I need some perspectives other than mine. I don't know if this is an overly wary cPTSD response or if my feelings are valid here.

I grew up taking care of the emotional needs and the psychological stability and safety of a mom with bed-ridden depression, and then I got sent to live with a narcissistic white dad with explosive anger issues. This means I now always end up in relationships where I default to that role of caretaking fawn. It's something I'm working hard on healing.

I have this friend. She's from England. I'm an immigrant from the Caribbean. We met at work and we both live in Australia. I have a lot of trauma I have been managing since I remember being alive. Over the past decade, I've been lucky enough to have built a good career, so I've been able to afford therapy and resources to live a healthier life (although still making a woman of color salary...but I learned to survive). This is a generational turn for me—I'm the first person in my family to graduate from university.

Anyway, this friend is a descendant from the man who founded one of England's most respected publishing houses. Her mom is a hedgefund manager who owns an estate in The Maldives. She grew up taking yearly holidays, like when her dad decided they would all go see the wonders of the world.

Often, we have dinner and chat about our lives. I definitely don't feel like I can share most of my life. Mine is one sort of matted and lumpy with a lot of loneliness, depression, isolation and just trying to survive the burnout of dealing with all this trauma, constant triggering, and the daily piñata prize bullshit assortment of racial and misoginist microaggressions. She's just too neurotypical for me to steep the waters of our conversations with that stuff, so I don't consider her a friend I can talk to about the things I struggle with.

Anyway, I have this feeling like she only comes to me to unload all of her personal and emotional struggles. It's not just a feeling, she's told me she can't tell her "brunch girlfriends" about any of her problems. I've asked for the same three times now—a meal with a friend in possession of a supportive and empathetic ear to my own brunch-inappropriate menu of issues. An exchange of the same ample emotional real estate I subsidize for her. All three times I asked, she showed up with random people I didn't know, once without even telling me she was bringing someone to something I invited her to. I am trying to accept that maybe she's simply not that kind of friend, and that she's limited in her ability to offer the same support.

I'm not a good writer, as you can see from the lack of brevity here. The point is...I'm torn. A part of me sees I'm someone a little farther along in emotional maturity, so of course some people would value a friend like that in their lives. This friend is clearly someone who has only been around people who validated her own relational patterns, someone who maybe hasn't had the chance to access this layer of regulation that I've gained through my own work on myself. A decade of therapy has put me in the position where I can often give good advice to people stuck in a pattern of self-doubt, gaslighting, abuse, self-abandonment, etc. I'm often a Chironic figure—a wounded healer archetype—for people stuck in hurtful interpersonal patterns.

But there's only one situation where it's a gift—when it's reciprocated. And right now, I'm not feeling very reciprocated in this dynamic that is also polluted with all kinds of colonialist and racial tones. I'm here mostly just wondering what kind of internalized bullshit I'm not seeing at play here, if at all.