Welcome back to the Department of Emotional Affairs, where we investigate the thing underneath the thing.

Let’s open our third file.

Submitted by: The Village Is Tired

My older sister is literally one of my favorite people in the world, so watching her go through a divorce has been fucking awful.

While I’m happy that she gets to restart her life without that ______, the transition has been rough. She’s had to move, figure out a new routine for the kids, deal with lawyers, and basically rebuild her entire life.

So I’ve been there. Happily.

I helped her move, brought food over, answered the late-night calls, picked the kids up from school, kept them during appointments, and told her she could bring them to mine whenever she needed a break.

Our kids are around the same age and love being together, so it really hasn’t been a problem.

But somewhere along the way, my offer became the plan.

My sister also hasn’t exactly been in her best energy, which I understand. But it has been hard being the place where all her frustration lands. Anytime I try to tell her she’s being unfair, it turns into a speech about how I’m not giving her enough grace.

I have given her grace. So much grace.

Anyway, this particular issue happened on a day when my children already had plans at their friends’ house.

For the first time in forever, I had the entire day to myself. My plan was to do absolutely nothing. Order food, get in bed, watch something ridiculous, maybe take a nap. I’ve been having a rough month myself, and I really needed a day when nobody required anything from me.

My sister knew all of this.

And then she called me mad early that morning asking if she could bring the kids over because she was having a really bad day and needed some time to herself.

She knew my kids weren’t home and that I REALLY wanted to spend the day alone. When I reminded her, she said, “Exactly. So you’re free.”

I tried to explain that being free was the point, but she said she wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t really need it. She had barely slept, the kids had been arguing all morning, and she felt like she was about to lose her mind.

So obviously, I felt terrible.

And obviously, I said fine.

She dropped the kids off and went to get her hair done and have lunch alone.

Now look, I understand why she needed that. I’m not even mad that she did it. But there I was, spending my one child-free day with more children because apparently doing nothing does not qualify as having plans.

When she came back, I told her that I couldn’t keep being the automatic answer every time she needed somewhere for the kids to go. I still wanted to help, but I needed her to ask without making me feel awful if the answer was no.

Complete shit show.

She said I had no idea what it felt like to watch my family fall apart. She reminded me of every time she had ever been there for me and said she never thought she would have to make an appointment for her own sister to help her.

Then she said she did ask, I said yes, and it was unfair to agree only to make her feel guilty afterward.

Which, okay. I did say yes.

But I only said yes because she made it clear that needing a day alone wasn’t a good enough reason to say no. And I hate that I even have to justify why my own time should belong to me.

I love helping my sister, but I don’t want my schedule to stop being mine. The resentment is building, so I need to get comfortable saying no, even if that makes me wrong in her eyes.

Am I being insensitive? How do I say no without feeling like I’m doing something wrong? And how do I help her understand that saying no to one day isn’t saying no to her?

---

THE VERDICT

Okay Village, we have reviewed the evidence, and this is one of those moments where a little bit of toughness is necessary to avoid a boatload of resentment on your part.

Helping your sister through an incredibly difficult transition is wonderful, and we’re proud of you for being so present for her. Clap for yourself, truly.

However, there is this thing that happens when you give a lot of help: eventually the help stops feeling like something you are giving and starts becoming part of the furniture in the other person’s life. It’s just there. Expected. Accounted for.

And that is usually the moment when you have to take a little of your power back.

Your sister assuming your free time belonged to her was that moment.

She knew you wanted the day to yourself. She also knew you would probably cave because you love her, she was struggling, and you have been incredibly generous up until this point. So yes, she pressured you. And yes, speaking up afterward was important, especially because you could already feel the flames of resentment starting.

A little family friction now is much better than swallowing your tongue for another six months and eventually becoming furious every time her name appears on your phone.

You did the right thing by saying something.

Now, your sister does have one point: you said yes.

She knows damn well she pressured you, but next time, Village, you have to be stronger about your no.

“I love you, but I can’t take the kids today.”

And then survive whatever comes next.

She might be disappointed. She might think you’re being selfish. She might remind you that she’s going through a divorce. She may even be a little pissed off.

Let her.

