The Possibility Tax

On compulsory availability, extractive networking, and the unequal price of openness

During the summer, a man I do not know liked something I wrote in May about the erasure of women’s work.

Then he commented publicly asking how we could get in touch.

On LinkedIn. While looking at my LinkedIn account.

I answered politely, because women are trained to treat every approach as potentially meaningful, every stranger as potentially sincere, every request as potentially important, and every refusal as something that must be padded until nobody else can feel its edges.

The private message arrived almost instantly.

He wanted ninety minutes of my time, recorded on audio and video, to discuss my childhood, my dreams, my work, my struggles, my wisdom, and the story of my life.

When I explained that I was in the middle of summer and quite overwhelmed with other priorities and not in a position to participate, the conversation did not end.

My hesitation became something to solve.

Perhaps the interview could happen later. Perhaps I could recommend other people. Perhaps I could introduce him to my network.

I will not name him, because the point is not that one man sent an irritating message.

The point is the whole economy behind it.

We are constantly told, most frequently by our female elders:

You never know what it could lead to.

That sentence is supposed to sound expansive. Open-hearted. Strategic. Full of possibility.

But possibility is not free.

Someone sends a speculative invitation and risks almost nothing. The recipient pays the possibility tax: the time required to read, investigate, interpret, respond, preserve everyone’s dignity, calculate reputational risk, imagine whether declining might close some invisible future door, and then carry the interaction around in her head after the sender has moved on to the next name. The tax is doubled if you are neurodiverse as I am, where stolen focus can mean a major loss of productivity.

He gets to buy a lottery ticket with my attention.

I am expected to finance the wager.

And the possibility tax is not flat. It is regressive.

It is always people with the least professional security are asked to pay the most.

For an immigrant, especially an immigrant trying to establish a public and professional life in a small society, every invitation arrives with a second message hidden inside it:

Are you serious about belonging here?
Are you open enough?
Grateful enough?
Visible enough?
Flexible enough?
Interested enough in meeting people?
Willing enough to contribute?
Serious enough about finding work?
Serious enough about finding purpose?
Serious enough about integration?

A person securely embedded in a professional system may decline a vague invitation because it does not interest them. The refusal is understood as ordinary discernment.

An immigrant enaging in the same selectivity risks being read differently.

Perhaps she is difficult.
Perhaps she is not making enough effort.
Perhaps she does not understand how opportunities work here.
Perhaps she is unwilling to network.
Perhaps she expects too much.
Perhaps she is not sufficiently grateful for being included at all.

So the cost of saying no is not merely the possibility of missing one conversation. It is the fear that every refusal may become evidence in an invisible case being assembled against your seriousness.

And so you say yes.
You accept meetings with no clear purpose.
You attend events where nobody has explained why you were invited.

You offer your story, your expertise, your contacts, your emotional energy, your evenings, your cultural knowledge, and your unpaid labour because somebody tells you that visibility matters and relationships take time and you just never know where something might lead.

Sometimes it does lead somewhere, but not necessarily where you want to go.

But much of the time, it simply leads to another request.

Another introduction.
Another committee.
Another coffee.
Another person who wants to understand your “journey.”
Another organization that wants diversity in the photograph but not power in the room.
Another man who has decided that proximity to interesting people constitutes a field of expertise.

And when, after giving generously, you eventually ask for something in return, the miraculous network often suddenly evaporates.

The person who found ninety minutes for your childhood, your migration wounds, your dreams, your ideas, and your contacts cannot find ten minutes to read your proposal or cover letter.

The person who urged you to believe in possibility cannot make an introduction when you need one.

The organization that praised your contribution cannot locate a paid role.

The people who told you that relationships are reciprocal suddenly explain that they have no influence, no budget, no time, no suitable contact, no authority, no opening, no ability to help.

The door was real when they wanted you to walk through it.

When you knock from the other side, it becomes decorative.
This is the part that “you never know” leaves out.

Possibility flows unevenly. Some people are permitted to approach strangers, ask for their stories, request their labour, borrow their credibility, and build networks from their generosity.

While others are expected to remain perpetually available because availability is treated as proof that they deserve a future.

The first group performs possibility.
The second group pays for it.

As a neurodiverse woman, I have to tell you that LinkedIn has become increasingly as unbearable as nails on a chalkboard because so much of it now consists of people constantly performing the surface of substance. People with autism and ADHD are famously perceptive and intolerant of performative behavior. We see that:

They perform possibility.

They perform leadership.

They perform innovation, wisdom, sustainability, transformation, purpose, newness, impact.

They create a vocabulary, gather people around it, collect stories and ideas, place themselves at the point where those ideas become visible, and then present themselves as the source of coherence.

The network becomes the product.

