The short answer
Being the buffer is a choice you keep renewing, not a fixed fact. The pressure won't stop until you stop treating yourself as the right place for it to land. Your job is to lead your team, not to disappear into their protection. You can do both — but only if you stop running on empty.
You're carrying pressure from above and pressure from below at the same time, and no one is carrying yours. That split — absorbing everything, releasing nothing — is genuinely draining. Research on courage at work shows that people who take on moral and protective burdens without any outlet or acknowledgment lose their sense of meaning fast. It's not weakness. It's physics. A wall with no foundation cracks.
Here's what Marcus Aurelius points at in Meditations 5.13: what you are made of cannot be destroyed. Not by chaos above, not by need below. The pressure you're absorbing doesn't define your core — it's just weather passing through. The shield image you're using on yourself is doing real damage, because a shield has no inside. You do. You are not the role. You are the person playing it, and that person still needs something to stand on.
This week, pick one person — a peer, a mentor, someone outside your chain of command — and say out loud what you said here: 'I'm absorbing from both sides and no one is absorbing mine.' Don't dress it up. Just say it. That one honest sentence is not a complaint. It's courage. And it's the first crack in the pattern that's wearing you down.