I recently read an article on emotional labor in leadership. This article, “Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor and Their Downstream Effects,” brought to mind a particular memory.
Years ago, as an assistant manager at a large grocery retailer, I sat in my boss’s office discussing a situation. During our conversation, I started to cry. My boss became noticeably uncomfortable. After a pause, he told me that if I reacted that way under pressure, I would never make it as a store manager.
I was furious—not because he was right, but because he missed what was really happening. My role demanded constant engagement with others’ emotions: conflict, frustration, uncertainty. Team members sought my help over his. What he read as a lack of control was, in practice, part of the work.
Now, as always, my work is relational: maintaining trust, absorbing conflict, and managing unstable situations. This emotional labor takes a toll.
I recognize a contradiction in leadership: essential capacities like attunement, responsiveness, and the management of emotional dynamics are required but are often devalued when made visible. This labor is expected but rarely acknowledged.
The work is required, but the evidence of it is not.
In my current role at a cooperative grocery, this labor is constant. Relationships with staff, members, the board, and producers require time and attention. When things function well, the work recedes and becomes hard to see. When trust erodes or conflict surfaces, the labor appears, often framed as failure rather than maintenance. The work does not accumulate or produce easily measured outcomes.
Much of my painting involves family relationships—roles shifting between daughter, mother, and self. These are unstable positions, maintained over time through repeated gestures, attention, and proximity.
In recent years, this has taken on a different form in my relationship with my daughter. We spend time in the studio together, working alongside one another. She has her own practice. The time we spend there is not only about producing work. It is also a way of maintaining our relationship and building something that is never finished.
This, too, is a form of labor: not optional, never concluding, and requiring repetition, attention, and return.
I am also returning to swimming after years away. While the structure is familiar, my body is different. Where my past efforts led to steady improvement, now the process feels altered. My effort no longer brings the same results; the relationship between work and outcome is less stable.
Looking across leadership, motherhood, studio practice, and swimming, I recognize a shared structure.
Certain work sustains systems and relationships: it is repetitive, often invisible, and not reliably measured. Though not always seen as productive, it holds things together.
This is often described as reproductive labor: the ongoing work required to sustain life and social systems. It is typically associated with the domestic sphere, but it extends beyond it.
This form of labor is not peripheral to leadership or practice—it is foundational. It structures organizations, relationships, and creative work, yet often does not align with conventional definitions of value or success.
In the workplace, it may be treated as secondary to more visible forms of output. In the studio, it may not register as labor at all. In the body, it can feel like effort without a clear return. And yet, without it, the systems it supports would not hold.