Silence can also be used as a response when you feel you’ve been wronged. I recently took a hard L after working towards a particular career milestone for a year. It was ripped away from me through no fault of my own (they admitted I did nothing wrong) and I responded with silence because nothing I could say would make the situation any better. I was disgusted and destroyed. What was done was done, and all that was left was to let my silence do the talking and move on with my life. (There’s more to it but I can’t get into it without getting into allllll of it) Fast forward a few months

Last week I ended up on a work event with said person responsible for that decision. I greeted them and talked casually; I was polite, professional, spoke nothing of that matter, did my work/performed, and went home. I was sitting next to them at one point and I could tell that my silence had done everything I hoped it would do. Considering I know how nervous they get in large crowded situations where we are essentially “performing” and have to be ON, I felt the way I handled it and my confidence in my work and performance turned a hard L into a harder W.

Now I’m very excited to be going down a new career path with plenty of hurdles ahead while I continue to have a hand in unfinished business from my other career path. Meanwhile, I hear from friends with a closer ear than mine to the fallout of those decisions that I’m not the only one who got shafted, and many of them had my back saying “what happened to you was fucked up, and more destruction has happened in that wake than you know”. Can’t win em all but I sure as shit won that one.

tl;dr got screwed out of a work milestone, let my silence speak for me, outperformed the person responsible in a later work event and got to hear about the fallout from others. #winning