Originally published on Medium.com here.
“I’m glad you remember the date.”
There was sarcasm in his voice. It stung just a little. He was dodging the weight of what I’d said.
I sat upright in my chair. “I remember May 18, 2021, because that was the day I realized the effort and compensation in this company would never line up.”
The company we built together.
The one started in 2018 with no clear vision how we were going to accomplish what we believed in. And accomplish something, we did. We grew it into a $20 million business. We hired more than two dozen people. We brought in a few big clients. Our business grew to have opportunities from Washington state to Nebraska.
We started early and stayed late so many times. We carried stress home on our backs and in our travels. We toiled as we watched our company become a real thing.
And still — I couldn’t say what needed to be said.
Not for four years.
I’m not proud of that. I’m not trying to cast myself as the noble one. I had opportunities. Days where I could’ve named what wasn’t working. Instead, I swallowed it. Smiled through it. Focused on the parts I could control. That’s what we do when we’re scared of the cost of honesty — we convince ourselves that silence is strategic.
But I have to be honest. Silence, most of the time, isn’t strategy. It’s fear. And maybe loyalty. And a weird sense of guilt I couldn’t quite shake.
I was the extreme minority owner in the business. That was never a secret. He reminded me of it once or twice — “You could’ve had more if you’d made different decisions.” He wasn’t wrong. But that’s not the kind of sentence you say to someone who’s been bleeding effort into your company for years.
At some point, I stopped believing we were building the same thing.
“We all worked roughly the same number of hours,” I said that day. “But when it came time to getting paid, you literally made sixteen times more than I did.”
He didn’t flinch.
“I risked everything I had to start this company,” he replied.
He wasn’t lying. He did take the entire up-front financial risk. But the part he couldn’t see, and the part I couldn’t keep pretending about, was the toll it took on the rest of us to hold that risk up.
Long days in extreme weather. Sales targets that never relented. Fixing the broken deals. Bolstering my own morale. Carrying the pressure. Bringing in tens of millions in revenue to the company myself. Not theoretically. Literally.
And still being the lowest paid employee per hour in the company.
I don’t want to turn this into a takedown. I’m not writing this to say I deserved more money. I’m writing this because I waited four years to say what only I could say. Not to blow something up. But to put it down.
Because silence is heavy.
And bitterness is even heavier when you pretend you don’t feel it.
I would vent to my wife almost daily. I thought I was being mature or taking the high road by not speaking up. I thought I was playing “the long game.” But that long game never came. I kept holding out for the future payoff. The equity adjustment. The recognition.
And it didn’t come.
What came instead was May 18, 2021. The day I knew I couldn’t pretend my way into a fairer version of reality.
I carried that silence for too long.
That’s the part I own. The part I’m learning to surrender.
And that’s got nothing to do with a job or the role.
I’m learning to surrender the belief that things only count if they end peacefully — that the work should speak for itself, or that someone else’s comfort matters more than my voice.
There’s a cost to not saying the things you’re the only one qualified to say.
It’s possible for you to stay silent long enough that you begin to believe that permission to write your story belongs to someone else.
There’s a kind of grief in that.
Eventually, I had to say it. I knew it wouldn’t change anything. It was actually about ending something as cleanly as I could. Honestly. Without editing myself or letting someone else write my story even one more time.
Like I said, that conversation wasn’t meant to change anything. I had already walked away from the company I built.
But I walked out of that meeting lighter than I’d been in years.
And that was enough.
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