The meetings were not full of people who knew what was happening. They were full of people performing comprehension at different levels of confidence.

I joined the company in March.

By April I had stopped asking questions in meetings because every question I had seemed like something I should already know. By June I had stopped taking notes because taking notes looked like I was lost. By August I had perfected the expression — the one that reads as engaged, processing, slightly ahead of whoever was talking.

I was not ahead of whoever was talking.

I was performing comprehension.

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Comic strip of a meeting showing people pretending to understand jargon for 24 months by the Author.

The meetings had a vocabulary I did not fully speak.

Not jargon exactly — the words were all English, individually comprehensible. It was the combinations.…