Just got demoted at 59 for not being a team player. I was mad as hell but now realize I was speaking a difficult truth my boss didn’t want to hear. All the men are brown noses and just fall in line but I don’t live my life falling in line. Now I got nothing to lose
I run a Buisness, we are two women running a bakery. We cannot be fired but we do have people leave and push back because we are women. If we give feedback in anything other than a gentle and somewhat floral manner we are deemed as being mean. A simple question can be turned around as the expectation seems to be, that because we are women and now also mothers. We should be their mothers. Talk to them in quiet comforting voices, softly encouraging at all times and applauding even basic tasks. It is exhausting. It would not happen if we were men. I’m not sure there is any sphere of life you can escape the expectation of the feminine woman.
Thank you for this very straight-forward piece. Amazing. I completely agree with what you said about ageing. To me, ageing is a relief: not seeking men’s attention as much, being a little invisible, feeling less needy… all that pressure to be super attractive finally fading. It’s a very powerful time. Even though I’m single, I actually feel more prepared to find the right partner after 40, my priorities have completely changed. I feel more attuned to my "true self" more and more each day.
What this made me think about is how much of women’s ‘professionalism’ only exists if you make yourself smaller. We’re not rewarded for doing the right thing, we’re rewarded for doing it quietly.
Eventually you realise the silence costs more than the consequences of staying put, as you loose yourself in the quiet.
For neurodivergent people there’s an added layer; many of us, silence is not politeness, it’s very much risk management. You never really know when to speak or how it will land, so being silent becomes the safest option. Which creates a pattern: stay quiet to stay safe, and breaking that pattern is not simple as it requires a complete rewiring.
What you wrote named something I learned early: stay small or pay the price. I have spent years policing myself before anyone else needed to. Yes, it hits women hard, but it is not only women. Anyone who challenges power or speaks plainly learns quickly what a system will tolerate and what are the consequences.
By midlife, that reflex had become second nature. And thanks also to a kind and supportive community and writers like @lilianmotta and @artistmorning my substack The Arc of Ageing has been part of waking up after a long dormant phase. The sun is so bright some days.
The cost of silence is too high. My voice is no longer negotiable.
Thanks for your article. I agree with you about the price of not speaking up. Our choices contribute piece-wise to what is 'normal' - even within ourselves: until over time, we refine our own conscious meaning of what is IS to be authentic.
I am so grateful to have found your body of work! I immediately shared your "Aging Out of Fucks" article with a friend and it was exactly what she needed to hear at that exact moment. Your work resonates with me so deeply! Mahalo piha!
I just joined your sub stack and I am thrilled for it! Thank you for spelling out so clearly what’s going on with me in perimenopause, the IDGAF-ness.
However, after reading many of the comments from these ladies that also follow you, I want to share a different side of this from an alternate perspective of a female high functioning autistic.
I am late diagnosed, like many high functioning, autistic women. I am 51 now, and in retrospect all of the signs were there consistently. We just didn’t know it. One of the signs was my inability to curb my out-loud thought process. This led me into a non-corporate world immediately, where my passion and voice carved out a career in my special interests because I couldn’t have it any other way.
I am also a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of my stepfather. My discontent and inability to process the trauma led to distrust and resentment of any kind of male dominated field. One could say that this stunted me, but I could say that because of it, I prevailed in pursuing my special interest. This didn’t come without constant criticism from the men in my life. It kept me single, as a single mother, it held me back career wise, and to this day, I am not financially stable.
At 51 my thoughts and my mouth have not been able to be completely passive, held back. Today, it’s a great struggle for me because I have now entered the corporate world, exited the arts and entertainment industry because I am no longer young and “sexual.” No longer needing to be in public eye to sell events, my art, my music, myself. I canceled posting on social media two years ago.
I’m still pretty, and I still do wonderful fun things. I just don’t post them. Now I’m corporate. And for the first time, I have to play these corporate games. My social skills are seriously honed at this point. I am very aware that I have had a social disability, my whole life. Whereas I don’t give a fuck anymore, now I am very methodical in a different way. The mask is off, but I choose to be in a different character when I need to. I choose to execute my words as a position of power, to support me until I no longer choose to be corporate. Or do I have a choice anymore?
