Living Between Timelines
What communications work requires when you're the person who knows first and speaks last
I love communications work. Over the past year, I keep returning to what it actually takes to sustain work you love.
I’m in a meeting learning that layoffs are coming. The decision isn’t mine, and neither is the timeline, but how we talk about it is. I walk back to my desk past colleagues planning their weekends. Someone asks if I want to grab lunch. I say yes, sit down, and start working on messages I can’t share yet.
This happens more than people realize. You’re in the room when decisions are made without making them yourself. You’re trusted with information before almost anyone else, which means you can’t process it with anyone. You exist in two timelines—the present everyone else inhabits, and the near-future only you can see.
I spent years thinking this was just part of the job. Professional discretion comes with its own kind of solitude. I didn’t realize how living slightly ahead of everyone else, carrying what’s coming, shapes you in ways that are hard to name.
Growing up, I moved across countries every few years. I learned early to code-switch between cultures, to hold multiple truths at once without fully belonging anywhere. I thought of home as something I carried with me. An awareness that comes from never quite fitting completely.
I didn’t connect this to my work until much later, but there’s a through line. When you grow up between cultures, you learn that belonging doesn’t require confession of everything about yourself. Some things you hold quietly because the translation doesn’t exist, or because speaking them would create more distance than silence.
Communications work asks for a similar practice. Information released too early creates chaos, too late breeds mistrust, and it’s my job to hold the gap between knowing and telling. What’s true today becomes destructive if shared too soon, and sometimes silence is the most honest thing you can offer.
I’ve been thinking about what it costs to be the person who knows first and speaks last, because over the years, I’ve learned that if you don’t build containers for what you carry, it starts showing up in ways you don’t expect.
There’s something else that happens when you spend years in roles where the stakes are always high. You get used to urgency, then quietly, you start to need it.
In my first year of pause, I kept waiting for the crisis that would require my attention. I’d wake up checking my phone, half-expecting the urgent message that would pull me back in. It didn’t come, and without it, I felt unmoored.
I’d spent years holding confidential information and managing through crises as the person who stays calm when everyone else panics. That level of urgency had become my baseline, and without it, normal life felt flat.
Even when the weight of that knowledge is heavy, there’s also a certain electricity to it. Your expertise matters. The stakes are real. However, when you’re always operating three steps ahead, you’re never fully present.
I’d sit at dinner with my daughter and husband, physically there but mentally running through next day’s talking points. At social gatherings, I’d be laughing, semi-engaged, but part of my brain was already drafting Monday morning’s message. Even on vacation, I couldn’t fully land. The strategic part of my brain never turned off.
This wasn’t about working too many hours, though that was sometimes true. It was about training my mind to always be somewhere else, always anticipating and managing what came next. I’d forgotten how to just be.
My pause forced me to confront this. Without the urgency to organize around, I had to learn to exist without always moving toward something. Urgency had become part of my identity. Breaking that pattern is still hard. I still catch myself operating through urgency, just through a different lens now, and I have to coach myself to slow down.
In communications, trust is your currency and your burden.
Leadership shares sensitive information with you, and employees expect you to tell them the truth, or at least as much truth as can be shared. Your role exists in that gap of translating between what’s decided and what’s communicated, between what’s known and what can be said.
When leaders trust you with information before a restructure, they’re transferring weight. Now you know what’s coming and you carry that knowledge while walking through the office every day, performing normalcy while carrying everyone’s difficult future in your mind.
I’ve watched leaders struggle with this too. They’re often holding even more—board decisions, market pressures, and strategic pivots they can’t explain yet. In my work advising executives, I see how this weight shapes them.
The best ones understand that authenticity isn’t about saying everything you know. It’s about being honest about what you can and cannot share, and maintaining integrity in both.
Discretion and authenticity aren’t opposites. Sometimes the most authentic thing you can offer is acknowledgment that you’re holding information you can’t yet share. That’s different from deception. It’s the practice of honoring what can and cannot be spoken.
Different cultures handle this differently. In some Asian contexts I’ve worked in, there’s more acceptance that not everything needs to be shared to maintain trust. Hierarchy is understood and discretion is expected. In Western corporate culture, there’s often more pressure toward transparency, even when it’s not actually possible. Neither approach is better, but understanding both has helped me navigate the tension.
Truth isn’t simple and it exists in relationship to timing. Information that’s true but premature can be destructive. Information that’s true but partial can be misleading. The question isn’t always “what’s true” but “what’s true to share now, in this way, with these people.”
The ability to hold difficult information with discretion is a skill.
Over time, you become someone who exists comfortably with complexity, who can sit with uncertainty without needing immediate resolution. Those are valuable qualities, but you can also become so practiced at strategic silence that you lose access to your own unfiltered voice.
Holding space for others is meaningful work—whether that’s leaders navigating difficult decisions or employees waiting for information. But it requires building your own containers for processing what you carry. Therapists or coaches who aren’t connected to your work, peer networks who understand the pattern, any safe space for unfiltered expression.
My pause taught me that the work itself wasn’t the problem. What had become unsustainable was the accumulation over years without those containers, especially when coupled with multiple relocations and building community from scratch each time. I've since built peer networks outside any single organization, made space for creative work that isn't strategic, and drawn clearer boundaries between professional discretion and personal isolation. These aren't nice-to-haves—they're what make this work sustainable.
For those who live in that gap between knowing and telling—the work matters. Learning to carry it without losing yourself is the ongoing work, and building the structures that make it sustainable means you get to keep doing work you love for the long term.
Nina
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