I just spent an hour trying to write a performance review. A simple review. For a guy, you know, he’s… fine. Mid-level. Nothing crazy good, nothing crazy bad. And I couldn’t do it. My brain just… froze. Couldn't find the words without sounding like I was either yelling at him or apologizing for existing. Ended up having to copy-paste the whole damn thing into some AI tone checker. For PROFESSIONAL PHRASING. Like, I’m a manager. I manage people. I talk to people every single day. And I need a robot to tell me how to sound like a human being in an email. *laughs* What a joke. My dad would kill me if he knew. He came here with nothing, built a whole business with his bare hands, barely spoke English for the first ten years. Wrote every letter, every invoice himself. No fancy degree, no software, just… guts. And here I am, college educated, talking about "synergies" and "leveraging assets" all day, and I can't even tell an employee to improve without an algorithm fixing it for me. It’s like, what was the point? All the sacrifices, the pressure to get good grades, get a *good job*, so I can sit here feeling like a fraud, a puppet for a machine. I just kept staring at the screen, deleting sentences, rewriting them, deleting again. Like my tongue was tied, even in my head. Is this what it means to be 'professional' now? To outsource your own voice? Maybe it’s not even about professionalism. Maybe I’m just… broken. Out of touch. Lost something along the way, trying to fit in, trying to speak the *right* way. The way they want me to speak. Man, I just wanna send the damn email. Get it over with. Before I start questioning everything.