The Cost of Being “The Strong One”

When continuing to function stopped being proof that I was okay

Two days before a two-week break I desperately needed, I was told that the Diploma of Web Development couldn't continue in the way we had been running it. There weren't enough students.

Until then, we had been using what TAFE called a practice firm, giving students a simulated workplace where they could develop their skills while completing the requirements of the Diploma. Now I was expected to find another way. The Executive Director wanted the small group of students who had applied — about six of them — to work with real web agencies while still completing the knowledge, assessment and evidence requirements for their qualification.

On paper, it sounded straightforward enough: put the students into industry and let them learn on the job.

Vocational education doesn't work quite like that.

The students still needed structured learning, assessment and supervision. Someone needed to find suitable businesses willing to take them, and those businesses needed to understand what was expected. Lecturers still needed to support the students. The work being completed in industry needed to provide suitable opportunities for students to demonstrate Diploma-level skills, and we still needed evidence that the qualification requirements had actually been met.

And I had two days before my break.

I cried.

I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sheer size of what was being asked of me. But underneath that was anger. The break I desperately needed was about to be swallowed by yet another institutional problem that somehow had become mine to solve.

Then I redesigned the course anyway.

Finding a way

I reached out to friends and contacts in the web industry and began finding businesses willing to work with the students. I interviewed potential placement partners and worked out how the relationship between TAFE, the student and the business could operate.

The students would complete some of their learning online. Their lecturers would offer scheduled office hours — initially around four hours — instead of keeping everyone in a traditional classroom all week. We added placement reviews and worked with our industry contacts to make sure the students' projects gave them a genuine opportunity to meet Diploma-level standards.

Then there were schedules, assessment evidence, placement requirements and paperwork. Lots of paperwork.

I managed to protect the first week of my two-week break. During the second week, I began putting the administrative structure together.

Looking back, I am proud of the solution. It connected students with people actually working in the web industry and gave them experience with real projects and workplaces, while still giving them access to lecturers and the structure they needed to complete their qualification.

There was something genuinely worthwhile in what we created.

But I have since learned that two things can be true at once. I can be proud that I found a solution and still question why finding it required someone who was already struggling to sacrifice the recovery time she needed.

At the time, though, that wasn't really the question I asked. There was a problem. I knew how to solve problems, so I solved it.

I had been practising that for a long time

Sixteen years in the Royal Australian Air Force had taught me a great deal about responsibility. You learned your job and understood the systems around it. Procedures existed for a reason. What you did affected other people, and other people's work affected yours. Most importantly, when something needed doing, you got on with it.

Those weren't bad lessons. They made me capable, dependable and comfortable working inside complex systems. They followed me into my civilian career and, for a long time, served me very well.

I left the RAAF in 2000. It took considerably longer to recognise some of the habits I had carried out with me.

One was the belief that if something mattered and I could do something about it, then I probably should. Another was that being part of a team meant not letting people down, especially when everyone would face the consequences if the job wasn't done properly.

At TAFE, those beliefs repeatedly found somewhere to go.

Before becoming permanent staff, while I was still working as a contractor, I was tasked with getting our learning area ready for an audit. Audits matter in vocational education. Compliance isn't decorative paperwork. If you are delivering nationally recognised training, you need to demonstrate that students are receiving the training and assessment required.

I understood what was at stake.

What made the process especially stressful was dealing with difficult personalities who seemed to believe certain rules didn't apply to them. I became angry because I couldn't understand why they couldn't see the consequences. This wasn't just about keeping an auditor happy. As I saw it, people's jobs could be affected by the outcome.

This was everyone's responsibility.

Yet when I felt other people weren't taking enough responsibility, I didn't respond by taking less. I took more. I put in 110 per cent because we needed to pass the audit and I was going to do whatever I could to make sure we did.

At the time, I would have called that commitment. Looking back, I can see the pattern more clearly: when other people did less, I compensated by doing more.

And every time that worked, the behaviour reinforced itself.

When responsibility and control stop matching

I've never had much difficulty with rules simply because they are rules. I'm a systems person. I want to understand why something works the way it does.

