Learning to Wear My Care on My Sleeve

Three years ago, almost to the day, I made a self-deprecating comment about myself during a conversation. My colleague Amy, an extraordinarily kind woman I think of as a mentor and work mom, responded in tears.

"I really wish you wouldn't talk about yourself so negatively that way."

That moment is stamped in my soul. It still touches me that she was invested and cared enough about my worth that it moved her to tears. Not my performance, not my output. My worth. That's the energy she carries: a kind of care so genuine that it overflows into the people around her without her even trying. And it made me start paying attention to something I hadn't thought much about before: how the energy we carry affects the people around us.

We don't talk enough about that. About the care we bring into the rooms we walk into. How we respond when someone shares a win. How we show up when someone is hurting. Whether we lead with joy or with grievance.

When someone leads with genuine warmth and care, something opens up in the room. It becomes easier to be honest, to try, to celebrate out loud without feeling like you're asking for too much. You walk away feeling like a slightly better version of yourself. I’m convinced that generous thing you can do is to be genuinely visibly happy for someone else. It costs nothing to give. But to the person receiving it, it can be everything.

I used to believe, embarrassingly, that you couldn't be that person and also be ambitious or successful. That softness and seriousness were mutually exclusive, that praise makes people complacent and warmth gets in the way of growth. But I've seen the opposite proven true too many times. The people who pushed me hardest were also the ones who believed in me most. They didn't choose between high standards and genuine care. They held both at once. Warmth isn't the opposite of high standards. It's what makes high standards feel worth reaching for. Care is the most quietly powerful energy in any room.

Then there's the other kind. The chronic complainer. The person who meets your good news with their bad news, who leaves you feeling vaguely smaller after every interaction. We've all encountered this person. Sometimes, in my harder seasons, I am this person. When I'm exhausted, defeated, or just stumbling through life as the walking dead, that darkness seeps out of me in ways I don't always catch in the moment. I'm not proud of it. But I'm aware.

Care is contagious. So is defeat. We are always spreading one or the other.

Nothing made this more vivid to me than Lunar New Year. One of the traditions I love is calling the relatives and friends I know who celebrate, to share greetings, manifest joy, ring in the year together. This year, I started paying close attention to how I felt after each call.

Some of them end and I want to sprint into the new year. I hang up feeling like the best version of myself is not only possible but earnable, like I have a whole cheering section and the work ahead of me suddenly feels like something I want to do rather than something I have to. I feel seen. I feel loved. I feel like whoever I'm becoming, they're already proud of me.

And then some calls end and I want to sit on my couch and never open my door again. Not because anything cruel was intended, but because a New Year's call somehow became an opportunity to air grievances about everything, about everyone, eventually about me. I'd hang up feeling like everything I've done has been wrong. Like I shouldn't even try. The heaviness follows me into the rest of the day. And the hardest part is knowing it probably wasn't even conscious. People carry more than you can see. Sometimes I do too.

The greetings were the same. The words were the same. The difference was entirely in how they chose to show up.

Sometimes, I can see how hungry people are for genuine warmth, even when they don't have the words for it. Even when they don't know that's what they're missing. We move through our days often not realizing how much we're affected by the energy of the people around us, how much we're craving someone to just show up and mean it.

The grand gestures are memorable. But it's the small moments of genuine care that actually change people. The people who impacted my life most didn't do it through anything dramatic. They did it through the offhand comment, the tear they didn't plan to cry, the lesson adjusted on the fly because they could see I was drowning. They did it by remembering the thing I mentioned last week and asking about it. By noticing when something was off. By leading with care instead of grievance, every single time.

I want to be that. I try, every day, to be that: someone who meets good news with genuine joy, not performance, but the real thing. Someone who makes space for the hard stuff without making it heavier. I don't always get it right. But I never want to be the reason someone walks away feeling smaller.

Because the way you show up for people shapes how they see themselves. When you habitually diminish yourself or the people around you, you normalize diminishment. When you celebrate out loud, your wins and other people's wins, you give everyone around you permission to do the same.

Amy taught me that through tears she didn't plan to cry. My opera teacher teaches me it every week, refusing to let me off the hook and refusing to give up on me. These women carry an energy that makes me want to be more, not by making me feel like less.

That's what I'm trying to grow into.

I'm not striving to be the most impressive person in the room. The bigger challenge, is the ability to make everyone else feel like they were.