I'm the only Black person in my department and I'm so tired of being the example that I've started being someone else at work.

Eleven years at this company. I'm a senior engineer. Forty-two. My department is about sixty people.

I need to say first that nobody here has done anything to me that you'd put in a complaint. I've been promoted twice. My manager is in my corner and has been for six years. I'm paid what I should be — I checked, carefully, in 2022, and it was fine.

This isn't about mistreatment. It's about a job I was given that isn't in my job description.

What that job is: I'm the proof.

I'm on the recruiting page. Twice. I was asked both times and I said yes both times, because saying no requires a reason and the reason is a conversation I didn't want. I'm on the diversity council, which I joined in 2019 believing in it and have stayed on for six years because the two other original members left and if I leave it's a council of new people with no memory.

I get asked to talk to every Black candidate who gets to final round — I've done eleven of those, all unpaid, all outside my actual work, and all of them matter, which is exactly why I can't stop.

And in June of 2020 I was asked to speak at an all-hands.

I said yes. I spoke for nine minutes. People cried. My inbox had sixty messages. For about three weeks I was the most visible person in that building, and then it was over, and nothing structural changed, and I went back to my sprint.

What I have never told anyone: I wrote those nine minutes to be comfortable. I took out the two hardest things because I could see where I was standing and who was in the room and what I'd have to live with on Monday. I performed a version of my own experience that my colleagues could applaud.

That's the confession. Not that I'm tired. That I've been editing myself for eleven years and calling it professionalism, and I'm good at it now, and I don't entirely know what I'd sound like if I stopped.

The cost is specific: I have about four hours a week going into being the example, which is four hours not going into the work that gets you to principal. I've watched two peers pass me who were never asked to do any of it. Neither of them did anything wrong.

My wife says quit the council. She's probably right. And if I quit, the next person who walks in is alone in a way I wasn't, and I know that because I was that person in 2014.

So I'm asking people who've been the only one in the room for a decade or more: did you ever put it down? What happened? And is there a way to say no to this stuff that doesn't cost you the thing you were trying to protect?