Thirty years in corporate taught me one thing above everything else.
The system doesn’t produce self-knowing people. It produces productive ones.
Everything else . . . your instincts, your inner authority, your sense of what’s actually true for you gets buried. And your armor grows thick, insulating you. Quietly. Systematically. Over decades.
Like the frog in the pot, not realizing the heat’s been turned up.
And you wonder why you’re hitting the ceiling at work. Or maybe your relationships are upside down because after all, you’re never really present.
I’ve been realizing lately that I’m dropping tears at the drop of a hat. Something emotional on TV. Someone I knew passing away on my dad’s birthday, of all days. I find myself undone by things that wouldn’t have touched me a few years ago.
It made me think back to when my friends would tease me. Oh my god, she’s crying again. My mom said it too, when I was a kid. Like it was something to fix.
So I fixed it.
There was a long period when I would never cry. Never feel any emotion. Never show any emotion. I learned to turn it off . . . completely. Hid behind professionalism. The system rewards that. Calls it composure. Calls it leadership presence.
What it actually is, is disconnection.
You can’t turn off an emotion in one place and still expect to feel it in another.
The armor doesn’t discriminate. When you shut down the parts that feel too much, you shut down all of it. And eventually you’re sitting across from someone you love, or standing in a moment that should matter, and you realize, nothing is coming through. Not grief. Not joy. Not even curiosity about your own life.
There was a period when the tears simply didn’t come. I thought I was being strong. I was just gone.
The return of feeling — messy, inconvenient, embarrassing at the wrong moments — isn’t weakness. It’s being human.
I excavate what the system buried. And I name what I find, clearly enough that you can’t un-hear it. Most people aren’t ready for that. The ones who are . . . that’s who I work with.
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 restack to ripple it wider.
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