but there has defoooo been a shift

i have become less patient, more careless, and unwilling to automatically give people the benefit of the doubt. less interested in spending hours trying to understand why somebody behaved a certain way before allowing myself to acknowledge that their behaviour hurt me. what makes this especially difficult is that i spent years deliberately trying to become the opposite of that.

unfortunately/fortunately, i don’t think i’ve ever lacked emotional intelligence. i’ve always been somebody who thinks deeply about people. i’ve always tried to understand where people are coming from, what might influence their behaviour and why they might respond to situations the way they do.

but in my early twenties, i moved away from that version of myself. i became much harder and much quicker to react, and looking back, there are definitely parts of that version of me that i look back on and shudder. so over the last few years, i consciously tried to return to the person i actually wanted to be. i wanted to be thoughtful. i wanted to be emotionally intelligent. i wanted to recognise that people disappoint each other, get things wrong and become overwhelmed. life happens.

but recently, i think i’ve started remembering why that harder version of me existed. because somewhere along the way, in my teens and up to that point, i confused empathy with endless accommodation.

and now it seems like years later i’ve accidentally circled back, becoming somebody who would immediately search for reasons behind other people’s behaviour. maybe something came up. they forgot. they were overwhelmed. they genuinely meant well. before i even allowed myself to feel hurt, i had already started building a defence for the person who caused it.

and there is a point where that stops being emotional intelligence and it becomes emotional burnout with a sprinkle of compassion fatigue

this is where i am now. i am tired of always being the person who understands. i am tired of constantly considering everybody else’s feelings whilst hoping that somebody might eventually consider mine with the same level of care. because as i’ve said on here before : the reality is, being understanding does not stop people from taking advantage of you. if anything, sometimes people become comfortable with it.

they know you will probably forgive them. they know you will probably look for context. they know you will probably soften your own feelings before bringing them to them. and eventually, your understanding becomes something people rely on rather than something they should thank their lucky stars for, and ultimately i think that is why i have become less emotionally accommodating.

and a tale as old as time - i’ve noticed people respond differently to me now. people are more careful with their words and actions. they think twice before speaking to me in ways they might have previously. and i think part of that is because everyone is becoming increasingly aware that i’m not as concerned about protecting thoughts or feelings anymore

when people know you to be empathetic, they know there are certain things they can get away with. they know you will probably swallow and soften your feelings to avoid conflict. but when somebody knows you are willing to say something back, the dynamic changes.

and if i’m being completely honest, there have been moments where that has felt good. i know that sounds bad and it’s probably isn’t the healthiest thing to admit. but there have been moments recently where i’ve watched somebody’s face drop after i’ve finally responded to them in the same way they have been responding to me, and a part of me has thought: oh, it doesn’t feel so good, does it? 😀🫵🏾

not because i enjoy hurting people. i don’t.

it feels good because, for once, i can see that somebody realises i am no longer going to quietly absorb everything. i am no longer automatically going to be the person who smooths things over, makes excuses and prioritises everybody else’s comfort over my own. but the uncomfortable part is that i know this isn’t entirely who i want to be.

there is a difference between having boundaries and becoming careless. there is a difference between no longer allowing people to take advantage of you and deciding that because people have been careless with your feelings, you can become careless with theirs.

i don’t want to lose the emotional intelligence that i worked so hard to rebuild. i don’t want to become somebody who reacts without thinking. i don’t want to become somebody who hurts people simply because i am tired of being hurt.

but i also cannot pretend i don’t understand why i got here. constantly being the bigger person is exhausting when nobody seems to notice that you are always the one being asked to be bigger.

idk maybe this is not me becoming a worse person. maybe this is me taking my own advice and reinforcing within myself that compassion also needs boundaries.

i still want to be kind and understanding but that i’ve also realised that it doesn’t require also being a doormat, soz!

butttttt, since, i have been actively trying to work against it.

i thought it meant i was emotionally intelligent and patient. somebody who appreciates that people are people and that life gets in the way. i never wanted to be the kind of person who expects perfection from the people around me because, i myself, am living proof it doesn’t exist.

people disappoint each other, get things wrong, become overwhelmed - life happens. i still believe all of that. what i have stopped believing,, is that understanding and patience are always virtues.

i think, particularly as women, we are encouraged to treat understanding as a kind of moral achievement. there is almost an expectation that emotional maturity means constantly contextualising other people’s behaviour. if somebody lets you down, you should consider what they might be going through. if somebody is inconsiderate, you should think about their intentions. if somebody behaves carelessly, perhaps they are stressed or busy. perhaps they simply did not realise.

