care of my younger sisters, two and three years younger than me. So they were what two or three and two at one point, and that's where we did get like we live with other folks, um, and we grew up in a trailer park up in um prospect and on Tui Avenue and Elmhurst, which is Route 83, right over here in Chicago in the Burbs. And I remember growing up, and my mom, she had to go to work early, so she would leave everything kind of laid out for me to go to school, but it was my responsibility to go take the bus. And I had this neighbor of ours that she would come by to pick me up, and I remember one day I forgot I I woke up and my dad told me that the bus had left. Like it was way later than I thought it was, and I remember getting dressed so fast, I bolted out the door and I walked by little butt. I think I was five, I was definitely five, um, and I walked to the and I waited for the bus forever, and then I realized, wait a minute, it's still like a little like dark outside. Usually when I wait for the bus, it's not that dark. So then I decided to go back home, but not stop at my house. I stopped at the house of the person, the neighbor that would come pick me up, and she was still getting ready. So my dad played a joke on me, and that taught me that I needed to wake myself up at a very young age. That was a lesson. It's no one's gonna do it for you, Mihan. Like, you gotta do it for you, and your dad's even gonna play the jokes on you. So, meaning at a very young age, I learned I needed to take responsibility for my own stuff, for my own actions. And yes, for a five-year-old, thinking you missed the bus, that's like the worst gut punch, pitting your stomach you can feel. Um, and when I got the reassurance that I didn't miss the bus, I was like, oh, okay. I don't know if my dad was playing a joke on me, or if he thought it was Daylight Sam's time, you know what? Here, neither here, nor there. But that's when I started, that's my first taste of reality. That girl can be late and miss the bus. And I was just talking to someone, like, you legit, you can miss the boat. Like, there was a a summer party for the company a few years back, and we went to Navy Pier, Feli, and I got ready. I had the parking pass, everything paid for. Well, traffic, we hit traffic a bit. And as you know me, I am notoriously late. Like a five-minute rule for me is like you just gotta wait five minutes for me. Like, that's just the reality of my life. So I'm fashionably late, always. And we got to downtown, we were having so we get to the parking lot, and it's the smallest parking spot you can ever imagine. Next to a pillar, of course. Well, at that point in the moment, I had my Dodge Charger, which I love. I love cars. I love I have a lead foot, I love to speed. So we were trying to get there as fast as we can. We got there, but the problem was how the hell am I gonna park in this little compact par car parking spot? Well, Dora made it happen. Of course, feeling needed to get out of the car because I needed to park really close to the wall on the other side on the passenger side. So we get out, we go. I'm we're like, I'm like huffing and puffing, trying to get there. Well, no joke. We get to the site where we're supposed to dock onto the boat. The boat was already out, like it left the dock. So I and Phoenix and I myself missed that that party. It was a really good party. I heard from a friend of co-workers. Um, but when they say you missed the boat, you I legit missed the boat. So that that for me was a lesson learned. You you're not gonna be late for when you're when you need to get in a boat, obviously, because the boat will leave its dock and the boat will leave the ship. Or what? No, you get what I mean. All right, and so you learn to carry relationships, the finances, emotions, logistics, dreams, but here's the part no one tells you survival eventually becomes self-abandonment when you're no longer questioned. So stick with me a little here. So when you just abandon yourself, like I felt at the bus, stranded, because I thought I left it, or when I got to the dock and the ship had left and it was it had sailed, I felt abandoned. Like that sense of abandonment, the oh my god, there's nobody coming to rescue me. That's the type of feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. The survival skills kick in, and that's where we'll talk about a little more, but that's the learning of all this, right? Is how do we get there? Well, it's situations, circumstances, things that happen to us. That's how we learn to survive. Let's talk about emotional labor. Not just doing the tasks, but holding that emotional weight of everything. You're the one who thinks ahead, you anticipate things, and you anticipate needs, remember everything, regulates everyone else's emotions, and swallows your own to keep the peace. And because you're good at it, people assume you're fine. Like I say, usually I'm fine. Like, oh yeah, everything's great. But