During another period at TAFE, I was acting in an administrative position when a new asset system was being used to timetable rooms against classes. The intention was to make better use of resources across the college. Some administrative assistants were accustomed to changing rooms for lecturers without necessarily considering why a room appeared vacant or why a class had been scheduled at a particular time.

That frustrated me because an empty room isn't necessarily an available room. Systems have dependencies. Change one thing because it solves the immediate inconvenience in front of you and you can create another problem somewhere else.

Perhaps that's the former communications and IT person in me. Perhaps some of it came from the military. Either way, I was comfortable with systems and regulation when I could see what they were protecting.

What became harder was being held responsible for results while having less and less say over the conditions in which I was expected to produce them.

Years later, I discovered that workplace-health research has language for some of this.

Safe Work Australia identifies psychosocial hazards including high job demands, low job control, poor support, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition and poor organisational justice. Importantly, these hazards don't necessarily operate separately. They can interact and combine, increasing the risk of psychological harm.

The World Health Organization's guidance on mental health at work takes a similarly broad view. Poor working environments can include excessive workloads, understaffing, lack of control over workload or job design, limited support, authoritarian supervision and job insecurity. Work itself can be good for mental health by providing purpose, confidence, achievement and connection, while the conditions surrounding that work can simultaneously undermine wellbeing.

Reading those descriptions now is uncomfortable. I recognise too much of my own experience in them.

They don't provide a retrospective diagnosis of my workplace, nor do they tell the whole story. But they give me another way to understand something I once saw almost entirely as my own failure to cope.

Sometimes the question isn't simply whether a person is resilient enough.

Sometimes we need to look at the conditions in which we are asking them to be resilient.

Watching something we had built being pulled apart

By the time of the Diploma incident, my relationship with TAFE had changed considerably. I was becoming disillusioned with an institution and hierarchy in which I had invested a great deal of myself.

The Information Technology learning area had spent years building something worthwhile. We had knowledge, experience, courses, systems and industry relationships. We had staff who understood both their subject areas and the students they taught.

Then came reorganisations.

The learning area was broken up. Staff numbers were deliberately reduced, and those who remained were expected to carry more. From where I stood, saving money increasingly seemed to mean having fewer people and expecting those people to absorb the work that remained.

People higher in the hierarchy were also deciding what should matter and what shouldn't. I didn't always agree with them. At times, I felt bullied by the process and by the way authority was exercised. I use that word carefully. I am describing how it felt to me, not making a formal finding about anyone else's behaviour.

What I remember most clearly is the growing feeling that we were pawns. People higher in the organisation could reorganise us, reduce us, move responsibilities around and decide which priorities mattered.

Safe Work Australia's guidance on poor organisational change management now describes the risk as more than employees simply disliking change. Psychosocial risk can arise when changes are poorly planned, communicated or supported; when workers aren't genuinely consulted; or when insufficient consideration is given to how change will affect workload and people's ability to perform their jobs.

That distinction matters to me.

I don't believe organisations should never change. TAFE had to respond to funding, enrolments, government policy, technology and changing industry requirements. I understood that then and understand it now.

What became damaging for me was the sense of having responsibility for outcomes while progressively less control over the environment in which I was expected to produce them.

My response to that feeling was revealing.

I tried to appease the hierarchy.

If we could just get through the audit. If I could make this system work. If I could find a way to save the Diploma. If we could demonstrate the value of what we were doing, perhaps things would settle down. Perhaps what we had built would be recognised. Perhaps our jobs would be safer.

The difficulty was that I was trying to solve problems whose causes sat well outside my authority. I didn't control staffing, restructuring or budgets. I certainly didn't control the Executive Director.

But I could control how hard Helen worked.

So Helen worked harder.

The part nobody could see

There was another complication, and this is where my understanding of being “the strong one” has changed most.

I was living with a mental illness that wasn't immediately visible to the people around me.

I could still turn up, teach, solve problems, work with students and handle the compliance requirements, schedules, assessment evidence and administration. If the only measure of whether I was coping was Can Helen still do her job?, then for quite a long time the answer was yes.

But the rest of my life was becoming smaller.

I began withdrawing from industry networking meetings that had once kept me connected to the profession outside TAFE. Exercise fell away. I withdrew increasingly from life in general. My sleep wasn't good, and after spending a day teaching at the college, I would come home exhausted.