I have witnessed exactly what it is to be “not feminine” or “ladylike.” I said fuck that from my teens to yesterday. I have run with boys and men my whole life because I wasn’t one of the girls, or I was weird. They said I think like a man, calculated and logical. What they don’t realize is that, although I am logical, it is because I see both sides. I’m less emotional, yet still have empathy. I see and feel both sides.
I know right from wrong, and I do not justify the men. In fact I correct them quickly, but with grace. The softness that I choose use now will be what helps me through to retirement. Men have proven to be softer than women on the inside. I have always known this. I don’t shrink from them. But I don’t need to boss them anymore, either.
Unfortunately, I will have to pretend to give a fuck for a little while longer. Blessings to many of you who do not. 🙏🏼
“The cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.
Not immediately. But over time, the weight of stuffing emotions and suppressed thoughts becomes unbearable.”
Yes to this observation. It took me way too long to speak- my sixth decade. And the highest price I paid was self respect. Every time I remained silent, a part of me was chipped away.
Recently I spoke up to a male acquaintance about my need and preference, which indirectly meant that he’d have to change his behavior. Initially, his text response looked good. But when we saw each other in person all was NOT okay. He couldn’t handle directness, even though how I communicated was respectful. He acted like a shamed little boy who had been reprimanded. Not my issue. I refuse to take care of men’s feelings anymore. Patriarchy coddles men into believing they’re competent when, sometimes, they’re really not. They’ve just been repeatedly deferred to. I for one am finished. It’s glorious to have more in me where “this came from.” And yes, we’re just getting started!
Thank you, thank you, for this column. I want to support younger women in their endeavor to speak.
It was really affirming to read this. In my substack, I'm exploring experiences just like the ones you describe. In each of the workplace scenarios I've encountered, I felt crushed, discouraged, and exhausted having tired to simply be my authentic self to get work done and move projects forward. Just to give one example, while working for a fortune 500 company, I was told I was "a lab rat for teaching a male manager how to lead." To clarify, I was that male manager's subordinate and he'd never had a direct report. More appalling was the fact that his FEMALE boss said this to me, as if she were letting me in on a mean little secret and I should be flattered to know her strategy about how to teach this man in a leadership role who had control over my career. I recall the moment she said this. My heart came into my throat, I wanted to scream or cry or pound my fist on the table. All three at the same time, if possible. I knew in that moment, I was either going to get fired or I had to hunker down and get comfortable eating alot of shit. And even in my late 40s, I was not good at eating shit. I started to create a journal with dates/times/emails/summaries of meetings and conversations. It created twice as much work for me because I still had my actual job to do and chronicling each of my meetings and other awkward, sometimes inappropriate, remarks made by my male boss and his female VP (the one who called me a lab rat), was very time consuming. Each journal entry re-opened the wound of having to endure behaviors and remarks that ranged from rude to sexist to abusive. Ultimately, I filed a complaint with HR and I girded my lions for an epic medieval battle for my job. I knew that filing the complaint was only going to make me a target. I became caught up in the quagmire of cyclical HR and legal reviews and meetings. Meanwhile I started looking for a new job. I learned that others in my organization had experienced similar issues with this male manager and had also complained to HR. When I raised this with HR, my challenges worsened. At that time,I thought, this company wouldn't dare give me a poor performance review after I've filed and HR complaint and yet, that's EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. And that's not the first time this has happened to me. In the end, after holding fast and refusing to admit that my performance was below average and that I deserved to be on a PIP, I received a settlement of about $35,000 from the company. The condition of acceptance is that I don't discuss it with my doctors, family, therapist, etc. Also, I could never work at that company again (thanks but no thanks anyway, right?!) It bought me time to find another job, but the trauma from the experience was life changing. It was all worth it, but I want to help others figure out how to prepare for these confrontations. I want to share with folks how to keep documents that will improve your likelihood of getting a settlement and how to protect your career history after the fact. At the end of the day, I would love to see more transparency from all companies about the number of employees who've received settlements like the one I got. How can future employees know what they might be getting themselves into if they have no way of learning about internal HR tactics and managerial behavior that is tolerated and continues because settlements are given to "troublemakers." And these settlement agreements are completely lopsided, suppressing the employees ability to connect with others about their experiences or even share their experiences with doctors who can help them process the trauma.
