MyThoughtsoutloud

  I show up. Every day. On time. I complete my work. I stay present. I carry what I need to carry — and often a little extra. I do this without asking for applause. I’m grateful for the support I’ve had during a challenging time, and I continue to give to my role without entitlement. But let’s not pretend certain dynamics don’t exist — especially when they’re so familiar they feel like background noise. The smirks. The dismissals. The assumptions. The eye rolls. “What is she still doing here?” "What is she wearing?" I’ve been in the room when that’s been said — and I’ve also been the one it's said about. As I put it recently: “Tell me how I should feel, when I have to show up, knowing I have smirks behind my back, eye rolls… silent dismissals because I didn’t bring the gloss.” And this isn’t just about hurt feelings. This is about how elitism quietly shapes workplace culture — and pushes out potential before it’s even recognised. I get it. I understand the desire for an ...

  I didn’t come into my career with corporate polish. I didn’t have a neat degree, a LinkedIn-optimised CV, or the right network whispering my name into rooms I hadn’t entered yet. What I had was pressure. Struggle. Hustle. I was a young mum, trying to make ends meet, my eldest in foster care, juggling commission-based jobs that barely covered bills. I wasn’t building a career — I was just trying to survive. And then I got a chance. At 24, I was taken on as an apprentice at a housing association. I had no idea what I was doing — but they saw something in me. Halfway through the apprenticeship, they promoted me. Not because I was polished. But because I showed potential. Because I solved problems. Because I asked questions and figured things out. Because I learned. That was the beginning of everything. What People Didn’t See I’ve worked in housing and benefits for over five years. I’ve managed high-volume post rooms processing GDPR-sensitive documents. I passed a formal interview at...

  For the Ones Rebuilding Quietly — Like a Phone Reset in the Dark There’s a silence that comes after being wrong. A cold kind of quiet — not peace, but pause. Not apology, but absence. And in that quiet, all the noise you tried to avoid starts speaking: The memory of what you did. The people you hurt. The things you can’t take back. The person you stopped being. 📵 The Shame of Trying to Reboot Trying to get right again after being wrong feels like trying to restart a phone that’s been dropped, cracked, and frozen in place. You press the button… nothing. You try again… flicker. But deep down, you’re scared the damage is permanent. You start asking yourself things no one else hears: Can I still be trusted? Do I even deserve another shot? Will they ever see who I’m trying to become, or only who I was when I failed? This is the part no one talks about. The raw, gut-level pain of knowing you messed up — and now you have to live through it, live past it, a...

Why Does History Seem to Repeat Itself, and Can We Ever Truly Break Free from the Past? As I reflect on why societal issues, like racism, persist through time, I find myself grappling with their stubborn and lingering presence. It feels almost immovable, like a boulder wedged into the fabric of human history. Racism, as one example, ties deeply into human resistance to change—rooted in fear of obscurity, loss of status, or identity. This led me to consider the broader question: why does history repeat itself? And more specifically, why do we struggle to adapt, even when survival depends on it? When examining patterns in human behavior, it becomes clear that these cycles persist because of our collective inability to accept impermanence. Evolution teaches us to adapt to survive, yet we resist when it comes to dismantling harmful ideologies. Instead, we fall into a loop of rebuilding systems that perpetuate the very issues we thought we’d left behind. Is this simply human nature, or is t...