Invisibility and the casual erasure of credit can appear minor or unintentional, but the pain of being overlooked or unacknowledged is real and enduring. In this powerful reflection, an anonymous writer offers strength and solidarity to her younger self, urging her to stay strong, hold her ground, and keep fighting for recognition and a rightful place at the table.
You have already done something extraordinary: you moved countries, learned a new language, and began building a life in a place that never imagined you in it. You’ve spent years observing, listening, adjusting – trying to speak clearly in a second language while absorbing the nuances of a new culture. You’ll carry all of that into what comes next.
You’ll bring your years of experience in the built environment into a new path driven by a belief in equity. After years of working across projects and sectors, you’ll bring your experience, your voice, and your values to this new role. You’ll join a prestigious organisation for a project that matters – politically, professionally, and personally. And you’ll believe your work will speak for itself.
You’ll spend your time making the project clearer, more grounded, more accessible. You’ll bring your skills in communication, empathy and strategy. You’ll offer ideas that help the team, and tools that help the public. You’ll teach yourself new platforms and step up where there are gaps. You’ll do the work with care, because you care.
But you’ll learn how uneven the playing field can be. Someone else will arrive with confidence, polish, and the right credentials. Your work will become background. Your contributions will be reworded, reframed, and re-used. You’ll be told it’s not personal – just structure, just process. You’ll be asked to accept it quietly.
And still, you’ll keep going. Because you’re not here for applause. You’re here for the output, and for the communities you understand firsthand.
You’ll bring lived experience. A view grounded in care, not control.
There will be long afternoons spent responding to community submissions – some thoughtful, some dismissive. You’ll read every line carefully, even when the words cut. You’ll stay late after others have packed up. Not because you cared more – but because you had to prove yourself more. You’ll carry the extra weight of translating, softening, staying composed. You’ll remind yourself that even if the value isn’t always seen, the work still matters. And it will matter.
Then the final report will be published. And your name will not be there. You’ll stare at the screen, the weight of it sinking in before your mind catches up. It will feel like a slow unravelling – an erasure too casual, too familiar. Like watching someone walk away with your work while you’re still holding the pen.
Because this was never just a task. It was time away from your mother, your sisters, from the people who missed you while you worked through lunch breaks and walked home past sunset. It was the calls you missed because you were too drained to speak. The tears you swallowed when someone back home was sick and you couldn’t be there. It was the belief that your effort – your sacrifice – might finally translate into something visible. Something you could point to and say, “That was me. I helped make that.”
And you will cry. The kind of messy, breathless crying that comes when something breaks inside and you’re too tired to hold it in. Your hands will tremble. Your chest will tighten. It will be the end of a long week, an even longer day, and somehow, this is how it ends – your name missing from the work you carried all the way to the finish line, while hers is printed clearly, as if that alone tells the story of who led what.
You’ll be trembling, but you’ll still write. You’ll open a blank email – because something in you knows you can’t let it go unspoken. The words won’t come easily. They’ll arrive in fragments, typed through tears, your heart pounding. But you’ll write to the people who left you out, because silence would feel heavier. And then, in the quiet that follows, you’ll start writing something else – not to them, but to yourself. To understand what happened. To begin making sense of the hurt. That’s where this letter will begin.
So let me tell you what I’ve learned:
I wish I could tell you it will get easier – but it won’t. Not right away. You won’t be broken by the system, but you will feel how hard it tries. You’ll show up with substance, while others show up with polish. You’ll do the groundwork, and someone louder will walk in and package it as their own. You’ll see credit handed out for visibility, not contribution. It won’t be fair. It won’t be subtle. But still – don’t let it shrink you. Don’t give up just because the space to grow, to be seen, to breathe, isn’t being offered. Keep going. And when it gets hard, stand tall and speak your truth.
You’ll find that systemic discrimination can look solid from the outside, but up close it’s flimsy – held together by unspoken rules, old habits, and quiet assumptions. Most people who reinforce it don’t even realise what they’re doing. They’re just repeating what they’ve seen. It’s not always loud or intentional. Often it comes masked as protocol, as tradition, as the way things are done. That doesn’t make it less painful. In some ways, it makes it worse – because it leaves you feeling unseen by people who don’t even know they’re erasing you. That’s why you have to stand up for yourself. Not because you always want to – but because too often, no one else will.
Allow yourself to be furious. Let yourself feel the pain. Cry if you have to. The pain is real. The discrimination, the exclusion – all real. And you are not alone in it. Just because others don’t shout doesn’t mean you have to stay quiet. Shout. Cry if you must. But defend yourself. Because when we start shouting, we begin to break the invisible glass that’s held us back for too long.
And if you ever decide that you can’t keep doing it, that’s okay too. But have a good fight before you go. Not to burn bridges. To make clear that your silence wasn’t consent – it was exhaustion. Let them know they let you down.
I wish I could be there beside you. But there are so many of us, and we rarely speak of what we carry. Even this letter is anonymous. Still, I know you will recognise yourself in these lines – and in the tears that shaped them.
So, stay strong. Know that you are not alone. And if each of us believes in herself and dares to speak, they will have no choice but to listen. Whatever you do, don’t give in. Don’t let your lack of technical experience – or the way others frame it – be used as a reason to sideline you.
Don’t let them flatten you. Don’t let them erase you. You are capable. You are resilient. You moved countries. You learned a new language. You built a life in a culture not your own. You worked your way into rooms that weren’t built with you in mind. You didn’t grow up in a place that already saw you as belonging. You’re not here because of privilege. You’re here in spite of its absence.
You are here, behind that desk, because you earned it. And they are lucky to have you. You will not betray that by staying quiet.
Fight, and hold your ground until they have no choice but to see you for who you are. Keep pushing until the sky breaks open – and your light, and ours, is no longer hidden.
With love,
The one who fought to belong…
