Why does holding it all together take so much out of you?

Three yards to her left, a cluster of mothers is laughing about something she can’t quite hear. The field trip? The sign-up genius? Did you see what she wore? Colleen doesn’t know the content but regardless of the content she knows it’s the specific kind of mom club belonging of women who’ve known each other since their kids were in the same infant swim class in 2019.

Colleen’s daughter wasn’t in that swim class. Colleen was closing her first five-figure client that summer, taking the call from a folding chair in the garage because the baby was napping and the office wasn’t built yet. She literally had not a single hour to spare to take Roxy to swim classes back then.

She watches them laugh, feeling like the awkward middle school girl she was back in 1994. She looks at her phone. Thirty-one unread emails plus a Slack from her operations lead about scope creep on the new retainer and on top of that, a text from her husband Ben, sixth-grade science teacher, saying he’ll grab pizza on the way home. She feels the overwhelm of the tugs on her to respond alongside the outsider feeling that’s swamped her.

She thinks to herself: How long has it been since I had a conversation with a mom friend who actually understands how heavy small business ownership is?

A back-and-forth with another woman who knew what she meant when she said the last quarter was harder than she’d let on, or when she said she almost lost the retainer, or when she said her father was dying and she hadn’t told her employees because if she fell apart the whole business would fall apart with her.

She literally can’t remember the last time she felt like she had a friend like her, someone she felt like she belonged with and not like an outsider in the mom group of her small town.

The thing most of us don’t have a name for

Colleen isn’t unusual. I’ve seen some version of her in my therapy practice for nearly all of the thirteen years I’ve been in practice. And I’ve come to call what she’s carrying the accomplished woman’s loneliness.

Not the loneliness of the single woman (though it can be that too). Not the loneliness of the isolated woman (though it can be that too). Something more specific: the loneliness of a driven woman who’s built a large and impressive life and can’t find, inside the literal geography of her immediate life in the town she lives in, the peers who can meet her at her own level.

Sure she has local friends. She has a spouse. She has colleagues she connects with everyday (virtually or IRL). What she doesn’t have, on any given Tuesday afternoon, is another woman who can look at her and know, without the exhausting labor of translation, what her week has looked like and why she wasn’t the one to do school drop off and extra curricular pick up all of last year.

If that sentence just triggered a response in your body, that’s data. Stay with me through the rest of the essay, that clench is data. It’s your nervous system recognizing a pattern you’ve been carrying for a long time.

Here’s what I want you to know upfront: the accomplished woman’s loneliness has three parts, none of them your fault, none of them a mindset problem, and none of them going to be solved by lowering your cortisol.

Structural. Biological. Historical.

Let me walk you through them.

Part one: structural

There’s a name for what’s happening to Colleen in every environment she enters, and it comes from Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, in their 2019 book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. They call it Human Giver Syndrome.

Here’s the passage I send to almost every client in her first three sessions:

“Human givers must, at all times, be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, which means they must never be ugly, angry, upset, ambitious, or attentive to their own needs. Givers are not supposed to need anything.”

Read that last sentence again. Givers aren’t supposed to need anything.

Which means, structurally, that if you’re the one who solves in every room you walk into, then no room you walk into has been designed to receive you. You’re the boss of your consultancy. You’re the boss of your household. You’re the boss of your aging parents’ care. You’re the boss of your friend group’s emotional weather. You might not use that word for what you do, but that’s the position you occupy.

Kim Scott, the Silicon Valley executive whose 2017 book Radical Candor is required reading in half the leadership circles I know, put it this way:

“Being the boss can feel like a lonely one-way street... They feel ashamed that they’re not doing a good job, sure that everyone else is doing better, and thus unable or afraid to seek help.”

Scott was writing about literal bosses. But the driven woman’s the boss in almost every environment she enters. And peer support doesn’t travel down a hierarchy. It travels across. So if you’ve arranged yourself, over decades of hard work, into a position where there’s no one at your level, you can’t reach down for co-regulation and you can’t reach up, because there’s nothing above you either.

You’re just, on a Tuesday, at a fence, holding cold coffee.