There are those who fit, who slip into the room like a hand into a well-worn glove. Then there are others. I have been the other.
I have spent years pressing myself into shapes I believed the world required. Sometimes I tried to dissolve into the crowd like sugar in tea. Other times, I styled myself a singularity—daring to be something different, to “be myself” (whoever that is). Both efforts felt like a borrowed coat: always slightly too large in the shoulders, never quite warm enough.
Sometimes, in social groups, I watch. It is not surprising when they say it is the watchers who tell the stories. For as long as men have scribbled words onto paper, they have written from the point of view of the ones who stand at the edge of the firelight, always reluctant to step close enough to warm their hands. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, shuffling through his measured life in coffee spoons, knew it. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby knew it, even as his shirts, fine enough to make a woman weep, fluttered in the breeze of a dream he could never quite possess. And now, in this new world of glass towers and city lights, where the rituals are conducted over quarterly forecasts and PowerPoint decks, I know what it is to be one of them—watching.
The corporate world is a world of joiners, of men and women who have learned to slide into its rhythm with the ease of a practiced hand signing a deal. Their words come out smooth and predictable, a language built on a repetition so careful that it sometimes sounds like a chant. "Synergy," they say, and nod. "Scalability." "Leverage." One can pass through these rooms without ever truly speaking, without ever truly saying anything. Every sentence said here has already been spoken a thousand times before.
I walk among them everyday. Power here is not shown through brute force. It is suggested, woven into casual asides and fleeting glances. A promotion is not just a title—it is a shift in how a name is said in a meeting, in who gets called into the right rooms, in the subtle way backs straighten when someone speaks. A man will mention, in passing, a recent chat with the VP. Or offer a firmer handshake at the off-site meeting. And there it is—that small flicker of status, carefully snuck in, never forced. It is an art, this thing they do, and I watch them perfect it.
And when the workday ends, the performance does not. It flows into the evenings, into the brunches and the beers, into the subtle hierarchy of toasts and travel stories. A man orders another round, leans back in his chair, and the one-upping begins—not in a way you can call outright competition, no, that would be too crude. Houses, cars, stocks, promotions, goals. “Thinking of upgrading to a bigger place,” one says, and another nods as if to say, naturally, that’s the next step. A third casually mentions a new place—three balconies this time. The others pause, just briefly, recalculating. Confidence up. Confidence down.
The night goes on, and some men sit a little taller. It may not even be cruel or deliberate, but it happens all the same. A raise is mentioned. Someone else already knows. A house is bought. Someone else has a bigger garden. The air thickens with things unsaid. Someone goes home feeling lighter, shoulders squared, and someone else turns the key in their front door with a weight pressing against their ribs.
From where, I wonder, does a man draw his confidence? Is it his income bracket? His passport stamps? His bookshelf? The things we cherish privately morph into public currency. You must love the right things, with the right fervor, in the right tone. It is not self-expression. It is self-positioning. A man does not simply enjoy a book anymore; he must mention, in passing, how many he has read this year, and they must be the right kind—literary, weighty, meaningful. Another speaks of music, but it is not enough to like a song; it must be an obscure artist, something critically acclaimed, a name that makes others nod in approval. The movies? Oscar winners, of course, always Oscar winners.
And why? Why this endless parade of curated lives and careful disclosures? It is too much like wearing all the jewelry you own to a single event, layering necklace over necklace, ring over ring, until the weight of it becomes absurd. Maybe we are all just trying to prove we are worth something. But the trouble with measuring worth in this way is that it is a game without end. There is always another man with a bigger house, a fancier car, a rarer first edition on his shelf. And so the game continues, quiet and relentless, confidence shifting like sand underfoot. No one ever really wins, but no one wants to stop playing either.
And I—I am still watching these shiny happy people.
Sometimes, I stop watching the play out there, and turn inward instead — why do I not enter the arena? Is it because I believe their game unworthy of me—or is that merely the gentle fiction I whisper to myself, a cushion against the sharper truth that I may not have what it takes to win? A man picks his battles, sure, but only the ones where he figures he might come out ahead. Surely only writers can toe this line between vanity and self-deprecation.
But perhaps I’ve been playing a different game all along. I tell people that writing is something I do on the side, a dalliance from my true profession. But maybe—just maybe—it was always the other way around. Perhaps writing was my true calling, and work, the dalliance.
And so, I’ve taken to lingering in the corners. It is no accident that Prufrock hesitated at the door, that Gatsby stood at the edge of his own parties. Not because they did not wish to speak, but because they wondered if there was anything left to say.
I watch the way a man adjusts his tie before he speaks, the way a woman shifts her posture before she delivers a point she knows must land. They don’t see me. Or rather, they see a suit, a nodding head, another face in the sea.
But that is the way of things. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Meanwhile the outsider is invisible in plain sight.
Image source: The Son of Man by René Magritte.
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