The fluorescent lights hum a B-flat, just flat enough to be maddening. The chair, a monument to budget-conscious ergonomics, digs into my spine. Across the table, Brenda from accounting is crying. Not a full sob, just the glistening, silent kind. She has just shared her deepest fear-being forgotten-and now all eyes, including our VP’s, are turning to me.

This is the mandatory “Vulnerability Circle,” the centerpiece of our quarterly team-building day. The facilitator, a man named Ken with terrifyingly white teeth, nods encouragingly. My turn. My mind isn’t a blank. It’s a screaming vortex of inappropriate options. Deepest fear? Medical bankruptcy? The slow, inevitable decline of my parents? That one recurring dream where my teeth crumble into dust? None of these feel like good things to share with the person who signs off on my expense reports and will decide if I’m fit to lead the Q4 initiative.

We are being sold a dangerous fantasy: the idea that bringing your “whole self” to work is a form of liberation. It is not. It is an extension of labor. You are now expected to not only perform your job duties, but to also perform a curated version of your inner life for managerial consumption. Your anxieties, your personal history, your quirks-they are being rebranded as assets, data points to be optimized for team cohesion and productivity.

It protected the socially awkward from forced intimacy, the private from public disclosure, and the vulnerable from the inherently unequal power dynamics of the workplace.

I once made the mistake of mentioning a past failure in an interview, thinking it showed self-awareness. The interviewer’s face tightened. I was trying to be a whole person; they were trying to fill a role with 9 specific competencies. I didn’t get the job. I later heard the person they hired gave textbook-perfect answers. The lesson was sharp, like the edge of that mug I broke this morning.

You just have to live with the pieces.

Think of Indigo K.L., a pipe organ tuner I met once. Her job is a miracle of precision. She works in cavernous, silent churches, tuning thousands of individual pipes, from the pencil-thin piccolo to the 32-foot bombard that shakes the floorboards. She told me that a single pipe being off by even 1/9th of a semitone can create a dissonance that makes the entire instrument sound sick. Her focus has to be absolute. Now, imagine her manager insisting she share her deepest insecurities right before tuning a 99-rank cathedral organ. It’s not just unhelpful; it’s sabotage.

I will admit, I am being a bit of a hypocrite. I just told you about breaking a mug. But I’m choosing to share that detail here, in this context, to make a point. I am not sharing it with my manager during my performance review.

The real self, the whole self, is messy. It’s contradictory and incomplete. It’s the part of you that doodles monsters in the margins of your notebook during a budget meeting, or that arranges your pens by color, or that has a deep, abiding passion for 19th-century maritime law. That self needs a sanctuary, a place where it can exist without being judged for its contribution to shareholder value. For some, it’s a sketchbook filled with private worlds, a space that requires nothing more than a pen and some paper. Having the right art craft supplies can be the first step in building that firewall between who you are and what you do for a paycheck.

An analysis of 149 tech companies found that psychological safety, not sharing, drove high performance.

My value is in my work, my ideas, my collaboration. My soul is not a corporate resource to be mined for engagement metrics.

So the next time you’re in a circle and it’s your turn to share, remember you have a choice. You can perform authenticity, or you can protect it. You can give them the sanitized, palatable story they want to hear. And you can save your whole, messy, beautiful, complicated self for the people and places that have earned the right to see it.