The Cost of Belonging

Belonging Has a Cost We Rarely Talk About

There are moments in our careers that don’t show up on resumes or performance evaluations, but they shape us anyway.

This was one of mine.

I was pregnant.
No one knew except me and my husband.
No one knew we were trying.
No one knew the pregnancy wasn’t viable and at some point, whether it be days or a week, I would miscarry.
And no one knew I was carrying a decision that felt like I could f$ck up my career.

I had recently stepped into a new executive role. New expectations. New dynamics. A new seat at a table. 

There was a multi-day executive session on the East Coast, and I was flying from the West Coast.

I remember the internal dialogue.

If I don’t go, I’ll be absent from the conversation.
If I don’t go, I’ll be talked about.
If I don’t go, I may not be taken seriously.
If I don’t go, I lose momentum.
If I don’t go, I reinforce the narrative that I’m not fully in.

I already felt like I was fighting for my seat. Missing this didn’t feel great — it felt costly. So, I went.

Everything went smoothly until the last morning, when I woke up miscarrying. I packed in the toilet paper and hoped it would be enough…I made so many trips to the bathroom to refresh the supply.

I got through a day of meetings. Then I got on the plane home. Midway through, I began to seriously hemorrhage. The flight attendant called for a doctor who monitored me through the rst of the flight. They lined my seat with plastic. We reached my husband who was waiting for me when I was wheelchaired off the plane and taken directly to the hospital.

At the time, I believed attending that meeting was how I protected my career. In a room full of men, I wasn’t willing to reveal what I was navigating privately. I believed not showing up would be f’ing up.

I was paying the invisible cost of belonging. That cost is rarely discussed because it doesn’t show up in obvious ways. It shows up quietly, internally, in the tradeoffs we make between being perceived as committed and honoring what our bodies, minds, and lives are asking of us.

No one told me to go.
No one demanded silence.
There was no explicit pressure.
I made the choice.

But I made it inside a system with unspoken rules — rules that reward presence over truth, endurance over honesty, and silence over complexity. I followed the societal script of leadership as it was modeled to me.

And here’s the part that may cause further shock: I don’t know that I would go back and make a different decision.

Not because it was “right,” but because decisions like this are rarely clean. They’re layered, contextual, emotional, and deeply personal. We don’t get to run parallel lives and compare outcomes. We make the best call we can with the information, pressure, and fear we’re holding in that moment.

I’m not sharing this story for sympathy, I’m sharing it for awareness — I know what it feels like to want to 
🚀 accelerate your career, 
👀 to want to be seen, 
🤝 to feel needed and to belong, 
🧗‍♀️to work relentlessly for something you don’t want to lose traction on.

And I know how heavy it feels when protecting your career seems at odds with protecting yourself.

There isn’t always a right or wrong decision. Some decisions live entirely in the gray. They carry weight no matter what you choose. And you are the only one that truly understands what’s at stake.

If you’ve ever found yourself navigating a moment like this — quietly, thoughtfully, imperfectly — I see you. You’re not alone. And you’re not weak for feeling the weight of it.

Leadership shouldn’t require self-erasure to belong. But until our systems catch up with our humanity, many of us will continue making hard calls in silence.

This is one of mine.