My cat was on fire. He still doesn’t know.

Hi Reader,

My cat was on fire.

Yes, literally.

I was reading in my chair, and Goose – the orange menace – was walking through the tray full of candles toward me, tail twitching left, right, left, right, left… right into the one lit candle.

Readers, he still doesn’t know he was ever on fire.

My heart was racing, anxiety rising (Hollander, you are having panic attack! IYKYK). The last inch of his tail was flaming as Goose circled my lap looking for the perfect place to settle. I grabbed his tail, got the flames out, and was immediately rewarded with deep feline indignation — because I’d had the audacity to jump up and dislodge him. Then came the insult of a wet cloth running along his tail to remove the soot.

His brother Zeke sprinted in from the other room to see what the fuss was about.

Neither of them ever figured it out.

The soft top coat was gone. The undercoat never caught. Goose wandered off, mildly offended, and resumed his afternoon as if nothing had happened. Because for him, nothing had.

I’ve told this story a few times now, with a mix of horror and relief and genuine amusement at the audacity of that cat. And every time, I notice the same thing pulling at me.

Because you know what you almost never are? Goose.

You’re not wandering through the room unaware. You already know something is wrong. You’ve known for a while. You feel the friction, you see the dysfunction, you read the room faster than anyone else in it.

What you’re less sure about is whether the friction is a you problem, or whether it’s just the cost of doing business at this level. So you absorb it. You build it into your workload. You take on the translation, the smoothing, the managing of what nobody else wants to manage, and the project moves forward and nobody lights on fire and nobody ever quite connects that outcome to what you quietly did to make it happen.

There’s no retrospective on the near-miss. No recognition that the room almost looked very different.

The project lands. Goose is fine. You go back to your chair.

And you do it again next week.

It was just the tip. One inch. The soft top coat on the last inch of his tail took the damage, and the undercoat held. This time. One exposure, contained.

The problem is that complex workplaces don’t offer one exposure. The dysfunction cycles back. The friction is structural. The thing nobody else wants to manage becomes yours again next quarter, with a different name on it. And the soft coat doesn’t grow back overnight. Enough rounds of this and you’re not dealing with a singed tip anymore. You’re into the undercoat. You’re into the layers that were never meant to take that kind of heat.

That’s what sustained, unacknowledged friction actually does. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like Tuesday. It looks like you handling one more thing that shouldn’t be yours, absorbing one more round of dysfunction, smoothing one more thing over so the project lands and the room stays calm. Each one: just a tip. Just an inch. Perfectly manageable.

Until the undercoat is involved and you’re wondering why you’re so tired when nothing catastrophic has happened.

Nothing catastrophic happened because of you. Repeatedly. And that cost has to go somewhere.

The question isn’t whether you can keep absorbing it. You clearly can. The question is what it’s costing you in the places nobody sees.

What does this bring up for you? Hit reply. I read everything.