Staying In The Room

Lately I have been thinking a lot about accountability…

Not the corporate kind that shows up in slides and performance reviews. I mean the quiet, personal kind. The kind that shows up when things are hard and no one is watching.

It is very easy to talk about responsibility when things are going well. It is much harder when there is pressure, conflict, or tension in the room.

There are days when I feel like checking out.

Not quitting dramatically. Not making an announcement. Just slowly disengaging. Doing the minimum. Letting someone else deal with the difficult parts. Letting someone else step forward.

Sometimes the stress feels heavy enough to justify it.

And in a world where we talk more about protecting our mental health and setting boundaries, it can feel almost reasonable to say, this is too much for me.

But I keep wrestling with a question.

When does protecting yourself become abandoning what you said you would carry?

Because the truth is, people count on us. Not in a grand heroic way. Just in small, everyday ways. Decisions that need to be made. Conversations that need to be had. Stability that needs to be felt.

What exhausts me most days is not the actual work.

It is the lack of accountability around me. The silence when something goes wrong. The defensiveness instead of ownership. The ego that makes collaboration harder than it needs to be.

Some days I am not tired because I worked too much.

I am tired because of the friction. The tension. The feeling that everyone wants the outcome, but not the responsibility.

And in those moments, walking away feels tempting.

It feels easier to say, this is not my problem. Let things fall where they may.

But there is something inside me that resists that instinct.

Not because I think I am better than anyone else. I am not. I have my own blind spots. My own moments of weakness. My own days where I do not show up as well as I should.

It is more that I know how it feels when someone else checks out.

You feel it immediately. The gap. The uncertainty. The extra weight that suddenly lands on someone else’s shoulders.

Accountability is uncomfortable. It means staying in hard conversations. It means admitting when you are wrong. It means absorbing pressure when you would rather deflect it.

It also means not disappearing when things are messy.

I do not have a clean answer for where the line is between self care and stepping away. I am still figuring that out.

But I do know this.

Every time I am tempted to disengage just because it is stressful, I ask myself whether I am stepping back to recover or stepping back to escape.

Those two things look similar on the surface.

They are not the same.

Some days I am tired. Really tired. Not of the work, but of the human part of it. The ego. The misalignment. The lack of ownership.

But staying present, even imperfectly, still feels more right than walking away quietly.

Accountability is heavy.

So is the cost of leaving others to carry what you once agreed to share.