kept my mouth shut in meetings for years
I am not the kind of person who talks first. Or second, usually. I grew up quiet and it sort of followed me into work, into conference rooms with bad lighting and those jugs of water nobody ever pours from. I would sit there with something in my head, something I actually thought was useful, and I would turn it over and over while other people were speaking. Checking it. Re-checking it. Waiting for the right moment which never felt right. I think part of me genuinely believed that if I waited long enough and the idea was good enough then somehow it would still get heard. It did not work like that. I remember one meeting in particular. There was a problem with how we were handling a certain client handover process, it had been dragging on for weeks, and I had been thinking about it on the bus home, I kept thinking about it actually, had this small adjustment in mind that I thought might fix the bottleneck. Wrote it down in my notebook in the margins, the one with the coffee ring on the cover that I carried everywhere. I sat down, the meeting started. A colleague, louder than me, generally louder than most people, said something in the first five minutes that was basically the same idea. Not identical. But close enough that I felt it in my chest, that specific feeling where you are embarrassed even though you did not do anything wrong. Everyone nodded. He got the follow up action. I looked at my notebook.
I don't know if there's a clean takeaway. I think the honest version is that staying quiet felt like self-protection and it did protect me from some things, from being wrong in public, from being dismissed, from a specific kind of embarrassment I am still quite afraid of. But it also meant years of ideas just dissolving. Not every idea was worth saying. Some of them were probably bad. But I didn't know which were which because I never tested them, so they all just went. I think that's the bit I actually regret, not any individual meeting, just the aggregate of all the undissaid things.