My daughter was three when she told me she couldn't be an astronaut.
Not because of the maths, or the danger, or the distance. Because she wasn't a boy.
We were watching a SpaceX launch together and I'd asked if she wanted to go to space one day. Her answer stopped me cold. "I can't, Daddy. I'm not a boy."
She was three. Nobody had ever told her that. Not me, not her mum, not anyone we'd let near her. And yet somewhere, from somewhere, she'd absorbed it.
We spent the rest of the morning looking at photos of female astronauts. We agreed that when the time came, her suit and helmet would be pink. She's older now and probably doesn't remember any of it. I think about it constantly.
What unsettled me most was trying to apply the lesson to my own career. I'm a British born Indian who grew up in a working class family. I'll never know which doors were closed for me and which ones I closed on myself, because that's exactly how it works. The outside gets in early, then it speaks in your own voice.
My daughter didn't think someone was stopping her from going to space. She thought it was simply a fact, like gravity.
The doors that close on people are rarely slammed. They close through a thousand subtle cues, and eventually we finish the job ourselves.
So watch both directions. What the world is telling the people around you about which rooms they belong in. And what you've quietly accepted about your own.