What the loud coach is carrying

There is a swimming coach at a club pool in Maadi whose voice carries across the whole deck. A ten-year-old touches the wall a moment late and hears about it in front of everyone. The parents in the stands go quiet and look at their phones.

People who are brutal about other people's efforts tend to come in two kinds.

The first kind speaks to themselves in exactly that voice. Every mistake they ever made was met with it, inside their own head, and they assume that is simply what getting better sounds like. They are not harder on the child than they are on themselves. They are precisely as hard.

The second kind is convinced they never fall short. They cannot understand why anyone else does, because as far as they can see, they never have.

Both are carrying something heavy. One lives with a judge who never rests. The other lives with a story about themselves that would not survive one honest look. Turning that weight outwards does not make it lighter. It only adds the problem of everyone they now treat badly.

This is worth holding on to the next time something you made is torn apart, by a customer, a reviewer, a stranger under a post. The instinct is to read the harshness as a measure of the work. Often it is a measure of the person delivering it.

Underneath most cruelty about work sits something frightened. Find what it is afraid of, and the words lose most of their weight.