💾 Archived View for gem.mjb.im › gemlog › 2020-10-08-speaking-up.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 00:40:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Written October 8th, 2020
A handful of things have popped up in my professional life recently where I've put to practice something I believe to be a strong truth: there are plenty of people who will feel something strongly and say nothing because nobody else has said anything, and they fear looking "dumb" or out of place.
I feel it all the dang time. Literally every day. And I want to start doing something about it. I'm a person of incredible privilege, and it's unlikely that me saying something that is on my mind will truly hurt me in my professional career or personal life. Not that I am immune from criticism - certainly far from it, but within the realm of reason, and especially regarding work, it's extremely likely that if I have a question or comment, someone else is thinking the same thing, but doesn't want to say it.
Two very different examples:
First, there was recently some controversial statements said in my workplace. I was far from the first to speak up about it, but even though others had already spoken with similar sentiments to my own, I still found myself getting plenty of DMs from coworkers thanking me for my statement because it matched their own feelings and they didn't want to say anything.
As for another example, my team at work recently did a sort of hackathon week, but the expectations weren't clearly set for if we planned to actually ship things to production by the end of it. I realized about halfway through that there was no chance of my project being "done" in a week. I figured that had to be the case for the other groups as well, but nobody was talking about it, and I was stressing out not knowing. So I just bit the bullet and posed the question, and immediately, every other group chimed in with the same sentiment.
I'm no hero for doing this. I'm just tired of feeling alone in my thoughts, and I'm increasingly proving to myself that I'm very much not alone. So, give it a shot. If you can't follow a professor in class or feel overwhelmed by something or think a situation doesn't feel right - speak up. There's probably others out there waiting for someone else to talk first so they can agree.