and whilst all of those things might be true, i have started wondering why the burden of doing that emotional labour so often falls on me, you know, the person who was disappointed/offended in the first place.

recently, somebody disappointed me. it was not the first time ,probably won’t be the last. and what rattled me was how quickly i was expected to digest excuse, after excuse, after excuse before i was even allowed be annoyed. i was spending more energy trying to understand their behaviour than i was acknowledging how their behaviour had actually affected me.

a lot of people live like this, where we become so invested in understanding intentions that we slowly stop paying attention to impact.

personally, i noticed that i had started confusing empathy with endless accommodation. i started believing that because somebody didn’t mean to hurt me, the hurt itself should somehow mattered less.

but intent and impact have never been the same.

you can understand exactly why somebody behaves the way they do and still decide that you no longer want to experience the consequences of that behaviour - those ideas are not in conflict. and if anything, they should probably exist together far more often than they do.

the more i have thought about it, the more i realised that my understanding can sometimes become incredibly convenient for other people. it is very easy to continue being inconsiderate when the person on the receiving end is committed to explaining your behaviour before you ever have to. it is very easy to keep taking the piss when somebody keeps replacing accountability with empathy.

i used to think being understanding would naturally be met with consideration in return. not because i expected a reward for it, but because it seemed reasonable to assume that if somebody knew you consistently extended them grace, they would become more thoughtful about how they treated you.

instead, i have often found the opposite. people do not always become more considerate when you are endlessly understanding. they simply become more comfortable disappointing you.

that has been quite an uncomfortable thing to admit to myself because compassion is unfortunately still something i value deeply. i still want to believe the best in people. i still want to leave room for context and recognise that everybody gets things wrong. what i no longer want to do is mistake those instincts for an obligation to keep accommodating behaviour that consistently leaves me feeling disappointed.

and, strangely enough, i have noticed that this shift has changed the way people approach me. i actually think i receive more respect now that i am less accommodating than i did when i was trying so hard to understand everybody. which is ironic because i think we are often taught the exact opposite. that if we are patient enough, calm and understanding enough, people will naturally treat us with greater care.

this has not been the case for me.

if anything, i think constantly accommodating other people’s behaviour can quietly communicate that there is very little cost to disappointing you - because your response rarely asks anything of them. i think there is a version of understanding that is healthy, allowing you to recognise that people are flawed and complicated without immediately reducing them to the worst thing they have ever done.

however, i also think there the all-too common version of understanding quietly teaches people that your empathy will always arrive before your boundaries. and i’m so sorry but this version no longer serves me.

me understanding somebody does not obligate me to keep making space for behaviour and i now understand this perfectly well.

obvs - i do not mean becoming cruel, reckless or intentionally hurting people. i mean disappointing the version of you that everybody else has become comfortable with.

i think a lot of women (people tbf) confuse being known for being free.

they think being liked is the same thing as being respected. they think being perceived positively is the same thing as living honestly. they think that if they can just maintain the right reputation for long enough, people will eventually reward them for it.

but i know now that no such reward exists.

in fact, i would argue that the opposite is often true.

i think some of the most unhappy women i know are unhappy precisely because they have become trapped inside reputations they are terrified of damaging.

one of my friends has what i would describe as a very good reputation. people like her. people trust her. she is warm, level-headed and generally perceived as somebody who has her life together.

and to be clear, she is aware of this article. i am not telling her business.

but over the years i have noticed something interesting.

the more attached somebody becomes to a particular reputation, the harder it becomes for them to step outside of it.

recently, a friend was telling me about a man who had behaved badly.

details are not particularly important. what matters is that he spent ages creating confusion where none needed to exist. trying to sell dreams nobody had asked him to sell. behaving strangely, dishonestly and, if i am being completely honest, just unnecessarily.

and then one day he blocked her, unprovoked.

just like that.

the thing that interested me, however, was not his behaviour.

it was hers.

because whilst we were talking about it, she kept circling back to the same concern. she wanted to say something. she wanted to address it. she wanted to tell him exactly what she thought.

but she did not want to come across crazy.

she did not want to come across bitter.

she did not want to come across like the type of woman who does things like that.

and i remember thinking how strange it is that so many women become more concerned with protecting their reputation than protecting themselves.

because the reality is that she was not asking whether she wanted to say something.

she had already decided she did.

the real question was whether saying it would conflict with the version of herself she had spent years building.

and i think that is a much bigger issue than one disappointing man.

i think a lot of women spend years becoming attached to identities that eventually start making decisions on their behalf.

the chill girl.

the classy girl.

the easy-going girl.

the girl who never argues.

the girl who never causes problems.

