The quiet cost of being the one who has to hold it together

 

You’re in a meeting and someone asks what you think.

Not casually.
In the way that signals they’re waiting for you to land something.

And you don’t have an answer. Not a clean one.

You have fragments. A sense that this is more complex than anyone wants to admit. A feeling that moving too quickly will cost something later. But not certainty.

So you speak anyway.

You choose your words carefully. You offer direction. You steady the room.

And then you carry what you didn’t say with you for the rest of the day.

This is the part of leadership that rarely gets named.

Not the visible decisions or the strategic calls.
The ongoing act of holding uncertainty when there’s nowhere appropriate to put it.

You can’t take it to your team. They need you oriented.
You can’t take it sideways. Everyone else is projecting confidence too.
You don’t always take it home. Some things don’t translate.

So you hold it.

At first, that feels like competence. Even responsibility.

But uncertainty doesn’t disappear just because it’s unspoken.
It goes somewhere.

It shows up in how long decisions start to take.
In the edge in your tone when you’re interrupted.
In the fatigue that isn’t fixed by rest.
In the mental looping that kicks in when things finally go quiet.

Over time, the distance between what you’re carrying and what you’re showing widens.

That distance is exhausting.

Here’s the paradox.

The better you are at holding it together, the less support you receive.
People assume you’re fine because you look fine.

Your steadiness becomes invisible labor. Relied on. Rarely acknowledged.

And because no one sees the effort, no one thinks to ask what it’s costing you.

Eventually, something shifts.

You feel more alone in your thinking.
Less connected to your own judgment.
More distant from the work that once energized you.

You start to wonder if this is just how leadership feels.

It isn’t.

Leadership has always involved navigating what isn’t fully known.
The problem isn’t uncertainty.

The problem is when uncertainty has no place to land.
When it has to be absorbed rather than reflected on or metabolized.

That’s when leadership starts to feel like performance instead of presence.
And performance is what wears you down.

You don’t need to eliminate uncertainty.
You don’t need to have the answer before it’s ready.

What matters is staying connected to yourself while things are still in motion.
Noticing when the cost of holding it alone starts to outweigh the benefit of appearing certain.

Because the goal isn’t certainty.

It’s not carrying everything by yourself.