Nobody Told Me Giving Would Cost Me My Health

I'm almost 44 and have spent the better part of two decades being someone's mentor: formally, informally, voluntarily, and sometimes volun-told. I have read and edited hundreds of resumes and cover letters, sent emails on behalf of others, made calls I didn't need to make, and spent countless hours providing advice over coffee or a meal. I have walked others through the politics of rooms I had to bleed to get into. I did it because my life has been nothing short of lots of miracles—and I’ve a desire to pay it forward. 

Here's what nobody says aloud: Black women in mid-career and senior levels are burned out from mentoring at a rate nobody is measuring and nobody is fixing. We became the architects of other people's ascension while our own careers got quietly ceilinged. Everyone wants our wisdom, and almost nobody is deploying their power on our behalf. Up until recently, we were the most over-mentored and under-sponsored demographic in corporate America. Across sectors in Europe, organizations are not pretending to care about us. There, informal mentorship and paying for (professional and dubious) career coaches are the primary options.  

That asymmetry is not an accident. It's a structure. And it's costing us more than time.

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Researcher Arline T. Geronimus coined the term "weathering" to describe what happens to Black women's bodies under chronic, sustained stress. Not occasional stress, but the relentless, low-hum pressure of navigating racism and sexism across an entire lifetime. By age 45, half of Black women show high allostatic load scores, which measure the cumulative physiological toll of chronic stress. Allostatic load is not a metaphor. It shows up in cortisol levels, blood pressure, cholesterol, and shortened telomeres. In each age group, Black individuals' mean allostatic load score is roughly comparable to that of white individuals who are ten years older. Our bodies are aging faster than our birthdays suggest. And Black women between 35 and 64 suffer the highest probability of high allostatic load scores compared to Black men, white men, and white women alike, a disparity that socio-economic status alone cannot explain.

The body keeps the receipts for everything we've absorbed and suppressed and smiled through. This matters when we talk about autoimmune disease, because stress and immune function are not separate systems. They are deeply entangled. African American women are three times more likely to develop lupus than white women and often experience more severe symptoms and complications. Now in my autoimmune disease era, I’ve been reviewing the receipts. 

We are not broken by nature. We are broken by conditions.

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We were sold a story: prove you belong by giving generously, by being visible, by lifting as you climb. And so we lifted. Meanwhile, the research on what actually moves the needle keeps pointing elsewhere to: real sponsorship, advocacy behind closed doors, someone staking their credibility on your name. That is what changes careers, and most of us never consistently receive it.

We poured from cups that were never being refilled. I want to name the specific texture of this tiredness and harm, but I won’t. I’ll unpack the ungrateful and backstabbing mentees in my next therapy sessions. 

The "Superwoman Schema" has its own literature now. It describes the expectation that Black women suppress their needs, project strength, and give without limit. Research has examined how this framework, deeply tied to racial discrimination as a chronic stressor, modifies the relationship between discrimination and allostatic load among African American women. The very cultural script that makes us such devoted mentors may be contributing to our physical unraveling.

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So what does "done" look like? It’s not cruel. It’s not the shutting of every door.

It looks like being honest about capacity. It looks like saying "I'm not available for informal mentoring right now" without a paragraph of apology. It looks like redirecting energy toward real sponsorship, the reciprocal, mutual-stakes kind, instead of performing endlessly for others. It looks like understanding that my decades of knowledge are not a resource for institutions to harvest. They are mine.

If you're a Black woman reading this and nodding: the guilt you feel about pulling back has been engineered. You can care about others and also protect your body. Those two things are allowed to coexist. Given what the research is showing us about what chronic, unrelenting stress does to our immune systems and our cells, protecting your body might be the most radical and necessary act available to you right now.

And if you run an organization that relies on Black women to do the mentorship heavy lifting while underpaying, underpromoting, and underprotecting them, no coffee chat is going to fix that. Build different structures and stop congratulating yourself for the ones you have.

I still believe in community. I still believe we rise together.

I just no longer believe that "together" means I pour until I'm empty while the “institution” applauds. That chapter is closed.