If you’ve ever thought, “If I don’t do this, who will?”

By the time I left academia, I was the only tenured professor left in my Higher Education and Leadership program. What had once been a program with a full-time faculty of 5 had slowly been allowed to shrink. Junior faculty had left for better opportunities, and their positions weren’t refilled. Senior faculty took early retirement. I’d write justifications for adjunct funds each semester. They cut our administrative support position.

And like many people in professions, I did what I had been trained (implicitly and explicitly) to do: I carried more. Picked up more students. At one point, I was on over 20 dissertation committees, chairing half, and advising all the master’s students.

So when COVID-19 hit, we had been in that pattern. I was carrying a shit-ton workload, then the pandemic added all the emotional and loss work for students and faculty, paired with the logistics of switching to online. Shockingly (sarcasm), I started having panic attacks 9 months after the shutdown started and ended that year on FMLA leave.

The cost of belonging to the Good Girl → Good Student → Good Worker pipeline was killing me once again. FUCK. I allowed myself to get to that place again. Had I not learned from the previous physical breakdown caused by chronic stress? It was easy to momentarily berate myself. Easy to resist the fact that I needed genuine caring for. And easy to tell myself I couldn’t stop carrying everything else.

And I told myself a familiar story: If I don’t do this, who will? If I don’t hold this together, it will fall apart. If I just keep going a little longer, maybe things will turn around.

Things didn’t turn around. No one showed up to help. I could not stabilize what was quietly, then loudly, becoming unstable. My requests for support due to over-carrying were met with my Dean’s recommendation to get therapy.

I was already in therapy.

And while therapy/self-care isn't inherently wrong, it can become a way institutions individualize institutional and systemic failure.

Maybe your version isn’t 20 dissertation committees and a collapsing program. But most of us have places where caring has quietly turned into carrying. The tricky part is that we often don’t realize how much we’ve picked up until we stop and name it.

The Carrying Inventory

Think about one place in your work where you're feeling stretched, resentful, exhausted, or indispensable.

Then write down:

What am I carrying?

Be specific. Not “too much work.” What exactly?

Why am I carrying it?

What story makes it feel necessary?

What do I believe will happen if I stop?

This is the important one.

Who actually owns this responsibility?

Me? Someone else? The team? The organization? Is this a structural/systemic problem?

What is the cost of my continued carrying?

Not just to me, but to others.

You may look at your list and realize some of what you’re carrying really is yours. Some of it may belong to someone else. And some of it may be the result of a system that has quietly made your over-functioning part of how it survives.

The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop confusing care with carrying everything.

So this week, notice where you hear yourself thinking, If I don’t do this, who will? Then get curious about the answer.