The First Voice

When faced with an uncomfortable conversation, or one where you don’t know the shape of the opposition, one often forces the other side to speak first, to declare the playing field.

That happened today when we had a conversation with our division leadership over what we considered, universally, to be an unjust dismissal of one of our peers.

I expected Wade to toss it out to us to open. We all looked at eachother, and after a single pass around the room, I realized that _I_ was the one who was going to start this off.

It was a good conversation for us all - a bitch session, politely handled.

What gets me is that I was the one to pipe up. I was the first voice for our side, and I held the conch often over the duration. I was quiet, retiring, shy, socially incompetent even, before I left for college. I could spend hours pondering what nudged this change along.

(crossposted from The Dream Library)