Enough
You are never going to be enough.
Not talented enough. Not innovative enough. Not polished enough.
You will only be as good as your last gift closed. And they will not remember it the next day.
And underneath.
It was already decided.
You could not have told anyone exactly what you noticed. The way a conversation stilled. The quality of the silence. The smile that arrived too late.
You just knew.
She is being managed out.
Said in a hallway. Said over drinks. Said with enough plausible deniability that when you bring it up, you sound paranoid.
You were not paranoid.
Where are you with that prospect. You left early. We have some feedback on the work.
The doubt was not a side effect. It was the point.
This does not announce itself. It arrives. And then you are inside it.
You will hear not enough so many times that you stop noticing it is coming from outside you.
That is when it becomes yours.
That is when it was always meant to become yours.
—
It followed you home.
But first, it took the oxygen out of every room you were already in.
You learned to read what wasn’t said. You had to.
You leaned into certain colleagues. Not for connection. For intelligence. Learning who was safe. Who was watching.
You called it intuition.
It was surveillance. Constant. Exhausting. Dressed as leadership.
You were always braced. Anticipating the blow before it landed.
Sleep became the first thing that left.
You rehearsed exchanges that hadn’t happened yet. You drafted emails in your head at 3am. You walked in already defended.
And then you went home and did it there, too.
With your partner. With your friends. With your children.
You brought the institution home with you.
It sat at your table. It got into your bed. It followed you into every room you thought was yours.
I know this room.
This is not random.
It never stays at work.
It never stays at work.
—
And then one day — enough.
You let yourself out.
Am I enough?
I have had enough.
One word. The distance between those two sentences is everything.
—
Manufactured Doubt: the systematic production of self-doubt in women by institutions that depend on it.
— Keira Haley | keirahaley.com
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.