“If you want to succeed, remember my words, just shut your mouth.”

“Shut your mouth…”
The words “shut your mouth…” echoed in Wendy’s mind, still too shaken to think clearly and navigate its course through the unannounced avalanche of confusion and self-depreciation inflicted by a dim-witted palm greaser. The entire school of thought to which she owed allegiance to seemed to have been deliberately pulverized to rubble with no sign of resurrection.
“Once hopelessness grips a free spirit, nothing can instill back the lost faith.”
The day Wendy was instructed to restrain from being an inquirer and slyly reprimanded for disturbing the age-old heavily prejudiced but sacrosanct workplace pattern of awarding glitzy cabins and flashy designations, she had walked into her seven-story office building with all intention to put forth her own set of demands and well-deserved rewards enumerated after thorough reflection and god knows how many discussions with family and friends, who had seen her in the state of both joy and extreme disappointment because of her work. Unfortunately, either she was too naive or a rigid rule abider, as her too-honest-to-be-believed demands fell on deaf ears, rather instigated harassment and unimaginably dirty politics against her.
In the half a decade of her career, the acute awareness of her “gender” had descended upon her for the first time. The realization that workplaces were eventually mere extensions of our social fabric and continue to remain as unaffected as the society despite any cries of discrimination was extremely difficult to accept.
Suddenly, all doors that earlier seemed too wide to be ignored, now seemed to have been deliberately shut by minds too busy in conniving. Interestingly, they were not just latched from outside, but also blocked from inside by piling any material good enough to cause obstruction against those doors.
Intangible barriers erected around were subtly felt by both Wendy and any other sympathizer or empathizer sharing similar causes and demanding equally too-daring-to-be-allowed changes. Besides such barriers, there were psychological barriers that had been troubling her more than the other. The fear of being limited to a space with zero scope of “expression” and “difference” and ultimately sharing space with people too similar to be distinguished from each other. The nightmare of being programmed to accept degradation of morality as “normal” and “acceptable” was profoundly horrifying for Wendy and her free spirit.
“Am I thinking too much? Have I become delusional?”
“Did I burn the midnight oil to only land up with a job where merit and talent are considered ‘overrated’ and mediocrity is celebrated with much fanfare.”
Such thoughts now consistently troubled Wendy and an inescapable and irrepressible feeling of incarceration within the invisible confines of a prison too well planned to be escaped from haunted her day in and day out. She felt as if this land of gold will steadily melt her body and her thoughts to erase any hint of her existence. But dilemmas acted like ropes knotted around her thoughts for restraining “adventurous movements”. Silver and nickels when jingled in deep pockets at the month end, it certainly gave a feeling of “empowerment”. Walking away from even such a superficial sense of “empowerment” was definitely not as easy task and demanded many more nights of deep reflection and pondering.
“Did I really deserve that scathing verbal attack still hurting my self-respect? Of course, no!”
Wendy had entered her career with a bang, oozing confidence and energy right from the word “go”.  The world undoubtedly came across not-so-difficult to conquer and every yet-to-be-imagined problem mere a figment of imagination. This confidence was not a foolish man’s pride, but an educated woman’s awareness of her knowledge. Unfortunately, the world was not as smooth as is often told by our elders, rather one rough sea with large sharks more than ready to eat the smaller fishes around without any remorse. 
When Wendy joined her first company, it was almost on the verge of going bankrupt, so she hardly experienced any of the rough waves that will later try hard to sweep her away from her chosen path and chosen principles. But, her current company was one of the sharks of the field and also dealt with the sharks of the field. It was a financial consultancy company with deep-pocketed men eyeing every opportunity and ever ready to cheat any customer to accumulate more and more of dollars reeking of never-ending corruption.
“Corruption was more than just a word in one of the newspapers. Standing naked in front of me, it seemed absolutely normal than ever. Being corrupt was something natural and unquestionable. Interestingly, it’s the people who voiced against any of such cheatings who were targeted and strategically isolated or alienated to gag any rebellious voice or opinion. The entire indigestible truth made me think about my goals. It seemed I have just walked into a dark endless tunnel with no exit nearby. My soul seemed caged, and so did my thoughts.”
Wendy still remembers her earlier days in office when people more than welcomed the idea of “flirting” than indulging in cerebral discussions she had been used to in her university. With so many new things to learn and follow, she constantly focused on enhancing her skills to stand apart. Unfortunately, more than making her taller than others, it definitely widened the distance between her and the team.
Despite being on the right side of the law, it seemed an uphill task for Wendy to structure her career as she had always dreamt as.  Ambitious women working according to the book of rules than according to the unfathomable dirty politics of office are always derided as “arrogant” and “too difficult to handle”, whereas women who act as per the crowd and go easy on men dying to pass another lewd remark are nominated for any raise and supported by all means for success. Wendy often wondered over the tragedy of all teachings turning out to be nothing but mere jokes.
“When a male colleague makes a totally incomprehensible sexual remark, the woman colleague is supposed to mere simper and let it go. I never understood the reason behind such a reprehensible approach.  When a woman agrees to be possessed by her male counterparts, she becomes absolutely fit for those already decided promotions. It’s at the workplace where I found my all learning crashing down like a pack of cards. It was absolutely difficult to drain out those ideas inculcated at the institutions of learning and refill a completely new and opposite set of ideas endorsed not by any institution but by a fistful of men and women.”