I said yes to everyone, and now there's nothing left of me.

Look closely at what Lakṣmaṇa refused. It wasn't hardship — he was begging for hardship. What he refused was the job of keeping everyone satisfied. That assignment — stay, and give contentment to all — is exactly the one the people-pleaser has accepted, and it withered the strongest servant in the epic within seconds of being offered. He recognised it for what it was: service with no centre. A hundred masters, each holding a piece of your worth, none of them ever quite content, and nothing left over that is yours.

His answer draws the line with images a child could hold. First, honest limits: I am a small child raised on your love — can a swan lift Mount Mandara? Ask everything of me and you will get failure dressed as effort. Then the astonishing claim: apart from you I know no teacher, no father, no mother. Every bond the world offers — affection, love, trust — moreṁ sabai eka tumha svāmī: for me, they all live in one place. His yes had an address.

Here is the uncomfortable diagnosis hiding in the scene. Lakṣmaṇa's fourteen years of service were harder than anything on your calendar — sleeping on the ground, standing watch over two people in a forest full of demons. It did not empty him. The scattered helpfulness you're drowning in is objectively lighter, and it is emptying you. The difference is not the amount of service; it is the centre. Seva (सेवा) — service offered from love — feeds the one who gives it. Service scraped out of you by the fear of disappointing people is not seva. It is a slow disappearance wearing generosity's clothes.

And notice the tell: Lakṣmaṇa's yes could argue. Told no by the person he loved most, he pushed back, wept, made his case — until Rāma, the poet says, drew him to his heart and sent him to his mother Sumitrā for her blessing. A chosen yes can negotiate. It can set terms, take on this and decline that, and still be wholehearted. The people-pleaser's yes can't argue with anyone; that is how you know fear is holding the pen. A yes that was never free to be a no was never really a yes.

Try this. Write down every standing yes that owns a piece of your week — the committees, the favours, the roles you've drifted into. For each one, imagine saying no, and watch what you feel. If it's grief — I would truly miss this — that yes is chosen. Keep it. If it's relief, followed a half-second later by fear of someone's reaction, you've found a leak: a yes that belongs to their disappointment, not to your love.

Then take one leak and do the honest thing: re-choose it wholeheartedly, on purpose, the way Lakṣmaṇa chose the forest — or begin the exit. Yes, someone will be disappointed. Lakṣmaṇa disappointed an entire city to serve one brother completely, and no one in three thousand years has called him selfish. He is remembered as devotion itself — because devotion, it turns out, was never about saying yes to everyone. It is about knowing what your yes is for.