I know, right?! But I think the mere mention of it in a settlement agreement reinforces the trauma. I think it is intended to be intimidating and to make a person think twice about getting assistance or moving on from a bad experience. At a minimum, it underscores the imbalance in the employee/employer dynamic. The fact that an employer can even put a statement like this in writing insinuates that they have the power and reach to enforce it, when in actually, they probably don't. But after a person has been through weeks/months of intimidation, fearing the loss of wages, reputation, and livelihood, many people will think they have to comply.
I love d everything about this. The point about midlife is a good one — changes in brain making other-pleasing behavior less reinforcing but also the fact we have less to lose — and I’d add, that we have already lost if, regardless of ass kissing or not. I’m in midlife, and I do have things to lose, but I give zero fucks, after all this time of kissing ass and it still not getting me anywhere either! So I think the differential experiences are what give us our voice in midlife, not our brain changes alone.
I liked the ending: Lost your boyfriend but kept your voice. Hell yeah! Kiss it, Gramps! (Respectfully, of course)
I love this essay! After a life-time of people pleasing at work, I was fired at the age of 51 for speaking up and questioning my boss. My shame sent me to therapy and I ended up with enough clarity and strength to leave my oppressive sexless marriage and began to build a life that nurtures my inner dreams. I am plum out of fucks and enjoying the time I have left!
What you wrote cuts because it reveals the design: power doesn’t punish mistakes, it punishes disobedience. The rules aren’t written anywhere because they work better when we internalize them. That way the system doesn’t have to silence us. We eventually do it ourselves.
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that “being agreeable” is just another word for “being manageable.” And every institution, from families to hospitals to corporations, runs smoother when the people inside them stop asking inconvenient questions.
But here’s the paradox: compliance costs more than defiance. You can lose a job for speaking truth, but you lose yourself by swallowing it. One wound heals. The other metastasizes.
Your story isn’t just about gender. It’s about the spiritual price of staying small in rooms that benefit from your smallness.
As someone who has lost family for speaking truth and a lot of other things besides... it feels so good to read this and the messages after like yours. But I hate every minute of it.
Sharing this with my 24yo daughter to remind her that it’s worth keeping her voice, even when it gets you fired.
Just got demoted at 59 for not being a team player. I was mad as hell but now realize I was speaking a difficult truth my boss didn’t want to hear. All the men are brown noses and just fall in line but I don’t live my life falling in line. Now I got nothing to lose
I run a Buisness, we are two women running a bakery. We cannot be fired but we do have people leave and push back because we are women. If we give feedback in anything other than a gentle and somewhat floral manner we are deemed as being mean. A simple question can be turned around as the expectation seems to be, that because we are women and now also mothers. We should be their mothers. Talk to them in quiet comforting voices, softly encouraging at all times and applauding even basic tasks. It is exhausting. It would not happen if we were men. I’m not sure there is any sphere of life you can escape the expectation of the feminine woman.
Thank you for this very straight-forward piece. Amazing. I completely agree with what you said about ageing. To me, ageing is a relief: not seeking men’s attention as much, being a little invisible, feeling less needy… all that pressure to be super attractive finally fading. It’s a very powerful time. Even though I’m single, I actually feel more prepared to find the right partner after 40, my priorities have completely changed. I feel more attuned to my "true self" more and more each day.
Beautiful piece.
What this made me think about is how much of women’s ‘professionalism’ only exists if you make yourself smaller. We’re not rewarded for doing the right thing, we’re rewarded for doing it quietly.
Eventually you realise the silence costs more than the consequences of staying put, as you loose yourself in the quiet.
For neurodivergent people there’s an added layer; many of us, silence is not politeness, it’s very much risk management. You never really know when to speak or how it will land, so being silent becomes the safest option. Which creates a pattern: stay quiet to stay safe, and breaking that pattern is not simple as it requires a complete rewiring.
What you wrote named something I learned early: stay small or pay the price. I have spent years policing myself before anyone else needed to. Yes, it hits women hard, but it is not only women. Anyone who challenges power or speaks plainly learns quickly what a system will tolerate and what are the consequences.
By midlife, that reflex had become second nature. And thanks also to a kind and supportive community and writers like @lilianmotta and @artistmorning my substack The Arc of Ageing has been part of waking up after a long dormant phase. The sun is so bright some days.
The cost of silence is too high. My voice is no longer negotiable.
LOL men pay a price for speaking up too. But you are obviously a feminist who doesn't want to hear men speak up, either.
