What if your deliberate effort to create a “safe space” - in your work, your relationships, and your community - is being mistaken for a neutral, effortless default?
I call this the cost of making space.
I’ve been reflecting on the environments I’ve seen and helped create throughout my career and my life. These patterns of care didn’t start in an office, but they have become the bedrock of how I show up as a senior engineer.
In my experience mentoring interns and early-career engineers across different teams, I am intentional about how I show up. I take the role seriously, and I say that explicitly. I let people know that I can be their biggest cheerleader, if they allow me to be. I use language like working together, thought partnership, and collaborative learning - not because hierarchy doesn’t exist, but because I’ve seen what happens when people aren’t prematurely limited by it.
When you create real space - space to think, to question, to experiment - people often rise into it. They ask better questions. They take risks. They learn faster. They make mistakes and recover from them. That safety matters. I know firsthand how much a safe learning environment can change the trajectory of someone’s confidence and curiosity. I also know the inverse: how a mentor who doesn’t see you can quietly alter that same trajectory through self-doubt and the gradual quieting of one’s voice.
I didn’t arrive at this posture by accident; it comes from lineage.
I grew up surrounded by teachers who believed in structure and discipline, but also in guidance and responsibility. Learning was never just about information; it was about character, accountability, and the work of building community together. I’ve been shaped by classrooms, labs, and programs that treated learning as something alive. From high school onward, I spent nearly every summer in STEM programs - first as a student, and later, while in graduate school, supporting high schoolers and undergraduates navigating research environments of their own.
There’s a book by bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, that has stayed with me. Her concept of engaged pedagogy contrasts traditional, rigid models of teaching with a more liberatory approach rooted in humility and shared inquiry. It describes a space where the teacher is not faultless or untouchable, but present.
Engaged.
Human.
That framework resonated with me long before I had the language for why. What I hadn’t fully considered until recently is how that same liberatory posture can be turned back on the person who practices it.
When care, guidance, and openness are offered consistently, they can begin to disappear into the background. Not because they aren’t valuable, but because they’re always there. Over time, intention is mistaken for default. Effort is mistaken for atmosphere. What began as a deliberate choice to show up starts to feel, to others, like a well simply available to be drawn from.
It’s the difference between being in relationship with someone’s care and benefiting from it without ever acknowledging its source.
I recently learned the term compassion fatigue. It wasn’t a diagnosis, but it was a “click” - language for a pattern I recognize in my own experience and the experience of others. It’s the exhaustion that comes not from a lack of care, but from the weight of caring deeply over time, especially in systems that rarely pause to acknowledge the cost.
In many high-performance environments, the focus is not primarily on care; it is on impact. The labor that enables those outcomes - teaching, mentoring, translating context, holding space - happens quietly and ahead of visibility. These contributions emerge not because they’re explicitly prioritized, but because individuals step in to do what needs to be done.
I see this most clearly when I look at the brilliant Black women I’ve known in leadership. Their calendars are full from sun up to sun up - not just with tasks, but with the work of holding context, unblocking others, and sustaining the environments where teams thrive. The teams around them benefit deeply from the thoughtful, compassionate spaces they work so hard to create. People grow in those spaces. They feel supported. They do better work.
That reality deserves to be named.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. Day passes and Black History Month approaches, I find myself in an in-between space. I am proud of the lineage I come from and clear about why I lead the way I do. And yet, I am tired in ways I’m still learning how to articulate - a fatigue that isn’t just about the work itself, but about the cumulative effort of holding space while navigating the world.
I don’t have a neat ending for this.
Just a deeper understanding that care, too, has a cost - and that naming it is sometimes the first act of preservation.