Patience on a monument

In Act II, Scene 4 of Twelfth Night, Viola recounts to Orsino the tale of her love for him. She is in disguise and he does not know that he is the muse of her melancholy. In a passionate monologue, she plumbs the depths of her suffering:

She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespeare play. When I was a teenager, I obsessed over how perfectly these lines echoed the feelings I had for my high school crushes: yearning for them to notice me yet terrified my affection might be too obvious, hoping my inner beauty would make me stand out yet hiding at every opportunity for fear of rejection and shame.

Outwardly at least, I am no longer an awkward adolescent, romanticizing unrequited longing. But this monologue still rings in my mind of late. I relate it to the Chinese women who quietly endure husbands who contract concubines for sons. I feel it in the smiles of women in the public eye, who cannot express indignation without it becoming national news.

I lived it at every company town hall, when I perched on a stool in the back, hoping to hear my name after the hundreds of hours, thousands of lines of code, years of my youth and my mind that I poured into a project. Maybe they would notice the late nights alone at the office. The hair loss. The fact that my title was not engineer. But I only heard myself lumped into “[Male manager] and team”.

These are the things I told myself again and again then: Well, what can you do? I can’t ask for more because I couldn’t have done it on my own. Life eventually rewards the patient. If I work hard enough and wait long enough, they will see how much I care and they will give me the resources I need. Public recognition is for the vain; I just want to do my best work.

Eventually, finally, I gave up waiting. I stopped being patient.

Patience is a virtue. As a designer, you must be patient to survive the slings and arrows of stakeholder and peer critique. You must be patient to lead a group of humans through disagreements and digressions towards consensus and action. You must be patient when the more experienced can’t follow new ideas and when the less experienced can’t follow directions.

But we should not prop Patience up on an infallible pedestal. I am working on figuring out the limits and pitfalls of my patience. What will I tolerate? And what will I not? When should I wait? And when should I take a stand? What is a paper cut and what is one more of a thousand wounds?

To be honest, my impatience is why I work in tech and why I work at startups. I want the world to change and I want to change it now. Time does not wait for people to catch up with technology. Patience is for the invisible and the forgotten, the left behind, the ones who contributed and competed but got erased for the convenience of narrative.

No one will know it is my best work if I do not tell them. No one will respect my effort if I do not demand their recognition. No one will reward what I give away without expectation. No one will see me if I choose to efface myself. Like Orsino, it is too easy to overlook what we can take for granted.

What did Viola do? After a mess of mistaken identity, she eventually revealed her true self and claimed Orsino’s heart. The play ends as the Clown sings about the passage of time and the aging of (a) man. Can we defer our dreams with promises that it will get better? Or can we do something now? Can we afford for our careers to be a comedy of errors? Or can we fix it now?

Words and views are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer(s).