When the Halo Gets Heavy: Nelly Vee & Võ Thị Như Mai Reflect on “Even Angels Get Tangled!”

Listen • Audio Version

Hear Even Angels Get Tangled!

Experience the poem in its recorded form, then return to the reflections below to consider how voice, pacing, and emphasis deepen its themes of overgiving, exhaustion, boundaries, and reclaiming light.

The Poem at the Center

What Happens When the Strong One Gets Tired?

Some people become known for what they can carry. They are the dependable one, the listener, the rescuer, the person who answers, forgives, gives, fixes, and stays. At first, that can feel like love. Eventually, it can become an identity that leaves no room for weakness.

Poetic PrettyWings captures that tension with one unforgettable image: “But a halo gets heavy when carrying crowds.” The line is not really about angels. It is about people who have been praised for their strength so consistently that nobody notices the cost of being strong all the time.

Nelly’s Lens • Responsibility Without Self-Erasure

Being Needed Is Not the Same as Being Valued

There is a difference between being loved for who you are and being valued mainly for what you provide. That difference can be difficult to see when you are the one everyone calls in a crisis. You may feel useful, important, even indispensable. But usefulness becomes dangerous when it is the only version of you that other people are willing to accept.

To me, the tangled wings in this poem represent responsibility without boundaries. You can care for people and still say no. You can show up without becoming everybody’s emergency exit. You can be generous without handing someone permanent access to your energy.

That is why this poem connects naturally with When the Trigger Hits. In both pieces, the real work is not simply feeling something deeply. It is deciding what responsibility actually belongs to you—and what does not.

— Nelly Vee

Mai’s Lens • The Courage to Untangle

Healing Can Begin When Pleasing Ends

I read this poem as a quiet warning against disappearing inside the needs of others. There is compassion in giving, but there is also wisdom in knowing when giving has crossed into self-abandonment. A person can become so practiced at helping that they stop asking whether they themselves are well.

The image of tangled wings is powerful because wings are supposed to mean freedom. Yet even something made to fly can become caught. That is how emotional obligation can feel: not like a prison built by one dramatic event, but like many small cords tied one after another until movement becomes difficult.

For me, the poem’s final movement matters most. It does not ask the exhausted giver to become cold. It asks them to become conscious. That same movement appears in When the Black Butterfly Finds Her Wings: healing is not the rejection of love. It is learning how to move without remaining trapped inside what has hurt us.

— Võ Thị Như Mai

Where Our Reflections Meet

Boundaries Are Not the Opposite of Love

We arrive at the poem from different directions, but we meet at the same point: care without boundaries eventually becomes unsustainable. A healthy boundary does not say, “I do not care about you.” It says, “I cannot disappear in order to prove that I care.”

That distinction matters in families, friendships, creative communities, workplaces, and relationships. Sometimes the people around us become accustomed to the version of us that never complains. When that version finally becomes tired, others may treat the fatigue as a change in character instead of evidence that the arrangement was never balanced.

The poem gives us another possibility. We can untangle. We can stop confusing depletion with devotion. We can keep our compassion while recovering our direction. And we can understand that protecting our light is not selfish when that light is part of what allows us to live, create, love, and continue.

Reader Reflection

What Would Become Possible If You Stopped Proving You Could Carry Everything?

Think about one relationship, responsibility, or expectation where your strength has become assumed. What would a healthier boundary look like—not as punishment, but as a way of making room for your own life again?

Issue 3 Connection

July — Become • Stage IV: Flight

Even Angels Get Tangled! belongs in July because its movement is ultimately toward release. The wings are still there. The light is still there. The work is learning what must be untangled before flight becomes possible again.

Explore July — Become • Visit the living Issue 3