the girl who is always unbothered.

the girl who always rises above it.

at first these identities can seem empowering because they help us navigate the world - they become part of how other people understand us and how we understand ourselves.

but i noticed eventually something strange occurs. you stop asking yourself what you actually want to do, instead, you start asking what somebody like you would do.

those are very different questions - because one is rooted in reality, while the other is rooted in performance.

and i think women are encouraged to perform versions of themselves more than almost anybody else.

we are constantly taught that reputation is protection.

be polite.

be respectable.

be classy.

be calm.

be mature.

do not be loud.

do not be difficult.

do not be aggressive.

do not give people something to say.

and listen - the problem is that people are going to say something anyway, that’s the scam.

people will judge you when you are quiet.

people will judge you when you are loud.

people will judge you when you are kind.

people will judge you when you are selfish.

people will judge you when you stay.

people will judge you when you leave.

there is no magical level of good behaviour that finally grants immunity from criticism or being wronged.

yet, i know so many women (people tbh) who continue living as though that reward exists. as though one day somebody will hand them a certificate for being endlessly agreeable.

as though there is a trophy waiting for the woman who swallowed her feelings the most effectively.

as though there is some grand prize for always being the bigger person.

where?

i would genuinely love to see it.

because from where i am standing, i have watched women sacrifice opportunities, relationships, experiences, opinions and entire versions of themselves in pursuit of maintaining a reputation that often benefits everybody except them.

and i think this becomes even more pronounced when you are a black woman.

because respectability politics has always been sold to many of us as a form of protection.

if you behave correctly, people will respect you.

if you present yourself correctly, people will respect you.

if you are educated enough, articulate enough, polished enough, modest enough, successful enough, people will respect you.

except that is not how prejudice works.

and it is not how judgement works either.

because no amount of perfect behaviour can fully protect you from people who have already decided who you are, which means many women end up exhausting themselves chasing approval that was never actually available to them in the first place.

i think about this every time my mum worries about people from her old church seeing me dressed the way i want to dress on the way to a day party - people from a church i have not attended in nearly a decade.

people i do not speak to, not particularly care about and frankly could not give a toss if most of them lived or died. but….. somehow i am supposed to modify my behaviour around the possibility that somebody i have not seen in ten years might form an opinion about me.

why?

genuinely.

why?

what exactly am i protecting?

their opinion of me?

for what?

because i learned a long time ago that shame is one of the most effective tools of social control.

if people can make you fear embarrassment, they can make you fear visibility. if they can make you fear visibility, they can make you fear self-expression. and if they can make you fear self-expression, they no longer need to control you directly.

you will do it yourself.

i think a lot of people underestimate how much social control relies on the fear of looking bad - once you become deeply invested in maintaining a particular reputation, that reputation can be used against you.

you become easier to manage.

easier to silence.

easier to predict.

in recent years, one thing that has always unsettled people about me is that they know i am not particularly concerned with how i come across.

not in the sense that i enjoy offending people or i deliberately seek conflict. but in the sense that if somebody says something i think is unfair, i will probably say so. if somebody says something i think is ridiculous, i will probably say so. if somebody approaches me in a way i think is disrespectful, i will likely respond.

and i have noticed over the years that people who know me even a little bit tend to approach me differently because of it.

they are more careful. direct, but they watch their fucking mouths.

less likely to assume that i will quietly absorb something simply to avoid looking difficult, because so much of social life depends on exactly that assumption. it depends on people being so invested in maintaining a particular image of themselves that they become willing to tolerate things they would otherwise challenge.

it depends on women choosing likability over honesty.

approval over self-respect.

comfort over truth.

and once you stop treating reputation as something that must be protected at all costs, a surprising amount of that leverage disappears into thin air. you cannot control somebody with the threat of looking bad if they have already accepted that looking bad is sometimes the price of telling the truth.

that is why i think ruining your reputation can sometimes be one of the most liberating things a woman does.

not because reputation itself is meaningless.

but because eventually you realise that being known for something can become just as restrictive as being criticised for it.

the girl who is known for being chill becomes afraid to make a scene.

the girl who is known for being nice becomes afraid to set boundaries.

the girl who is known for being classy becomes afraid to be messy.

the girl who is known for being unbothered becomes afraid to admit that she cares.

the reputation becomes a prison - and the longer you stay inside it, the harder it becomes to remember that the door was never actually locked.

these days, i think women should spend less time worrying about whether something is “them” and more time asking whether something is true.

do you want to say something?

say it.

do you want to leave?

leave.

do you want to wear it?

wear it.

do you want to disappoint somebody?

disappoint them.

