The Leader in the Glass Coffin

You only took a small bite.

You did not mean to fall asleep.

The apple was not obviously poisoned. It was polished. Persuasive. Glossed with the language everyone else seemed to be using. Half red: urgency, justice, belonging. Half green: freshness, safety, growth. It did not feel like deceit. It felt like fluency.

You told yourself it was only language.

You are a leader. You understand that leadership involves translation. You cannot afford to ignite unnecessary fracture. The group is tired. The institution is brittle. The mood is volatile. So you insert the sentence into your speech — not because you are fully convinced, but because it settles the room. Because it signals alignment. Because it prevents you from becoming the obstacle.

The mirror, which is really the group, reflects back approval. Not vanity, exactly, legitimacy. You are fair. You are modern. You are decent. You feel the relaxing of the room when you speak. A junior colleague nods with admiration. Someone later quotes your phrasing in an email. It lands well.

The apple is sweet.

You do not notice the numbness immediately.

Inside you, other parts stir. In the old story, Snow White is accompanied by dwarfs: small, instinctual presences who labour underground. In psychological terms, they are the quiet functions of the psyche. One notices contradiction. One remembers history. One mistrusts enchantment. One guards language. One smells danger. One worries about exile. One holds complexity.

When you said it to them, they shifted uneasily.

There was a half-second pause before the words left your mouth. A dryness at the back of your tongue. A micro-hesitation. One of those inner figures tugged your sleeve. Another cleared his throat. But you overruled them. You are responsible for the whole. You cannot afford to indulge every doubt. Leadership requires steadiness.

You swallow.

The group stabilises.

And something in you stiffens.

The glass coffin is not death. It is preservation.

You remain visible. Respected. Intact. The speech is circulated. The phrase appears in bold in the strategy document. Three weeks later, a colleague cites you in a meeting: “As you said, this is non-negotiable.” The line that once felt provisional has hardened into policy.

You feel a flicker of heat not because they are wrong, but because you recognise your complicity. You did not mean that. You thought you were offering symbolic cover, buying time, preventing fracture. But the room heard commitment.

Now you are the evidence.

“Even she agrees.”

You are held in glass. Admired. Protected from overt attack.

But you are no longer metabolising what is happening.

The dwarfs gather around the coffin. The parts of you that once tolerated ambiguity, that enjoyed dissent, that could hold competing truths without panic. They cannot wake you. They can only watch. The group grows calmer. The language grows cleaner. The field narrows. Dissonance is quietly coded as harm. Doubt becomes dangerous.

Externally, everything looks stable.

Internally, something is starving. But the only thing worse than being hidden is being found out.

The part of you that valued intellectual honesty grows thin. The part that once risked being misunderstood becomes cautious. You begin to refine your speech so it does not outrun the consensus. You insert the calming words before you think. You anticipate the mirror before you speak.

The coffin protects you from exposure.

It also immobilises you.

The dawning is slow. A policy justified in your name that goes further than you intended. A colleague who is marginalised for raising the very question you once privately held. A meeting where silence spreads too easily. You recognise the architecture. You helped build it.

You were not coerced. You were not deceived.

You chose cohesion over clarity.

To wake now would mean admitting that you allowed language to outrun your thinking. That you signalled certainty where you had doubt. That you preferred belonging to friction. It would mean risking the mirror’s favour. Risking the accusation of betrayal. Risking the charge that you are destabilising what you once stabilised.

There is a particular terror in stepping out of glass.

Because once you move, you cannot pretend you were merely preserved. You must acknowledge that you were suspended.

The old story says Snow White wakes when the coffin is jolted and the apple dislodges from her throat. In lived experience, awakening is rarely romantic. It is often humiliation. A question you cannot answer without contradicting yourself. A junior colleague who looks confused. A private moment where you hear your own voice and it does not quite belong to you.

And yet, breath returns and with it, the unbearable recognition: you were complicit in your own enchantment.

The question is not whether you made a mistake. It is whether you prefer to remain preserved.

There is safety in glass. Approval. Moral coherence. The relief of not being cast out.

But vitality requires something else. It requires allowing the dwarfs back into council. Letting contradiction speak. Risking the mirror’s displeasure. Saying, perhaps publicly, “I spoke too quickly. I need to think again.”

Integration often feels like a collapse.

To remain in the coffin is to be loved for an image. To step out is to be uncertain, possibly less admired, but alive.

You thought the danger was in not conforming.

It may be that the greater danger was in falling asleep.