The Crisis No One Can See

Part One

The harder version of what I described yesterday, the reason it quietly takes so much out of people who have otherwise built enviable lives, is that it is almost completely invisible to the people who are in a position to help.

Your team cannot see it. They see a senior person who runs the room, holds the strategy, and sets the tone for the week. You are their ceiling, their buffer, and in many cases their north star. If you let on that the ground underneath you is moving, the ground underneath them starts moving too, which you are responsible enough not to let happen. So you hold it.

Your partner cannot see it, or cannot see the full picture. They can often feel something, but they have been next to you for long enough that they have adapted to your particular weather, and in many cases they are carrying their own version of the same thing for similar reasons. The two of you are each protecting the other, neither of you naming it aloud, each of you becoming the other's structure over years in a way that is loving and quietly exhausting at the same time.

Your closest friend cannot see it either. You may have tried to raise it once or twice, and the response you received made it clear that this is not something they are able to meet you on. They are not bad friends. They are friends who have their own pressures, their own weather, and who are not trained or particularly inclined to hold a conversation about something that looks to them, from the outside, like a life in full working order.

A therapist, if you have one, is a partial exception. Some therapists can meet you on this properly. Many cannot. Most have not worked with people at your level of external success, and when they encounter the hollow, their instinct is to look for unresolved childhood material, which may also be present but is not the whole picture. The condition sits on its own and does not always map cleanly onto the frameworks they have been trained in.

So you carry it alone. Not dramatically. Just as a private weather system inside a life that looks, from every angle, to be in working order.

Part Two

The invisibility is not incidental to what is going on. It is part of what makes it compound.

A visible crisis receives intervention. Friends call, partners raise it, colleagues suggest time off. The culture around us is broadly built to respond to distress that can be seen, and when distress is visible, the response arrives without the person in crisis having to fully organise it themselves.

An invisible condition receives no intervention. The people around you do not raise it, because they have no evidence that anything is wrong. The culture around you does not catch it, because the culture reads your output and concludes everything is fine. The condition grows in conditions of perfect quiet, without interruption, for as long as you are willing to carry it without naming it.

The senior people I work with have often been carrying this for longer than they would like to admit. Almost none of them reach out early. By the time they do, they have done a great deal of the damage of avoidance, not because anything bad has happened, but because much of the best of them has quietly leaked out while they were performing that everything was fine.

Continue reading: The Afternoon I Stopped →

Or if you'd rather start a conversation: Book the free 30-min Diagnostic →