Jenny Dreizen was the one who took care of everyone.
In sixth grade that meant making dinner for her younger brother and getting him to bed while her parents split custody fifty-fifty. Later it meant officiating other people's weddings under a brand she called Cheerleader For Love, then coordinating corporate events where her actual job was making sure everyone else was fed, housed and handled. The feedback loop was clean. She was good at taking care of people so she kept doing it. Nobody was taking care of her.
She spent ten years with a man who held her engagement ring for two years before he used it. The relationship was never contentious. It just was never good. Ten months before it ended he told her he wasn't sure he loved her anymore and she told him yes, you do.
In this episode, Jenny — co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry, a resource platform for people rebuilding after divorce and other endings — walks through three Wednesdays in June 2021 and the night she drove to Target alone to buy towels, because whatever her life was going to be, she was going to need towels.
This is where validation dependency hides inside competence. When worth is built on being the capable one, being taken care of stops registering as available, and nothing that happens to you ever rises to the level of deserving help. We trace where that wiring gets installed, what it costs to stay in something that was never quite wrong enough to leave and why Jenny and her sister built a company designed to make divorce boring.
If you have always been the person everyone counts on and never the person anyone checks on, this one is about you.
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