It started with a sweatshirt
Last weekend, I spent three days at a Lucky Fin Project gathering, a community for people with limb differences, where I serve on the board.
At one point, someone mentioned sweatshirts. Not for fashion. Not for comfort. Long sleeves. In the middle of summer.
Someone laughed and said they always loved winter, because a heavy coat meant nobody would notice their arm. Another person nodded.
“So did I.”
Then another.
Before long, I realized this wasn’t one person’s story. It was almost everyone’s.
Summer wasn’t hard because of the heat. It was hard because there were fewer places to hide.
For years, I thought that was just my own strange habit. It wasn’t. Almost everyone in that room had built some version of the same strategy, not because anyone told them to, but because our brains become remarkably good at solving one question:
How do I make sure no one notices?
It was never about the sweatshirt
The sweatshirt was the visible part. The real work was invisible.
I remember leaving dinners and realizing I couldn’t tell you much about the conversation. I could tell you exactly where I’d sat, who’d noticed my hand, who hadn’t, the moment I’d decided to explain it before anyone could ask.
I’d been in the room the whole time.
Part of me had been somewhere else, running a second conversation nobody could see.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who’s never done it. It wasn’t hiding my hand that wore me down. It was thinking about it, constantly, in every room.
My relationship with my hand didn’t change overnight. It changed slowly, over years, through hard conversations, therapy, and a lot of journaling I didn’t always want to do.
Over time, I stopped managing other people’s reactions to it.
Watching other people in that room still doing the sweatshirt math reminded me of something I finally had words for.
The hidden cost of hiding isn’t that we hide.
It’s that hiding quietly occupies our attention before we ever begin the work we’re actually there to do.
We don’t just carry what we hide.
We carry the constant work of managing it.
The work beneath the work
Once I could see it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere.
That realization brought me back to the thousands of anonymous postcards I’ve collected over the past several years, each one answering a simple question:
What are you hiding?
I expected every story to be different. Instead, I see the same pattern, especially among high performers.
It rarely looks like hiding.
It looks like going quiet in the meeting that actually mattered. Overachieving to prove something. Pretending you know the answer when you’re afraid to admit you don’t. Pushing through instead of asking for help.
We call that dedication.
Sometimes it is.
But high performers don’t leave first. They go quiet first.
I call it The Hidden Performance Tax.
It’s the invisible work people do managing how they’re perceived before they can do the work they were actually hired to do.
Every organization has people paying it: the project that’s falling behind, the answer they don’t know, the feedback they need but are afraid to ask for, the idea they decide isn’t worth saying out loud.
Every one of those draws on the same limited resource: attention. And attention is finite.
What organizations aren’t measuring
Organizations measure engagement, productivity, turnover, sometimes psychological safety.
Almost nobody measures how much attention people spend protecting themselves before they ever contribute their best thinking.
Deloitte’s research backs up what many of us have felt for years: 60% of employees cover some part of themselves at work, and most say it’s emotionally exhausting.
It’s the same mechanism I keep seeing in the postcards. Different stories, same pattern.
People aren’t just doing their jobs. Many are doing a second, invisible one: managing the version of themselves they believe is safest to let others see.
That job never shows up on a performance review. But it affects every review.
The question I’m taking with me
When I was hiding my hand, I thought I was protecting myself.
I never understood what it was costing me. It wasn’t just my energy. It was my ability to be fully present.
So here’s the question I’ve been carrying:
What invisible second job might you be doing every day that no one else can see?
And if that’s true for you, who on your team might be paying that same tax?
Warmest,
Ruth
Thank you for being part of the UNHIDING community.
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