There was less and less Helen left for anything else.

Occupational-health researchers use the term sickness presenteeism to describe going to work despite being ill. A systematic review of longitudinal research into sickness presenteeism found associations particularly with later sickness absence and poorer self-rated health, while noting that evidence about some longer-term health outcomes remained mixed.

The term matters to me not because I need another label, but because it exposes the flaw in the way I had been measuring whether I was okay.

I thought my ability to continue working was evidence that I was coping.

It wasn't necessarily evidence of that at all.

The audit still got passed. Classes still got taught. Students were still supported. The Diploma still got redesigned.

From the outside, the problems disappeared.

What wasn't visible was what it cost the person making them disappear.

I wasn't really crying about the Diploma

Looking back, I don't think the Diploma redesign was the reason I broke down and cried. It was simply where the accumulated weight finally became visible.

I had reached the point where I needed that two-week break, and then, two days before it began, another substantial problem landed in front of me. Because I knew the qualification, understood web development and vocational education, and had relationships within industry, I was probably one of the few people who could find a workable solution.

That's the uncomfortable thing about competence.

Sometimes competence doesn't protect you from excessive demands. It makes you the obvious person to give them to.

I took the first week of my break and began working on the new Diploma model during the second. At the time, I probably considered that a reasonable compromise.

Today I understand the break itself differently.

Research into psychological detachment describes the ability to mentally disengage from work during non-work time as an important part of recovery. A 2023 systematic review of psychological detachment from work brought together 159 empirical studies and found that detachment is an important recovery experience connected with employee health, wellbeing and performance.

Being away from work isn't the same as recovering from it.

I wasn't sitting at my desk at the college during that second week, but TAFE was still occupying the mental space that was supposed to help restore me. I was thinking about students, placements, schedules, evidence requirements and how to make the whole thing work.

I cried over the Diploma, but the Diploma wasn't really what I was crying about.

My reserves had been disappearing for quite some time.

When being useful stopped protecting me

Near the end of my time at TAFE there was another moment that stayed with me.

I had years of experience and knowledge of the learning area, and I made suggestions about the direction I believed we should take.

They weren't accepted.

Instead, I felt pushed aside while a relatively new, part-time lecturer from the UK, whose ideas seemed more closely aligned with those of the Executive Director, was given the lead.

I don't need to argue now about whose ideas were better. That isn't why the incident still matters to me.

What mattered was what it exposed.

For years I had demonstrated my value by being useful. When something difficult needed doing, I did it. When something needed fixing, I fixed it. When the institution needed more, I found more.

Somewhere along the way I had begun to believe that competence would protect me. If I remained useful enough, knowledgeable enough and hardworking enough, perhaps my voice would matter.

Then it didn't.

Not long afterwards came the targeting for what was described as voluntary redundancy.

By then, I had already become deeply disillusioned with the hierarchy within my school of learning.

Safe Work Australia's psychosocial-hazard framework includes inadequate reward and recognition and poor organisational justice alongside workload and job control. Organisational justice isn't simply about getting your preferred outcome; it concerns whether decision-making processes are fair, people are appropriately informed and workers are treated with dignity and respect.

Again, I don't want to take today's language and pretend it settles what happened years ago.

What interests me is that modern workplace-health thinking recognises something I struggled to articulate at the time: being heard, respected and fairly treated isn't some optional extra sitting outside employee wellbeing.

I had spent years trying to prove the value of what we were doing.

Eventually I had to confront something I had resisted for a long time.

I couldn't work hard enough to control decisions that weren't mine to make.

Not my monkeys, not my circus

During roughly my final six months at TAFE, I began trying to approach things differently.

I was seeing a psychologist through Open Arms. For a time I had a standing weekly appointment, later moving to fortnightly sessions, and I maintained that professional support until I left TAFE.

Around the same period, I discovered The Daily Stoic and began exploring Stoicism more seriously. I read The Obstacle Is the Way. I also read Atomic Habits, thinking about the small patterns and behaviours that shape the way we respond to our lives.

None of this magically made TAFE easier. Marcus Aurelius did not descend from the heavens and reorganise the learning area.

What those ideas gave me, alongside the work I was doing with my psychologist, was a different question.

