What Almost Losing Everything Taught Me About Power
It Gets Late Early: Four themes from my conversation with Maureen Wiley Clough
Today’s interview on the podcast It Gets Late Early is a discussion about what I experienced inside Meta and what it cost me. We talk about the gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit I filed after 15 years working at Meta, yes, and also about the deeper truths I’ve come to understand through this process: tactics of toxic corporate culture, how women and neurodivergent people are punished for resisting, and how accountability is structurally suppressed.
Themes emerged that now feel like a glimpse into how power protects itself, how it weaponizes our deepest vulnerabilities against us, and why speaking truth requires not just courage but privilege most people don't have.
I’ve not stopped thinking about some of these themes since my conversation with Maureen, and I’m sharing several below with direct quotes from the interview and additional thoughts.
Theme #1: Corporate Coercive Control
"I used to proudly say that they were going to take me out of the company on a stretcher one day and without any idea of how toxic and problematic that was." Listen to full episode
For fifteen years, I wore my corporate loyalty like a badge of honor. I genuinely believed I was part of something meaningful, shaping the future of the internet, connecting people, making the world more open. When I said they'd have to “carry me out on a stretcher,” I meant that I planned to work there so long, I’d die at my desk an old lady. I thought I was expressing dedication, but I was experiencing an abusive relationship.
I stayed for the same reason many people stay: I was in love. I fell in love with one entity, and as it gradually became something else, believed I could make it better. And the deeper I got, the more tangled that belief became with my own identity. I had a deep sense of duty to an organization that I fundamentally believed would do the right thing by people. When public criticism surfaced about the company, I rationalized paying the news less attention than it deserved. Surely these were problems being evaluated and addressed by the smartest people and the most values-driven business, right?
That rationalization was part of the toxicity, something I don’t offer to excuse but to explain. I blindly believed in the company until I was expected to cast children's safety and women’s careers aside so that men and Meta could make more money.
"It's a real shame to be a company who can fly drones over Africa on the promise of giving people access to Facebook and the internet, but can't figure out how to make a VR video game safe for children to not be interacting directly with predators." Listen to full episode
We had the resources and technical capability to do incredible things. We could literally fly internet-delivering drones across continents. But when it came to basic child safety in Horizon Worlds, preventing racist harassment, stopping predators from accessing children, suddenly the problems became too complex, too expensive, too scary.
This is how abusive relationships work: they train you to celebrate the grand gestures while ignoring the daily harm.
The company I thought I was building my life around didn't actually exist. The mission-driven, values-based organization was a means to an end. The drones flying over Africa become proof of good intentions while children facing predators in VR, and a myriad of other harms, was treated like an unfortunate trade-off.
Theme #2: Women Are Expected to Absorb
"As women, we are trained to take on the discomfort of those around us, which is what they were counting on that I would just continue doing that." Listen to full episode
One of the most insidious aspects of workplace discrimination is how it weaponizes women's socialization against us. From childhood, women are taught to make others comfortable by internalizing problems.
When I raised concerns about child safety and racist harassment in Horizon Worlds, the otherwise all-male leadership team deflected by telling me to "shut up" a female colleague to prove my worth; she was raising legitimate product quality and safety concerns. When I refused, I was denied access to leadership meetings and information I needed to do my job.
In my conversation with Maureen, I reflect on how my lawsuit documents a fifteen-year pattern where everything from my body being violated by supervisors to my brain being dismissed in meetings was part of the same systemic disregard for women.
They were counting on me to absorb that treatment silently. They expected me to internalize the shame of their failures, to carry the emotional weight of their harmful decisions, to protect their comfort at the expense of my own well-being and even my salary when I was told I wouldn’t be recognized for my achievements due to the ways it would expose senior male leaders.
"I am done turning my anger inward. Women have carried the shame of men for too long. And I say, I should say those at the margins have carried the shame of those in power for a long time, and I'm learning how to share." Listen to full episode
This pattern extends far beyond individual workplaces. Systems of oppression maintain themselves by training those with less power to absorb the consequences of those with more power, to protect the comfort of those who benefit from the status quo.
Theme #3: Neurodivergent Burnout Isn’t “Burnout”
"I'm autistic, and have ADHD, and I really experienced a significant and shocking loss of my ability to, at the beginning, speak, get out of bed, and that is such a confounding experience."
What I experienced at Meta wasn't a single traumatic event but getting knocked down over and over, causing a stepwise erosion of my capacity to function. Autistic burnout is not typical burnout—something I didn’t know before experiencing it. It's a complete system shutdown that can take months to years to recover from. I lost skills I'd relied on my entire life: the ability to organize thoughts, to speak consistently and coherently, to regulate my emotional responses to unexpected stressors, to manage any amount of interpersonal ambiguity. For someone whose identity had been built around competence and achievement, this disintegration was devastating.