the people who benefit most from your reputation are very rarely the people who have to live inside it, and there is no reward waiting for you at the end of a life spent performing everybody else’s idea of who you should have been.

and that, more than anything else, is why i think “ruining your reputation” is not really about destruction at all, but reclamation. it is about choosing reality over performance. truth over approval. self over image.

and once you start making decisions from that place, you begin to realise something quite uncomfortable, which is that most of what you were trying to protect was never actually protecting you in return.

it was only ever protecting other people’s comfort with you.

not you.

and there is a difference.

a while ago, i saw a woman on tiktok say that every woman needs male friends because it helps you understand how men move.

and i remember thinking: why?

women have been documenting their experiences with men since the beginning of the fucking dawn of time.

there are books about it.

studies about it.

films about it.

entire academic fields built around it.

there are group chats with more useful information in them than some sociology texts.

women have spent over a millennia explaining exactly how certain men behave. so whenever i hear somebody say that women need male friends in order to understand men, i always find myself wondering what information they think is still missing.

because if a man has a long, well-documented history of treating women badly, i do not need to become his friend in order to understand him. if anything, i would argue that many women understand men perfectly well. the more interesting question is why so many women continue rewarding men whose behaviour they openly acknowledge is harmful.

that is the part i cannot stop thinking about.

because one thing i have noticed throughout my life is that some women have an almost limitless capacity for extending friendship, loyalty, understanding and social protection to men who are consistently terrible to women.

i am not talking about men who made a mistake or had one bad relationship.

i am not talking about men who behaved poorly once and genuinely took accountability for it.

i am talking about patterns.

the patterns that become public knowledge.

the men whose names are always followed by stories, where every woman seems to know somebody who has an experience with them.

and yet somehow the most dastardly of men continue to enjoy thriving social lives filled with female friends.

that has always fascinated me because, in my experience, men who are consistently careless with women are not simply revealing how they behave in romantic relationships. they are revealing how they think about women.

those are not the same thing.

a relationship can end.

a situationship can end.

a talking stage can end.

but the underlying worldview usually remains.

if a man repeatedly demonstrates that he feels entitled to women’s time, bodies, attention, labour, forgiveness or emotional energy, that is not just a dating problem. it is information. it tells you something about how he understands women as people.

and sooner or later that worldview tends to leak.

it leaks into the jokes he makes.

the comments he thinks are acceptable.

the assumptions he carries.

the empathy he extends.

the respect he withholds.

when i was younger, i occasionally made the mistake that a lot of women make. i would look at a man who treated women poorly and think, well, he’s always been nice to me.

what i eventually realised is that being the exception is not the same thing as being respected.

sometimes all it means is that the behaviour has not reached you yet.

sometimes it means you currently occupy a position within his worldview that benefits you.

but worldviews have a habit of revealing themselves eventually.

which is why I don’t really understand the logic of overlooking a man’s behaviour towards other women simply because he happens to be pleasant to you.

that has always fascinated me because friendship is not neutral. people talk about friendship as though it exists outside morality, but it doesn’t. friendship is endorsement. friendship is social proof. friendship is access. when you choose to remain close to somebody, you are communicating something about them to everybody watching.

you are saying that whatever i know about this person is not enough to outweigh whatever i gain from knowing them.

that does not mean you agree with everything your friends do. obviously. but i do think it means something when somebody’s treatment of women never seems to affect their social life. especially when the women around them claim to care deeply about women.

in fact, i think some women underestimate just how valuable female friendship can be for certain men. friendship allows people to access all the benefits of female presence without requiring them to seriously examine their behaviour towards women. they still receive emotional labour. they still receive validation. they still receive social credibility. they still receive care. they still receive access.

and because women are often seen as the moral barometer of a community, female friendship becomes one of the most effective forms of reputation management available.

after all, if all these women still trust him, how bad can he really be?

if all these women still invite him out, introduce him to people and defend him in conversation, surely there must be something everyone else is missing.

friendship launders reputation more effectively than most people are willing to admit.

and i think some women participate in that laundering because proximity to men remains one of the most underrated social currencies in heterosexual life.

i think some women believe proximity to men is evidence of value.

i think some women enjoy being the exception.

the cool girl.

the woman who gets chosen.

the woman who is “one of the mandem”.

the woman who can comfortably sit amongst men who dislike women because she has convinced herself she exists outside the category being discussed.

i knew a woman once who openly admitted that she loved being the princess of the group. and, funnily enough, a lot of (i’m not saying ‘all’ to be polite) the men she kept around seemed to arrive with alarming allegations stories attached to their names. not rumours. stories. the kind of stories that quietly shape how women move around somebody. the kind of stories everybody knows but nobody directly addresses.