inside, your body is tired and on fire. Your chest is tight, your jaw hurts, you sleep, is shallow, and you don't feel held, you feel responsible, and that kind of responsibility, it ages the nervous system, it really takes a toll on the body. Like I can give you an example. This week I've been so busy, it's year-end at work. I had we had a big meeting Wednesday um afternoon, and we have to crunch the numbers, and because of the nature of my work, I actually touch people's incentive pay, like dollars in their pocket. I have this anxiety every single time that I'm going to do that and I'm gonna present final numbers and I'm gonna do the final numbers. And this time around, there's mistakes, like there's legit mistakes, and and it's not all on me or my team, it's because of information and things that we get or whatever, be under control. But if I don't learn to regulate, if I don't learn to like take a moment, pause, recalibrate my energy, especially this past week, where last week I lost my voice. This week it's back. It's a little raspy, of course. And I do have a cough, awful cough, the perro, like of a dog cough. My God. Um, but emotionally, like I take that on as a responsibility because every individual on that spreadsheet is my responsibility. I feel, I feel, I I I give it to myself as like an expectation. But that's because, as one someone told me once, it's the curse of the conscientious, meaning that you actually care. And that's not a wrong or bad thing. There is no right or wrong, it's just about perspective. If you have the expectation you're gonna be perfect, well, let me tell you, you're gonna be disappointed in yourself every flip in time. And so that's where just listen to that, paying attention, just become aware. You don't have to do anything at this point in the moment, but just think of a time where you did like a huge mistake. How did that make you feel? How did that feel in your body? I just wanna leave you with that for right now. Here's the truth we don't want to hear. So when a situation like that happens, where you have that sensation in your body, the body always keeps the receipts of doing it alone. Burnout doesn't just happen mentally. It shows up as chronic fatigue, autoimmune flares, hormone hormonal imbalance, anxiety that won't turn off, like my example of this week when I'm turning in stuff, pain with no clear cause. And this isn't weakness. This is a nervous system that has been in survival for too long. And it could be a few days, it could be years, it could be so much. Time that got has gone by. And I've lived this not in a dramatic telenovela way. I mean, I mean, I I my life I could argue is a telenovela, and there's a lot of drama, that's for sure. But in the quiet way, where your body starts whispering and then it starts yelling, you know, like I suffer from sciatica, so my lower left back. Um this weekend I was actually bathing Tlachi, um, our Mexican hairless dog, and we were doing good, and he's a 50-pounder, man. He's a little chunker, especially now that it's cold outside, he can't really run around. But he eats, oh my god, give him treats. Um all dogs, I think, are motivated by food. But I was bathing him, showering him in my in my bath, and it's a shower, right? So we have a adapter or whatever that we I can like a little handle or whatever I can shower him with. And we were doing fine until the end where he didn't want to do his face. Oh my gosh. I had to pin him down and I pulled something in my back. So that's when my back started yelling. And then eventually after it yells, then it force it's forcing you to listen. And I had to really sit back and ask myself, what am I doing? Like, how do I baby myself now? Because I couldn't even like stretch, I couldn't even like bend over or like stretch all the way out like I normally do and stand up straight. And so you have to listen to the body. And I'll say this gently sometimes the breakdown isn't a failure, it's an intervention. It's saying, like, pay attention to me, there's more here. It's information, and that's where you have to be curious. So let's dig into how else this shows up in our life. Doing everything alone also shows up financially because when you don't feel supported, you underearn. So no look at the mereces, you overgive. It's like GoPro, right? You get a car, you get a car, you get a car. And you don't receive help. It's so hard to receive help. You delay asking for support, or you stay in just get-by mode. So, not because you're bad with money, but because receiving feels unsafe. And that for me has been one of my biggest blocks in my business, in my coaching business, is I'm like, oh, but I want to give all my services out to everyone, and I want to give out everything for free. But, you know, it's humbling, yeah. Like I could do that. I'm in a situation where I don't need money necessarily in that way because I'm doing it out of the because I love it. Like my heart is in it. I want if I could feel