I was very honest with Maureen about how dark this period became with the hope that it decreases shame and increases awareness of resources for others similarly suffering.
"I carried around the crumpled up study on outcomes for kids whose parents die by suicide. Spoiler alert, it's better to be a shitty parent than to die by suicide." Listen to full episode
Companies increasingly recognize the value that neurodivergent employees bring—our pattern recognition, systems thinking, uncommon care, and intense focus—but they rarely acknowledge the heightened risks we face in toxic environments. There's little awareness that the same traits that make us valuable also make us more vulnerable to burnout that goes far beyond typical work stress.
For anyone struggling with similar experiences or interested in self-education as a form of self-protection, Dr. Megan Anna Neff's research on autistic burnout recovery has been invaluable. She teaches that healing comes through embracing autistic identity rather than fighting it, finding spaces where autistic traits are valued rather than pathologized, and developing genuine self-acceptance instead of constantly striving for neurotypical presentation.
Theme #4: Remorse Requires Repair
Some people look at my story and think: here's another privileged tech worker who got rich off the system and now wants to burn it down when it turned on her.
I don’t see my Meta-augmented privilege as a reason to stay quiet about the harms I witnessed, but as a reason why I must speak up.
The people with the most to lose, without financial cushions, healthcare access, or career alternatives, are suppressed through economic coercion. NDAs, severance packages, and the threat of industry blacklisting ensure that the voices most likely to expose harm are also the most vulnerable to retaliation.
And similarly, the pattern of silencing women who speak up about harm isn't unique to tech or to director-level positions. It happens to nurses who report patient safety violations, to teachers who expose inadequate resources, to retail workers who call out wage theft, to women at every level in every industry.
My silence wouldn’t benefit any of them, but it would benefit Meta.
"If I spend every dollar I have left, which I probably will, on this lawsuit, and I am left with nothing. Well, guess what? I will figure it out. Right now, I know that this is exactly what I need to be doing to reconcile the role I played in the hyper growth of a company that harms people." Listen to full episode
For 15 years, I helped build a company that I now understand causes significant harm, particularly to vulnerable populations, like children, women, disabled people, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and more. I convinced people to work there and literally wrote internal essays on request of the leadership to boost morale and dedication.
My healing requires acknowledging that complicity and taking responsibility for repair, which means doing everything within my capacity to actively reconcile the role I played in the hypergrowth of a company that causes harm, including exposing and providing sworn statements to the FTC on Meta’s illegal, harmful practices and advocating for protections for kids online.
"There's no way for me to reconcile silence when I have my health and my life because of my privilege. And I don't know about you, but that really fires me up, because that's not just.” Listen to full episode
Recovering has been extremely political. I survived because I had resources: access to mental healthcare, the ability to take extended medical leave, the financial ability to reject Meta's severance package. Many people facing what I faced don't have those privileges. As such, repairing is political, too.
What emerges from these four themes is a clearer picture of how corporate power can operate: not through dramatic villains making obviously evil decisions (although, sometimes that), but through systems that normalize harm while making resistance nearly impossible.
By the time someone has both the knowledge and freedom necessary to speak truth to power, they've usually either been damaged or privileged enough to absorb the consequences.
The genius of corporate coercive control is that it doesn't just silence critics, it creates conditions where potential critics silence themselves. When your identity becomes inseparable from your employer's success, when speaking up means shame, when the cost of truth-telling might include financial ruin, most rational people choose silence.
The system is designed to ensure that the people most capable of exposing its failures are also the most invested in its success, the most vulnerable to its retaliation, or the most broken by its processes. Understanding this isn't about assigning blame to those who stay quiet—it's about recognizing that systemic change requires dismantling the mechanisms that make speaking up a luxury only the privileged can afford.
Kelly, this was very powerful. Your words land in such a powerful way. I feel that I was very impacted by the toxic work environment and the absorption of the failure of the strategy from the top- run by men. I was released from my duties last October and I am still recovering. I doubt myself and my skills. Thank you for your voice.
This article took the words out of my mouth, I just kept saying yes, yes, yes to all of this. As a fellow AuDHD woman facing discrimination and retaliation, I feel this in my bones, and it fires me up.
I don't have the financial security to fight indefinitely, I'm still stuck in a mid-level role, and I'm deeply vulnerable to systemic, institutional abuses. But these systems work best when they can count on our silence.
Although my position is precarious, I refuse to sanitize my reality for their comfort, to protect the status quo, or to silence the embodied harm I've suffered. I've made the intention to reject any NDAs or severance package that requires me to relinquish my legal rights.
There's a limit to how much I can share publicly right now. What I've had to go through isn't unique or rare, it's unfortunately garden-variety discrimination. But if I can use my experience to also illuminate something for others, I will do it.