You became this gradually. It probably wasn't a decision so much as an accumulation, you were reliable, so people relied on you; you were capable, so people brought you their needs; you held things together once and then again and then it became simply what you do. And now the weight of everyone else's stability rests, in no small part, on whether you hold.
The people depending on you are not wrong to depend on you. That needs to be said, because the exhaustion of this role can quietly curdle into resentment if it isn't named carefully, and resentment toward people you love is its own burden to carry. They need what they need. You have been able to provide it. That is not a mistake. But the cost of it, the private cost, the one no one sees because you are too good at not showing it, is real, and it has been accumulating without anywhere to go.
There is a particular kind of alone that belongs to the person everyone leans on. You are rarely physically alone, there is always someone who needs something, always a problem that has found its way to you because you are the one who handles problems. But in the middle of all that need, in the center of all those people depending on your steadiness, there is a version of you that no one is checking on. The you that is tired. The you that occasionally imagines what it would feel like to not be responsible for any of this, even for a day. The you that is quietly falling apart in the margins of the life everyone else experiences as held together.
That version of you is allowed to exist. It is allowed to need something. The strength that has been flowing outward for so long did not appear from nowhere and it does not replenish itself automatically, and the pretense that it does is costing you more than you have let yourself calculate. If one of the people depending on you is someone you are actively caring for, a parent, a spouse, a child with significant needs, the invisible cost of that specific role has its own prayer for the caregiver no one is caring for.
You don't have to have this handled before you bring it somewhere. If you need to set some of this weight down, even briefly, even just in the act of naming it, you can request a prayer for strength, not the strength to keep holding everything, but the strength that comes from not holding it alone.
The invitation in scripture to come with weariness and burden was not offered to people who had nothing to carry. It was offered to the ones whose loads had become too heavy, and notably, it did not say first put the load down, then come. It said come. As you are. With all of it. The weight is not a disqualification from rest. It is the very reason for the invitation.
Surrender, here, is not abdication. The people who need you will still need you tomorrow, and you will likely still show up for them, because that is who you are. But there is a difference between carrying a load and being buried under one, and the difference often comes down to whether you are carrying it alone. The surrender available to you is not surrender of the responsibility. It is surrender of the isolation, the release of the fiction that you are sufficient to this entirely on your own, that the weight should be manageable, that needing help with it is a failure of the strength everyone is counting on. Sometimes the weight of being everyone's anchor settles into something darker, a hidden depression that lives just beneath the surface of the person who always seems to be holding it together. If that is where you are, the prayer for depression you're hiding from everyone names what that costs.
It isn't. Needing help is the most honest thing the anchor can do. It is, in fact, the only way to keep being one without being broken by it.
You have held so much for so long. You are allowed to be held for a moment. That is not weakness leaving. That is wisdom arriving, finally, after everything else has been tried. The strength prayers gathered here are for people like you, the ones everyone else is leaning on, who have nowhere to lean themselves.