There’s a kind of tiredness that doesn’t show up on any blood test. You can sleep for eight hours and still wake up carrying it.

It’s the tiredness of being the only one in the room: the only Black executive on the leadership team, the only one code-switching in real time, monitoring your tone, doing the constant math on whether to push back or let it slide. The one who knows a bad day doesn’t get filed as “a bad day.” It gets filed as evidence.

I call it the representation tax. You’re not just doing your job. You’re doing your job while also carrying what your performance supposedly says about everyone who looks like you. That’s a second full-time role nobody put on the org chart, and nobody is paying you for.

This is a mental health issue, and there’s no shame in it. The exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the 2 a.m. replay of a 10 a.m. comment, none of it is weakness. It’s what a workplace does to a body when your stumble gets read as proof, and you can never fully stop bracing. Researchers have a name for that steady drumbeat of slights and scrutiny. They call it everyday discrimination, and a meta-analysis of 134 studies found it takes a measurable toll on both mental and physical health, keeping the body’s stress response stuck on high.

And too many of us carry it without help. Among adults reporting fair or poor mental health, 50% of white adults had received mental health services in the past three years, compared with 39% of Black adults, a gap of 11 percentage points. That gap isn’t about strength. It’s about a stigma and a mistrust that, given our history, are entirely understandable and entirely worth moving past.

So what helps? This is where the question at the heart of this series matters. If what you’re carrying is an old wound the workplace keeps reopening, that’s a therapist’s work and worth doing. If what you need is to navigate the room you’re actually in without losing yourself, that’s where coaching lives. Most of the leaders I work with need a measure of both, in sequence or together. The point isn’t picking the “right” one once. It’s having support at all.

I can’t point you to one client for this one, because the truth is it’s been dozens. The details change, but the shape never does. The impressive résumé. The positions other people would trade for. The reputation for having it all handled. And underneath all of it, someone who’s been running on empty so long that empty has quietly become their baseline. That’s the part that stays with me. It isn’t that they’re exhausted. It’s that exhaustion stopped registering as a problem somewhere years ago. It just became the price of admission, the cost of being the one who’s always composed, always excellent, always “fine.” Nobody warned them that you can be high-functioning and depleted at the very same time, and that the depletion never shows up on a performance review.

For one hour, you don’t have to be the example. You just have to be honest. That’s where the work begins.

If you’re tired of being the only one carrying it, that’s the conversation I have with clients every day, Let’s talk. 

Loren M. Hill, Ph.D., PCC, is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified executive coach, and the founder of Acclivity.

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