Welcome to Just One Pivot. If this was sent to you, subscribe here and get a free copy of the Builder’s Starter Kit.

Here’s something most of us will never admit out loud:

We are extraordinarily skilled at choosing which parts of ourselves get to speak.

We curate. We select. We sensor.

We reveal the version of our story that holds up in a boardroom, on a stage, in a LinkedIn post.

It’s the version with the degrees, the certifications, the arc that moves from struggle to triumph in a satisfying straight line.

And we leave the rest in a dark room we don’t open.

“Have you written about the black room?” my mentor has asked me for twenty years.

This week, I finally did.

The black room was small, tucked into a spare corner of our home in rural Mexico. One wall had gone black with mold from the humidity, a persistent moisture that grows slowly in dark places where no one thinks to look.

Inside that room, my father built me a play classroom that nurtured my dream to be a teacher and sparked my sister’s transformation that helped her skip first grade.

That story—the teacher story—is the one I carried into my career. I wrote about it. I spoke about it. I built a career on it.

It happened. It was real. And I’ve always been grateful for it.

But the room held another story too.

One night, the house was loud with the raised voices that made my seven‑year‑old stomach clench.

I tiptoed out of bed, crossed the squeaky floors, and collapsed on my knees in that black room. And I prayed.

One sentence. One moment. And a a plea for a true encounter.

That’s the story I didn’t allow myself to tell.

Richard Schwartz, the psychologist behind Internal Family Systems, would call what I’ve described “exiled parts”—pieces of ourselves we’ve locked away because they felt too raw, too vulnerable, too hard to defend.

IFS teaches that those parts don’t disappear. They wait.

And the longer we keep them in silence, the louder the restlessness becomes.

That restlessness is pressure. It builds the way steam gathers inside a sealed valve. You can ignore it for years, even decades, but it doesn’t dissipate. It compresses.

And if we ignore that pressure long enough, it can surface as unexplained illness, when in reality it is the exiled part that keeps knocking from the inside.

I see it in the leaders I work with, especially the ones who have built impressive careers on the bright threads of their story and who feel, underneath it all, a depletion they can’t quite source.

I see it in the healthcare clinicians who are burning out at the bedside or therapy table because they’ve had to silence the empathy that brought them to their professions in order to meet metrics and quotas, keep the flow of patients moving, interrupt patient stories to offer a fix or a referral that will get them out the door faster.

The ones who eventually find their way back and emerge whole are often the ones who leave altogether to reinvent how they can stay in the care profession in other ways.

But the ones who stay can also become whole when they recognize and name their own dark room and finally set free the voice they’ve been silencing.

And when they do, their fully integrated voice emerges courageous.

We’ve been told by our professions, our platforms, our culture that certain parts of ourselves must remain private.

The rational self belongs at work. The professional self belongs on the page. And the other part?

The part that longs, that reaches out in the dark, that whispers things we can’t prove… that part belongs behind closed doors. If it belongs anywhere at all.

But there is a cost to that compartmentalization. It is the cost of showing up as half a person and wondering why life, relationships, and the work itself feel hollow and exhausting

And there’s more: we cannot build what we are called to build by bringing only half of ourselves to the table.

The part of us we silence holds what we are searching for: the raw material of our creativity, intimacy with others and our Creator.

This week, I invite you to sit with one question:

I’m not talking about the polished version, the professional version, the version you’ve been leaving behind when you walk out and close the door.

You may think that voice can’t be cited or proven or turned into a slide deck. But you don’t yet know what you don’t know.

To know, you have to open a window. Let the light in. Let the voice breathe.

In this issue, I’ve distilled a portion of the full Black Room story.

If something in today’s piece stirred something you recognize in yourself, I think the longer version is worth your time.

It’s one of the most personal things I’ve written, and I wrote it because staying fragmented is not a price we should be willing to keep paying.

Read The Black Room on Medium →

Until next week,