I remember the chair long before I remember the storm.
It sat opposite my desk, ordinary and unremarkable, bearing the accumulated weight of countless decisions, difficult conversations, strategic plans, and moments of quiet reflection. For years, it had been a place of certainty, a small island of stillness amidst the relentless turbulence of leadership. It was where I sat to think, write, to solve, and to carry. I did not know then that it would also become the place where certainty abandoned me.
The morning itself was very ordinary. Meetings crowded the calendar, and emails arrived with their customary urgency. The institution moved forward with the indifferent momentum of an organism far larger than any individual entrusted with its care. I closed my office door and lowered myself into the chair, only intending to rest my eyes for a moment.
What followed was a brief and unplanned surrender to exhaustion. Not quite sleep, but something close enough to it. The kind of drifting that occurs when the body quietly claims a debt the mind has refused to acknowledge.
When I opened my eyes, I thought I was returning to the day that I had left behind.
I was mistaken as the storm had already entered the room.
Like most dangerous storms, it had not announced itself with thunder or spectacle. It had arrived quietly, gathering force beyond the edges of my awareness long before I recognised its presence.
Some storms arrive through circumstance. Others arrive through people.
They emerge from ambition that has curdled into resentment, from misunderstandings nurtured into convictions, and from the quiet calculations of those who have persuaded themselves that belonging is not commonly held. Such storms move through corridors and conversations and gather strength in whispers. They feed on insinuation and acquire momentum in rooms where you are absent, becoming reality long before you are aware of their existence.
They arrive with suspicion and uncertainty as instruments of excavation, digging patiently beneath your confidence, certainty, belonging, and self-trust.
Those who have endured such seasons will recognise the feeling. There comes a moment when your reputation appears to detach itself from your person and begin travelling independently through the world. It enters rooms before you arrive and accumulates assumptions that facts struggle to dislodge. You discover that suspicion has a velocity that truth can seldom match.
The burden is not merely the weight of the accusation, whether spoken or implied. The burden is to carry that weight while continuing to lead. You are expected to reassure others while privately confronting your own uncertainty. You are expected to project confidence while your foundations are being tested.
And this is where the storm becomes truly dangerous.
What begins as external turbulence slowly colonises the interior landscape of the self. Doubt appears where conviction once resided. Questions begin to occupy spaces previously held by certainty. The leader who once walked confidently into a room becomes cautious. The voice that once spoke with clarity becomes measured. The self gradually becomes gaunt, not in body but in spirit, diminished by the exhausting labour of defending its own legitimacy.
There were days during that season when I felt less like a human being and more like a weary amoeba, stretched beyond recognition by competing pressures and struggling to maintain coherence while forces from every direction sought to distort my shape. I carried the fatigue of responsibility, while simultaneously carrying the burden of proving that I deserved to carry it.
Looking back, I realise that the chair occupies such a prominent place in my memory because it became a metaphor for the moment everything changed. It was the last place where certainty felt ordinary before the storm revealed itself.
The irony is that storms are supposed to move. They are meant to arrive, disrupt, and depart. However, some storms refuse the logic of weather. They settle into memory and begin altering the emotional climate through which we interpret the world. They shape our understanding of trust, belonging, ambition, and power. Long after the visible turbulence has subsided, they remain present beneath the surface of ordinary days.
So, I remain seated within it, listening to winds that never fully disappear, and is uncertain whether I am waiting for the storm to leave or whether, somewhere along the way, it became the place from which I now lead.