At some point I stopped being surprised that it kept happening, which I suppose counts as progress.

The pattern — and it is a pattern, I've checked it enough times to be sure — goes roughly like this. You join somewhere. You do the work. The work is good, sometimes better than good. And then, somewhere in the middle distance, you find yourself on the wrong side of a dynamic that has nothing to do with the work. Someone has decided something about you. The decision has been made socially, not technically. And it turns out that the decision is the thing that matters, not the work.

I've watched this happen at several different organisations, across different industries, in different decades. I'm not going to name any of them. That's not what this is. But I want to be honest about the shape of it, because I think there's something real in there worth examining.

The first time, I assumed it was bad luck. A bad fit. The second time, I started wondering whether there was something I was doing that I wasn't aware of. The third time, I was fairly certain it wasn't all one thing — that there was a genuine structural problem in how certain workplaces handle people who are technically competent but socially awkward, or who ask direct questions at the wrong moment, or who can't quite manage the performance of deference that keeps the room comfortable. That's not an accusation. Organisations need social cohesion to function. The question is whether they're willing to be honest about what they're actually selecting for.

But here's the part I've had to sit with more carefully: some of it was me.

Not the pattern itself — I think the pattern is real, and I think it affects a lot of people who've never been able to name it. But the specific ways I navigated it, or failed to navigate it, were sometimes genuinely counterproductive. I have a habit of being direct about things that people would prefer remain indirect. I find it difficult to pretend not to notice something when I've noticed it. These are not character defects, but they are friction sources, and I was not always good at managing the friction. Being right about something and being useful about it are not the same thing, and I learnt that slowly and with more damage than was necessary.

What changed, eventually, was not that I got better at performing the social rituals that smooth things over. I didn't, really. What changed was that I stopped trying to fit the shape of places that weren't built for the way I work, and started building the context myself. Independent research, pro bono, no institutional politics. You discover quite quickly what problems are actually interesting to you when there's no career ladder pointing you at a prescribed set of problems instead.

There's a grief in that, which I may as well name. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I wanted colleagues, and shared purpose, and the particular warmth of a team that's working well. I've had versions of that, briefly, and it was lovely when it happened. The grief is real. But so is the relief of being out of rooms where the main activity is managing perception rather than doing anything.

I think about this mostly when I'm reading about other people's careers — the LinkedIn version, the tidy narrative of progression and recognition. I'm aware that narrative is a product, that the actual experience behind it is messier and more ambiguous than the version on display. Still, there are people for whom the shape of institutional life genuinely fits. I'm curious about them in an anthropological way. What does it feel like, I wonder, when the room is just a room?

I haven't fully worked out what this pattern means. Maybe it means I'm difficult in ways I can't fully see. Maybe it means I've consistently worked in places with particular structural problems. Probably both. The honest answer is that I hold the question open, because I don't think I've earned certainty about it yet.