everyone in this world, like from their shadow side, meaning like be that boast bolt of light in their life so they can like have an epitome, that would be amazing. But I know that I don't even have the capacity to serve every single person on this world. That's like what eight billion people at this point. Um, and so the other one that I was struggled with a lot, especially these past few months, being on the receiving end, is learning to receive. And I was told, and I was actually just talking to my coach yesterday about this. I have been all my life so centered on the fact that money needs to show up in my bank account. Well, a year ago, I said, like, no, no, no joke, like I have this written down. I want to be a millionaire in the sickest shape ever. So a millionaire, okay? So stick with me. I thought it was gonna be a million dollars in like assets where I mean if you were to count everything up, we're kind of almost there, feeling myself. But I wanted a million dollars like in my bank account or or in my business, like coming through uh revenue generating year, which I should have been specific on that. But what happened? I at this point of moment sitting in my closet recording this, I am a million-dollar woman in my body. Between both surgeries, it was over$700,000. And right now I'm going through chemo. I just last Friday I completed my fifth round on the weekly, and I have I'm 25% done. I just say that. And I have four more months left. And between all the stuff that the insurance company has paid for and my all the benefits that I've had, I am well worth over a million dollars. Obviously, we can't put a price tag on a body, right? Or a person such as myself. Um, but I just found that so incredible. And when I said sickest, I didn't I didn't mean it at the time. I didn't realize what I was asking for, but that's how it came. It came in in illness, came in as breast cancer. So I'm just saying, my manifest mana, my manifesting power is real. I know that now. Now it's sitting in right now recording this, I know that I can manifest abundance. And I would love to show others how to do that as well. But you need to be ready for it. You need to be ready to receive. You need to have the it's like it's like la basuna. Like if you just have the garbage can, the trash can full every single day, how are you supposed to throw out your trash? You're just gonna accumulate. Okay, so you gotta remember to take out the trash. You gotta remember to take it out to the curb. So, you know, the garbage people, thank goodness for their, you know, especially in these winters here in Chicago, they take it away. We also have to be considerate on how do we compost, right? We have to compost, and this is just a metaphor to life, is you have to take out the trash so you can then receive or be able to toss the things that you don't need. Same thing with the closet. Your spaces are, and that's where I was doing some feng shui like this earlier this year. I got introduced to the whole concept of it, which is cleaning out the areas, and then you also there's a way you could sell in your room how you can optimize receiving and health and your work and your everything life. And I was organizing my office, and I didn't realize my southeast corner of my room is the where I would manifest. That's how I manifest, and I create like this abundance and and work and everything it generates. So, what I I didn't realize was when all these years in my office, that corner has had boxes and has had papers, and all the things that I have like neglected for so many years, it was just accumulating. It looked like a big like mountain of stuff, like just boxes accumulated on top of each other. Other and random things. Well, what did I do? I I didn't realize it, but I bought a bookshelf because I'm like, I need to reorganize it. But then when I learned this whole thing, straight, I'm like, wow, I'm gonna be so intentional on how I actually go about it. So that's what happened. And let me tell you, this month it's been pretty good. I there's been things that have come in that I was not even expecting to receive. And it didn't happen in money in my bank account necessarily, which it did, but it also happened with opportunities. It happened with like receiving more love and harmony at here at home. And it also happened with receiving this whole thing of losing my voice, I had to rethink my whole business. Like, what happens if I cannot energetically be there? And I started thinking of new strategies. And wow, Eureka, how that happens. Well, I was open to receiving. So again, it's not because you're bad with your money, but because receiving feels unsafe. And if you've ever thought I'll invest in myself later, I can't afford support right now, or once things calm down, then I'll do, you know, fill in the blank. That's survival talking, girl. That's survival. Healing doesn't require collapse first. It doesn't require you to crash, it doesn't require you