The Quiet Violence of Competence

I was twenty-six when I sat across from a woman who was going to either make me or break me. She was the only female equity partner at the litigation firm in downtown San Francisco, and she wore her hair in a tight, severe bun that I can still picture if I close my eyes. She didn't smile when I sat down. She asked about a brief from law school. I must have said "I think" at some point because she cut me off. "No. We don't do that here," she said, picking a piece of lint off her sleeve. "Just tell me what it is. I don't need the hedges."

I hated her for the first three months. Then I started watching her. She left at seven on the dot because she had a kid to pick up from school. It amazed me, how she could shed it. At the time, I was drinking bad office coffee just to stay awake past nine. One time, she lost a case. A bad one. I was walking past her office and heard this sound, this thick, ugly sound she made in there. I stopped. I stood there for a second, staring at the industrial carpet, counting the flecks of grey in it. I didn't tell anyone. I don't know why I remember the carpet.

She taught me that competence had nothing to do with being nice. She was too tired to perform softness to keep the room comfortable.

Last year, a junior associate quit. In her exit interview, she said I was cold. Intimidating. She said she never knew where she stood. HR sent the notes over. I read them. I put them in my top drawer, right next to broken pens and a stray cough drop. I haven't thought about it once this week. I think about it constantly.

Then Catherine died. Pancreatic. It was fast, the way they say it is, except it's never as fast as they say. Standing in some awful reception hall with a warm plate of roast beef I couldn't touch, I stopped. I decided I wasn't going to ask for permission anymore. Mostly, I wanted to figure out how to survive without needing to be liked.

That decision didn't make me happy. It made me effective. I've spent six years not looking too hard at what it cost.

I've got a young woman working for me right now. Twenty-six, same age I was when Catherine hired me. She turned in a draft recently that was just not good. The argument was falling apart. The citations were a mess. I could tell she'd pulled an all-nighter. I called her into my office. The blind was open, sunlight on dust. I stared at the sun hitting the dust on my bookshelf for a second before I started talking. I told her the draft wasn't good. I needed it redone by Thursday. I said she could do better, because she had done better.

She didn't cry in front of me. Good. But I knew she went straight to the bathroom, because the hallway floor is sticky and the door bangs shut. I sat there for a while. Looking at columns of data, numbers going across the spreadsheet. I thought about the first time Catherine ripped one of my briefs apart, and how I went home that night and rewrote the whole thing twice.

I don't know if she'll rewrite it. I don't know if she's quitting. I sent her an email late last night. Two specific edits, no exclamation points at midnight. What kind of psychopath puts exclamation points in a work email at midnight? She hasn't answered. I keep picking up my phone.

Nobody actually warns you about this part of getting competent. It makes you cruel in these small ways you barely catch yourself doing. Not the kind that gets you fired. The kind you do without thinking. You start sorting people into hierarchies of usefulness. Then you lose patience with hesitation, and eventually you're confusing someone's inability to fake confidence with their inability to do the job, even though you know better.

There's a guy I work with. David. Tax attorney. He's not fast. He's not brilliant. By the standards of the firm, he's mediocre. I've read his emails and thought, you are not my equal, thought very clearly about David. Then I remember he's the guy who drove forty-five minutes across the city to bring soup. Remembers his assistant's birthday. He's quietly done more actual good in a month than I've done in a year.

But put us in a meeting and something in me just shuts down. I file him away. Not worth it.

I don't know what to do with that.

My friends outside of law. The ones who teach, or paint, or just stay home with their kids. They've started telling me I'm a lot. Four different people in the last couple of years. And every single time, I make some little joke to shut it down so I don't have to actually hear it.

I'm forty-three. Not the villain. Not the boss people warn junior associates about, but something quieter. I'm the woman who's right in every single meeting, but exhausting to live with, or so I'm told. I can't take a compliment without turning it into a joke. I'm the woman who keeps the armor on at home because taking it off feels like losing a limb, and everyone has already seen me without it anyway.

My husband is a good guy. He watched this whole transformation happen right in front of him. Last year, we were in the car. He was driving. I was answering an email that didn't matter. He just said it, out of nowhere, staring at the road. "You know, you don't have to win every time." It wasn't even poetic. It hung there in the car.

I felt something lock up in my chest. I looked at him and said something nasty. I don't remember exactly what, but it was enough to make him stop talking. He definitely remembers it.

I think about it now. I'm sitting in the driveway. The car is off. The rain doing that annoying thing where it just sits on the glass because the wipers are bad. A cold brew in the cup holder that's mostly water now. I'm letting it sit there. I don't want to go inside yet. I don't want to be whatever version of myself you have to be when you walk in the door from court.

Catherine's daughter is in her twenties now. Doing some grad school thing that was probably way too soft for Catherine. I ran into her at a memorial a while back. She came up to me, wiping her nose, and hugged me, which felt weird because I barely know her. She said her mom used to talk about me. I asked what she said. She nodded, sniffling, and shrugged. "She said you were a difficult woman, that you were going to be a great one, too." Like it was just a fact. Like the weather.

I don't know if she was right. I'm using Catherine's death as an excuse to be a terrible person to work with, or maybe being difficult and being great are the same thing. The engine ticks while it cools. The porch light is probably on. I'm sitting here with my dead cold brew, wondering if Catherine taught me how to be powerful, or how to be alone in a room full of people. Probably the same skill.

The porch light just turned off, which means he noticed I'm out here. I'm going to sit for another minute anyway.