The Cost of Holding On

Dana is a lawyer, the one the firm hands things to when the deadline has already passed.

She found out twenty-four hours in advance that a board write-up was due the next morning. She stayed up, pulled it together, got a mentor to review it, and turned it in fifteen minutes late. Most people would call that a save. Here is what she said: “I don’t feel great about it. I feel okay about it.”

That sentence is the whole pattern. Every task arrives as a referendum. “There’s no room for error. In the moment it feels like, if you don’t get this perfect, I’m not going to talk to you again.” She knows the math is wrong. Knowing doesn’t help. “It feels like the bill will come due.”

Even the good nights carry it. After a big deal closed, the team went to dinner, partners and spouses, everyone laughing. Like finishing a big group project with a bunch of friends. She doesn’t want to lose that. And underneath the warmth, the fear that holds her hostage: the connection is rented. “They’re not friends with you because you’re nice. They’re friends with you because you do stuff for them.” If she ever says no, she believes, all of it evaporates.

She absorbs every cost herself, and she is good at it. “I can tolerate that. I’m really good at tolerating that, lowering my own expectations for myself.” Endlessly flexible for everyone except one person. At some point I said it back to her: you have a craft, and your craft is making sure nobody else gets hurt. Except, of course, you.

When we sat with what actually lives underneath the pushing, it wasn’t anxiety. It was resignation. She described a big, smooth river rock sitting just below her rib cage. Cool, smooth, not angry, just there. She has tried to put it back in the river and walk away from it. She keeps finding it sitting there, back again. It feels, she said, like part of the infrastructure.

The change so far is small, and she’d be the first to say so. Two percent, she called it. A reminder that no single thing she does this week changes what people think of her. The rock is still there. She is no longer pretending it isn’t.