Town halls are meant to be open spaces for dialogue, but somewhere along the way they began to feel like an arena I wasn’t sure how to navigate.
Early on in my career, company-wide meetings felt like gatherings — moments of connection where information flowed both ways, and questions were truly welcome. I remember sitting among colleagues, fascinated by how many different corners of the company converged in that one virtual room.
My hand would sometimes rise. Not always confidently, not always smoothly, but often enough that I believed the meeting belonged to everyone — including me.
But over time, something changed. These forums, once informal and surprising, became rehearsed and loaded with expectation. They weren’t just about updates anymore. They were about presence, participation, portrayal.
And somewhere in that shift, I began to stay quiet.
First signs of distance
I remember the first time I noticed myself hesitating — not because I didn’t have a question, but because I calculated what asking it might *look like*.
The town hall started the way it often did: slides, topline metrics, celebrations of wins, recognition of teams. There were smiles, applause buttons in the virtual platform, and frequent invitations to *participate*.
When the floor opened for questions, one colleague raised a hand to ask something nuanced. The response was quick but general, wrapping the answer so it didn’t complicate the moment. The affirmation that followed wasn’t for the question — it was for the brevity of the exchange.
Watching that, I felt my own questions shrink before they even formed fully.
It reminded me of how I felt in other parts of the culture, where participation carried emotional expectations I couldn’t quite decode — as in feeling out of place in a workplace that celebrates everything. In both, the space wasn’t modeled as neutral territory anymore; it had norms I hadn’t been taught and wasn’t sure how to interpret.
I began to notice how certain kinds of participation — concise, confident, punchy — were rewarded with affirmation. Anything that felt tentative or complicated was quietly smoothed over.
I started not to raise my hand.
The theater of participation
These town halls began feeling less like conversations and more like curated shows. There were spotlights on certain speakers, planned celebrations, and carefully timed applause.
Participation felt like a performance role. You balanced the risk of saying something not polished with the reward of being seen. I began to notice how many subconscious questions zipped through my mind before I decided not to speak up:
- Would my question be interpreted as critique or curiosity?
- Would my tone sound uncertain?
- Would I appear uninformed?
- Would I waste someone’s time?
I realized I wasn’t weighing *whether* I had something to say — I was weighing how it would land, and what it would cost me socially to say it.
It was the same kind of calculation I noticed in being expected to have a personal brand at work, where visibility itself became a form of currency with subtle consequences.
And every time I decided *not* to raise my hand, I felt a little more distant from the space.
My silence was not absence — it was a way of showing up that felt safer than speaking.
The weight of visibility
I don’t think I ever feared speaking. I think I feared the aftermath — how answers might be repeated in another meeting, how interpretations might drift away from intention, how a simple question could be replayed in mental loops long after the meeting ended.
In those early days, I didn’t ask because I was afraid. I asked because I was curious. But curiosity began to feel like something that needed context, framing, and delivery — all of which felt like performance.
I began to watch who asked questions and how they did it. Some people had a rhythm that felt effortless: a confident opening, a neat segue, a question that looked like it had been crafted for applause rather than comprehension.
Others stumbled. Their questions got brushed aside or answered in brief, noncommittal phrases. Sometimes, the deeper nuance of the question was lost entirely in the rush to move forward.
I started to wonder: was the town hall a place for complexity? Or only for soundbites?
The internal dialogue this triggered was unfamiliar — not reflective, not bold, just cautious. And cautious voices don’t lift their hands very often.
It reminded me of how I felt guarded in spaces that prized vulnerability, as I wrote in how the push for authenticity made me more guarded. In both places, the unspoken rules shaped participation long before I could name them.
The aftermath of silence
There have been times when I regretted not speaking — a question that lingered, something that could have clarified a point of confusion, an opportunity to show a perspective that might have mattered.
But each time I stayed quiet, I also felt a kind of relief — not from avoidance, but from not having to monitor how my words would be received.
Silence, in that context, wasn’t emptiness. It was observation. It was preservation. It was a decision that my inner barometer was more trustworthy than the outer affirmations that seemed to surround these forums.
I began to see that my silence wasn’t apathy; it was a choice grounded in an assessment of where I could *actually* show up without feeling exposed.
And there was something quietly powerful about that — not triumphant, not flashy, just intimately rooted in knowing my own boundaries.
But still, I stayed quiet.
I stay quiet not because I have nothing to say — but because I no longer trust that saying it here would hold the nuance I meant it to have.
Leave a Reply