for something bad and catastrophic to happen to do those things. Support doesn't have to come after burnout. So just take notice of where you condition yourself to think that way, that you need to wait until something something super, super bad happens until you do something. It can happen right here, right now, from this point forward. Let me be clear. Stopping doing it alone doesn't mean you suddenly depend on everyone. It means you allow yourself to be witnessed. It means letting someone walk with you. Like it could be if you work from home, you can walk with a dog, or you can if you have a dog, or you can walk with a coworker, a friend, a buddy, a neighbor. It's letting your body rest in another's presence. So being taken care of. Like my mommy yesterday came over to put like something on my chest, front and back. Um, and she her home remedy, like that's love. That's receiving. It's letting support be sacred, not shameful. Like you're not lazy for resting, you're not lazy to receiving support or meaning that you're you can't do it yourself. It's more of you're giving someone else the opportunity to gift you with that. So this is ancestral repair, this is nervous system healing, this is reclaiming your softness without losing your strength. So don't no shame in the game of receiving support and it and coming in ways that you don't even imagine how they're gonna come. Because sometimes we cut ourselves off from magical miracles happening because we think of it a certain way. And there's no right or wrong again, it's all about perspective. And one thing that I'll mention here is there we're all born light, we're all born good, if that's what you relate to or resonate with, but light, it's all like a yin and a yin, right? And so the positive, we all have that, but for whatever reason, through life circumstances, experiences, um, things that happen, the the all the things, right? There's these layers that we build on and conditioning that we get, especially passed down from our parents and ancestors, and this is how the family's done it over and over and over again, or culturally, especially you know, in the Mexican culture that I grew up in. Catholic, right? We have these rules and everything. But what is it that is true to you? If you feel the calling that, hmm, maybe this is not aligned, and maybe it worked, right? For so many years. Like that hustling grind for me has worked all the way through when I was 30. But after 30, like stuff started breaking down. Like it wasn't as rosy as I thought it was, the world, right? Like, oh, I work and I have my family and this and that. It's like I knew deep down in my heart I had a bigger purpose, and I just followed the thread. I got curious. So over time, we discover that there's all these things that are not aligned with us anymore. And we thank them because they helped us out, right? But this survival mode, once you become aware that you're in it, it's not really that fun anymore. That's where you can definitely start reclaiming your essence, reclaiming the person that you are, reclaiming that empowerment because you are able to do anything that you want in this life. And there is for me, there is no impossible. Everything is definitely possible. It might take you a little longer, or you might have to go through challenges and things, and it might not be so clear, clean cut, and so easy. But that's where for me specifically, because I have a a sacral authority, it's like I have to listen to my my gut. Is it yes? Is there is it a hell yes or a hell no? And that's where everybody's so different, everyone's wired so differently. And we go through our challenges and battles and the works because it's teaching us, it's molding us. I feel like it's God's spirit divine's work is to go through those motions. To learn the and have that experience. Because once you have an experience, no one, no one, absolutely no one can take that away from you. That is something you lived, that's something you've embodied, that's something you've embraced, like it or not, but it shapes you to the person that you are standing or sitting and listening to this podcast today. So I celebrate you for that. If this episode touched something in you, if your body softened while listening, if you felt seen in ways you haven't in a long time, I want you to know this. I have opened limited one-on-one spaces for the woman or the person who are ready to stop holding it all alone. Because you don't have to do this alone. This isn't about fixing you, it's about supporting you emotionally, energetically, holistically. You can find the link in the show notes. And if not, no, that's okay too. Just don't gaslight yourself about how tired you are. And I meita. You were never meant to do this alone. I see you, I hear you, and you can definitely reach out to me and you can contact me down below. Alrighty, well that wraps up this week's episode. Sending you so much love, a big besite, and talk to you next week.