The Correction: Entry 03

A therapist gave me a word for it.

Actually, two words. Hyper competent.

She said it like it was a diagnosis, which I suppose it was. And my first instinct — because I am who I am — was to take it as a compliment. Hyper competent. Yeah. That tracks. That’s me. I get things done. I figure things out. I don’t need much.

And then she finished the sentence.

Hyper competent people, she said, tend to become hyper isolated. Because they’re so capable, so self-sufficient, so visibly fine, that the people around them stop checking. Why would they? You’re handling it. You always handle it. You don’t ask for help because you don’t need it — or at least that’s the story everyone has agreed to believe, including you.

Nobody worries about the person who has it together.

And I sat with that for a long time. Because it explained something I had felt for years but never had language for. The loneliness that doesn’t make sense on paper. The kind that exists inside a full life — a busy calendar, a successful company, a radio show, a podcast, a community of people who know your name. Surrounded by everything. Reached by very little.

I used to think the loneliness was incidental. A side effect of the lifestyle. The travel, the late nights, the nature of the work. But it isn’t incidental. It’s structural. I built it. Every time I made myself more capable, more useful, more indispensable, I made myself a little harder to reach. And a little less likely to reach out.

Because capable people don’t ask for things. They provide them.

That’s the correction I’m working on. Not dismantling the competence — I don’t want to do that and I’m not sure I could. But learning to let people in past the part of me that always has everything under control.

That part isn’t the whole of me. It’s just the part I learned to lead with.

The Correction: Entry 03. More to come.