and yet she stayed.

because eventually i realised the friendship was providing something more valuable than accountability.

it was providing proximity.

it was providing status.

it was providing access to a particular social identity.

and i think that is what makes conversations like this so uncomfortable.

because once we stop pretending this is about understanding men, we are forced to confront what it might actually be about.

attention.

validation.

social positioning.

proximity.

which brings me to the part that genuinely unsettles me.

it is one thing to remain friends with a man whose behaviour you know is poor. it is another thing entirely to start introducing him to other women.

that is the bit i cannot understand.

because now you are no longer simply maintaining a friendship. you are actively vouching for him.

you know exactly how he behaves.

you know exactly what women say about him.

you know exactly what his reputation is.

and yet you are still expanding his access to other women.

i find that bizarre. if i know somebody consistently mistreats women, my first instinct is not to increase the number of women available to him.

yet i have watched women do exactly that for years.

which is why i sometimes struggle with the contradiction of taking some people seriously when they tout certain feminist rhetoric whilst making certain friendship choices. because, correct me if i’m wrong but, i do not think feminism - or any type of activism - is only about what you say. i think it is also about what you reward, condemn and condone. i think it is about who continues receiving access to your time, your loyalty, your care and your social protection.

otherwise, what the fuck are we even talking about?

because friendship is one of the highest compliments i can give somebody.

my friends get my time.

my attention.

my loyalty.

my care.

my protection.

those things are valuable.

which is exactly why i am careful about who receives them.

and if a man consistently demonstrates contempt for women, i genuinely do not understand why so many women seem determined to keep rewarding him with all of the above.

not in a dramatic way. there was no singular explosive incident. nobody called me a slur. nobody said anything overtly racist. if anything, that was part of what made the experience so psychologically exhausting. everything existed in implication, tone and atmosphere.

i think one of the most difficult things about being the only black woman in a predominantly white workplace is that you spend an enormous amount of time trying to determine whether what you are experiencing is real whilst you are still experiencing it. you become both participant and investigator. constantly gathering evidence. constantly second-guessing yourself. constantly trying to work out whether you are reacting to genuine workplace dysfunction or whether you are becoming oversensitive to ordinary professional friction.

because there is rarely one singular incident you can point to afterwards.

there is no neat story.

no obvious villain.

just a slow accumulation of moments that leave you feeling slightly less secure than you did the day before.

i remember sitting on a teams call whilst an account lead pulled me into what had been framed as a reset chat. only a few (2 and a half to be precise) weeks into the role, she began listing all the things i apparently had not done on an account i had barely even been onboarded onto.

publicly.

in front of everyone else on the call.

i remember feeling genuinely confused because half the responsibilities she was naming were things nobody had actually told me i owned. i had not been trained. i had not been given context. i barely knew who half the team were. ask me if i even knew what some of their roles were.

yet somehow i was already being positioned as somebody underperforming.

that was the moment i realised the environment was going to demand performance before support.

and once i realised that, everything else started making sense.

because workplaces are far less meritocratic than people like to pretend. we like to imagine work exists separately from social life. that competence speaks for itself. that effort speaks for itself. that outcomes speak for themselves.

they don't.

workplaces are social ecosystems before they are professional ones.

competence is social.

credibility is social.

trust is social.

and the people who are already understood as familiar, trustworthy and capable are often granted more room to be imperfect. their mistakes remain mistakes. their bad days remain bad days. their stress remains contextual.

but when you sit slightly outside the emotional centre of a workplace, every mistake begins to feel more expensive. every misunderstanding carries more weight. every awkward interaction feels capable of reshaping how people see you.

professionalism feels conditional. softness felt conditional. grace felt conditional.

when you’re the only black woman in the room, you become aware very quickly that your margin for error is not always the same as everybody else's.

i think this is one of the hardest things to explain about race in professional environments. people expect racism to look like certainty. they expect an incident. a statement. a complaint. a moment that can be neatly identified and discussed afterwards.

but some of the most difficult workplace experiences are built from accumulation.

they are made from hundreds of small interactions which are individually defensible but collectively exhausting.

a public criticism that could have been private.

an assumption that appears from nowhere.

a lack of patience.

a lack of generosity.

a lack of curiosity.

nothing catastrophic.

just enough to leave you feeling as though humanity is being distributed unevenly.

during one particularly important client event, i was carrying multiple deliverables, multiple deadlines and multiple competing priorities simultaneously. what frustrates me when i think about that period is not even the workload itself. people get busy. work becomes chaotic. that happens.

