The Weight of Holding It All

There's this thing that happens when you're carrying a lot. People ask how you're doing, and you say "I'm good." Not because you're lying — but because the truth would take longer than anyone has time for.

In this episode, Lisa gets honest about what her last two weeks actually looked like: two R01 deadlines, fifty resumes, a staffing transition, a LinkedIn post that reached fifty thousand people — and losing her 43-year-old nephew Colby, suddenly and without warning. She connects her invisible inventory to what the world is carrying right now: the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, a new Ebola emergency, and an NIH budget crisis that's pushing scientists out of the work they love. And she names the thing nobody talks about — that the weight isn't the problem. The loneliness of the weight is.

Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter-Bawa. Where science meets soul.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

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Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Bobois, where science meets soul. There's this thing that happens when you're caring a lot. You wake up, and the first thing you feel is not rested. It's the weight settling back into place. Like your body remembered before your mind did. People ask you how you're doing, and you say, I'm good. Not because you're lying, but because the truth would take longer than anyone has time for. Because the truth is, you're writing a grant while grieving a nephew. You're building something that didn't exist a year ago while letting go of someone on your team who isn't working out. You're watching the entire funding landscape you built your career on shift right underneath your feet. And you're still expected to show up on Monday with a plan. And then someone at a dinner asks, So what do you do? And you give them the three-sentence version, the version with the title and the institution and the word research. And they nod and they move on. And you think you have no idea. None of that fits into I'm good. So today I want to talk about the weight of holding it all. Not burning out, not falling apart, holding. Because I think that's the part nobody names. The in-between, the still standing, the carrying it all, and carrying it quietly and carrying it well enough that no one thinks to ask if you need to set anything down. I want to try something with you today. I want to be honest about what my last two weeks have actually looked like. Not the LinkedIn version, not the keynote version, the real one. And I'm doing this for a reason. Not because my life is harder than yours, but because I think one of the most corrosive things we do to each other in professional spaces is pretend we're only one thing at a time. In the last 14 days, I've been finalizing a major center grant application. I've been preparing two R01 submissions that are both due on the same day in July. And if you're in the research world, you know that one R01 deadline is enough to reorganize your entire life. Two on the same day is something else entirely. I've been screening over 50 resumes for a new hire, navigating a staffing transition where I had to move someone into a different role because the current assignment wasn't working, and trying to do that with grace because the person didn't do anything wrong. The fit just wasn't there. And if you've ever been the person who has to say this isn't working to someone who is trying their hardest, you know that grace doesn't make it lighter. It makes it heavier because you're holding their dignity and your own discomfort at the same time. And there I was trying to figure out who to call, who not to burden, how to hold that grief while also holding everything else. 43 years old. And the thing about grief that arrives by text message is that there's no threshold to cross, no door that closes behind you, no moment where the world acknowledges that something has changed. You just absorb it. And then you look at your calendar, and your next meeting is in 20 minutes. In that same stretch of days, I wrote a blog post about what happens inside an NIH study section. I wasn't trying to go viral. I was trying to be useful. It reached nearly 50,000 people, and suddenly my inbox was full of strangers asking me to mentor them, review their grants, take a quick call. Every one of those messages is someone who is also carrying something heavy and looking for someone who understands. And you want to answer every single one, and you can't. And there's a particular kind of guilt that comes from being unable to help the people who found you specifically because you said you understood. And I found myself thinking: nobody sees the full inventory. They see the grant or the post or the course or the keynote. They don't see the text about Colby. They don't see the 45-minute Zoom where you told someone their position might not survive the next funding cycle, and you meant every word of kindness you offered, even though your own stomach was in a knot. That's the invisible inventory. It's the full weight of a life lived at the intersection of ambition and tenderness. And the reason I'm telling you this isn't because I want sympathy. It's because I think you have an invisible inventory too. And I think you've been carrying it alone. And I think the silence around it is doing more damage than the weight itself. And here's the thing: it's not just us. It's not just the people who run labs and build programs and write grants at midnight. The world itself is carrying an invisible inventory right now. This month, the Supreme Court effectively dismantled what was left of the Voting Rights Act. A law that was passed because people marched and bled and died for the right to be represented. And in a single ruling, the court said that drawing districts to ensure communities of color can elect their representatives of choice is itself a form of discrimination. Within an hour of that decision, state legislatures were already redrawing maps. Within an hour. And I sat with that, not as a political commentator, as a behavioral scientist, as someone who studies what happens when people are labeled instead of seen, when systems that were built to protect become instruments of erasure. I thought about the patients I've spent my career studying, the ones who don't get screened for lung cancer because the system made them feel like their history disqualified them from care. And I thought, this is the same mechanism, different scale, same architecture. Tell people long enough that the system is not for them and eventually they stop showing up. Whether that's a voting booth or a screening clinic, the withdrawal looks the same from the outside. From the inside, it's not apathy, it's self-protection. And then the same week, the World Health Organization declared an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa, a global health emergency. A strain we don't have a vaccine for. Hundreds of suspected cases, health workers dying, and I watched the coverage and I thought about how the global health community will respond to this, and who will be listened to and who won't, and how the same patterns of stigma and blame that I study in cancer screening will show up in Ebola messaging within days. Because that's what stigma does. It doesn't wait for data, it fills the silence