When Leadership Feels Like a F—ing Trap
There are days I wake up and just… don’t have it in me. The patience, the diplomacy, the endless nodding. The smile that says “it’s fine” when it’s not fine.
Everyone talks about leadership like it’s some holy calling. Like if you care enough, if you serve enough, if you communicate enough — it’ll all click.
But sometimes it doesn’t click. Sometimes it grinds. And if I’m honest, there are days I resent it.
The responsibility. The expectation to stay calm while the world burns and the Wi-Fi dies and someone’s crying in the green room because they just got notes from five different people who all want different things.
Some days, I want to throw the headset across the room and just be human again.
The Myth of “Having It Together”
Leadership books love to preach composure. Stay grounded. Stay gracious. Stay centered.
But let’s be real — staying centered is easy when no one’s pulling on you from every direction. Out here, composure costs something.
It costs sleep. It costs presence. It costs the part of you that used to get excited about opening night instead of just relief that no one got hurt.
- The truth: you can’t be centered for everyone all the time. That’s not composure, that’s suppression.
- The cost: the longer you fake calm, the more detached you get from what’s real.
- The shift: composure doesn’t mean control. Sometimes it means saying, “Give me a minute before I bite someone’s head off.”
You don’t have to be graceful all the time to be good at this. You just have to be honest enough to notice when you’re not.
When Caring Starts to Hurt
Everyone says “take care of your team.” Cool. But who’s taking care of me? I’m the one who absorbs the chaos so everyone else can stay focused.
I’m the one who walks out smiling after a shitstorm so the crew knows it’s under control.
And I’m the one who goes home wondering if I’m actually any good at this because I yelled once — even though no one else saw what led up to it.
- Caring doesn’t make you soft. It makes you sore.
- Burnout isn’t weakness — it’s evidence you’ve been carrying too much for too long.
- You can’t pour from an empty cup, but sometimes you can at least admit the cup’s cracked.
That’s what leadership really is: not pretending the cracks aren’t there, but learning to hold the water anyway.
The Quiet Promise
I don’t want to be a leader today. But I still showed up. And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe leadership isn’t about being inspiring or composed or endlessly available. Maybe it’s about the quiet promise to keep showing up — even when you’d rather disappear.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up, put the headset back on, and do it again. Not because I feel like it, but because I still care. And that’s the part worth protecting.
Editor's Note: At StageLync, an international platform for the performing arts, we celebrate the diversity of our writers' backgrounds. We recognize and support their choice to use either American or British English in their articles, respecting their individual preferences and origins. This policy allows us to embrace a wide range of linguistic expressions, enriching our content and reflecting the global nature of our community.
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