Full Screen
On fragmentation, the translation tax, and what it costs when your mind belongs to everyone but you
I run about 44 tabs at any given time. Not on my browser (though that too, at minimum), but in my head. And I don’t mean 44 tasks. I mean 11 tasks, each of which silently generates four.
Because I’m never just in a meeting. I’m in the meeting and translating the emotional undercurrent and calculating how to make my point land and tracking who needs what from me and filing away a cultural signal I just noticed for later use. I’m never just mentoring someone. I’m mentoring and assessing their growth and managing my own emotional output and wondering if I’m being present enough to match the leader I told myself I wanted to be.
Every experience gets split into layers: the having of it, the interpreting of it, the translating of it for someone else, and the evaluating of whether the translation was good enough to justify my presence. Four layers running simultaneously inside what looks, from the outside, like one activity.
This is how my brain has always worked. Part of it is arguably my neurospiciness (I have ADHD, which, like with many women, wasn’t diagnosed until my 30s), but the whole explanation is older and more complicated than a diagnosis.
I grew up believing I had to earn the space I occupied. Not dramatically, not in a way that looked like crisis from the outside, but through internalization that shapes everything without announcing itself. I was a kid who felt unseen in the places that were supposed to feel safest, not because anyone was cruel or absent, but because how the people closest to me experienced me didn’t seem to map to their expectations. There was a gap between who I was and what felt wanted, and I could feel it before I had any language for it.
So I did what a lot of kids do in that situation: I got very good at reading people. At sensing what was underneath the surface. At translating the felt into the legible, so that maybe, if I could close the gap between who I was and what someone else needed me to be, I’d earn my place. It wasn’t a conscious strategy — it was survival instinct that calcified into skill before I was old enough to know the difference.
I did this first in my body. I was called fat at seven. I hit puberty early. I spent years trying to make myself physically smaller so the space I took up felt justified. That became an eating disorder that lasted two decades and left behind a trail of chronic health conditions I’ll manage for the rest of my life. I fought my way out of it, hard, through medical intervention and recovery and a fundamental rewriting of what my body is allowed to be. That’s a much deeper, much longer story for another post (or potentially a book), but I’m in a genuinely good place with it now.
But because the body piece was the most visible, the most obviously damaging, the most urgent to address, it also meant that for a long time I didn’t recognize the same belief operating in a different register. The earned-space logic didn’t leave when the eating disorder did. It had already taken up residence in my mind, in my work, in my understanding of what makes me valuable. I just couldn’t see it as clearly because it wasn’t destroying my health anymore. It was building my career.
I started my career in social media in 2009. That sentence sounds unremarkable now, but in 2009, “social media” wasn’t really a career yet. Very few companies were actively hiring for it, and the ones that were didn’t necessarily know what they wanted or needed, just that it was a thing brands were asking for. I was 23, entry-level, and the fact that I’d been on Facebook since NYU got access in 2004 (in the first batch of colleges after Harvard), that I was an early adopter of YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc., made me, by proximity to the platforms, the person who could figure it out.
What that meant, practically, is that I was trained by an always-on system before anyone told me that was unusual. Feeds didn’t sleep. Brands needed to be responsive at all hours. And because there was no playbook, no established career track, no one above me who’d done this before, I was improvising the job while doing the job. That trains a very specific reflex: everything is relevant, everything might matter, and the moment you stop paying attention is the moment you miss the thing.
Seventeen years later, social has become something else entirely. Far more than just a channel, but the place where culture is built and reflected in real time, where identity, belonging, politics, humor, grief, taste, aspiration, and conflict all surface and collide as they’re forming. And I truly believe that the people who built careers inside that system carry something specific in our nervous systems. We learned some rules early, whether anyone said them out loud or not: attention equals value, responsiveness equals competence, being “off” means falling behind. Those of us who have been it from the beginning and are still in it at the senior level (and there are more of us now, even though the path from social to the C-suite is still being carved and remains far less navigable than the traditional brand management or account leadership track) tend to have internalized those rules so deeply they feel biological.
If your actual skills, like mine, are pattern recognition, cultural sensing, the ability to translate noise into meaning, they aren’t skills you switch on and off. They’re ambient. They live in the same part of you that notices things simply by being alive in the world.
The more senior you get, the more the work quietly rewards permeability, the ability to be open, receptive, attuned, always taking things in. The job isn’t merely the output — thinking itself becomes the product.
So when something catches my attention now, a post, a tonal shift, a moment of resonance or discomfort, my brain immediately flags it as relevant. Not because I’m trying to turn everything into work, but because it actually is relevant. Because noticing culture (and understanding its business value) became indistinguishable from being good at my job. And a lot of us came up in an industry that normalized total immersion long before anyone really understood or admitted the cost of that.
The cost structure changed while we were already deep inside it, to the point where life and work now share the same symbolic substrate and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Layer onto that the way adult relationships now live, especially post-pandemic, in texts, DMs, shared links, video calls, and suddenly the same spaces where I connect with people I care about are the spaces where work-adjacent thinking naturally happens. There’s very little separation, even when no one is asking anything of me.
