Leading Myself First: The Year I Stopped Blaming My Stars
By Prerna Chandra ·
My thumb has been hovering over send for ten minutes now, maybe longer. I’ve rewritten the first line four times. Underneath the professional tone I’m aiming for, there’s a question running on loop, what if this backfires, what if he reads this and decides I’m not worth the trouble, what if my next appraisal quietly reflects this email instead of my actual work, what if this is how people like me end up let go, not with a dramatic conversation but with a slow freeze-out that starts the moment you ask for something.
I close my eyes for a second. Open them. The draft is still there, unsent, waiting on me.
This isn’t the first time a situation like this has found me. Tough bosses, confusing team dynamics, projects that fell apart in ways nobody could quite explain, I’ve landed in more than my fair share over the years, enough that for a long time I genuinely believed something was wrong with my stars. Why does this keep happening to me, I’d ask, usually at midnight, usually to no one. It felt easier to blame something outside myself than to sit with the possibility that each situation was handing me something I needed to look at and hadn’t yet.
What I noticed, slowly, almost without meaning to, was that every single time I actually did the looking, something shifted. Not the other person, not the circumstances exactly, just something in how I was standing inside the situation. And almost without fail, shortly after that internal shift, I’d find myself out of it. A team would restructure. A project would end. A role would change. I started to suspect, cautiously at first, that what happens on the inside has a way of arriving on the outside eventually, even when you can’t see the thread connecting the two.
This particular situation started months before the email, when I sat down and wrote my skip manager a short note about how I work best. Clear timelines. A heads up before anything urgent lands on me. Communication upfront instead of assumptions filled in later. It wasn’t a complaint about anyone, it read more like an introduction, this is my shape, here’s what tends to bring out my best work. I had no idea yet that I was writing something I’d need to point back to later.
I needed it a few months after that, once it became clear my manager and I simply operated differently, and neither of us had noticed until it started costing something. I brought it up once, carefully. He waved it off, called it a small thing, moved on before I’d finished the sentence. I remember agreeing out loud faster than I meant to, and then carrying the actual feeling home with me instead, where it sat and slowly turned into something heavier.
So I did what felt safer. I adjusted around him. Stayed later than I needed to. Double checked things that didn’t need double checking. Said yes to timelines I already knew were too tight, because saying no again felt like more than I could risk.
Underneath that, other things were piling up too. A role change had left half my responsibilities undefined, and nobody seemed to notice the confusion but me. Asking for help started to feel risky, like it would be read as not knowing enough rather than just needing a second opinion. I didn’t feel heard in the moments that mattered. And the checking in, the constant visibility into things I’d already handled, started to feel less like support and more like being watched. That one, I slowly realised, was close to a dealbreaker for me. I just hadn’t said it out loud yet.
None of this stayed where it belonged. It came out sideways, short replies to messages that didn’t deserve them, a low irritation I carried into meetings that had nothing to do with any of this, a tiredness that had less to do with the actual workload and more to do with everything I wasn’t saying.
The shift, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. It was a question I caught myself asking one evening, mid spiral, instead of just continuing the spiral. What’s actually at stake here. Where exactly am I losing my own agency in this. What pattern is running me right now that isn’t even really about today. I’d asked myself versions of this before, in other tough situations, and it had worked before. I just hadn’t trusted it would work here too.
One answer caught me off guard. Somewhere underneath all of it, I’d quietly decided my way of working was simply the correct way, and his need for visibility wasn’t unreasonable so much as it didn’t match how I’d learned to think about trust. That one sat uncomfortably for a while. It’s easier to be the person wronged than the person who also has work to do.
I went to my skip manager with all of it, not vague this time, specific. I told her I didn’t feel comfortable asking for guidance anymore. I told her I didn’t feel heard. I told her the role change had left me without clear lines, and that the constant checking in wasn’t something I could keep absorbing quietly. My voice was steadier than I expected it to be. She listened in a way that made the next part possible.
That’s where the email came from, the one still open in front of me. I wrote it to land softer than the conversation that led to it, naming his need for visibility instead of treating it as the problem, laying out the actual impact on my end, leaving room for something in the middle rather than asking him to simply concede. Somewhere around the third rewrite, it stopped sounding like a complaint and started sounding like an offer.
I press send.
He replies faster than I expect. We get on a call, and the tone is nothing like last time. He understands the impact in a way he hadn’t before, maybe hadn’t let himself before, and he’s genuinely open to finding middle ground. When I tell my skip manager how it went, she sounds unsurprised, like this had been available to us the whole time, if someone had just said it clearly enough.
I close my laptop a little while later. Nothing dramatic has happened, nobody’s rescued me, the situation hasn’t vanished, it’s just quieter now, easier to stand inside. I notice I haven’t once, through any of this, reached for the stars as an explanation. Just that for once, I did the looking before anything made me.
Let me leave you with a question, answer it in the comments or send it to me directly.