Everyone is carrying something.
Everyone is carrying something we cannot begin to understand. If we are lucky, they only carrying one single thing. Many of us are carrying so, so much more.
I work across the street from the cancer center where I received my final radiation treatment just over five years ago. Every day for twenty days, I walked up to the corner of campus and across the street, through the large sliding doors, and down the eerily long hallway to the brightly lit corridor at the end. I walked past women in wheelchairs: scarves wrapped around their bare scalps.
I checked in, went to the back room and changed: top off, gown open in the front. A half-hour later, I dressed again and returned back down the long hallway, past more wheelchairs and more scarves. The wristband I wore during treatment reminded me that I was one of them. I crossed the street and stepped back onto campus: back to my life.
I was quieter during those few months. Less engaged, less fun, less me. I didn’t mind sharing what I was going through; I simply had no idea how to articulate the confusion of it all. My skin was cracking from radiation burns; peeling off and raw. My arm chafed when it rested against my sidebody. I was in pain, almost all of the time, and I had no idea what was happening or when it would end.
“I’ll be okay,” I was certain. But between radiation oncology and medical oncology, my marriage was unraveling, my mother was declining, and my teenagers were teenag-ing. My world was so heavy, and life had become so. incredibly. much.
Everyone is carrying something. In good moments, they may have the words to tell you what they’re carrying. In great moments, they may even be able to tell you how it feels for them.
I’m grateful that I felt safe enough to share so much of my cancer journey; thankful I could share my confusion and emotion with so many people along the way. But I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to explain how it felt to walk back to work each day after treatment: feeling both incredibly lucky to be strong enough to walk at all, while also completely terrified by the process.
As leaders, it’s not our job understand what people are carrying. It is not our role to pry it out of them. It is simply our work to hold space for the certainty that every single person we lead is carrying something that they may not share, we may not see, and we will never fully understand.