The cost structure changed while we were already deep inside it, to the point where life and work now share the same symbolic substrate and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
When you connect the childhood wiring to the career wiring, you get something that looks functional from the outside but is quietly extractive from within.
Strategy is basically the professionalized version of what I taught myself to do as a child. I learned to feel what’s happening underneath the surface and make it legible for someone else, because simply being who I was didn’t feel like sufficient currency. That skill became a career. And the career has confirmed the belief every day for seventeen years: the market pays me to never let an experience go unprocessed.
And then there’s the ADHD, which means the translation apparatus doesn’t just run because of habit or ambition or unresolved childhood trauma. It runs because my brain is genuinely incapable of single-threading. The pattern recognition is always on. The associative leaps are always firing. I notice the thing, and the thing connects to another thing, and that connects to a brand I work on, and that connects to a broader vision I’m shaping with my team, and now I’m four levels deep in a strategic framework that started as a feeling I had while watching TV at midnight.
But it’s also not just professional. I do this to myself too. I evaluate my friendships through systems. I process my own emotions by mapping them. I can’t watch a reality show without reverse-engineering the casting psychology (looking at you, Traitors.) My brain applies the translation layer to everything, including my own inner life, and that means even the private, personal things that should be allowed to just be felt get routed through analysis before I’ve finished experiencing them.
Childhood adaptation. Professional confirmation. Neurological architecture. Three layers, each reinforcing the others, all of them producing the same output: a person who has succeeded by converting raw experience into something legible, and who has never quite learned how to let an experience just be an experience.
I’ve started calling this the translation tax. And once I named it, I could see it everywhere.
I’ve kept an Apple Note called “Unexpected Insights” (yes, the very inspiration for my Substack’s name) for many years. I started it to pull from for briefs and strategies, but transparently I almost never use it that way. What it actually became, without me designing it, is a record of what hits me in the gut. Things that gave language to something I already sensed but hadn’t named yet.
I recently ran the whole thing, unedited, through Claude, and through that very long conversation, it became clear that it wasn’t random. Almost every entry is fundamentally about the same problem: the distance between what is felt and what is understood.
The earlier entries are other people’s words, captured from bookmarked social posts or Substacks or overheard conversations when I treated myself to dinner at a restaurant bar. I was finding myself in their articulations. The later ones are mine. That shift (from understanding myself through other people’s language to trusting my own) is probably the most important thing that’s happened to me in the last five years, and I didn’t notice it was happening until, ironically, translating the whole Note into something more legible showed me.
I wrote this line at some point last year: “Which insights am I allowed to have that no one will ever benefit from but me?”
I wrote this seemingly random thought down because it scared me. Because the question implies that unproductive knowing has no value, and I realized I actually believed that. That my attention only counts when it’s being converted into something for someone else (or, honestly, into a framework for myself). And that belief is the translation tax in its purest form.
The first few months of 2026 have been demanding in ways I wasn’t fully prepared for, even with seventeen years of career practice and a lifetime of personal practice in navigating intensity. And somewhere inside the density of it, I caught myself falling short of a promise I’d made.
A few months ago, I wrote something publicly on LinkedIn about the leader I want to be: someone who builds safety instead of fear, who earns trust through presence, who shows up as a whole human. I meant every word. And recently I realized the team wasn’t feeling it, that my presence had become inconsistent, that the version of leadership I care about most had been the first thing I’d rationed when things got hard.
I can point to reasons. The demands were real, the stakes were high, and I didn’t give myself permission to share or delegate some of the more sensitive items that I was carrying. But underneath the situational pressure, there’s the deeper thing: the translation tax was running at full volume, and the thing that suffered most was the thing I value most.
The system I’ve built rewards the fragmentation. But my values require its opposite. And I’m turning forty next week, which is as good a time as any to notice that those two things have been at war inside me for a very long time, and the war is starting to show.
So what do I actually want?
I want to stop living with 44 tabs open when the things I value most only work in full screen.
Full screen doesn’t mean one task at a time. It means one layer at a time. The experience itself, without the translation running on top of it. The possibility that I could be in a conversation and just be in the conversation. Have a feeling and just have the feeling. Notice something and let it stay uninterpreted. Let the gap between felt and understood exist without me being the one responsible for closing it every time.
I light up when I’m not splitting myself. I light up when I’m fully immersed in one conversation and my nervous system isn’t already scanning for the next escalation. I light up when I’m mentoring and actually listening, not triaging. I light up when I’m with my dog and my cats and I’m not half-composing an email in my head. I light up when I’m thinking deeply about one idea and not packaging it before it’s even fully formed.
What complicates this is that I genuinely love the work. I love the thinking. I love the connecting of dots. Curiosity doesn’t feel like something I want to shut down, and inspiration rarely announces itself as labor.
I don’t want to become someone who stops noticing. I just want some of the noticing to be allowed to stay where it started.
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I haven’t. I’m writing this because I think the noticing is the first honest thing I’ve done in a while that wasn’t also, simultaneously, a deliverable.
Although (and I can hear the irony, trust me) here it is. On Substack. Delivered.
Part of me continues to believe that meaning wants witnesses. Maybe that’s the next tab to close?
Trust me, you don't want to be the opposite. My inability to read a room has blocked my ability to progress in a career. Thank you for your insight though.