I spent three years being the "strong one" and I didn't realize how exhausted I actually was until I cried at a gas station over nothing

This is going to sound small but I need to put it somewhere. Last Thursday I stopped to get gas on the way home from work. It was raining a little. The pump was slow. A song came on through my car speakers that I hadn't heard in probably four years, nothing dramatic, just a song I used to listen to on drives in a different period of my life when things felt more open somehow . And I just started crying. Not a few tears, actually crying, in a gas station, in the rain, for about ten minutes.

I am the person in my family who handles things. My mom got sick two years ago and I coordinated her care, attended every appointment I could, managed the communication with my siblings who all live further away than I do. A close friend went through a divorce and I was on the phone with her constantly, sometimes until 2am. My partner went through a really hard patch at work and I held space for that for about eight months. I am not complaining about any of this, these are people I love and I would do it again. But somewhere in the middle of all of it I think I just quietly stopped checking in with myself because there was always something more pressing.

The gas station thing scared me a little because I genuinly did not see it coming. I wasn't even thinking about anything sad. My body just decided it had been storing something and that a slow gas pump in the rain was apparently the time to release it. I drove home, made tea, sat on the floor for a while. I think I need to actually rest. Not sleep, rest. I dont really know what that looks like for me anymore and that itself is probably something worth figuring out.