Grey shirt. Grey decisions. Grey mornings filled with meetings that start on time and end in polite inaction. Navigating schedules, budgets, resource constraints. I know how to word an email so precisely that it says everything and means nothing. I have learned the language of silence; how to nod while people are erased, how to smile while dignity is traded for deliverables.
And yet, there was once a red in me.
Not loud, not militant. But warm. Humane. That quiet, pulsing shade of leftist feeling; a belief that the world should not be so lopsided, so cruel in its efficiencies. It lived in the unease I felt when privilege walked freely past sweat. In the instinct to speak up when something didn’t sit right. In the tears I never let fall when I watched someone be treated as less.
It was there, once.
But these days, I feel it fading. The light shade of red inside is wearing off.
The rebel, I’m afraid, is adapting.
Not because I’ve stopped caring, but because caring; truly caring; costs more than I can spare right now. You start by justifying a few things: the overtime, the delay in payment, the clause that shields us from blame. “It’s not personal,” you say. “It’s just the system.” Then you start avoiding eye contact with the mirror.
The dangerous part isn’t that the system wins.
It’s that you start wanting it to.
Unaccountability becomes comfortable. It's easier to survive when you stop looking too closely. You start telling yourself that someone else will fight. That you're just doing your job. That it's better to be realistic than idealistic. And eventually, you stop noticing the shift. You just become… corporate.
Detached. Efficient. Numb.
The red fades not with a scream but with a shrug.
A compromise here. A silence there.
And soon, the part of you that used to ache starts filing reports instead.
I sometimes wonder if the red is still in there somewhere. Buried under years of deliverables and debt, of promotions and polite compromises. I wonder if it’s waiting for a crack; some moment of raw truth; to flicker back to life. But I fear what I fear more than its death is its dormancy. That it might still be there, watching, whispering, but too faint to move me.
And yet, I write this.
Maybe that means something.
Maybe naming it is resistance, however small.
Because the truth is, I miss the red.
Not the slogans or the firebrand anger.
But the clarity. The conscience. The part of me that still believed the world could be kinder; and that I had a role to play in making it so.
Now? Now I keep my head down. I write memos. I track timelines. I manage teams. I hide behind the phrase “within scope.” And at night, when it’s quiet, I sometimes feel the guilt like a fog; the sense that the version of me who once cared more is watching, quietly disappointed.
We all start out hoping to be part of something better. But the machinery grinds slow and relentless, and if you’re not careful, you stop noticing what it's grinding down.
It’s not dramatic. It’s not tragic.
It’s just... gradual.
A slow unlearning of outrage.
A practiced detachment from consequence.
A drift from who you thought you were, toward someone who still knows right from wrong; but no longer acts on it.
That’s how the red fades. Not all at once, but in layers.
And I wonder; if we lose that last light shade of red, what’s left?
Do we still get to call ourselves good?
Do we still believe the story we tell in job interviews; that we’re principled, that we lead with integrity, that we care?
Or are we just comfortable now?
Complicit in the machine we once thought we’d change?
I don’t have the answers. Only the ache. Only the flicker.
But I know this:
Somewhere, under all the layers, the red still remembers.
It may not burn, but it watches.
And if nothing else, I owe it my honesty.
That’s why I write this; not as a manifesto, but as a confession.
Because the rebel is learning to live without rebellion.
And that, I think, is the most dangerous peace of all.
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