I tracked WHO PABS for a year. Losing it felt like relief, not loss.
On knowing which swim lanes are actually yours to carry.
Tabea, happy Saturday,
A few weeks ago I got a message mid-session in Geneva.
Short version: step back from WHO PABS. It was about capacity, not performance. I had tracked WHO PABS, the pathogen access and benefit sharing system, for over a year. I see this same setup show up in other places, just under different names.
The instruction was simple: let it go.
I am calling what happened next the Coverage Trap. I think a lot of us are stuck in it. We just don’t have a name for it yet. Carrying five lanes at once looks like range. It looks like rank. It looks like the kind of person who shows up everywhere. In this movement, that gets read as power. But carrying five lanes is not the same skill as going one mile deep in one of them. I had quietly stopped checking which one I actually was.
Here is the short version, before the detail.
I lost a lane I had tracked for a year. I felt relief before I felt loss. My own system for carrying five lanes never once asks if five is the right number. And a group I respect just spent weeks writing nine pages of principle with no plan behind it. Same trap. Different shape.
The instruction.
Though I got specific instructions last year to track the PABS, I did not fight it. That is the part that should have bothered me more. WHO PABS is not a small file. It is a market system being built right now. Free, prior, and informed consent was never written into it. Not once.
I have written before about why I even bother with a room I am not allowed to enter
Yesterday I was on a FILAC call.
I gave a list of eight currently active fights on Indigenous rights. I ranked them from most dangerous to most hopeful. In terms of defcon 1. WHO PABS sits just above CBD. It is a little better than FAO CFS. UNCCD is still the worst one on the list right now. So WHO PABS is mid pack. Stalled, but still dangerous. That is what makes the relief so hard to explain.
I had screenshots. I had notes. I had a whole thread of who said what behind closed doors. When someone told me to set it down, my first feeling was relief. Before anything else.
The relief was really about not having to hold it alone anymore, not about the work mattering less.
If I am honest, that scared me more than losing the file did. If relief is the first thing you feel when work gets taken off your plate, ask yourself why you picked it up in the first place. Hold onto that question. You will want it by the end of this.
What I was still holding.
The UNDRIP 20th anniversary roadmap. BBNJ. Article 6. The Human Rights Council calendar. I keep a separate document for each one in Notion, my second brain. I stopped trusting my own memory to hold five fights at once without mixing them up. I read each document out loud before I use it. The way you would rehearse lines. I need to be aligned with myself before I can align with anyone else.
That system works. I know it works, because I have run Article 6 for years, and the document has outlived three versions of my own thinking. I told myself the whole second brain was strategy. Most of it was. But some of it, if I am honest, was something else. Letting a lane go felt like admitting I could not hold it all. And for a long time, I needed to be the one who could.
A system that lets you carry five lanes without dropping one is still built to carry five lanes. It makes five survivable. It never asks if five is the right number.
The nine pages from Santa Marta.
Around the same week, Indigenous relatives gathered in Santa Marta wrote a declaration. Nine pages. Good principles. Strong rights language. All the right words, in the right order. It took them a long time to get there.
I told a colleague the same thing I will tell you.
It is good to restate your principles. But you cannot show up with half a plan. A principle with no plan behind it goes nowhere. It does not need to be perfect. It needs one more sentence: the one that says how you actually get it done.
Someone pushed back.
They said we should not talk strategy in public. I don’t think they got the difference. A plan is the blueprint. Strategy is how you get states to actually hand it to you. You can publish the blueprint. You should. Most people never even get that far. They mistake making something for moving something.
I do not have this fully figured out.
I am writing this two weeks after the instruction. I still catch myself wanting the WHO file back, not because I miss the work, but because I miss being the one who carries it.
If you remember nothing else, remember this.
Carrying more does not mean you are deeper in any of it. Feeling relief when work gets taken off your plate is data, not weakness. And a principle with no plan behind it goes nowhere, no matter how many pages it took to write. Use that data this week, not someday.
Before you go.
Most of us measure how serious we are by how many fronts we cover, not by how far we have actually moved any one of them. The fix is picking the one lane you are running thin on right now, not doing less overall. Pick the one you would feel the most relief setting down, not the one that is easiest to talk about. That is usually the one running on habit, not on purpose.
I still do not know for sure if WHO was the right one to drop first. I might be wrong about which lane is really mine to carry, and which one I just got used to holding. I would rather be wrong about that out loud than keep five lanes running just to protect my own standing.
So here is my question. If someone pulled you off your least important lane tomorrow, would you feel loss, or relief?
Tell me which one. I read every reply, even the ones I cannot answer.
See you next Saturday.