what stayed with me was the complete absence of curiosity about whether any of it was sustainable.

nobody seemed interested in capacity.

nobody seemed interested in support.

there was only pressure.

more.

faster.

quicker.

why isn't this done yet?

and because i was junior, because i was trying to prove myself, because i was terrified of being perceived as incapable, i absorbed far more of it than i should have.

i think black women are often socialised into this particular kind of endurance. you learn very early how to tolerate environments that are slowly exhausting you because you do not want to become the problem. you learn how to remain professional. how to remain composed. how to remain productive. even whilst your body is quietly trying to tell you something is wrong.

eventually mine did.

there were mornings where logging on filled me with dread before i had even opened my laptop. there were meetings where i could physically feel my chest tightening beforehand. there were periods where i needed time off not because i was incapable of doing the work, but because my nervous system had become completely overwhelmed by the environment surrounding it.

and what made the experience even more difficult was how socially embedded everything felt.

office dynamics are rarely just about work. people pretend they are, but they are not. workplaces operate through social consensus as much as formal hierarchy. people take cues from one another constantly. opinions travel. assumptions travel. perceptions travel.

i noticed very quickly that once tension existed with one person, the atmosphere around me seemed to shift more broadly. interactions felt colder. more careful. more performative. it was as though workplace opinion moved socially.

and because none of it was overt, i spent months doing what many people from marginalised groups learn to do exceptionally well.

gaslighting myself.

maybe i'm imagining it.

maybe i'm overthinking.

maybe everybody feels like this.

but eventually patterns become difficult to ignore.

you start noticing how differently mistakes are handled depending on who made them. how some people are corrected gently whilst others are corrected publicly. how some people are granted complexity whilst others are reduced to whatever their worst moment happened to be.

you start noticing who is protected.

and i think protection is actually a more useful way of talking about race in the workplace than inclusion.

because inclusion tells you who entered the room.

protection tells you who feels safe once they get there.

i remember sitting at my desk one day trying very hard not to cry. not dramatically. not publicly. just trying to get through the day.

and suddenly becoming aware that people were watching me.

openly.

not the usual thing where everybody pretends not to stare whilst very obviously staring. after not so subtly discussing it amongst themselves, one colleague took one for the team, approaching me under the guise of a work question. with a soft voice, careful tone and performative concern.

only to walk back afterwards, whisper and laugh with everyone else.

and i think that moment stayed with me because it revealed something i had been struggling to articulate for months.

visibility is not the same thing as care.

being noticed is not the same thing as being supported.

observation is not protection.

attention is not kindness.

some of the loneliest experiences of my professional life involved being highly visible whilst feeling completely unsupported.

which brings me back to race.

because racism is not always overt hostility.

sometimes it is uneven softness.

sometimes it is watching grace move through a workplace unevenly. watching certain people receive patience, understanding and second chances whilst finding yourself constantly aware that your own mistakes seem to linger longer in people's minds.

sometimes it is noticing that other people's stress remains contextual whilst yours becomes behavioural. that their difficult moments remain temporary whilst yours become representative.

and because these moments are subtle, cumulative and socially slippery, they become incredibly difficult to explain. each incident appears manageable in isolation. it is only when you experience hundreds of them that the pattern begins to emerge.

i spent almost six months trying to rationalise an environment my body had already identified as harmful within the first three weeks.

that is the real mindfuck of it all.

your body knows long before your intellect catches up.

long before your pride catches up.

long before your ability to explain it coherently catches up.

eventually i had to admit something to myself.

regardless of anybody's intentions, regardless of whether anyone consciously meant harm, i did not feel emotionally safe there.

it’s odd how an identity can make you so hyper-visible, yet, unsupported at the same time.

i mean the kind of betrayal that rearranges the way you move through other women afterwards. the kind that teaches you, very suddenly, that proximity does not always equal loyalty. that somebody can love your company and still humiliate you. that friendship alone does not automatically produce care.

for some women, it is a friend sleeping with somebody they know they should not have because of who that person was to you.

for others, it is finding out your business, your PERSONAL INFO, has been chinese-whispered.

for others, it is slowly realising you are the emotionally convenient friend. the therapist friend. the friend people come to when they are falling apart, but somehow never the friend they invite out when life is soft and easy and fun.

whatever the incident is, for some, it changes something structural inside you afterwards.

because after enough experiences like that, you stop moving through friendships , or even human interaction casually. you become more observant, more intentional, more boundaried. and I think the women that do are often punished socially for becoming that way.

