5.1 KiB
title, description, pubDate, tags, category, draft
| title | description | pubDate | tags | category | draft | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knowing Your Worth (And Saying Nothing) | On the particular silence of someone who already knows exactly what they're worth, having already talked themselves out of saying it before anyone else gets the chance. | 2026-05-07 |
|
reflection | true |
by LATTE
I know what I earn.
And I am not going to pretend I do not know what that number means.
I know exactly what it means.
What the number covers
Let me just say it plainly.
User lifecycle. Onboarding, offboarding, the full arc from day one to last day.
Microsoft 365: users, groups, roles, permissions, conditional access, MFA, shared mailboxes, SharePoint, Intune.
Device management. Asset register. Building full kits for new colleagues: laptop, phone, SIM, bag, accessories, configured and ready.
Telecom. Hardware orders. Shipping. Supplier contact.
Tickets. Triage. Routing. Being the bridge between internal and external.
Documentation that did not exist before I wrote it.
Processes that did not exist before I designed them.
First-line security. Incident handling. DevOps, starting to grow into that too.
For a long time, I was doing all of this alone.
That is what the number covers.
I know what this work is worth.
I have looked it up.
The market does not lie.
And I say nothing.
The conversation I have already had
Here is the thing about courage.
It is not that I do not know what I want to say.
I have the conversation prepared.
I know the arguments. I know the numbers. I know my case.
But before I can say any of it out loud,
I have already heard the response.
It is too early.
You are still learning.
You need to grow into the role first.
Give it time.
I have played the whole thing through.
Every version of how it goes.
And in every version, I lose.
Not because my case is weak.
But because I have already decided it is.
That is the part that is hard to admit.
It is not that I am afraid of what they will say.
It is that I have said it for them already.
quietly, inside my own head,
before I ever open my mouth.
I have pre-emptively talked myself out of my own argument.
What that actually is
I have been thinking about what to call this.
It is not imposter syndrome exactly.
Imposter syndrome is not knowing your worth.
I know mine.
It is something more specific.
It is the habit of protecting yourself from rejection
by rejecting yourself first.
If I never ask, no one can say no.
If I never say the number out loud, no one can tell me it is too much.
If I stay small and quiet and grateful,
nobody has a reason to push back.
The silence is not modesty.
It is armour.
And I built it so carefully that I forgot it was keeping things out.
Twenty-two and already calculating
I am twenty-two.
And I am already doing the math on when it will be acceptable to ask for what I am worth.
Not yet. Too new.
Next year maybe. But only if I have proven enough.
After this project. But then there will be another project.
When things settle. But things do not settle, they just change shape.
There is always a reason to wait.
There is always something I have not done yet that would make the ask feel justified.
And underneath all of it is a question I do not like looking at directly:
Do I actually believe I deserve it?
Not whether the market says so.
Not whether the workload justifies it.
But whether I, specifically, new, still learning, only here since August, am allowed to want more.
I think that is where the silence really lives.
Not in fear of their answer.
In uncertainty about my own.
The full-time salary
Recently I started getting a full-time salary.
After five, maybe six weeks of carrying everything alone, it arrived.
And it felt like something. It genuinely did.
Recognition, in a form that has a number attached.
I sat with that for a day.
And then the thought came back, quietly:
this still is not enough.
And I felt guilty for thinking it.
Like I was being ungrateful.
Like wanting more, after finally getting something, made me difficult.
But ungrateful is not the right word.
Grateful and underpaid are not opposites.
You can appreciate what you have
and still know it does not match what you give.
Both things are true.
I just only let myself say one of them out loud.
What I am not doing yet
I am not going to end this post with a resolution.
I am not going to say and so I will finally speak up.
because I do not know if I will.
Not yet. Not soon.
What I can say is this:
I know what I am worth.
I know what I do.
I know the number does not match.
And I am no longer going to pretend that the silence is patience.
It is not patience.
It is fear dressed up as waiting for the right moment.
and the right moment does not come
because I keep moving it forward
every time it gets close.
That is the honest version.
I do not have a fix.
I just have the truth of it, finally written down somewhere.
And maybe that is where it starts.
knowing is not the hard part.
the hard part is letting yourself be known.