{"id":25311,"date":"2026-05-06T14:56:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/?p=25311"},"modified":"2026-05-08T16:40:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T16:40:30","slug":"thichtlisc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/2026\/05\/06\/thichtlisc\/","title":{"rendered":"The Handle I Can Hold, The Load I Still Carry"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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A little Duck Duck Goose!<\/h3><\/span><\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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There are days when the ego cards get stacked in ways I can\u2019t control. Not by merit. Not by skill. Just stacked.<\/span><\/p>

I\u2019m handed a scenario that feels unwinnable, or at least engineered to be. Epictetus would say there are two handles on every situation, and you only get to pick up the one you can actually hold. So I pick up the handle I can hold. I do the work. I lead from the front. I stay steady.<\/span><\/p>

But there\u2019s a shift that happens after enough years of being competent. People stop noticing the cost. They stop noticing the lift. Eventually, they stop noticing you<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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High achievers talk about gratitude like it\u2019s a practice, but most of us don\u2019t pause long enough to witness it. Not because we\u2019re ungrateful \u2014 but because gratitude gets absorbed into the baseline expectation. Another quiet task folded into the stack.<\/span><\/p>

Years ago, I got a text congratulating me for an award I didn\u2019t even know I\u2019d received. No conversation. No context. Just a digital nod for something I apparently did well enough that no one thought to tell me about.<\/span><\/p>

I should have recognized the pattern. But I defaulted to grace. I always have.<\/span><\/p>

That\u2019s the trap: when you\u2019re good at carrying things, people assume the load is light.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The overwhelm isn\u2019t in the things themselves. It\u2019s in the flood of handling all of the things<\/strong> \u2014 the orchestration, the switching, the buffering, the invisible labor of keeping the system from collapsing.<\/span><\/p>

Competence becomes camouflage.<\/span><\/p>

You start to realize you\u2019re not drowning in effort. You\u2019re drowning in unwitnessed effort<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>

You\u2019re not exhausted by responsibility. You\u2019re exhausted by the expectation that you\u2019ll carry it without needing anything in return.<\/span><\/p>

And that\u2019s the rub. Not the tasks. Not the pace. Not the outcomes. It\u2019s the quiet, relentless management of everything \u2014 the part no one sees, because you\u2019ve trained them not to.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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So when I\u2019m handed another impossible scenario \u2014 when I\u2019m chosen because others in \u201cleadership\u201d can\u2019t step into the arena, when my reputation is quietly reshaped in rooms I\u2019m not in \u2014 I feel that rub.<\/span><\/p>

I feel the weight of being the one who can carry it. And the frustration of knowing that competence is both the reason I\u2019m chosen and the reason I\u2019m overlooked.<\/span><\/p>

I can\u2019t control their perception of me. I can\u2019t control the levers being pulled by people who have never carried the weight of the work they\u2019re rearranging. I can\u2019t control the erosion that happens when others reuse my work without understanding it.<\/span><\/p>

But I can<\/em> control this: if my work is going to be taken, reused, reshaped, or repurposed, then I will make sure it\u2019s durable. I will leave notes. I will leave context. I will leave scaffolding so the thing doesn\u2019t collapse under someone else\u2019s misunderstanding of it.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I\u2019ve been through enough interviews only to observe my solves show up elsewhere. I know my fingerprints. I know my design language. I know the difference between a generic strategy deck and a model built from first principles.<\/span><\/p>

Even more emergent models\u00a0 are just the previous ones I shaped for previous solutions, repackaged. I\u2019m not angry about the reuse \u2014 I never have been. What frustrates me is where the critical context is stripped away, when the work is used without understanding the philosophy behind it, when the shape remains but the soul is missing.<\/span><\/p>

So I\u2019ve started mentoring others toward a different approach: make your information durable. Make it reusable. Make it so the work can survive outside of you \u2014 but also so it can\u2019t be misused without someone noticing the seams.<\/span><\/p>

Durability isn\u2019t documentation. It\u2019s stewardship. It\u2019s leaving behind something that can be picked up by someone else without losing its integrity.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Because here\u2019s the truth no one wants to say out loud: there will come a time \u2014 soon \u2014 when the people pulling the levers will look around and realize there\u2019s no one left who can actually do the work. Not the real work. Not the front\u2011line work. Not the work that keeps the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight.<\/span><\/p>

And when that moment comes, it\u2019s going to hurt.<\/span><\/p>

But I won\u2019t be caught unprepared. I\u2019ll keep doing what I\u2019ve always done: lead from the front. Document the path. Make the work durable. Carry the handle I can actually hold.<\/span><\/p>

And finally, name the architecture of the load I\u2019ve been carrying all along.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A little Duck Duck Goose! There are days when the ego cards get stacked in ways I can\u2019t control. Not by merit. Not by skill. Just stacked. I\u2019m handed a scenario that feels unwinnable, or at least engineered to be. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[811,814],"tags":[824,825,826,828],"class_list":["post-25311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-check-ins","category-ads","tag-tag-st","tag-tag-agency","tag-tag-discernment","tag-tag-reflections"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25311"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25345,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25311\/revisions\/25345"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}