The interviews become authority.

Access to substantive people becomes the appearance of substance.

Neurodiverse people are also often gifted with the type of pattern recognition companies spend millions of dollars trying to replicate in early warning systems. So one begins to notice that again and again, the person most comfortable appointing himself to the symbolic position is a man.

Not all men, but somehow always a man.

A man decides that he is an expert on dreams because he asks other people about theirs.

A man decides that he is a leader because he occupies the place from which other people’s work is approved, narrated, or presented.

A man decides that he represents sustainability because he stands beside the people doing the thinking, writing, organizing, repairing, and implementing.

Time and time again, its the women bring the research, the language, the relationships, the emotional intelligence, the institutional memory, the conceptual architecture, the follow-through, and the actual work.

The immigrant brings an additional layer: translation, navigation, cultural interpretation, gratitude, adaptability, and the endless public performance of being both competent enough to not be a burden and non-threatening enough to not steal resources from the natives.

The man claims the frame.

This is not simply a problem of men receiving more credit for the same labour. It is often a division between the material and symbolic layers of work.

Women are expected to make the thing real.
Men are permitted to become its representative.
Immigrants are especially expected to treat participation itself as payment.

And because institutions, funders, audiences, and platforms see the representative more clearly than they see the infrastructure underneath him, representation begins to resemble authorship. Position begins to resemble expertise. Confidence begins to resemble knowledge. Inclusion begins to resemble reciprocity.

Then women, and especially immigrant women, are asked to help complete the illusion.

• Explain your work.
• Tell your story.
• Offer your contacts.
• Translate the context.
• Improve the language.
• Supply the examples.
• Make the vague idea credible.
• Make the institution look open.
• Make the project look international.
• Make the room look diverse.
• Do not embarrass him.
• Do not sound arrogant.
• Do not appear ungrateful.
• Do not close the door, because you never know what it could lead to!

So when I tried to decline this interview, I made myself smaller. I said that I was currently unemployed. I questioned whether I was sufficiently inspiring. I implied that perhaps my story would be worth telling later, once it had reached a more impressive conclusion.

I did that partly to protect myself from embarrassment, but also to protect him.
I did not want to say:

I do not yet know whether this project is serious enough to justify my time.

Because men sometimes get angry or even abusive if you say the honest thing out loud, I seamlessly relocated the uncertainty into my own worth.

Women learn to make themselves the reason for the refusal because it is considered kinder than evaluating the offer. Flee, fight, freeze and fawn: the four Fs of survival.

Immigrants learn to do it because evaluating the offer can itself appear presumptuous. Who are you, still trying to establish yourself here, to decide that an invitation is beneath your attention?

A boundary framed as self-doubt allows the other person to retain his dignity.
But it also allows him to continue negotiating. And that is the trap.

If I refuse, I may be judged insufficiently serious about work, belonging, networks, purpose, or opportunity.

If I accept, I may lose hours of time, surrender pieces of my story, lend credibility to somebody else’s project, and receive nothing of substance in return.

If I later ask for reciprocity, I likely discover that the relationship existed primarily in the direction of extraction.

That is the possibility tax.

It is the price charged to people who cannot safely assume that another opportunity will come.

It is collected in unpaid hours, emotional labour, forced openness, reputational risk, self-diminishment, and the constant suspicion that protecting your time may be interpreted as proof that you did not deserve anyone’s interest in the first place.

But the thing is, I do not want to become closed to unexpected people or strange beginnings. Real relationships sometimes begin awkwardly. Genuine opportunities do emerge from unplanned conversations.

But after nearly 13 years abroad, I increasingly see that “anything could lead somewhere” is not a serious standard for deciding who receives access to my mind, history, labour, networks, or public identity.

Possibility alone is not value.

And an immigrant’s professional insecurity is not an unlimited public resource.

The person requesting access must demonstrate enough present substance to justify the present cost. That means understanding who someone is before asking for her story. Engaging with her actual work rather than treating it as an entry point. Explaining the purpose, audience, method, benefit, and terms of the invitation. Recognizing that another person’s attention is not free raw material for one’s own project.

It also means reciprocity.
Not vague warmth.
Not “let’s stay connected.”

Not praise when you need her ideas and silence when she needs your help.
Reciprocity means that the relationship does not disappear the moment the direction of value changes.

I really do not want to lose my openness.
I do want to stop confusing openness with compulsory availability.
I do want to stop paying for other people’s self-authorization.

My kindness is not consent.
My curiosity is not availability.
My immigrant hunger for belonging is not permission to waste my time.
My network is not a communal pantry.
My intellect is not raw material for somebody else’s authority.

And my fear of missing a hypothetical future opportunity is not a debt I owe to every stranger performing possibility in my inbox.