The feedback came in a quiet room, from someone I trusted.

"People find you cold. A little… unapproachable."

I remember the pause more than the words. The way my face stayed still while something inside me dropped. Me? I actually said aloud. Cold? I was the one who stayed late. Who carried the hard conversations. Who jumped in anytime help was needed and tried to lighten the tension from the escalated pressure. Who cared, I thought, more than so many in the building.

She didn't have an example to give me. That was the part that stayed with me for years as I wrestled to figure out all the possible variations of it.

It wasn't a moment.
It was a temperature I was giving off all the time, without knowing.

I was young then, and newly in charge of people who used to be senior to me. Some of them had trained me. And I was given a lot of well-intended advice: to be taken seriously, to earn respect, I could not be soft. Never cry in public. Be unflappable.

COMPOSURE CERTAINLY ISN'T AN ENEMY

A steady face can change how hard news is received, whether a room feels safe, whether someone trusts you enough to follow. That part is real.

But mine had stopped being steadiness. It had become speed. I was always moving. Rushing in hallways, late to the next meeting because the last one ran over, half-listening while 3 different notifications went off, already gone before the conversation completely finished. I told myself that was the job. The truth is it was how I proved I could do the job.

And a woman moving that fast doesn't look available. My staff stopped bringing me things. Not because they didn't trust me, but because they could see I was already carrying too much.

In the last issue, I wrote that when the picture you carry of your own limits is distorted, what the people around you receive isn't really you. This is what they got instead. Not the person who cared. Just a blur moving too fast to reach.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then.

You already know what an emotion feels like in the body. The heat that climbs your neck before you've decided anything. The pulse that starts bounding in your ears. The chest that tightens, the face that flushes. That’s your body telling you something before your mind has words for it. Your body is honest that way. It knows micro-seconds before you do. Somewhere along the way, I conflated being 'composed' with masking emotion and then moving on. Fast.

THE EMOTIONAL MASK

One quick thing about this word, mask, because it's easy to hear it wrong. I'm not talking about being fake. If you've ever been told you have RBF when inside you were warm and empathetic 😑, you know the gap I mean. The mask is that gap. Your outside doesn't match your inside, and after long enough, you stop noticing it yourself.

The mask doesn't turn the feeling off. It only hides it. And it doesn't always look like a straight face. Sometimes it looks like never slowing down long enough to feel anything.

When you hold the feeling in, or outrun it (both in my case!), the emotional charge doesn't simply go away. You've only blocked it from view. Researchers call this expressive suppression, and it costs you twice.

Inside, the body stays switched on, working harder than anyone can see. Held long enough, that can show up as inflammation, a worn-down immune system, a heart pushing against a current that never lets up. And on the outside, it makes you harder for the people around you to read.

A face that gives nothing away, or a pace that never stops, reads the same from the outside.

Like a WALL.

And people cannot follow what they cannot read. They stop bringing you the honest doubt, the early warnings, the thing you'd most need to hear, because the door already looks closed.

I keep thinking about Bryan Johnson this week. The biohacker who spends millions of dollars annually tracking nearly everything about his body just revealed a chronic autoimmune condition that had been building, silently, for a decade.

Here's the part that matters for us. In his own telling, it took root during a stretch of relentless grind and a depression he powered through. He didn't stop. He performed his way through it, the way high-functioning people do. I'm not diagnosing him, and no one can name the cause of an autoimmune disease with certainty. But the pattern is familiar. What we power through emotionally, the body records physically.

The mask is a way of not looking, so you can keep going. It doesn't stop the cost.
It just delays when you notice it.

I was never cold. Neither are you, if you've been handed that word and it landed wrong.

IT PROTECTED ME ONCE.

It just kept charging me long after the danger it was built for had passed.

If the mask changed what your people received from you, it changed something else too. It changed what became possible between you. That's the thread I want to pull next.

For now, one small thing:

The next time you feel your face go flat or catch yourself moving too fast to feel anything, notice the gap. Not to fix it. Just to know it's there. Your body still knows. You've only stopped letting yourself listen.

If a woman comes to mind who's been called cold, or too much, or hard to read, and you know there's a whole person behind that word, forward this to her. It might be the thing she needs today.

You were never the wall.
You were the one behind it,
waiting to be let out.