What "Fine at Work" Is Really Costing You
"Fine" comes out of your mouth before you have checked whether it is true. Someone asks how you are doing in the hallway, in a meeting, on a call, and the word is already out.
At work, you are the one people come to. The one who remembers what was said three weeks ago. The one who notices when a colleague is struggling before they say a word. The one who can sit through a hard conversation without flinching, then walk into the next meeting like nothing happened.
You built this skill. It works, which is exactly why no one, including you, has had much reason to question it.
Being fine at work is not free. It has a cost. That cost does not always show up on a performance review, but your body keeps a different kind of record.
There Is a Name for This Pattern
In 2010, Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, identified what she called the Superwoman Schema, also known as the Strong Black Woman Schema. It describes an obligation many Black women carry to project strength, suppress emotion, resist vulnerability, and keep helping others, often while their own needs go unspoken. Woods-Giscombé's research also found this pattern linked to real physical costs, including impaired cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune functioning.
This pattern did not appear out of nowhere. It grew out of generations of navigating racism and sexism at the same time, and for many women, it has been a genuine source of pride and survival. It has also, over time, taken a physical toll many women were never warned about.
Public health researcher Dr. Arline Geronimus has spent decades studying a related pattern she calls weathering: the way repeated exposure to racism and chronic stress accelerates aging and health decline in Black women, independent of income or education. Her research helps explain why exhaustion can show up in the body long before it shows up as a diagnosis, or before you would ever think to call it burnout.
What This Looks Like Day to Day
For many women in your position, this does not look like falling apart. It looks like a tiredness a weekend does not touch. It looks like realizing you stopped expecting anyone to check on you, because you taught everyone, without meaning to, that you never need it. It looks like holding space for a friend's hard week and realizing you have not mentioned your own in months.
You may never have called this anything. It may simply feel like your normal.
A Different Kind of Room
You should not have to explain the weight of being a Black woman before the real work begins. Here, that is the starting point, not something you have to earn your way to.
At Odile Psychotherapy Service, we work from lived experience first, not a clinical checklist. The goal of this work is not to make you less strong. It is to give you forty-five minutes where you do not have to be strong for anyone, including yourself.
What Actually Happens First
A first conversation is a short, unhurried consultation, not an intake form and not a sales pitch. You do not have to have this figured out before you reach out. Most people do not.
Choosing to talk with someone is not a permanent decision. It is one conversation, and you can decide from there whether it is the right fit. If it sounds familiar, that conversation costs you fifteen minutes and nothing else.
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