because female friendship culture places enormous value on being “easy”. easygoing. chill. understanding. endlessly forgiving. able to laugh things off. able to “not deep it”. women are often socialised to prioritise group harmony over individual discomfort, which means that the friend who swallows things quietly is usually treated as more socially desirable than the friend who names what is happening out loud.

but i think one of the biggest realisations i have had in adulthood is that many women are expected to absorb disrespect quietly in friendships the same way they are expected to absorb it in relationships.

the second you stop doing that, you become “difficult”.

and i know this because i have been called difficult in subtle ways for years. not directly, mostly - but through tone, through surprise, through that strange look people give you when they realise their behaviour actually has consequences with you.

because I am, especially as of late, increasingly less and less interested in emotional laziness from the people around me.

and emotional laziness can show up in so many different ways.

sometimes it is people only reaching for you when they need comfort, advice, regulation, perspective - but outside of crisis, you become strangely forgettable. there are friendships where you slowly realise somebody only really reaches for you emotionally when they are falling apart, but outside of that, they do not particularly think to include you in joy, softness, ease or fun.

and after a while, you start wondering whether people actually love you or simply love access to what you provide emotionally.

because there is a difference.

i think emotional labour has become so feminised that some women genuinely expect endless emotional availability from their friends without questioning whether they are offering care back in return. some friendships survive almost entirely through emotional parasitism.

sometimes emotional laziness looks like repeatedly having boundaries that have already been communicated clearly crossed, and then receiving an oscar award-winning ‘i’m oh so taken aback’ act once you finally react.

and after a while, you start wondering why the burden so often falls onto the hurt person to repeatedly explain the same discomfort before it is finally taken seriously.

because i think a lot of women are socialised to interpret boundaries as optional unless they are delivered harshly. before that, your softness gets mistaken for flexibility. your patience gets mistaken for permission. your silence gets mistaken for consent.

and then suddenly you are “too serious” because you finally reacted on the fifth, sixth or seventh occurrence instead of the first.

socially, people are often more disturbed by visible reactions than by the behaviour that caused them. the atmosphere only becomes a problem once somebody refuses to quietly absorb what was happening before.

i also think emotionally perceptive women are punished heavily in friendships.

women who notice dynamics quickly. women who pay attention to social hierarchies, passive disrespect, weird energy, subtle humiliations. women who clock when somebody is constantly making them the butt of the joke. women who notice when they are expected to carry emotional labour nobody else is carrying.

those women are almost always accused of “deeping it” or “taking themselves too seriously.”

but i think a lot of the time they are simply the only people willing to acknowledge what everybody else is quietly participating in.

because friendships are deeply social spaces, and social spaces often prioritise comfort over honesty. people expect you to swallow things so the atmosphere stays light. they expect you not to react too strongly when somebody embarrasses you, dismisses you, minimises your experiences, crosses your boundaries, or allows harmful behaviour around you unchecked.

and if you do react, suddenly your reaction becomes more socially inappropriate than the original behaviour itself - as though naming discomfort somehow creates more tension than causing it.

and i think that is part of why i have become stricter in friendships over time, especially as of late. not cruel, not impossible - just less willing to abandon myself for the sake of social smoothness.

i spent a lot of my life thinking good friendship meant endurance. staying quiet longer. being understanding for longer. making myself smaller so other people could remain comfortable around me.

now, i think real friendship should be able to survive honesty, and require urgency.

and if somebody only finds you easy to love when you are swallowing your discomfort, overlooking your own boundaries, or pretending not to notice what hurt you in the first place, then maybe what they valued was never your friendship at all.

maybe it was your tolerance.

britain does not govern itself through confrontation nearly as much as it governs itself through embarrassment.

that is the real national currency here.

shame.

not always a dramatic, biblical shame. quieter than that. subtler. the kind that settles invisibly inside people until it begins organising their personalities for them. the fear of looking stupid. the fear of looking needy. the fear of trying too hard. the fear of caring too much. the fear of being cringe.

people here are constantly performing emotional moderation for one another. nobody must be too loud, too sincere, too emotional, too ambitious, too confident, too difficult, too earnest. every feeling has to arrive wearing irony first, otherwise it risks humiliation. once you notice it, you begin to realise how much of british society is built around reputational anxiety.

and maybe i notice this because i move through the world with relatively little shame. or at least, very little fear of embarrassment.

which is ironic, considering how i grew up.

because i grew up around “what will people say?” culture constantly. what will people say in church? what will people think of this family? what kind of girl behaves like that? wears that? i think a lot of black british people - particularly children/descendants of immigrants - will recognise this instinct immediately. especially those of us raised in deeply conservative, religious, or communal environments where behaviour never fully belonged to you. it belonged to the family reputation. to the community. to appearances.

