The Years Don't Erase It

The rooms I've spent years walking into have long memories. Someone mentions a gathering from a decade back, and three people nod, because they were there. Someone else gets introduced by tenure before their name even comes up: been coming to these since before most of us started. That kind of memory isn't incidental in a community built around network operators and the handful of events that keep everyone loosely connected year after year. People remember who showed up when, who used to run which network, who vanished for a stretch and came back changed. The memory is usually generous. It also means nobody gets to fake having been around.

I've had a badge with my name on it in that room for a long time now, long enough that nobody points at me as the new one anymore. Somewhere in those years, without deciding to, I started treating visible tenure as a stand-in for depth. Ten years in the room, I assumed, meant ten years of understanding the protocols and the politics cleanly, without gaps. My own understanding hadn't caught up to my own tenure, so the gap felt specific. It attached itself to whatever conversation I was standing in at the time, with whoever seemed to already know the answer.

So I stayed quiet more often than I needed to. Nothing anyone watching would have noticed, just the small tactical silence of letting a question go unasked because asking it would confirm a gap I assumed everyone else had already closed. The room isn't hostile. Nobody there keeps score of who understands what. The scoring happens entirely in my own head, using years attended as a measure of knowledge, which is a bad measure and I've mostly known that the whole time.

What changed, slowly, was watching that assumption fail often enough to stop feeling like an exception. People I'd have bet had settled certainty turned out to be working things out in real time too, asking basic questions once the group was small enough to feel safe, admitting they'd skipped an entire era of some technology and never gone back to fill it in. Confidence in that room often turns out to be the willingness to speak before being sure, repeated until it reads as expertise from the outside. Some of it is real depth, built over real years. A lot of it is performance, the ordinary kind everyone leans on to get through a conversation rather than anything calculated.

A while back I wrote about walking into one of these events for the first time, about standing at the edge of a room and reading everyone else's ease as proof of something I hadn't earned yet. That piece captured the sharp version of the feeling, the one that comes with being new. What follows here is the duller, ongoing version: the feeling doesn't leave, it just changes shape. It gets quieter. It shows up less often and with less force. It doesn't resolve, and at some point I stopped expecting it to.

What I have now is closer to a working relationship with the feeling than a resolution to it. I still catch myself assuming a gap that probably isn't there. I still choose silence over a question sometimes, more out of habit than fear at this point. But I recognize the pattern faster than I used to, and I've watched enough people I respect turn out to be figuring things out alongside me that the whole theory of everyone else already knowing has lost most of its authority. The feeling hasn't disappeared. It's just one voice in the room now instead of the only one, and most days I let it talk without giving it the floor.