She Looks Like Me

The Quiet Power of Proximity

The Email

A couple of weeks ago I received an email that stopped me cold. It was from a colleague in HR — a Midwestern dad I had partnered with a few months earlier when his leadership training cohort toured our campus. We hosted a roundtable and walked the studio, and I answered questions the way I always do — candidly, sometimes irreverently, hoping a few minds would leave more curious than when they arrived. I never expect anything in return.

We gave the participants a parting gift that day. We had just celebrated a milestone in our business unit and created a commemorative coloring book featuring outline illustrations of vehicles that came out of our studio. Clean lines. Real design. Not childish, just accessible. Something tactile in a world of digital decks.

His eleven-year-old daughter loved it. She is neurodivergent, and he and his wife adopted her from China when she was two. He wrote that she studied every page carefully and then designed a vehicle of her own. He told her about the woman who runs the unit and pulled up my photo from the company portal. She looked at it and said, “She looks like me.”

I teared up — not because someone praised my work and not because the program landed well, but because somewhere in a living room I will never see, a child saw a future and recognized herself inside it.

We debate inclusion in corporate hell like it is an initiative, a scorecard, a quarterly argument. We reduce it to language and optics while an eleven-year-old girl quietly widens her sense of what is possible because she sees a face that resembles her own in a seat of authority. That is not policy. That is proximity.

The Horizon

For most of my career, when I looked up, there were not many people who looked like me. I did not frame that as injustice; it was simply the air. You work. You adapt. You learn how to sit at the oversized walnut desk and make it fit. You focus on competence and keep moving.

When she said, “She looks like me,” she was not talking about nationality. I am Japanese. She is Chinese. We are not the same. She was talking about recognition in a broader sense — about seeing someone who looks like her in a country and an industry where that is still not the default. She was talking about permission and possibility, about a door that might otherwise have looked closed.

Inclusion is not abstract and it is not symbolic. It is structural. It shifts the horizon line just enough for someone else to see themselves in it. It gives a child evidence that someone who looks like her occupies the seat she is imagining, even if the details of origin differ.

I have spent decades navigating corporate hell — budgets, reorgs, rooms not built with me in mind — and I have questioned the trade-offs and wondered what it all ultimately adds up to. That email answered it. If my presence in that seat made it easier for one child to imagine herself in it, then this was never just a career. It was meaning.

That’s everything, Bitches.