Somewhere in your last performance review there is a sentence about how you hold everything together. 🩹
Maybe it was the glue. Maybe it was connective tissue, if they had a consultant in that year. Maybe your manager said it out loud in a meeting, everybody nodded, and you felt good about it for a solid day and a half.
I need you to go back and look at that sentence again. Nobody has ever been promoted for being adhesive.
Glue is what you reach for when the thing was not built to hold. They were describing the org chart, and they put your name on it.
What the job actually was 🩹
You were the translation layer. You knew that when the VP said quick sync he meant a decision, and when the director said let's circle back she meant no. You were the reason two teams that could not stand each other shipped anything at all.
None of it was in your job description. All of it was load-bearing.
And here is the trick of it: the better you were, the less anybody could see. A problem you prevented does not have a name. It does not go in a deck. There is no metric for the meeting that never had to happen, and no line item for the fire that did not start.
So you got the reputation and somebody else got the title, and everyone agreed you were indispensable — which, said plainly, means hard to replace where you are. Not hard to promote. Hard to move at all.
Why it follows you
This is the part that will get you if you are not watching for it. That skill is real, and you are going to walk into the next place with it still switched on. 👀
Week three of a new job you will notice two people talking straight past each other, and your whole body will move toward fixing it before your brain gets a vote. It feels like competence. It feels like being useful. It is both of those things.
It is also how you end up doing the same unpaid job in a new building with a different badge.
Unlearning this is not becoming less capable. It is refusing to give the same thing away twice.
What you put down, and what you keep
Keep the read. Keep knowing what a room needs before the room says it. That is not a habit, that is discernment, and it cost you years to build.
Put down the reflex to supply it for free. Those are two different things and they have been fused together so long that they feel like one.
In practice it is small and unglamorous. Naming the thing out loud instead of quietly absorbing it — we are working from two different definitions of done, can we settle that here. Saying it in the meeting where credit lives instead of in the hallway afterward. Letting a gap sit visible one more day so that somebody else gets a look at the shape of it too.
Audre Lorde called caring for herself “an act of political warfare.” I think about that every time a woman tells me she feels selfish for not fixing something that was never hers to hold.
The takeaway
One thing this week. Find the gap you are currently holding shut with your own two hands — the process nobody documented, the handoff that only works because you are watching it.
Do not fix it. Write it down and send it to the person whose job it actually is. One paragraph. No apology, no offer to help.
It will feel wrong. Feeling wrong and being wrong are not the same thing, and you can carry both for a week. 🖤
Rebuilding after a transition and want a real read on where you stand? Start here: Discover