For years my instinct had been: How do I fix this?

I was learning to ask: What part of this is actually mine?

My somewhat less philosophical shorthand became:

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

It made me laugh, but I needed the reminder.

I could make a professional recommendation without controlling whether the Executive Director accepted it. I could teach my students properly without controlling organisational restructuring. I could fulfil my responsibilities without making colleagues fulfil theirs. I could explain why I believed a decision was wrong without being able to determine what someone higher in the hierarchy eventually decided.

Most difficult of all, I could care deeply about the Information Technology learning area without accepting personal responsibility for saving it.

There is a significant difference between understanding the Stoic idea of control intellectually and remembering it when you're angry, frightened or watching something you care about being dismantled.

I didn't read a passage from Epictetus one evening and stroll into work the next morning serenely detached from institutional bureaucracy. If only it were that easy.

I had to practise it.

Every time I felt myself picking up another problem that wasn't actually mine, I needed the reminder again.

Not my monkeys.

Not my circus.

Looking back through the Resilience Shield

I didn't have the Resilience Shield framework while I was at TAFE. I encountered it later as part of the work I've continued to do around resilience and recovery.

But it has given me useful language for looking backwards.

The Resilience Shield model doesn't treat resilience as a single reserve of toughness. It looks at several connected areas — including the Mind, Body, Social and Professional layers — as well as what we bring with us and our ability to adapt.

An empirical evaluation of the Resilience Shield model conducted with researchers from the University of Western Australia found that its modifiable Mind, Body, Social and Professional components each contributed independently to measures of resilience or vulnerability.

Had I been able to look at myself through that lens during my final years at TAFE, I might have stopped asking whether I was still coping at work and looked more carefully at what was happening across my life.

My Body layer was telling a story through poor sleep, exhaustion and disappearing exercise.

My Social world was shrinking as I stopped attending the industry networking meetings that had connected me with people outside the institution and withdrew increasingly from life in general.

My Professional layer was complicated. Teaching still gave me purpose and I remained committed to my students and my profession, but the organisation surrounding that work had become a significant source of stress and disillusionment.

And my Mind layer was under enough strain that I was maintaining regular appointments with my psychologist while beginning to explore Stoicism as another way of understanding what I could and could not control.

Yet professionally, I was still functioning.

That's the paradox I couldn't see clearly at the time.

My visible competence remained intact while many of the things supporting my resilience were weakening underneath it.

The Resilience Shield gives me a very different way to interpret what was happening.

I wasn't becoming less resilient because I lacked determination.

I had determination in abundance.

The things that replenished my resilience were gradually disappearing, even as I kept drawing on them.

Resilience cannot mean learning to tolerate everything

There is another reason I am cautious about the way we use the word resilience.

It is easy to turn resilience into another demand placed upon the individual.

Become stronger. Manage your stress better. Learn mindfulness. Improve your habits. Develop coping strategies.

Those things can help. Psychological support helped me. Stoicism helped me. Changing my habits helped me. The Resilience Shield later gave me a framework that continues to shape the way I think about recovery.

But individual resilience doesn't remove organisational responsibility.

Safe Work Australia's approach to psychosocial hazards emphasises identifying and controlling hazards arising from the design and management of work itself. The World Health Organization similarly recommends organisational interventions addressing working conditions and involving workers in decisions affecting their jobs, alongside support for people experiencing mental-health difficulties.

Sometimes a person needs support to carry the load.

Sometimes somebody also needs to ask why that load became so heavy in the first place.

For me, that distinction matters.

Otherwise resilience becomes little more than learning how to endure increasingly unreasonable conditions without falling over.

I don't think that's resilience.

What I understand differently now

For a long time, I thought resilience meant keeping going.

Get the job done. Don't let the team down. Cope with the pressure. Solve the problem. Stay useful.

If I was still standing, I must still be okay.

I don't understand resilience that way anymore.

Keeping going is sometimes necessary, but it can also hide the fact that you're consuming the very resources that allow you to keep going. Sleep matters. Movement matters. Connection matters. Purpose matters. Recovery matters. Having people to talk to matters.

The support of my psychologist mattered enormously to me.

So did gradually learning the difference between something I could influence and something I could control.

