Nobody knew I was going through a breakup when I opened Du’s Donuts in April 2017.

I didn’t feel safe enough to say it when I was going through it. I didn’t want to answer any questions, or possibly be told I couldn’t handle the opening. As a Black Latina in a white-dominant industry, there was no room for that. So I tucked it away and kept moving.

That’s the part that doesn’t come up when people ask about the opening. They ask about the line around the block on day one. They ask about the influencers and the colorful donuts, The William Vale in Williamsburg and Chef Wylie. Nobody asks what I was going home to.

I had been trying to get out of a toxic relationship. I was commuting from Newark to 34th Street, managing Stella 34 on the sixth floor of Macy’s, turning a thousand covers a day. The commute was killing me. The relationship was worse. I took a major pay cut to become the bookkeeper at Ellary’s Greens — easier commute, 9-5 hours, something I needed badly. I finally moved out of the apartment we shared, stayed with my brother’s ex-wife for a month, then two, saved up money, and signed a six-month lease on a basement apartment in Bushwick with three roommates.

I slept on a mattress on the floor. My clothes were in bags. There was a door to the backyard on one side and a door to the boiler room on the other. And a hairless cat who always wanted to be in my room and would shit in front of my door when I didn’t let it in. The amount of times I stepped in it at the crack of dawn getting ready for work. That was home.

Meanwhile, Chef Wylie Dufresne had called me at the end of 2016 and said he wanted to get the band back together. Would I be the GM of Du’s Donuts? We walked the space, sat down, talked through the vision. It was a brand new build at The William Vale, in a part of Williamsburg that was just starting to get going. Construction delays. Passover pushed the timeline back. Last-minute hiring. The whole thing.

I said yes and threw myself into it like I had nothing else going on.

Because I couldn’t say otherwise.

Opening day, we had a line around the block. I had slept a few hours, maybe. I think I stayed in the hotel the night before just so I could be there by 4 or 5am for prep. Standing there watching that line, I was exhausted in a way I couldn’t name. But we did it. We opened.

And nobody knew.

Months later, Wylie and I were talking about a situation with one of the team members. He was going through a hard time personally, and Wylie was telling me to give him grace. I looked at him and said, yeah, I went through one too and moved from NJ to NY while working on the pre-opening.

He stopped. “You did? You didn’t tell me.”

“For what?” I said.

I meant it. What was I going to say? I’m a Black Latina who has spent most of her career in the Celebrity Chef fine-dining industry, almost entirely white and almost entirely male at the top. I had never seen a woman who looked like me in a role like the one I was in. I had never had the luxury of saying “I’m going through something” without feeling like it would cost me. The people who did have that luxury, who could show up distracted and be given grace, who could name what was hard and still be trusted with the room, did not look like me. There was no template for what I was doing. And maybe I could’ve told Chef Wylie. We had already worked together for 15 years. But I couldn’t risk it. So I tucked it away and I kept moving.

At the time, I called that strength. I was a tough cookie. I could compartmentalize with the best of them. I thought the ability to show up and perform no matter what was happening in my personal life was something to be proud of.

Now I know what it actually was.

It was a survival skill. One I’d been practicing since I was a little girl, long before Bushwick, long before any restaurant. A skill that told me: the way to stay safe is to stay useful. Keep the performance up. Don’t give anyone a reason. Don’t need anything.

For years, that skill kept me in rooms I might otherwise have been pushed out of. It helped me open a donut shop while sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It helped me perform “fine” through things that were very much not fine.

It also cost me things I didn’t notice I was paying at the time.

This is the thing I see in the leaders I work with now. Not all of them, but many. The ones who look completely together from the outside. The ones who have never missed a deadline, never dropped a ball, never let anything show. The ones who have been so practiced at tucking themselves away and showing up that they’ve lost track of where the performance ends and where they actually begin.

They don’t come to me because they’re falling apart. They come because something is quiet and persistent and they can’t name it. They’re still in the role, still delivering, still fine. And they are also, underneath it, running on a survival skill they developed in a different context, for a different reason, that doesn’t actually apply to the life they’re living now.

The Empty Cup work starts here. Not in a framework. In the moment you can see the thing that got you through clearly enough to ask: is this still what I want to be doing?

That’s not a small question. But it’s the right one.

What have you been tucking away and calling it strength?

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If you’re not sure where to start: take my Why Do I Feel Stuck? quiz. It gives you language for the patterns that might be shaping your current decisions.

Sharilyn Chavez is a leadership coach (CPC, ELI-MP, ACC, Trauma-Informed Certified Coach)

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