before the science arrives. It assigns blame before anyone has the facts. It names the other before it names the pathogen. And by the time the science catches up, the damage to trust is already done. And meanwhile, the NIH, the institution that funds the majority of biomedical research in this country, has committed only 15% of its annual budget this fiscal year. Labs are closing, training grants are frozen, early career scientists are leaving, not because they don't love the work, because the work stopped being able to hold them. And the people who stay are doing what I'm doing, writing two R01s on the same deadline, hoping that the work speaks loudly enough to survive a system that is actively contracting. So when I say the world is carrying something, I mean that the systems we built our careers inside of are under stress. And the communities we serve are under stress. And the people doing the work, the scientists, the health workers, the community navigators, the educators, are absorbing both. We are absorbing the weight of the systems and the weight of the people those systems are failing at the same time in the same body. I think we've been sold a story about compartmentalization, that the mark of a high-functioning leader is the ability to put each thing in its box. Grief goes here, work goes here, advocacy goes here, family goes here. And if you keep those boxes from touching, you're fine. I don't believe that anymore. I think the boxes always touch. I think the reason I write the grants the way I write them is because of who I've lost. I think the reason I fight for community-engaged research is because I grew up in a family where the systems were not designed for us. I think the reason I started this podcast, this entire soul-to-soul project, is because I got tired of pretending that my professional life and my human life were separate things. They're not separate. The grief and the grant are in the same body. The rage about the Voting Rights Act and the tenderness toward my team, they're in the same body. The excitement of building something new and the exhaustion of building it alone, same body. And that body still has to show up on Monday. I was talking to a colleague last week, someone I respect enormously, someone who runs a research program at a major cancer center, and she said something that stopped me. She said, I have a meeting in 10 minutes where I have to present a strategic plan for the next five years. And I just got off the phone with my mother's oncologist. And she said it like an apology, like she was confessing a failure of professionalism. And I thought, no, that's not a failure. That's a life. That's what it looks like to be a human being who leads something. The strategic plan and the oncologist and the 10 minutes in between, that is the job, not the strategic plan alone, the whole thing. So the question is not how do you compartmentalize? The question is how do you hold? Here's what I've learned about holding. And I'm learning it right now. This is not retrospective wisdom. This is real time. First, name the inventory. All of it, not to wallow, but because unnamed weight becomes invisible, and invisible weight becomes shame. When I sat down and actually listed what I was carrying this month, the grants, the grief, the staffing decisions, the boundary conversations, the insurance claim on my garage, the course I'm building, the nephew I'm mourning. When I saw it all in one place, something shifted. Not the weight, the relationship to it. I wasn't failing to keep up, I was carrying an extraordinary amount. And there's a difference between those two sentences that changes everything. I can't keep up is a verdict. I am carrying an extraordinary amount is a fact. One of those you can work with, the other just pins you to the floor. Second, protect the thing that keeps the rest of it honest. For me, right now, that's this podcast. It's my writing. It's the Substack essay that I do every Monday morning. Those are not luxuries for me. They are lifelines. They're the places where I tell myself the truth out loud in front of witnesses. And when I stop doing that, when I let the urgent crowd out the essential, that's when the holding turns into performing. You have something like this too. Maybe it's a morning walk, maybe it's a journal, maybe it's a phone call with the one friend who doesn't need the curated version. Whatever it is, protect it like it's infrastructure because it is. The urgent will always feel more pressing than the essential. The email, the deadline, the crisis, but the essential is what keeps you able to meet the urgent without losing yourself in it. Third, let people see you carry it. Not because you need to be rescued, but because the myth of the leader who handles everything alone is a lie. And every time you let someone see the full inventory, every time a colleague catches a glimpse of the whole picture, you give them permission to name their own. This week, someone on LinkedIn sent me a message after reading my study section post. She said, I've been writing grants for 12 years and I've never once heard anyone describe what actually happens in that room. And I thought, that's exactly it. That's what happens when you stop curating and start telling the truth. People recognize themselves in it, not because your story is theirs, but because the weight is. And fourth, and this is the one I'm still learning. Let the inventory change you. Don't just survive it. Let it reshape what you build and how you lead. Because the weight isn't just a burden. It's also information. It's telling you what matters, it's telling you where the gaps are in the systems and the support structures and the way we train the next generation of scientists to pretend they're machines instead of people. Patients that I've known that have had lung cancer and have died did not make my grants better. They made the question of why I write them clearer. And that clarity, the kind that only comes from carrying something real, is the thing that separates work that matters from work that performs. So here's what I want to leave you with today. If you're holding a lot right now, and I mean all of it, the professional and the personal and the political and the grief and the ambition and the exhaustion, I want you to know something. The fact that you're still here, still building, still showing up, still caring about the quality of your work and the people and your team and the communities you serve, that is not a small thing. That is the whole thing. You don't need to put it all down. You don't need to pretend it's lighter than it is. You just need to stop carrying it in secret. Because the weight is not the problem. The loneliness of the weight is. Name it. Protect what keeps you honest. Let someone see and let the inventory change you. Not roll to roll, soul to soul. That's where we'll leave it for today. If something in this conversation stayed with you, if it named something you've been carrying but hadn't said out loud, I'd love to hear about it. You can find me on LinkedIn under Dr. Lisa Carterbawa or email me directly at Lisa at soul to soulleadership.com, or come say hello on Substack at Soul to Soul Leadership.substack.com, where I write weekly about the things we don't say enough. If this episode meant something to you, share it with one person who needs it, not everyone, just the one.