Thanks for your article. I agree with you about the price of not speaking up. Our choices contribute piece-wise to what is 'normal' - even within ourselves: until over time, we refine our own conscious meaning of what is IS to be authentic.
I am so grateful to have found your body of work! I immediately shared your "Aging Out of Fucks" article with a friend and it was exactly what she needed to hear at that exact moment. Your work resonates with me so deeply! Mahalo piha!
I just joined your sub stack and I am thrilled for it! Thank you for spelling out so clearly what’s going on with me in perimenopause, the IDGAF-ness.
However, after reading many of the comments from these ladies that also follow you, I want to share a different side of this from an alternate perspective of a female high functioning autistic.
I am late diagnosed, like many high functioning, autistic women. I am 51 now, and in retrospect all of the signs were there consistently. We just didn’t know it. One of the signs was my inability to curb my out-loud thought process. This led me into a non-corporate world immediately, where my passion and voice carved out a career in my special interests because I couldn’t have it any other way.
I am also a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of my stepfather. My discontent and inability to process the trauma led to distrust and resentment of any kind of male dominated field. One could say that this stunted me, but I could say that because of it, I prevailed in pursuing my special interest. This didn’t come without constant criticism from the men in my life. It kept me single, as a single mother, it held me back career wise, and to this day, I am not financially stable.
At 51 my thoughts and my mouth have not been able to be completely passive, held back. Today, it’s a great struggle for me because I have now entered the corporate world, exited the arts and entertainment industry because I am no longer young and “sexual.” No longer needing to be in public eye to sell events, my art, my music, myself. I canceled posting on social media two years ago.
I’m still pretty, and I still do wonderful fun things. I just don’t post them. Now I’m corporate. And for the first time, I have to play these corporate games. My social skills are seriously honed at this point. I am very aware that I have had a social disability, my whole life. Whereas I don’t give a fuck anymore, now I am very methodical in a different way. The mask is off, but I choose to be in a different character when I need to. I choose to execute my words as a position of power, to support me until I no longer choose to be corporate. Or do I have a choice anymore?
I have witnessed exactly what it is to be “not feminine” or “ladylike.” I said fuck that from my teens to yesterday. I have run with boys and men my whole life because I wasn’t one of the girls, or I was weird. They said I think like a man, calculated and logical. What they don’t realize is that, although I am logical, it is because I see both sides. I’m less emotional, yet still have empathy. I see and feel both sides.
I know right from wrong, and I do not justify the men. In fact I correct them quickly, but with grace. The softness that I choose use now will be what helps me through to retirement. Men have proven to be softer than women on the inside. I have always known this. I don’t shrink from them. But I don’t need to boss them anymore, either.
Unfortunately, I will have to pretend to give a fuck for a little while longer. Blessings to many of you who do not. 🙏🏼
“The cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.
Not immediately. But over time, the weight of stuffing emotions and suppressed thoughts becomes unbearable.”
Yes to this observation. It took me way too long to speak- my sixth decade. And the highest price I paid was self respect. Every time I remained silent, a part of me was chipped away.
Recently I spoke up to a male acquaintance about my need and preference, which indirectly meant that he’d have to change his behavior. Initially, his text response looked good. But when we saw each other in person all was NOT okay. He couldn’t handle directness, even though how I communicated was respectful. He acted like a shamed little boy who had been reprimanded. Not my issue. I refuse to take care of men’s feelings anymore. Patriarchy coddles men into believing they’re competent when, sometimes, they’re really not. They’ve just been repeatedly deferred to. I for one am finished. It’s glorious to have more in me where “this came from.” And yes, we’re just getting started!
Thank you, thank you, for this column. I want to support younger women in their endeavor to speak.
Resonates 💯💯💯💯 - better to lose the boyfriend/job than lose your voice.
