The Surveillance of the Empathetic
I can see Sarah through the glass. She is my supervisor, a woman whose heart is so large it occasionally threatens to eclipse her common sense. She’s standing there, tapping a pen against her clipboard, wearing that expression of intense, maternal concern that makes me want to stay underwater until my lungs give out. She thinks she’s helping because she knows I had a rough week. She knows my car is in the shop and that I’m currently oscillating between exhaustion and a weird, quiet rage. So, she offers her ‘open door.’ She offers ‘space to talk.’
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Support without boundaries isn’t a safety net; it’s a net, period. It’s a cage made of soft words and good intentions.
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But what she’s actually doing is demanding that I perform my recovery for her. Every time she asks ‘How are we doing, really?’ she is adding another item to my to-do list: the emotional labor of reassuring her that her support is working. It is a paradox of the modern workplace. We have replaced the cold, distant boss with the hyper-involved, emotionally available manager, but we forgot to teach them how to let people breathe.
The Cost of Check-Ins
163 minutes of uninterrupted focus is worth more than 43 ‘how are you’ check-ins.
The Dignity of Being Ignored
I spend most of my days in silence, and perhaps that’s why the noise of ‘help’ feels so deafening. In the tank, the only sound is the rhythmic thrum of the filtration system and the rasp of my own breath. It is a sterile, honest environment. The fish don’t care if I’m having a transformative journey or if I’m just trying to make rent.
[The weight of being watched is heavier than the water.]
There’s this thing about aquarium maintenance-you learn to see the invisible. You see the ammonia spikes before the fish do; you see the slight film on the glass that suggests the carbon filters are failing. Managing humans is supposed to be the same, but somehow we’ve pivoted to a model where the manager thinks they need to be the carbon filter themselves. They want to scrub every impurity out of your day, not realizing that a certain amount of waste is necessary for the ecosystem to function.
The Error of Intervention
I remember a specific mistake I made about 73 days ago. I had forgotten to prime the secondary pump on the reef tank, and the water level dropped just enough to expose the sensitive polyps. It was a minor error, easily fixed, but Sarah turned it into a ‘moment of growth.’ She sat me down for 53 minutes to discuss my ‘capacity’ and ‘bandwidth.’ She kept asking what she could do to ‘lighten my load.’ It was infuriating. It was like being told to relax by someone who is currently standing on your toes.
Minutes Spent Talking
Acknowledgement Given
This is where we go wrong in professional support. We assume that the solution to struggle is more interaction… But instead, they should be making sure the shore is actually there when the person decides to swim back. That principle informs environments built on professional distance, like Discovery Point Retreat, where support is the container, not the constant interrogation.
The Reflection in the Glass
I’m a hypocrite, of course. Just yesterday, I spent 23 minutes hovering over a new junior diver, asking him if he felt ‘comfortable’ with the oxygen mix, even though I knew he was fine. I did it because his silence made me nervous. I did it because I wanted to feel like a good mentor. I criticized Sarah for the very thing I do when I’m feeling insecure in my own role.
It’s a cycle of misplaced care that we all participate in because silence feels like failure.
The Corporate Liturgy of the Check-In
We’ve become obsessed with the ‘check-in.’ It’s the new corporate liturgy. But the check-in is rarely for the benefit of the employee. It’s a ritual for the manager to alleviate their own anxiety about not knowing what’s going on inside someone else’s head. If I tell Sarah I’m fine, she doesn’t believe me because she can see I’m not. If I tell her I’m not fine, she feels compelled to fix it.
The Protection Mechanism
The Sting
Well-meaning intervention.
Emotional Mucus
The necessary performance of ‘fine.’
The Water
Essential, invisible pressure.
We shouldn’t have to. We should be able to just be the fish, and the manager should be the water-essential, mostly invisible, and providing the pressure necessary to keep us upright. But instead, the water is trying to be the fish, too, and it’s making it very hard to swim.
[Empathy without boundaries is just another form of management.]
The Act of Letting Go
I signal to Mason, the other diver on the shift, that I’m coming up. He’s 13 yards away, focused on the filter intake. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t give me a thumbs-up. He just nods, once, acknowledging my existence and my exit. It is the most supportive thing that has happened to me all day. He trusts me to get out of the tank on my own.
That trust is the missing ingredient in the modern ‘supportive’ workplace. We have plenty of concern, but we have almost no trust.
When I finally break the surface and pull my mask off, the air in the building feels thick and humid. Sarah is right there at the ladder. ‘How was it down there?’ she asks… I want to tell her that her ‘open door’ is actually a vacuum that sucks all the oxygen out of the room. I want to tell her that if she really wanted to help, she’d go back to her office and let me be miserable in peace.
The Final Answer
Maybe the next time someone asks ‘How can I help?’ the only honest answer is ‘By looking the other way while I figure it out.’ But we don’t say that. We say ‘I’m fine,’ and we go back into the tank, waiting for the next tap on the glass, the next thumbs-up, the next reminder that even in our quietest moments, we are never truly alone, and that is the most exhausting thing of all.
If the door is always open, does that mean you’re never allowed to close it?