Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos
The greatest burden is often the person we believe we have to be
Early in my career, I spent a lot of energy trying to become the firefighter I thought the fire service wanted me to be. I watched how people spoke, what they laughed at, what they shared and what they kept to themselves. I learned which parts of my personality seemed acceptable at work and which parts were better left at home. Over time, I became fairly good at fitting in, but fitting in came at a cost. I had created one version of myself for work and another for the rest of my life, and I did not understand how exhausting it was to keep those two people separated.
Researcher Brené Brown explains that fitting in requires us to assess a situation and become who we think we need to be in order to gain acceptance, while belonging asks us to show up as who we actually are. That distinction says a lot about my early years in the fire service. I believed that certain parts of me did not belong on the truck. I became more guarded, less expressive and more careful about what I allowed others to see. Looking back, I left some of the best parts of myself outside of work because I thought they would make it harder for me to be accepted inside it.
The fire service requires professionalism, discipline and boundaries. Belonging does not mean sharing every detail of our lives at the kitchen table or turning every shift into a personal therapy session. It means the character, values and humanity we hold at home should still be recognizable when we report for duty. The person our family knows and the firefighter our crew depends on should not feel like complete strangers. The closer those two versions become, the less energy we spend performing, hiding and trying to determine which version of ourselves is allowed in each room.
Research into authenticity at work has repeatedly connected the ability to act in alignment with our values to stronger engagement, greater well-being and a deeper sense of meaning. Studies have also found that constantly suppressing parts of ourselves can create stress and emotional strain.
The Hidden Cost of Hiding
Psychologists Dale Larson and Robert Chastain found something similar when they studied what they called self-concealment — the habit of actively hiding parts of ourselves we believe will not be accepted. Their research linked it to higher rates of anxiety, depression and physical symptoms, even after accounting for other factors like trauma or social support. They described it as a kind of internal tug-of-war, a pull between the instinct to hide and the instinct to be known.
That makes sense to me, because a tug-of-war only has one outcome. One side wins and one side loses. I am not sure why any of us should be fighting a war inside ourselves where part of who we are has to come out on top and another part has to be dragged through the mud to lose. This is not about everybody getting a ribbon. It is about not being at war with yourself in the first place. That should matter to firefighters because we already shoulder more than enough. We manage interrupted sleep, difficult calls, family responsibilities, financial pressure, changing relationships, injuries, aging parents and years of accumulated experiences. Maintaining a separate identity at work becomes one more load we may not realize we are hauling.
We can often see that weight building in the people around us. We notice when someone’s footing is beginning to slip. Their energy changes. Their patience disappears. Their drinking increases, their marriage begins to unravel or their frustration starts shaping every conversation. We talk about it at shift change, around the kitchen table or while standing beside the truck. We know something is wrong, but most of us have no idea what the right move is.
Our first instinct is usually to fix it. That is what we do. Give us a leaking kitchen faucet and we will identify the problem, tell you what part to buy and help you install it. Give us a complicated incident and we begin gathering information, assigning tasks and working toward a solution. When someone we care about is struggling, we want to apply that same approach. We want to remove the pain, repair the damage and return their life to normal.
When Fixing Isn’t the Answer
People do not work like leaking faucets. Someone can go to treatment for alcohol, come home sober and still return to a life that feels completely upside down. Someone can leave a difficult marriage and still hold the grief, anger and uncertainty that existed inside it. We can encourage people, connect them with support and remain close to them, but we cannot complete their work for them. That is where we often feel handcuffed. We care deeply, yet we may have little training in how to support someone whose life is coming apart.
Perhaps one of the most important things we can offer is a place where the person no longer has to perform. We can listen without immediately prescribing a solution. We can ask better questions. We can allow someone to speak honestly without defining them by the worst period of their life. We can remind them that belonging is not earned through perfection and that their current struggle does not erase everything they have contributed.
This also requires us to examine our own lives. Who are we when nobody is watching, and who do we become when we arrive at the station? How much distance exists between those two people? What have we edited, hidden or abandoned in exchange for acceptance? A problem well stated is half solved, and perhaps the problem is that many of us have spent years learning how to fit into the fire service without ever asking whether we feel that we truly belong.
This is not a small thing for the fire service to pay attention to. The breakthrough is not a program or a policy. It is liberating for our firefighters, at every rank and every year of service, to bring a true sense of self into this work instead of a performance of it. That is the trajectory we should be moving toward — a mental fitness initiative, rooted in the understanding that we are good enough and truly valued when we share all parts of ourselves. Belonging is the truest form of serving ourselves.
From Fitting In to Belonging
For those of you who are guarded, here is something worth testing. Let your crew see the parts of yourself you have been managing and controlling. More often than not, they will understand you better for it, because the pieces that did not seem to add up before will finally make sense. But the bigger reward is yours. You will be the one who benefits most, finally allowing yourself to give the parts of you that you believed had to stay hidden.
The truth is, the strongest version of us is not the one that performs the role most convincingly. It is the one that brings our values, our humanity and our whole character into the work, closing the distance between the person beneath the gear and the firefighter everyone else is counting on.
