Comparing Your Middle to Everyone Else’s Ending

So here's the one thing I'm actually useful for.

I spent years in rooms with people whose lives look completely finished from the outside.

And because of where I happened to be sitting, I got the unpublished version.

How long it really took, what nearly stopped them, how bad it got in year six.

That is the missing information.

That is the whole of it.

I'm here to bring you some of the boldest people out there and ask them the questions that you would ask if you had my seat.

So let me show you the thing I said you already had, starting with a question.

There's no wrong answer.

When was the last time you told somebody what you actually wanted and watched their face do something? And what did you do with that? Maybe nothing.

Maybe it rolled straight off of you.

Maybe you laughed along 'cause laughing along is quicker, or maybe you've never brought it up again since.

Here's mine.

First year of university, a corridor in Caen.

I'm arguing with a student about something I've completely forgotten, and he explains to me very calmly that in 15 years we'll have the same job.

He will just earn 30% more than me because he's a man and I'm a woman.

He wasn't trying to be cruel about it.

He said it the way you'd read out a train timetable.

But I didn't believe him, not out of defiance.

I wasn't being brave.

I just looked at him and thought, "Who are you? What have you actually done that makes you the authority on my next 15 years?" And the answer was nothing.

He was a student in a corridor with a very firm opinion.

That instinct is the thing I said you already had.

Nobody taught me that.

I was standing in a corridor, and it was already there.