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She searched outside herself for power, wandering through buildings filled with alphabet soup, endless initials stitched onto jackets and office doors promising significance.

Make me powerful.
Give me a badge.
Give me a gun.
Give me authority strong enough to quiet the frightened child still living beneath my skin.

And so they peered through doors and windows, placing themselves above others in the fragile architecture of control, clawing their way toward the top only to discover that the top was crowded with hollow people rehearsing the language of accountability while avoiding its reality entirely.

People who spoke of honor but would not recognize truth if it struck them across the face like cold wind on a rollercoaster, the kind that drags you backward through time toward moments you wish you had abandoned sooner.

Moments you should have walked away from.
Stayed away from.

I remember the warrant officer telling me:

Don’t be a lady.
Be a soldier.

Outwit him.
Deceive him.
Overthrow him.

That’s how you become powerful.

Become a man.
Become him.

And I remember how it landed inside me—not as instruction alone, but as a quiet reprogramming of what survival was supposed to cost. As though softness was something to be corrected. As though becoming worthy of respect required the removal of anything gentle, anything receptive, anything that might be mistaken for vulnerability.

So I learned the performance.

The sharpened voice.
The guarded face.
The strategic silence.
The careful calculation of emotion.

But somewhere beneath the costume, I could feel the fracture widening.

Because the alphabet soup did not spell power.

It spelled corruption.

It spelled wounded people disguising shame as authority. Men wearing badges hoping that if they caught enough criminals, they might finally outrun the helplessness that first entered them years ago, back when the pitch crossed home plate and they froze.

He didn’t swing.
He didn’t act.
He didn’t become the man he thought he needed to be.

And so the wound remained.

Now he was powerful.
Now I am too, they told themselves.

But I also remember the top boss, the top cop—the one who called me privately at home, voice steady with assurance, saying, Let me know if they oppress you.

As if oppression would arrive neatly packaged. As if it would introduce itself politely before settling into the walls.

And when I did speak, when I named what was happening, I watched what he became under pressure. I watched the careful retreat into structure, into policy, into distance. I watched him move through the system like someone peering into the hidden compartments of a boat with two tiers:

one for the powerful,
one for the powerless.

And when the waters turned, when the cost of standing became real instead of theoretical, I did not have to guess which level he would choose to preserve.

Not mine.

Never mine.

Because the higher they climbed, the stranger the revelation became: the institution did not require strength from them. It required obedience. It required silence. It required the performance of power while remaining spiritually powerless enough to sustain the machinery itself.

And worst of all, it needed criminals.

Needed brokenness.

Needed fear.

Because without disorder, the empire loses its purpose. Without shame, there is no one left to tower above. Careers were fed by the suffering of strangers while families quietly lowered their heads into inherited oblivion, pretending not to notice the moral erosion unfolding at the dinner table.

And she thought of Dorothy then, clicking her heels toward home only to realize the lie had never been the wizard alone, but the belief that power could be granted externally at all.

Because real power was never issued through badges or buildings or frightened hierarchies.

Real power had to be earned internally, in the unbearable act of facing oneself without the costume.