with shame being the enforcement mechanism.

i do not even necessarily mean this in an unusually cruel sense. sometimes it existed in tiny things. the way african parents could turn discipline into spectacle. the way being told off became public performance. the way embarrassment itself became part of the punishment. i remember how impossible privacy could feel sometimes as a child. your mistakes did not simply belong to you; they became communal knowledge, communal discussion, communal disappointment.

and i think growing up around that makes you hyperaware of how shame operates socially later on. especially in britain, because britain already functions through soft social humiliation anyway.

british people rarely tell you not to do something outright. they simply make certain behaviours socially unbearable. making a scene. being visibly upset in public. being too openly enthusiastic. posting too confidently online. being earnest without cushioning it in humour. even ambition in britain has to disguise itself as self-deprecation, or be wrapped in nonchalance. people apologise before expressing opinions. people downplay their achievements before anybody else can. confidence must constantly soften itself to remain socially acceptable.

and nowhere do i think this becomes more obvious than in black british culture specifically, where social life can sometimes feel intensely governed by coolness, social surveillance, and public shame.

recent events on tiktok reminded me of this again. somebody got unfollowed, somebody exposed somebody else, screenshots started circulating, private grievances became public spectacle almost instantly. and watching it unfold, i realised how deeply “bait-out” culture has embedded itself into the way we socialise now.

everything becomes communal performance.

every conflict becomes audience participation.

every humiliation becomes content.

and i honestly think black british online culture has become particularly fluent in this language of public embarrassment. the bait-out pages. the stitched videos. the obsession with exposing people over increasingly minor infractions. the way screenshots travel further than context ever does. everyone becomes terrified of becoming the next communal joke.

sometimes it feels as though british culture confuses humiliation with social cohesion. like we bond through collectively deciding who should feel embarrassed next.

and i think this becomes especially brutal for women.

i think back now to the entire “baiting out skets” era online and honestly, we were far too young to be behaving like that to one another. genuinely far too young. thirteen. fourteen. fifteen years old. a young girl’s entire reputations publicly dismantled before they had even fully become people yet.

screenshots circulating. rumours spreading through blackberry broadcasts and group chats. girls being labelled “skets” over text messages, kisses, parties, clothes, rumours, proximity to boys. humiliation became social entertainment before most of us even understood sex properly ourselves.

and the frightening thing is how normal it all felt at the time. how casual the cruelty was. how easily entire communities of young people participated in collectively disciplining girls through shame.

especially sexual shame.

because slut shaming in the uk - and particularly within certain black british spaces - has always felt strangely communal to me. female sexuality stops belonging to women the second it becomes publicly visible. everybody suddenly feels entitled to evaluate it, rank it, expose it, punish it.

and yet british culture simultaneously sells desirability everywhere. women are expected to be attractive, flirtatious, sexually available enough to remain desirable, but never so visibly desiring that they lose social respectability. it is an impossible balancing act. one wrong performance and the social punishment arrives quickly.

people act as though shame is morality.

as though humiliation is accountability.

as though publicly embarrassing people is evidence of virtue rather than entertainment.

even our workplaces feel governed by the same emotional logic. every email sounds emotionally pre-apologised for. “sorry to bother you.” “sorry to chase.” “apologies if i’ve misunderstood.” people stay late at work not necessarily because they are productive, but because leaving on time risks looking lazy. people hide stress to appear competent. hide financial struggle to appear stable. hide emotion to appear professional.

britain often mistakes emotional suppression for dignity.

and class intensifies all of it, because british class is not only economic - it is behavioural. you are judged on your accent, your clothes, your vocabulary, your hobbies, your confidence, your taste. even confidence itself must appear in the correct proportions. too much and you become arrogant. too little and you become pathetic. there is always a socially acceptable performance level to maintain.

and i think that is partly why so many people here struggle to become themselves fully. they are too busy managing perception. too busy trying not to become embarrassing.

but the strange thing is that once you stop fearing humiliation quite so much, you begin to realise how fragile a lot of these social rules actually are. how many people are organising their entire personalities around avoiding ridicule. how many desires get abandoned before they are even attempted because somebody, somewhere, might laugh.

I came to realise very early that it’s a terrible way to live.

i do not think human beings were meant to exist under this much, almost orwellian style reputational surveillance.

i do not think embarrassment should function as national infrastructure.

and i do not think shame should be the primary emotion through which a society understands itself.

i have felt it in rooms where my skin made me visible, but my africanness made me inconvenient or alienated. in conversations where people borrowed from us freely - our slang, our cadences, our humour, our entire aesthetic vocabulary - while pretending we had cont…

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