Why carrying it seems right

I want to be fair to carrying it before I argue against it, because the reasons aren't foolish and the people who carry things alone are usually the kind ones.

They've got enough on. Your partner is stretched. Your friend has her own mother to worry about. Your colleague has a deadline. Adding your thing to their pile isn't kindness.

It's yours. The scan is your body. The mistake is your spreadsheet. The debt is your doing. A grown adult manages their own affairs and doesn't hand them round.

Saying it makes it real. As long as the result is unknown and unspoken, it's a possibility. Once you've said "I'm waiting for a scan result" to your sister, it's an event with a Thursday in it.

They'd worry. You'd be moving the worry from your head into theirs, and they'd have it for the fortnight too, and you'd have made two worried people out of one.

You should be able to cope. You've coped with things before. This is a thing. Coping is what you do.

It might resolve. The result might be clear. The mistake might not be found. The marriage might come back on its own. If you wait, you may never need to have said anything.

It's private. Some things are simply yours, and a person is entitled to an interior that isn't on display. That's true, and the book agrees with it, and the disagreement is only about which things belong in the interior and which have grown too heavy to keep there.

And you don't want to be that person. The one who's always got something. The one people brace for.

There are needs under all of this. To protect the people you love. To be competent. To keep the thing from getting bigger. Not to be a drain. Those are good needs, and the method later in the book is built to meet them. What I'll show is that carrying it meets them badly. It doesn't protect anyone, because the people close to you already know something's wrong. It isn't competence, because the thing isn't being managed, it's being hidden. It makes the worry bigger, not smaller. And the person people brace for isn't the one who tells them once. It's the one who says "fine" and clearly isn't.