And There I Was…Empathy for a Cockroach

Discovering Our Overdone Strengths

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About this series

And There I Was… is a storytelling series inspired by the Army’s timeless tradition of beginning unforgettable stories with four simple words.

Today, I’m the founder of Hellbender Coach, where I help leaders navigate complexity through coaching, mediation, and leadership development. Before that, I built my career of fifteen years as a federal civilian, most recently serving as a Training Instructor at the Army Management Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, where I facilitated the Intermediate Course for Army civilian leaders using the Army Leadership Requirements Model found in ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession.

I’m not a military veteran. These stories are written from the perspective of a civilian leadership facilitator who discovered that some of life’s best leadership lessons never happen in a classroom.

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Empathy has become a surprisingly controversial word.

Depending on who you listen to, it’s either the answer to everything or the reason everything’s gone wrong.

That always makes me smile because one of the leadership competencies I spent years coming to understand was empathy. Not sympathy. Not pity.

Empathy. Walking in someone else’s shoes.

Then a cockroach named Katy taught me something the DoD doctrine never explicitly says.

And there I was…

Two weeks into a TDY with my mobile education team, staying in an Army hotel near Fort Bragg.

If you’ve ever stayed in government-as-customer lodging, you know the experience. The furniture has seen things. The HVAC has only two settings: Arctic and Swamp. By about day three, making coffee in the bathroom somehow starts to feel perfectly reasonable.

Then I found the cockroach.

Now, this wasn’t one of those healthy, terrifying cockroaches that can cover the room before you’ve finished freaking out.

She looked off. One antenna was drooped. She seemed disoriented, barely moving. She looked like she’d had a rough encounter with whatever government-approved pesticide supposedly “doesn’t cause cancer” but somehow manages to kill an insect that’s rumored to survive nuclear fallout.

Clearly, the bug was dying.

So instead of grabbing a shoe, I grabbed one of those little bowls that comes with the hotel suite. I figured if she only had a few hours left, maybe she deserved to die in peace. Besides, as long as the bowl stayed where it was, she couldn’t crawl up my nose while I was sleeping.

My situationally-diagnosed OCD had already convinced myself the room probably had bedbugs. I’d stayed in enough Army lodging to know my ADHD imagination had an entire chain of command.

Twenty-four hours later, curiosity got the better of me. I carefully lifted one side of the bowl.

Katy wasn’t dead.

She actually looked… better. Her antennae were straighter. She seemed more alert. Somehow she looked healthier than she had the day before.

Well. Now what?

According to Google, cockroaches can live about a month without food and about a week without water.

Fantastic.

I was already halfway through my TDY. I’d leave the bowl in place, give her some time to heal, and deal with the fallout, whether eventual death after all or catch and release when I checked out.

As a GenX kid who caught frogs and crayfish in the crick… IYKYK… that idea seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

Somewhere over the next several days, things got, well, different.

When I woke up in the morning, I’d check the bowl: nope, didn’t move. Then I’d follow with, “Good morning.”

Not to another guest.

To the cockroach.

By the next day she had a name: Katy.

Every morning before class I’d check to make sure the bowl hadn’t moved. “Morning, Katy.” We’d listen to music together. Get ready for work together. Have coffee together. Connect over lunch together. After class I’d tell her about my day as if we’d been roommates for years.

Two weeks in, she was still very much alive. So was I. Looking back, I realize that should have been my first clue.

One of the competencies in the Army Leadership Requirements Model is empathy.

It’s an important competency.

But like every strength… it has an overdone version.

Checkout morning finally arrived. Katy had survived. I’d survived. I decided it was finally time to let her go.

Now before you question my judgment, I grew up playing in the crick.

Not the creek.

The crick, y’all.

I’ve spent my whole life catching things and letting them go. Frogs. Turtles. Snakes. Crawdads. Years later, while working in another federal office, I once rescued a mouse, carried it through a cube farm, and set it on top of a GS-14’s coffee pot before taking it outside. For about fifteen minutes, I was Xena: Warrior Princess. Absolute legend.

But I’m also a late-diagnosed ADHDer. I’m clumsy. I know myself.

There was no way I was attempting a complicated cockroach rescue halfway through the trip. If Katy disappeared into my luggage, I’d have to burn down the entire hotel. I’m not dumb. So I waited until checkout.

I lifted the bowl. Reached down.

And Katy immediately chose violence.

She shot across the carpet, disappeared beneath the refurbished radiator, and vanished before I could even react.

And there I was.

A grown woman. A leadership instructor. Standing in an Army hotel room…

…calling maintenance because I’d accidentally lost the cockroach I’d spent two weeks trying to save.

When the maintenance technician arrived, I realized I was about to explain the situation out loud for the very first time. There are moments in life when you suddenly hear yourself. This was one of them.

Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped asking whether Katy needed saving.

I’d simply assumed she did.

That assumption became a story.

The story became a plan.

The plan became two weeks of behavior.

I never stopped to ask whether the conditions had changed.

That’s the funny thing about our brains. They are incredibly good at writing stories. They’re not always as good at checking whether those stories are true.

Katy taught me something I still think about today.

Empathy isn’t the problem.

Unchecked empathy is.

The same strength that helps us understand another person can also convince us we’re responsible for fixing them.

Sometimes helping means stepping in.

Sometimes helping means stepping back.

Wisdom is knowing the difference.

Leadership has never been about finding the perfect answer. It’s about creating the conditions that allow your best thinking to catch up with your fastest thinking.

I still think about Katy.

I also wonder how many people I’ve accidentally put under a bowl because I cared too much to slow down and check the conditions first.

Turns out…

Nobody checked the conditions.

Least of all me.