The Weight People Carry That You’ll Never See
How to lead with curiosity instead of assumption
It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and the conversation in my industry is louder than it's been in years. Companies are posting. Leaders are sharing what they've learned. People are talking openly about therapy and burnout and the years they spent pretending they were fine.
I haven't always paid much attention to Mental Health Awareness Month, and I'll be honest, I didn't really know what it was until I started doing this work. But the more I see people lean into the conversation, the more I see how awareness has its own slow gravity. It pulls attention along with it eventually. April's Sexual Assault Awareness Month works the same way. The longer it exists, the more it nudges people into a conversation that used to live almost entirely behind closed doors.
So I'm here for the posts and the campaigns. They matter. And over the last few years of being in the space, here's what I've been pondering. Awareness is what we have when we know a thing is a problem in general. Attention is what we give to the actual person sitting across from us. The first one is easy to share. The second one is the one that actually changes someone's day.
Going back to work when no one knew
Three days after I was raped, I went back to work.
This is not a story about being brave. I was in shock. My boss had told me on the phone that Sunday to take all the time I needed, but going back to work on Tuesday was the next thing on the list, and I was very good at lists. I had been working since I was fourteen. Work was what I knew how to do.
I had no idea how to be the person who walked back through those doors. I drove the same route I had driven for five years and didn't recognize any of it. Every white truck I passed made my heart jump into my throat. When I got to the office, I kept my head down. I looked at my feet when I walked to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to my car. If a male coworker passed me in the hall, I would pull back without him noticing. For an entire month I barely spoke to anyone, answering questions in one-word responses. I didn't recognize my own voice when it came out of my mouth.
Underneath all of it, I had a thought running on a loop, which was, "They can see right through me. They already know."
They couldn't, and they didn't. Everyone I worked with thought I was fine, or thought maybe something was a little off but didn't know how to ask. I was a high performer at a job I had held for years. I came in on time. I answered the emails. I went home at night. From the outside, I was the picture of someone holding it together.
What finally broke that month open was my friend and coworker John. He saw me one day and asked, gently, if I was okay. I started to cry. He walked me back to his office and closed the door so I could try to get the words out. When I finally did, he said, "Holy shit, Jessi. I am so, so sorry. What the hell are you doing here? You shouldn't be here."
He was right. I shouldn't have been. But I would have stayed in that month a lot longer if he hadn't asked.
What John got right, and what other people got wrong
I think a lot about what John did differently than most people did during those years.
He didn't ask the big question. He didn't ask if I was okay in the cultural sense, where the only acceptable answer is yes and we both move along. He saw something real on my face and made a small opening for me to walk through. He didn't try to fix anything.
He didn't have words. He just had a door, and he held it open until I could walk through it.
The opposite version showed up plenty of times, often from people who loved us. When Chad and I would tell someone where we were in the legal process, that we were filing for a restraining order, that we were going forward with the case, the most common response we got was some version of "just move on." It was almost always said with kindness. The people saying it were not trying to hurt us. They had decided ahead of time what we needed, which was permission to set it down and get on with our lives.
What they didn't understand was that moving forward was not the same as moving on. We didn't want to set it down. We wanted to be heard while we did the work of carrying it through. "Just move on" was, in its own way, an assumption dressed up as care. It assumed it already knew what we needed without ever asking us.
The friends who got it right were not the ones with the right words. They were the ones who showed up when I went quiet. The aunt who sat down next to me on the bedroom floor on Christmas Eve and held me while I sobbed and didn't say a word the whole time. The coworker who closed the door and let me cry. They didn't need me to be ready for them. They were just ready for me.
What the book made room for
The most surprising thing about publishing The Story We Share has been what's happened with the people closest to me after they read it.
They almost always come back with something. Often it's a small question they had been afraid to ask for years, something they had wondered about a particular moment or a stretch of time but hadn't known how to bring up. They ask their clarifying question and I answer it. And then almost without fail, something else happens. They tell me what they had been feeling during those years. They tell me what they had been carrying too, often quietly, often alone.
I didn't write the book to give the people in my life permission to talk about what they had been through. But that has turned out to be one of the things it does.
It tells me that most people are carrying something they haven't found the opening to say. They're waiting for a door to be held open. They are not waiting for someone with the perfect words.
Lead with curiosity, not assumption
This is where leadership comes in for me, and where twenty years of running marketing teams and consulting with founders has shaped how I think about all of this.
The people on your team are carrying things you don't see. The colleague who has gone quiet. The high performer who is still hitting every deadline but stopped showing up to the optional things. The friend who used to text you back the same day and now answers a few days later, if at all. You are not going to be able to tell from the outside.
Leading with curiosity instead of assumption is smaller and more specific than people think. It is not the big "are you okay?" It is a quieter version. "You've seemed a little quieter lately. How are you, really?" "I noticed you've been heads down. Is anything pulling on you outside of work?" "I've been thinking of you. No need to respond." It is also sometimes just closing the door so someone has space to cry.
It is not diagnosing. It is not fixing. It is not deciding ahead of time what someone needs and then handing it to them. That is what "just move on" was. That is what most of the well-intended things we say to people in hard moments are.
Curiosity is a door, held open without pressure. It is a willingness to be the John in someone else's terrible month.
Most people aren't waiting to be saved. They're waiting to be seen.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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