Executive Functioning: The Boardroom Inside Your Head

Decolonising the Manager in the Skull

The “executive” in our heads wears patriarchy’s suit—capital’s clock judging living weather. This piece loosens that boardroom grip, inviting gestalt time to breathe beyond corporate verbs.

Opening — The Boardroom Inside Your Head

This second piece begins with a room many of us were taught to live inside—the boardroom in the skull where a small manager keeps the minutes of our worth. I let him be he on purpose. The voice of executive function has always sounded to me like a man who has never met the moon: brisk, certain, allergic to weather. Patriarchy wears many suits—whiteness, colonialism, capitalism—and they share a tailor. The metaphor of the competent executive arrives dressed in that same coat of many colours, pretending to be neutral whilst carrying an empire in its pockets.

When people speak of planning, initiation, monitoring, I hear corporate verbs masquerading as psychology. They belong to a world that learned to treat forests as inventory and hours as currency. To be well, in that grammar, is to behave like a tidy office. Those of us who run on gestalt time—who begin in the middle, who gather meaning before steps—are judged by a model never built with our materials. The diagnosis is written before we enter the room.

Part of decolonial work, I am learning, is to notice these micro-managers squatting behind the eyes. They arrived early in childhood, taught us to apologise for our tempo, convinced us that the body’s hesitation was laziness rather than discernment. Many of us carry an internal foreman who speaks with the accent of schools and workplaces, telling us we are defective for not booting the approved operating system. The poem that follows tries to overhear that conversation and loosen its grip.

I do not want to pretend the manager has no uses. Chronos keeps trains from colliding and bread from burning. But the problem begins when his language claims the whole house, when kairos is evicted as unproductive and the orchard forced to file timesheets. Gestalt minds especially feel this squeeze—the demand to translate a flock into a spreadsheet, a season into a checklist. We are asked to prove competence in a dialect that mistrusts our native tongue.

So this series continues its quiet rebellion. Not with slogans, but with atmospheres that might help a reader recognise the stranger living in their head. If you have ever felt scolded by an invisible supervisor for the crime of ripening, you already know him. The invitation is not to wage war, only to open a window and let another clock speak. The poem is a small eviction notice written in moonlight.

The Boardroom Inside Your Head

They installed an office in the skull
without asking for planning permission—
glass walls, swivel chairs, a small tyrant
with a mug that says productivity.

He calls himself Executive Function
as though a mind were a shipping company
and thought a crate with a barcode
waiting to be moved by forklift.

Planning, initiation, monitoring—
verbs with polished shoes,
verbs that smell of photocopiers
and carpets vacuumed before dawn.

Somewhere a bell is ringing
for the quarterly meeting of the self.
Someone is late—
it is always the same someone.

The manager taps his pen on the ribcage:
Why haven’t you started?
Where is the action plan?
Explain this delay in deliverables.

But the body is not a warehouse.
It is a field with its own grammar—
moss learning the alphabet of shade,
rivers deciding where to become rivers.

No one asked the orchard
to submit a Gantt chart for peaches.
No one told the tide
to file a risk assessment.

Yet we were taught to host a boardroom
in the middle of our dreaming—
little bosses in sensible shoes
walking the corridors of breath.

Capital moved in like a polite relative,
hung calendars in every doorway,
taught the children to apologise
for the tempo of their own blood.

Now the mind speaks in memos:
action items, deadlines, outcomes—
a language that believes a person
is a machine with feelings as faults.

I have watched friends shrink
under that fluorescent alphabet,
calling themselves broken engines
for not idling at the correct speed.

But listen—
the so-called disorder is often only
another operating system booting up,
a season that refuses the spreadsheet.

Gestalt arrives like a flock—
whole sky before single wing—
and the manager panics,
searching for a form to contain weather.

He does not understand beginnings
that start in the middle of meaning,
does not trust the slow assembly
of a thought teaching itself to walk.

So he calls the difference deficit,
writes reports in narrow fonts,
prescribes louder clocks
to drown the softer one.

Meanwhile kairos waits in the stairwell
with soil under its nails,
asking whether we might try
to live without a foreman.

Decolonise the boardroom,
say the poets and the grandmothers—
evict the small accountant of minutes
who charges rent for breathing.

What if the mind were a commons—
no CEO, only neighbours,
ideas knocking on each other’s doors
with cups of sugar and bad jokes?

What if competence were measured
by how kindly we meet the moment,
not by how straight we march
across the ruler of another man’s time?

I am learning to fire the manager—
not with anger but with tea,
thanking him for his brief service
and asking him to return his keys.

The skull becomes a wide room again.
Thoughts sit on the floor like cousins.
Someone opens a window
and the weather walks in barefoot.

There is work, yes—
but it grows the way bread grows,
warm from the inside,
smelling nothing like an office.

And the so-called executive
turns out to be only a costume
we were told to wear to dinner
with people who fear the moon.

Take it off.
Feel how the shoulders remember sky.
Another clock is speaking through the walls,
and it has never asked for a meeting.