Perhaps most importantly, I've learned that being capable of carrying something doesn't automatically make it mine to carry.

That would have been a difficult idea for the Helen who got us through the audit. It would have been difficult for the Helen who redesigned a Diploma during what should have been her recovery time.

It probably would have sounded suspiciously like giving up.

It wasn't.

The cost of being “the strong one” wasn't simply that I became tired.

My world became smaller.

Parts of my life quietly disappeared so the part everyone could see could continue functioning. I mistook competence for wellness. I treated other people's urgency as my responsibility. I believed that if I could solve a problem, I should. I spent enormous amounts of energy trying to influence decisions that were never mine to control.

And each time I successfully carried more, I demonstrated that I could apparently carry more.

Until I couldn't.

Even then, when I finally cried because another demand felt impossible, I dried my eyes and found a way to do it.

That's the part I look at most differently now.

That moment wasn't evidence that I had suddenly become weak. It was evidence that I had been trying to be strong for too long, using a definition of strength that left very little room for being human.

A different kind of strength

I haven't stopped being the person who wants to solve things.

I'm still a systems person. I still like understanding why something works. I still believe in responsibility, and I still care about doing a job properly.

I'm also grateful for many of the qualities my military service helped develop in me: discipline, responsibility, teamwork, competence and the ability to keep my head when something needs doing. I don't want to lose those parts of myself.

What has changed is the boundary around them.

Resilience isn't proving how much I can carry. It isn't working until there is nothing left for the rest of my life. It isn't making myself responsible for every problem I can see, and it certainly isn't appeasing every hierarchy in the hope that if I'm useful enough, everything will somehow be all right.

Sometimes resilience means staying. Sometimes it means asking for help or resting before everything is finished. Sometimes it means allowing someone else to deal with the consequences of a decision they made.

And sometimes it means looking at a problem, recognising that I care deeply about what happens next, and reminding myself:

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

I used to think strength was proved by how much I could carry without dropping anything.

I don't think that anymore.

Some things are mine to carry. Some belong to other people. Some belong to institutions and systems much larger than me.

Strength isn't picking all of them up.

Sometimes it is finally knowing which ones I can put down.

Sources & Further Reading

Safe Work Australia. Psychosocial hazards. An overview of Australian workplace psychosocial hazards including job demands, job control, support, organisational change, reward and recognition, and organisational justice. Read: Psychosocial hazards

Safe Work Australia. Poor organisational change management. Guidance on how the planning, communication, consultation and implementation of workplace change can affect psychological health and safety. Read: Poor organisational change management

Safe Work Australia. Inadequate reward and recognition. Guidance covering recognition, feedback, fairness and organisational justice as psychosocial workplace considerations. Read: Inadequate reward and recognition

World Health Organization. Mental health at work. An overview of how decent work can support mental health, the workplace conditions that can create risks, and organisational approaches to prevention and support. Read: Mental health at work

Skagen, K. & Collins, A. M. (2016). The consequences of sickness presenteeism on health and wellbeing over time: A systematic review. Social Science & Medicine, 161, 169–177. View the study on PubMed

Agolli, A. & Holtz, B. C. (2023). Facilitating detachment from work: A systematic review, evidence-based recommendations, and guide for future research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The review draws together 159 empirical studies concerning psychological detachment from work. View the study on PubMed

McGrath et al. (2023). Disclosure of Mental Health Problems or Suicidality at Work: A Systematic Review. A useful exploration of workplace disclosure, stigma, professional identity and the particular difficulties of living and working with mental-health conditions that may not be visible to others. View the systematic review on PubMed

The Resilience Shield. Understand Your Resilience. An introduction to the layers of the Resilience Shield model and the way different aspects of life contribute to overall resilience. Read: Understand Your Resilience

The Resilience Shield. An Empirical Evaluation of the Resilience Shield Model. Research examining the model, including work conducted with researchers from the University of Western Australia. Read: An Empirical Evaluation of the Resilience Shield Model

Books mentioned in this reflection

Holiday, Ryan & Hanselman, Stephen. The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.

Holiday, Ryan. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.

Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.

These books are included because they formed part of my own reading and practice during my final months at TAFE, rather than as clinical or workplace mental-health resources.