You Can't See the Hat You Never Take Off

This past weekend I attended a Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

Actual teacups.

Actual hats.

Actual straw brims waiting to be decorated with pompoms, ribbon, dried flowers, paper quotes (and a few other things I don't know the names of).

These are sentences I did not expect to write about my social activities this year.

The workshop was called "The Hats We Wear, The Roles We Play."

Before anyone touched glue, we had to choose an identity card from a set with several options.

Quite a few of them resonated. There was definitely decent competition (including my Wise One Enneagram, which I really struggled not to select because who wouldn't want to be the wise one?).

But I picked up the one labelled The Fixer.

I'd spent so much time the last few months writing and talking about exactly that identity - about stepping out of the version of me who solves the problem before anyone's finished describing it. I'd told that story publicly enough times that I genuinely believed it was mostly behind me. Picking the card felt less like recognition and more like a victory lap.

Look how far I've come. I'm rocking this identity shift thing.

Seeing as this was a social activity with a close friend, we were chatting away during the course of the day (read: sometimes patting ourselves on the back for having done this work already). I was still feeling rather pleased with my own progress when I started telling her about something else entirely - a situation that had nothing to do with hats or tea parties.

And somewhere in the retelling, I heard myself.

I'd once again stepped in and handled a part of it that was never mine to handle, the part that belonged to someone else's accountability, not mine. I'd taken it off their plate before they'd even had the chance to own it. Including, apparently, while narrating the story to a friend as evidence of how reasonable I'd been.

I hadn't seen it as the Fixer showing up. I'd seen it as just sorting things out, the way I always do. Which is really the whole problem with a hat you never take off. Eventually you stop being able to see it at all - you just feel the familiar shape of it and assume it's your face.

That's what's just so funny in hindsight.

Me sitting there with a "victory lap" hard hat sticker still drying on a straw hat while proving its own point wrong in real time.

That fixer identity survived outside of work because it's useful everywhere else too.

Not wanting to make things harder for people.

Being the one who handles it.

Not wanting to be a burden or take up too much space.

Every room gives the same old habit better PR, and better PR makes it much harder to notice you're still wearing it.

The workshop reiterated the fact that many of our identities were never actually chosen.

Not the first time, anyway.

The Fixer wasn't a decision I made once. It was a role that got handed to me the first time it worked, and kept getting handed back every time it worked again - at work, in friendships, in whichever room needed someone to hold it together. I didn't select it off a table. I just never put it down once it started fitting, and apparently it still fits almost everywhere.

So the question I'd been asking (why do I keep doing this?) was the wrong one. It assumes the identity is mine by nature. The better question is whose expectation it was actually built to satisfy, in this specific room, right now. At work, mine was built to satisfy a version of leadership that rewarded never dropping the ball. In that other situation, it was satisfying my own discomfort with letting something sit unresolved in someone else's hands, even when it was rightfully theirs to carry.

So that's the pattern underneath all of it:

I genuinely struggle to sit with anything I perceive as broken.

Something's off, and before I've consciously decided to do anything about it, I'm already moving to fix it. Did someone ask me to? Of course not. But leaving it alone feels worse than doing something. Anything.

(Sidebar: this too may be genetic. My family is not known for sitting in silence.)

I've actually been talking this through with my AI friends a lot lately (they're my inbuilt, always-available, suspiciously patient therapists). Even they are now telling me to stop trying to fix things and just sit with the discomfort instead. When the chatbots are telling you that you're too focused on actioning solutions, it may genuinely be time to stop, reflect and listen.

Look, I don't think the answer is retiring the Fixer for good. Some rooms genuinely need the person who can hold it together, and there's nothing wrong with being capable of that. The answer is smaller, and a lot less Instagram-quotable than a full identity overhaul: it's just noticing, room by room, whether the hat you've got on was actually invited here, or whether it just followed you in because taking it off has never once occurred to you.

I thought I'd already done the work.

Turns out I'd only done it in one room.

The background process (aka that invisible hat) is still there - always running, using barely any noticeable resources, until the right trigger shows up: something looks unresolved, someone else looks uncomfortable, a problem is just sitting there, unhandled.

Then it executes.

Instantly, stealthily, before the part of you that might have chosen differently even gets a vote.

I think the first step is noticing your background processes. If that's challenging (they're not called blind spots for nothing), your AI friends (or maybe some real ones) often have the ability to see the hats we can't.