It was really affirming to read this. In my substack, I'm exploring experiences just like the ones you describe. In each of the workplace scenarios I've encountered, I felt crushed, discouraged, and exhausted having tired to simply be my authentic self to get work done and move projects forward. Just to give one example, while working for a fortune 500 company, I was told I was "a lab rat for teaching a male manager how to lead." To clarify, I was that male manager's subordinate and he'd never had a direct report. More appalling was the fact that his FEMALE boss said this to me, as if she were letting me in on a mean little secret and I should be flattered to know her strategy about how to teach this man in a leadership role who had control over my career. I recall the moment she said this. My heart came into my throat, I wanted to scream or cry or pound my fist on the table. All three at the same time, if possible. I knew in that moment, I was either going to get fired or I had to hunker down and get comfortable eating alot of shit. And even in my late 40s, I was not good at eating shit. I started to create a journal with dates/times/emails/summaries of meetings and conversations. It created twice as much work for me because I still had my actual job to do and chronicling each of my meetings and other awkward, sometimes inappropriate, remarks made by my male boss and his female VP (the one who called me a lab rat), was very time consuming. Each journal entry re-opened the wound of having to endure behaviors and remarks that ranged from rude to sexist to abusive. Ultimately, I filed a complaint with HR and I girded my lions for an epic medieval battle for my job. I knew that filing the complaint was only going to make me a target. I became caught up in the quagmire of cyclical HR and legal reviews and meetings. Meanwhile I started looking for a new job. I learned that others in my organization had experienced similar issues with this male manager and had also complained to HR. When I raised this with HR, my challenges worsened. At that time,I thought, this company wouldn't dare give me a poor performance review after I've filed and HR complaint and yet, that's EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. And that's not the first time this has happened to me. In the end, after holding fast and refusing to admit that my performance was below average and that I deserved to be on a PIP, I received a settlement of about $35,000 from the company. The condition of acceptance is that I don't discuss it with my doctors, family, therapist, etc. Also, I could never work at that company again (thanks but no thanks anyway, right?!) It bought me time to find another job, but the trauma from the experience was life changing. It was all worth it, but I want to help others figure out how to prepare for these confrontations. I want to share with folks how to keep documents that will improve your likelihood of getting a settlement and how to protect your career history after the fact. At the end of the day, I would love to see more transparency from all companies about the number of employees who've received settlements like the one I got. How can future employees know what they might be getting themselves into if they have no way of learning about internal HR tactics and managerial behavior that is tolerated and continues because settlements are given to "troublemakers." And these settlement agreements are completely lopsided, suppressing the employees ability to connect with others about their experiences or even share their experiences with doctors who can help them process the trauma.
How would they even know if you shared it with doctors or therapists or others?
I know, right?! But I think the mere mention of it in a settlement agreement reinforces the trauma. I think it is intended to be intimidating and to make a person think twice about getting assistance or moving on from a bad experience. At a minimum, it underscores the imbalance in the employee/employer dynamic. The fact that an employer can even put a statement like this in writing insinuates that they have the power and reach to enforce it, when in actually, they probably don't. But after a person has been through weeks/months of intimidation, fearing the loss of wages, reputation, and livelihood, many people will think they have to comply.
I love d everything about this. The point about midlife is a good one — changes in brain making other-pleasing behavior less reinforcing but also the fact we have less to lose — and I’d add, that we have already lost if, regardless of ass kissing or not. I’m in midlife, and I do have things to lose, but I give zero fucks, after all this time of kissing ass and it still not getting me anywhere either! So I think the differential experiences are what give us our voice in midlife, not our brain changes alone.
I liked the ending: Lost your boyfriend but kept your voice. Hell yeah! Kiss it, Gramps! (Respectfully, of course)
I love this essay! After a life-time of people pleasing at work, I was fired at the age of 51 for speaking up and questioning my boss. My shame sent me to therapy and I ended up with enough clarity and strength to leave my oppressive sexless marriage and began to build a life that nurtures my inner dreams. I am plum out of fucks and enjoying the time I have left!
What you wrote cuts because it reveals the design: power doesn’t punish mistakes, it punishes disobedience. The rules aren’t written anywhere because they work better when we internalize them. That way the system doesn’t have to silence us. We eventually do it ourselves.
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that “being agreeable” is just another word for “being manageable.” And every institution, from families to hospitals to corporations, runs smoother when the people inside them stop asking inconvenient questions.
But here’s the paradox: compliance costs more than defiance. You can lose a job for speaking truth, but you lose yourself by swallowing it. One wound heals. The other metastasizes.
Your story isn’t just about gender. It’s about the spiritual price of staying small in rooms that benefit from your smallness.
Some people get fired for telling the truth.
Most get spiritually bankrupt for avoiding it.
As someone who has lost family for speaking truth and a lot of other things besides... it feels so good to read this and the messages after like yours. But I hate every minute of it.