Nobody knew. That’s the whole problem.

Dear Worthy Woman,

A client of mine recently went to brunch with her girlfriends. She told me that they had lots of fun and laughed almost the entire time. Immediately after brunch, though, she went home and cried in her apartment alone.

What her girlfriends didn’t know was that my client was being pushed out of her firm. In fact, other than the HR folks at the firm and me, her coach, no one knew. She hadn’t told a single person. Not her mom, not her closest friend, nobody.

When I asked her why she was shouldering this difficult time alone, she said something I keep coming back to: “I don’t want to bring anyone down. I’m the strong one. They come to me.”

My client had become so skilled at holding everyone else up that she had no idea how to let herself be held.

This is what I call performing fine. Performing fine is not being fake. Instead, it’s a fluency you develop over years of reading every room and adjusting yourself to fit it.

You learn early that your discomfort makes other people uncomfortable, so you keep it to yourself. You learn that your uncertainty reads as incompetence, so you project confidence you may not feel. You learn that needing something is a liability, so you stop naming what you need ( and stop speaking up in the process).

When I think of performing fine, I think of this famous Marianna Williamson quote: There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

When you perform fine, you aren’t shrinking your brilliance; you shrink your humanity. You become someone without needs, desires, or depth. You are a performance.

Women of color perform fine because it works. It gets results. Most of my clients have gotten promotions, accolades, and coveted assignments while performing.

People trust them with things. They are the person others lean on, both professionally and personally, and there is genuine satisfaction in that. But somewhere in the process, the performance and the person start to blur.

I’ve noticed this pattern with women of color outside of the corporate realm, too. I recently read a Substack essay from a well-known online entrepreneur. This entrepreneur built a recognizable brand and became a visible success story in her industry.

In the essay, the entrepreneur described going on stage at an event for women entrepreneurs like her and receiving applause and praise for being a multimillionaire, while privately, she couldn’t afford a cup of coffee.

Yet she was in the room. She took the stage. She performed fine, and not one person in that room, including people she considered friends, knew what was actually happening to her. Because why would they? She looked great. She said the right things. The performance was flawless.

What struck me about that post wasn’t the financial situation. It was the isolation of her experience. She seemed to believe that there was no space, even among people who genuinely cared about her, to say, “something is wrong, and I don’t know how to fix it.” There was no place for her to be cared for during a time of immense need.

That is a specific kind of loneliness, and it belongs almost entirely to women who have learned that their struggles are not safe to show.

I’ve talked about performing fine with women of color from London, California, New York, and Texas. I’ve had conversations about it with lawyers, doctors, corporate professionals, and artists. I had the conversation twice this week with women from wildly different backgrounds, yet they shared the same loneliness and the same performance.

One of them told me that when she imagines talking about what she actually wants or needs at work, it feels childish, like a child wanting attention. That is how far the conditioning goes. We’ve conflated wanting to be seen, known, and understood with a character flaw.

There’s a particular cost to performing fine for women of color, and it has to do with what we learn about survival in spaces that were not designed with us in mind. We are experts at anticipating what the room needs.

We know what will make the partner feel heard, what framing will get the proposal approved, and what tone will keep things from going sideways. We can walk into almost any professional situation and calibrate ourselves to it almost instantly. That skill is real. However, it runs on a fuel source that never gets replenished because we rarely ask ourselves: what do I actually need here, and am I willing to do what is required to get it?

The woman going to brunch while her world was falling apart wasn’t performing fine because she was weak or in denial. She was doing what she had always done: managing everyone else’s experience of her. She was so good at it that she had no one to call, despite having friends and family who truly love her.

That’s the deeper cost. Not the burnout or the career stagnation, though those come too. The deeper cost is that you can become completely invisible to the people who would actually show up for you because you’ve never given them the chance.

Performing fine is not the same as being fine, and there are more women of color performing than we know. My work as a coach is wholly tied to interrupting that performance.

I’m Toya Gavin, a coach for women of color who have made “it” and realize that “it” isn’t it. If this resonated, let’s talk so you can learn to stop performing fine and start allowing everyone the privilege of knowing your full humanity. Click here.

In power and solidarity,

Toya