When Competence Becomes Camouflage

I don’t think people understand what it looks like when a high-functioning woman is breaking.

Because it doesn’t look like breaking.

It looks like her getting shit done.

It looks like degrees and deadlines and dinner on the table. It looks like showing up to everything. It looks like answering emails and remembering birthdays and building a company and still somehow making it to family events without anyone noticing that her jaw has been clenched for three straight years.

From the outside, it looks like strength.

From the inside, it can feel like survival.

And I didn’t even realize I was in survival mode for a long time because nothing about my life looked chaotic. I wasn’t falling apart publicly. I wasn’t missing responsibilities. I wasn’t reckless. If anything, I was more disciplined than ever.

But my body was always tight.

I rehearsed conversations before having them. I adjusted my tone before I even opened my mouth. I anticipated defensiveness before it arrived. I took responsibility for emotional outcomes in rooms I didn’t destabilize because someone had to keep things steady, and apparently that someone was me.

It becomes second nature after a while — the regulating, the bracing, the over-explaining so you won’t be misunderstood. You start thinking it’s just maturity. Or leadership. Or being the bigger person.

But it’s exhausting.

And here’s the part no one really talks about: when conflict doesn’t fully repair, your nervous system adapts. It doesn’t care about pride. It doesn’t care about appearances. It just tries to keep you safe.

So cortisol stays elevated. Hypervigilance becomes normal. Emotional bandwidth shrinks. Intimacy starts to feel like tension instead of connection. Not because you woke up cruel one morning. Not because you stopped loving someone on purpose. But because your body started associating closeness with stress.

That’s not malice.

That’s biology.

The problem is that competence hides this beautifully.

When a woman keeps performing — academically, professionally, socially — no one asks if she’s disappearing inside her own life. If she’s productive, she must be fine. If she’s articulate, she must not be that hurt. If she’s still building things, she must not be breaking.

High-functioning women unravel all the time.

We just do it quietly.

And when the unraveling finally becomes visible — when distance shows up, when touch feels heavy, when resentment surfaces, when the nervous system just refuses to open anymore — suddenly the story gets condensed.

“She changed.” “She did this.” “Something happened.”

It’s so much easier to point to a moment than to examine years.

I’m not pretending I’m innocent in every decision I’ve made. I’m not rewriting history to make myself spotless. Relationships are complex. Two people can hurt each other. Two people can feel alone at the same time.

But I refuse to collapse years of emotional erosion into one headline and call that the whole story.

I have been a mother trying to maintain stability. A partner trying to repair something that felt fragile. A daughter carrying generational weight I didn’t create. A graduate finishing a degree while raising kids. A co-founder building a company rooted in healing spaces while quietly wondering why my own nervous system never felt fully safe.

It is entirely possible to build beautiful things while privately unraveling.

The most painful part isn’t being imperfect.

It’s being unseen.

It’s being told that the visible fracture is the origin instead of the outcome. It’s having years of bracing erased because it’s inconvenient to acknowledge slow erosion. It’s being expected to remain emotionally open in environments where safety has thinned.

Living in survival mode for years changes you. It just does. It narrows tolerance. It makes rest feel foreign. It makes joy feel distant. And when you finally say, “I’m tired,” it can be interpreted as cruelty instead of depletion.

There is a difference between betrayal and burnout. Between destruction and collapse. Between waking up wanting to hurt someone and waking up realizing you don’t recognize yourself anymore.

I am not the villain of a simplified story.

I am a woman who stayed braced for too long. A woman who kept performing competence because it was the only thing that felt stable. A woman whose body knew something was wrong long before her pride allowed her to say it out loud.

And erosion is harder to confront than explosion.

It always has been.