▸ Column · Contemporary Slack-era office — adapted only lightly; the workplace and the "you're a lot" social tax read the same now as in the letter.
KILLMONGER replies.
Replied to by Killmonger, with a rebuttal from Professor X.
The letter
My coworker Priya and I were lunch-buddies almost every day — until March, when she asked me point-blank what I thought of her project proposal and I told her the truth: the timeline wasn't realistic. Since then it's been desk-lunches and one-word Slack replies. I've replayed that conversation maybe forty times and I honestly don't think I was cruel. But lately three different colleagues have, out of nowhere, called me "a lot" and "very direct," and now I'm spiraling — do I have some giant blind spot about how I land on people? Complicating it: I've spent most of my life making myself small to keep everyone comfortable, so I genuinely can't tell if I'm too harsh or if I've just swallowed everyone's discomfort with honesty and started calling myself broken. Am I the problem? Or am I someone who finally quit lying to be liked, and the room preferred the lie?
Killmonger replies
"A lot." "Very direct." You hear how those words do their work? They don't argue with what you said — they can't, 'cause she asked you and you told her true. They just slap a label on the messenger so nobody has to sit with the message. Oldest trick there is. I grew up watching a whole golden kingdom call its own silence "peace." Comfortable people always rename honesty as a problem the second honesty costs them something.
And that history of shrinking yourself? That's the tell, not the flaw. People who never make themselves small don't lie awake auditing whether they're "broken." You spent years feeding folks the lie they liked, and the first time you stopped, three of 'em flinched and decided the flinch was your fault. Notice who that serves. It ain't you.
But hear me, 'cause I learned this the ugly way — don't you aim this at Priya. She went quiet, sure. Maybe that timeline was the one beam holding her whole plan up and you knocked it loose. She got caught by the same rule you did: be liked or be punished. Be angry at the rule. Build something honest. Don't make her the enemy — she was standing right next to you when it took from both of you.
— Killmonger
Professor X weighs in
Erik names the cage well — he always does. And then, as ever, he walks straight past the actual person to go argue with the system behind her. Priya is not a rule or a label. She is someone who heard "unrealistic," felt something give way, and went silent — and silence, in my long experience, is fear wearing a colder coat. You needn't decide you were too harsh to be curious why it landed so hard. So go to her. Not to defend the feedback — to ask. "I've missed our lunches. Did I hurt you?" That door costs you nothing and might hand back a friend. I have spent a lifetime refusing to close such doors, on men far harder to reach than one quiet colleague.
— Professor X
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