A Love Letter to My Female Bullies

There is one I remember more than the others.

Not because she was the worst. One of the men was worse, objectively, in ways I will not detail here because this piece is not about him. She makes the list not for severity but for confusion. For the specific flavour of it. For the way I walked out of her office on more than one occasion genuinely unsure whether she had just mentored me or gutted me, spending the drive home trying to work out which, holding back hot tears.

She was sharp. Formidably so. She had been in rooms I was still trying to get access to. She knew things I needed to know. She made me feel, on a fairly regular basis, like I was a problem she had not asked to inherit.

I spent a long time being angry about that. Then I spent some time feeling sorry for myself about it. Eventually, not recently, I started to try to understand it.

The economy they were operating in

When the women who bullied me entered the workforce, there was functionally one seat.

Not one good seat, or one senior seat. One seat, full stop. One woman per floor, per firm, per leadership team. Maybe two if the organisation was progressive and feeling bold. The rest of the seats belonged to men, had always belonged to men, and were not being vacated with any particular urgency.

So you had a cohort of extraordinarily capable women who entered a system that told them, structurally and repeatedly, that their presence was a concession. That they had been allowed in. That the seat they occupied was a gift that could be revoked. The way you kept the seat, the only way, was to be indispensable and undemanding and never, under any circumstances, to be seen as the woman who brought too many other women with her. Because that was how you became a threat. That was how the seat disappeared.

Sit with what that does to a person over twenty years. Not a bad week. Twenty years of operating inside a zero-sum game where the only person who could actually take what you had built was someone who looked like you.

It did not make them worse than the men. It made them something the men never had to be: strategic about other women. Watchful. Conditional. The warmth was always there, I think, but it was rationed. There was not enough safety in the system to give it freely.

That is not an excuse but it is a context.

What my youth actually meant to her

I used to think she resented my energy. My optimism, maybe. The fact that I had not yet learned to be tired.

I do not think that anymore.

What I represented, without meaning to, without knowing I was doing it, was evidence. Evidence that the path she had taken, the sacrifices, the performance, the years of making herself small in some rooms so she could be large in others, might not have been the only path. That the thing she gave up to get through that door might not have been compulsory after all.

That is a specific kind of grief. It does not come with a name. It does not come out cleanly. It comes out sideways, in small humiliations and withheld endorsements and feedback that lands just this side of cruel. Not because she hated me. Because she was grieving something she could not name in a system that had never given her the language for it.

I was not the target. I was the reminder.

Why it hit differently

The men who were terrible, and some of them were genuinely terrible, did not break something in me the way she did. A man crossing a line confirms a fear I already had. It is awful. It is wrong. It does not surprise my nervous system the way she did, because I was not wired to expect safety from him.

I was wired to expect safety from her.

There is something very old in that expectation. Older sister. The women who were supposed to show you how to survive and pass the knowledge down without the scars. When that instinct is activated and then betrayed, it does not read as a professional disappointment. It reads as abandonment. Your biology does not care that this is the modern workplace. It is sending signals calibrated for a much older kind of danger.

On a logical level, she did not owe me anything simply because we were both women in a system that had not been built for either of us. She was not my mother. She was not my mentor, not really. She was a person trying to hold her ground in a difficult place and I was one more variable in her intense day.

The part of me that walked out of her office feeling like I had failed a test I did not know I was sitting did not care about logic.

The mirror

Okay, here is the part I do not particularly enjoy writing.

Not long enough ago, I was in a meeting with a woman who had arrived with more polish and more confidence than I had managed at her age. She was good. Clearly good. The kind of good that fills a room before it has earned the room’s permission, which is a particular kind of threat to a particular kind of wound.

I felt it before I clocked it: a tightening, a measuring, the quiet involuntary question of whether she was an ally or a problem. The flash of something ungenerous that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. I watched myself do it in real time and still could not fully stop it.

I saw myself in it. Clearly, the way you sometimes see yourself in a shop window and do not immediately recognise the person looking back.

I am not going to perform guilt about this.

It was there. I noticed it. I have been working on it. What I want to say is that the system does not stop with the women who came before us. It is in us too, in the places we have not yet looked. The brainwashing does not announce itself. You find it later, in the moments you are not proud of, in the irritation that turns out to be a mirror, in the woman who irks you for a reason that is more about you than her.

Not comfortable. Not optional, if you actually want things to change.

The letter

So here it is.

I do not forgive you, because forgiveness suggests a ledger I have decided to close, and that is not quite right. What I have instead is understanding, which is harder to arrive at and probably more useful.

I understand that you were operating inside a system that made generosity dangerous. I understand that I arrived carrying evidence of your sacrifice without knowing that is what I was carrying. I understand that what sometimes looked like cruelty was a misguided attempt at immunisation, preparing me for a world you knew and I did not.

I even understand that some of what felt like your meanness was my own mirror, and that my healing was always going to require me to look at that.

What I want for the women coming through now is the thing neither of us had access to: a system where the seat is not scarce. Where one woman’s arrival does not threaten another woman’s position. Where the knowledge gets passed down with warmth instead of with invisible tests.

I hope what is coming is something you would have wanted for yourselves too, if anyone had ever thought to ask.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Mel

💖