Brain vs Heart: the price of unlocking freedom to speak & write
Afterthoughts on trading off emotional freedom & risks vs. financial freedoms and risks, and what’s changed now that I’m out of corporate life & writing full-time
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My husband and I are huge music fans. Lyric snippets emerge naturally in our conversations, usually triggering a chuckle and “I know that song too” 🙂
Occasionally a well-written lyric snags my brain. Lately, while reflecting on the new-found sense of expressive freedom I’ve been enjoying since leaving the corporate world at the end of 2023, I’ve been mulling an old Eagles song snippet:
“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key”
- The Eagles, “Already Gone”
(Friends, this post is going to be a bit more on the philosophical side than my usual; feel free to skip if that’s not your cup of tea.)
Looking Back
I worked in the corporate world for several decades. Out of necessity at first, and then by preference ever since, I’ve been self-supporting since college.
Although I only learned about affinity bias many years later, I realized while still in school that making it (more) obvious to the guys that I was (even more) different from them would likely make things harder for me. (And yes, it was mostly guys, i.e. men; being a geek & engineer and working in industrial domains made that the norm.)
🤫 So I studiously avoided expressing my political or religious or other potentially controversial opinions, and stayed non-committal when they spouted off with theirs. I quietly did what I could to personally support the few other women, and others who were marginalized, and I joined some protests outside of work, but stopped there.
😞 Those emotional chains were heavy. But the potential consequences of unlocking myself (i.e. being fired, laid off, or unemployable) loomed so dire, being on my own, as to make staying ‘chained’ seem sensible.
In hindsight, I let my head (minimizing financial risks) win the tradeoff against my heart (enduring emotional costs). It wasn’t a conscious, well-deliberated decision at the time. I don’t recall feeling like I really had a choice.
My tenure at my first employer after college reinforced this school-based strategy of keeping my opinions to myself. It was a big corporation taken over by a raider, then divvied up and sold off in pieces after the raider stripped the pension fund. I survived, I don’t know, maybe 15-20 layoffs in my 10+ years there. I stopped counting; they became quarterly blood-on-the-walls events. The clear risks of job loss and my survival of their recurring layoffs indicated that I was probably doing the right (safest) thing by keeping my opinions to myself.
After I left that company, a few moves later, I ended up at an awesome telecom startup in RTP. We almost made it big and changed the world, but the startup ran out of runway 2 years later, went bankrupt, and closed down. Although I was fortunate to land a new role quickly, the stress of being unemployed and needing health insurance for myself and my soon-to-be-husband further reinforced my sense of caution, and stayed with me.
Once social media became a thing, I felt similarly constrained on commenting on controversial topics, even with the disclaimer “All opinions are mine only”. I was always concerned about offending my network, people at my current employer, or possibly at a future employer, and jeopardizing my livelihood and self-sufficiency.
Later in my life and career, I got braver and began speaking up more often about equality, and participating & launching & leading ERGs at my workplaces. By then I was more financially secure, although I still needed & wanted a paying job (and health insurance for my family!).
I was still somewhat wary of being too outspoken, though. Even in corporate cultures advertised as supportive of equality, it was obvious that many people didn’t value the activities.
Less than two years after I started speaking up & taking more action internally and externally, I was part of a selective layoff for the first time ever, due to a reorg. This was at a company I’d already been loyal to for 15+ years, and where I’d survived ~4 other huge reorgs and layoffs.
My next two positions, where I became even more active and outspoken, also ended in layoffs. One was due to COVID-related business cutbacks, and the other was due to aftereffects of an acquisition.
🔑 As the Eagles song said, even though I didn’t know it then, I clearly had the key all along. I could in theory have ‘unchained’ myself years ago by just speaking my mind and discounting the consequences (“damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”). Why didn’t I?
My key tradeoff on speaking out seems to boil down to weighing emotional vs. financial risks & freedoms. Here’s what I’ve been mulling:
Should I have stayed quiet longer?
What harms would have come to others I was able to help, if I hadn’t spoken up and acted?
Would I still have been impacted by the first and third layoffs if I’d continued to keep my mouth shut about inequalities? Or was being laid off in one or both cases more likely driven by ageism, which coincided with me getting braver as I got older, rather than activism? 🤷 (There’s probably no way to know.)
Should I have unlocked myself to speak openly in my earlier years?
Who could I have helped if I’d spoken up more, and what price did they pay for me not doing it?
What emotional or financial costs of speaking up would I have paid for this freedom? Would it have been worth it, or would the costs have outweighed the benefits? 🤷 (Again, probably no way to know. Being long-term unemployed would have definitely impaired my personal freedom in very practical ways!)
How are things different now, and what should I do now?
Looking Ahead
Now that I am out of corporate life and I’m “on my own” (with collaborators), the financial risks are clearly lower: I have no corporate job to jeopardize, and no worries about whether work colleagues devalue equality-related activities! Yes, writing is my chosen new job, but haters can’t fire me from it or stop me from writing; all they can do is stop reading, right?
I obviously don’t expect everyone to agree with me. In fact, as I used to tell the software and AI teams I led, if we never have or express differing opinions, we are not getting to the best understanding and solution. As a team, we need to “disagree without being disagreeable”.
So I’ll always truly want to hear what you think about my posts, whether we agree or not. Email me, restack, or use that comment button below!
Beyond constructive discussion, I realize not everyone will like hearing my opinions and ideas, and not everyone will be kind about it. I’m preparing myself to handle the emotional consequences of any hard pushback I may get, and be ok with it. ❤️ I love this advice from TS (and am now starting to get to know her music):
“If they don’t like you for being yourself, be yourself even more.”
- Taylor Swift
Net result: since leaving corporate, the tradeoff between emotional and financial risks seems to have unquestionably tipped the other way. I feel like I can now, in relative safety, follow my heart to:
write or speak on whatever topic I wish, and
say what I really think, still respectfully but candidly
❓ This feeling of safety is clearly an assumption, and perhaps a naive and optimistic one. Writing publicly still feels a bit risky, even with no job at stake. Social media in general is known to be horrid to women who speak up and become visible. Three things (more assumptions than facts) make me feel somewhat safer:
My collaborators, and pretty much everyone who has subscribed so far to this newsletter, know me from my past 8 years or so of speaking up, or from what I’ve already written here. So hopefully my future frank opinions won’t surprise or faze any of you. 🙂
I don’t expect to actually become so famous that my writing gets attention from trolls 😏
Substack feels different than other SM. From what I’ve seen so far in the community, I’m optimistic that you all will tolerate (and perhaps even welcome) hearing what I think, and will engage constructively, whether we agree at first or not. Thank you in advance for that. 💕
Within the past few weeks, I’ve still caught myself questioning “should I really say that out loud?” when reviewing before clicking ‘publish’. But overall, I feel a huge sense of relief to be mostly free of the self-censorship burden. I finally ‘get’ what my late husband said he cherished about turning off his “self-monitor process” with me.
It’s going to be interesting to look back at this post in a year, or 5 years, and see if my assumptions about safety were valid, and if this new tradeoff decision has been a good one …
In the meantime, I plan to “be myself even more” and strive to follow RBG’s excellent advice (simple, but not easy):
"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." - Ruth Bader Ginsburg