Being indispensable is flattering. It’s also exhausting.
Off Duty Is a Discipline.
On my first night in New Orleans, I laughed in a way that genuinely surprised me. It was not the polite, socially calibrated laugh I have perfected over the years. It was loud and uncontained. The kind of laugh that makes you forget, briefly, how you are being perceived.
There was a brass band somewhere behind me. The air was heavy in that particular way only New Orleans manages. Beads were already tangled in my hair. I was holding a plastic cup and, for once, I was not thinking about what was waiting for me at home. It struck me, almost mid-laugh, that I do not really know how to be off duty.
In recent months, I have had to make difficult decisions to strengthen the business. I have sat in conversations where the right decision was not the easiest one. I have visited my mother and watched dementia rearrange her world while I try to remain steady inside it. In each of those spaces, I have been composed, capable and contained. I am good at being the steady one.
And if I am honest, many women in senior roles are. We are praised for it. Relied upon for it. Paid for it. We anticipate risk before it surfaces. We absorb emotion before it spills. We remain reachable, responsive, responsible.
Over time, that steadiness stops feeling like strength and starts feeling like obligation.
When someone recently asked how I would feel if my phone died for twenty-four hours, my answer was immediate: panic. Not because I love my phone, but because I have quietly come to believe that if I am not available, something might wobble. That belief is flattering. It makes you feel indispensable. It is also exhausting.
Standing in the middle of Mardi Gras, laughing without calculation, felt unexpectedly significant. No one there knew what I was carrying. No one needed reassurance or decisions. The music was loud enough to drown out the inner habit of vigilance. For a few minutes, I was not managing anything. I was not anticipating. I was not holding grief with one hand and strategy with the other. I was simply a woman in a crowd, laughing at something ridiculous.
I am not interested in abandoning responsibility. I care too much about my work and the people I love. But I am beginning to understand that competence can quietly harden into constant alertness. And alertness, sustained long enough, becomes burnout. So I am experimenting with something unfamiliar: being unavailable on purpose.
I am curious how many of us would panic if our phones went dark for a day. And what that panic is really protecting. Perhaps the most radical thing a capable woman can do is allow herself to be briefly, gloriously off duty.