Saturday morning. Forty women on a floor above a restaurant, mats edge to edge, mimosas waiting downstairs. Christy is at the front telling us to keep going.
I have no intention of stopping, but my muscles were aching. I’m going to say something about it.
So I do, out loud. You know those loud guttural sounds. Jessica is next to me and she’s loud too, and the two of us are carrying on in the corner. My legs are shaking and I say so.
And then I look around the room.
Forty women with the same shaking legs and the same held breath, the room is joining. The vocals of being pushed. Sweat running down. Vocal.
It’s such a difference from what happens during the week in the Pilates studio class. Same teacher. Twelve women. Not one sound out of any of them while their bodies screaming, their faces are smooth and contained.
In the studio, Christy does what she always does. Walks the room, leans down, checks in and asks how ya doing?
She gets, I’m good, maybe a smile.
I’ve been in that room a hundred times and I’ve never once heard anyone say no from their guttural sounds. Nobody says this is really hard. Nobody says I’d love to stop, or that their legs are done and they’re doing it anyway. Just the controlled face and the good answer, while every muscle in the body is arguing with it.
One day it got to me and I said it out loud. “There’s no suffering in silence today.”
And I don’t know who I was talking to. Christy, maybe. It came out with more heat than I expected, because all that quiet had started to make me angry and I didn’t have a name for why yet.
I write about this constantly. The woman in the meeting who says everything is fine, or the woman at the dinner table who says she’s just tired. I’ve written about it in offices and in marriages and in the car on the way home from both.
It never occurred to me that she’s also doing it on a mat with her legs shaking.
Pilates isn’t meditative and it isn’t yoga. Nobody’s asking you to sit with anything. It’s your body, in real time, telling what’s going on physically and it can’t possibly be confused about what you feel. And still the mind says “I’m good”.
That’s how deep it goes. This isn’t a work thing or a marriage thing. It’s a reflex that moved into the body years ago and never left, and it comes with us into rooms where there’s no boss, no client, no partner, nothing at all to protect.
What it costs
I was talking with a woman this week who has more energy than anyone I know. Someone asked her how she does it and her answer was that she doesn’t filter herself. That’s it. She’s the same person everywhere, so there’s nothing to filter.
She said the filtering is what’s expensive. Not the doing, but the holding back. The pushing down what wants to come out naturally. It takes major effort to suppress it.
Sit with that for a second, because I think it explains something people can’t account for. So many accomplished women I talk to are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t replenish it. They’ve optimized everything. They’ve cut what they can cut and they still wake up depleted and can’t point to why.
It’s the holding and the filtering. The mask that they wear every day. It’s the all-day work of running everything through the filter before it reaches your face, and it’s automatic, which doesn’t make it free. You’re burning fuel all day long to keep the controlled face on, and because you’ve done it since you were young, you don’t experience it as effort. You just experience being tired and the silent effort is what’s debilitating you.
Then I noticed something else
In that room on Saturday, a few of us started loud. Me. Jessica. And by the end it was everybody. I don’t think that was courage. I think it was the room.
We were out of the studio. It was Saturday. Half those women came from different studios or no studio at all, and I will probably never see most of them again and there were mimosas downstairs. Nothing about that morning was going to follow anybody home. There was nothing at stake. No risk.
That’s when the room gets real. In the one hour when authenticity wouldn’t cost anybody anything.
I’ve been vocal in that studio for hundreds of classes and it rarely spreads. Same sounds. Same teacher. Twelve women, voices silenced. On Saturday I made the same noise I always make and the whole room came with me. The difference wasn’t me. It was that nothing could come back on anybody.
The part I don’t love
The room with nothing at stake is where we made noise. The rooms that have consequence, the meeting where the promotion lives, the marriage, the conversation with the person whose opinion of you you’d have to care about, those are the rooms where the volume goes to zero.
The more there is to lose, the more silence takes over.
So we’re only true to ourselves at the two ends. When it’s free, or when we’re so far gone we’re ready to burn the whole thing down and we finally say the thing on the way out the door.
I know that end. I lived at it. Thirty-two years of a career that looked exactly right from the outside, and I stayed smooth through almost all of it. I didn’t say the true thing in the room where it would have cost me. I said it when I was sitting in front of an offer I couldn’t sign, when the cost of staying quiet had finally gotten bigger than the cost of speaking. I didn’t leave because I was brave. I left because staying had gotten more dangerous than the unknown.
What I wanted back then wasn’t a different life. I liked my life. I wanted to say what was really on my mind in a meeting. I wanted to tell somebody I was drowning without watching them start doing math on me.
The woman who was vocal on Saturday is the same woman who says “I’m good” on Tuesday. She isn’t somewhere out ahead of me. She only comes out when it doesn’t cost anything.
So,
If you’re reading this and you already know you’re the controlled mind in the room, I’d stop looking for the room that feels safe enough. That room is a mimosa on a Saturday morning because it doesn’t prove anything about you.
The work is the other one. Saying the actual thing in the room where it costs you. It isn’t blowing anything up and it isn’t waiting until you’re at the end. It’s one true sentence while you still have skin in the game.
Where else are you doing this?
Tell me in the comments and not the version you think you should say because others will be reading it. What would you say in the “safe” room.
And if you’re not sure whether you’re doing it at all, I built something for exactly that. Five minutes, and it isn’t a quiz. It’s called Everything is Fine
If this spoke to you, consider sharing or gifting it to someone who’s ready to hear their own voice again — or give it a re-stack to ripple it wider.
Carolina Migliaccio is the founder of Soulful Moxie, an advisory for high-capacity female leaders navigating the distance between who they became and who they actually are.
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