She couldn’t find her voice at six. By thirty-something, she had built a career on it. Here’s what happened in between.
There is a girl I think about sometimes. She is six years old, maybe eight, maybe ten — the years blur together the way difficult years tend to — and she is very, very quiet. Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The other kind. The kind that a child learns when silence feels like the safest option available. She could not speak up. Not then. Not in that house, in those years, under those particular circumstances. She simply did not have the language for it yet.
That girl grew up to work in communications.
I find this funny, sometimes, in the way that only things that were once painful can become funny — at a distance, with enough time and enough therapy and enough late-night conversations with the right people. Life has a sense of irony that borders on editorial. The lesson was always inside the wound. I just had to live long enough to read it.
“The people who couldn’t speak as children often become the ones who choose their words most carefully as adults.”
Lately I have been learning — or rather, re-learning, because some lessons have to be taught more than once — the value of what in Indonesian we call banyak temen. Not in the shallow sense of a large contact list. In the deeper sense of having people around you who know things you don’t, who will tell you the truth before you make a decision you’ll have to live with. Before I act, I consult. I go to the people whose judgment I trust. I ask the uncomfortable question before the situation forces it. I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that thinking before acting is not hesitation — it is intelligence dressed in patience.
I have also learned — and this one took longer — never to make myself small for anyone’s comfort. You belong in every room you walk into. I know this sounds like the kind of thing printed on a motivational poster, and I know how easy it is to dismiss. But stay with me for a moment, because there is a specific situation I want you to understand.
There is a particular kind of person — charming, fluent, practiced — who uses warmth as a disorientation tactic. Lawyers know this technique well. The charm creates a slight imbalance in the room, a subtle pressure that makes you question your own standing, your own read of the situation. You walk in feeling sure of yourself and somehow, by the third sentence, you are explaining yourself instead of asserting yourself. If you have ever felt that reversal and wondered why — that is why. It is not accidental. Recognise it. Take a breath. Do not trip. Stand back up.
“Emotions are information. Facts are evidence. Know the difference before you walk into any room.”
Here is what I know about protecting yourself professionally, learned from rooms I wish I had walked into better prepared:
Never agree to anything verbally that matters. Put it in writing — all of it, every time, without apology. Keep every piece of correspondence as if you already know you will need it someday. You may not. But the act of keeping it changes how carefully you communicate in the first place, which is its own kind of protection.
Read every contract. Every word, not just the comfortable ones. Highlight the grey areas — not to be difficult, but because a contract without clarity is a document with two edges, and you do not want to discover which edge you’re on when it’s too late to renegotiate. Ask the questions that feel awkward to ask. Clarity now costs nothing. Ambiguity later costs everything.
Place yourself at eye level with everyone you negotiate with. Not above — that is arrogance, and it closes doors. Not below — that is a habit some of us learned in childhood and have been unlearning ever since. Eye level. Firm. Professional. Clear about yes and no, and willing to say both out loud without softening them into something that can be misread.
And when someone plays dirty — because sometimes they will — play fair anyway. Not because fairness is naive, but because facts and law and a clear paper trail are more powerful than any dirty tactic I have ever watched someone try. Stand your ground on what is actually, verifiably yours. Do not bluff. Do not shrink. Do not retaliate in kind. Just stay on the facts, stay on your rights, stay standing.
“Play fair but firmly. The opponent’s tactics are their problem. Your integrity is yours.”
The girl who couldn’t speak up — she is still in me somewhere. I don’t try to pretend she isn’t. But she is not running the meeting anymore. She has been replaced, slowly and imperfectly, by someone who has learned that a voice is not something you are born with fully formed. It is something you build. Sentence by sentence, difficult conversation by difficult conversation, contract clause by contract clause.
Life is for living with the lessons that are inside it. Even the ones that started before we were old enough to understand what was being taught.
Especially those.