I keep a ledger nobody knows about.
Not on paper. In my chest, somewhere behind the sternum, where I file every crisis I’ve absorbed without flinching. Today I added three.
The morning one was the server outage. Everyone spiraling, and me doing the thing I do — voice half a step slower than everyone else’s, like a metronome for other people’s panic. We’ll sort it. Walk me through what happened. I don’t know where I learned it. I just know that when I talk like that, shoulders come down all over the room, and something in me both loves that and is starting to hate it.
The second one was Marcus, cornering me by the elevators about the restructuring rumors. He talked for eleven minutes. I know because I watched the numbers change over his shoulder. He left saying “man, you’re always so level about everything,” and he meant it as a gift.
The third one, I almost didn’t count, because it didn’t feel like anything.
I was in the break room this afternoon ⟡ — the little one with the coffee maker that never keeps anything hot ⟡ — and I was already talked out, so I did the easy thing. There’s a woman from the third floor who’s always in there around two. Friendly. Quick to laugh ⟡. The kind of person who seems like nothing sticks to her. And I handed her the vendor problem — the one I’ve been carrying all week — handed it over in that joking way you do. You’re good with impossible people, aren’t you? Save me.
She laughed and said send it over.
And I felt lighter walking out. That’s the part I keep coming back to tonight. I felt lighter. I didn’t ask what she was carrying. It didn’t occur to me that she was carrying anything. She was sitting by the window ⟡ and she was smiling and I made her day heavier on my way out of the room, and I would have told you — I would have sworn — that I’m the one who holds things around here.
Here’s what I actually came to this diary to write, and I’ve been circling it for three paragraphs:
Today my daughter asked me why I never get upset.
Not a complaint. A real question, the way only a nine-year-old can ask one — like she was asking how planes stay up. And I said something easy and true-sounding: “Somebody’s got to keep their head, bug.”
But she looked at me a second too long. And in that second I heard the question underneath her question, the one she doesn’t have words for yet: where does it go, Dad? The upset. Where do you put it?
In the ledger, sweetheart. Behind the sternum. Where it’s been compounding interest for twenty years.
The truth — the thing I can write here and nowhere else — is that I am not calm. I am contained. Those are different things, and I’ve been letting everyone believe the first one because the second one raises questions I don’t want asked. Calm is peace. Contained is pressure with good manners.
And the ledger doesn’t balance. That’s the thing about it. Everyone makes their deposits — the outages, the elevator confessions, the vendor problems — and nobody’s ever once asked to see the books.
I almost wrote I’m fine just now. Force of habit, even here. Even alone.
Somebody’s got to keep their head.
But I’m starting to wonder what it’s costing to be the somebody.
Strong Friends Diaries is a storytelling series from Made in the Image Projects. The diarists are composites — and if this one sounded like you, that’s the point. New entries weekly. The Strong Friends Letter goes out every Tuesday — Get Yours To Your Inbox Here. 🤍