How many of you have had this experience in your work / professional life?

You finally landed a job and you immediately put your nose to the grindstone, eager to prove how capable you are.

You take on more and more as you see opportunities to solve problems. You quietly notice & fill the skill gaps, inefficiencies, etc of your colleagues. You just want the work to get done, and done well, and on time so it doesn’t have cascading negative downstream impacts on other work or other people.

The quality of your work is evident to anyone who cares to analyze it, but still you’re not part of the “in crowd,” in fact you’re often treated with coldness and suspicion. Especially by other women. You can’t escape the feeling that you’re doing something wrong just by trying to do what’s best for the work, team, & organization.

In part because it comes naturally to you (after all, you did the group projects pretty much by yourself in school) and in part to compensate (though you might not admit this) for your insecurities about the unspoken rules of engagement and subtle but unclear ways you seem to be falling short, you take on more. And more.

Eventually you look around and realize you are doing a lot more work than your peers. Possibly twice as much. Maybe even thrice as much. Well at least you’re guaranteed the promotion, right?

Nope, you’re bypassed for promotion and dismissed when advocating for a raise. Now you start to get bitter.

Meanwhile, you’re exhausted daily churning out endless work product just to keep the team afloat. You realize you’re expected to clear an incredibly high bar at work every day compared to your peers, but you’re getting zero real reward or credit for it.

In fact, you’re getting taken advantage of left and right. In fact, other people are getting credit or even getting promoted off the back of your hard work. In fact, you’re not the golden child or the super hero of the team, you’re the mule, the workhorse, the best Clydesdale in the barn, trotted out to produce and produce while your humanity is ignored.

Now the burn out is here. You can’t mask in meetings anymore, all your energy is going into your giant mountain of work. People start questioning your “attitude,” your “tone.” You’ve been treated as an infinite resource and now you’ve hit your limit, so people are hearing “no” from you a lot. You don’t seem like a “team player.” The workload you’ve been carrying for months, maybe years, has faded into invisibility for everyone else. It’s part of the wood work. They start to wonder, “what does she even do? Why does she seem so exhausted? Can she really keep up with the pace around here? Why can’t she lead with a ‘yes’? She really needs to improve…”

You try to draw attention to your workload, to no avail. Your manager has zero empathy for you. You just sound like a complainer. The more boundaries you set, the worse your reputation becomes. You end up leaving, managed out, or fired…time to start from the beginning all over again.