People can be sensitive about needing help and even more sensitive when the help they’ve grown accustomed to suddenly has conditions. That doesn’t mean you have done something wrong.

Your sister needs to know that you are a person too. Your time belongs to you. Your help is something you lovingly give, not something anyone is automatically entitled to.

You can be part of the village without becoming village property.

So keep helping your sister. Love on those babies. Show up when you can.

But the next time you need your Saturday, keep your damn Saturday.

Case Closed.

THE DEPARTMENT WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

When does helping someone start becoming an expectation?

Was the sister wrong for pushing after she knew Village wanted the day to herself?

And be honest: if someone you loved was going through a divorce, would you have kept your Saturday or given in too?

Leave your verdict in the comments.

SUBMIT A CASE

Have a friendship dilemma, a weird text exchange, or a situation you keep overthinking?

Submit your case to The Emo Files by sending an email to the link in our bio with the subject line: EMO FILE Submission.

Tell us what happened, give us the context, and keep it anonymous. We’ll handle the rest.

What they often mean is that they value honesty that arrives at the right time, in the right tone, with the right amount of cushioning, and preferably without requiring them to change anything.

The moment honesty creates discomfort, our commitment to it becomes considerably less ….enthusiastic.

This is the complicated reality of direct communication. We need it. Our relationships, workplaces, families, and communities cannot function well without it. Yet the people most willing to practice it are often punished for disturbing the comfort that silence was protecting.

They are called confrontational, negative, difficult, dramatic, aggressive, or unnecessarily blunt. Sometimes these descriptions are fair. Direct communicators are not automatically correct simply because they are willing to speak. But sometimes these labels are less an accurate description of how something was said and more an attempt to avoid dealing with what was said.

This is what makes direct communication so difficult to master.

It requires enough courage to tell the truth, enough humility to question your version of it, enough discernment to know when it needs to be said, and enough emotional stamina to survive the fact that even the best delivery cannot guarantee a good reception.

The Comfort Economy

Every relationship develops a comfort economy.

Families, workplaces, friendships, and communities all have a system determining what may be discussed, who is allowed to discuss it, and how much discomfort everyone is expected to tolerate.

There are things people genuinely do not notice. But there are also things everyone notices and agrees not to name.

• The parent whose moods control the entire house.

• The friend who repeatedly makes cutting remarks and calls them jokes.

• The colleague whose behavior creates more work for everyone else.

• The resentment growing between two people who continue to insist that everything is fine.

• The offensive comment everyone heard but nobody wants to challenge.

These are not always secrets. More often, they are realities that have been granted protection through collective silence.

Naming one changes the atmosphere. Once something has been said aloud, the room can no longer hide inside ambiguity. People must decide whether they agree, whether they care, whether they are implicated, and whether they are willing to do anything about it.

This is one reason direct communication is so easily punished. The direct communicator does not merely introduce an observation. They introduce responsibility.

The conflict did not necessarily begin when they spoke. The dysfunction, contradiction, resentment, or unfairness was already present. But before it was named, everyone had the luxury of pretending it was not theirs to address.

Silence allows people to benefit from awareness without accepting the responsibility that may come with it.

Directness removes that convenience.

Why the Person Who Names the Problem Becomes the Problem

When an observation is uncomfortable, people often move the conversation away from its substance and toward the person who made it.

Instead of asking, “Is this true?” the room asks, “Why would you say that?”

Suddenly, the conversation is about tone, timing, attitude, personality, motivation, and social etiquette. Anything but the original issue.

Sometimes this shift is legitimate. The way we communicate matters. A truthful observation can still be delivered cruelly, carelessly, publicly, or at the worst possible moment. “I’m just being honest” has been used to disguise humiliation, superiority, and a profound lack of emotional control.

But conversations about delivery can also become an extremely effective escape route.

A room discussing your tone is no longer examining its behavior.

A person defending themselves against your alleged hostility does not have to consider whether your observation was accurate.

A group consumed by comforting the most reactive person in the room is a group that has stopped moving toward resolution.

Sometimes the reaction is unconscious. Some people experience disagreement as rejection. To them, an observation feels like an accusation, a boundary feels like abandonment, and a difficult conversation feels like evidence that the relationship is no longer safe.

In other cases, the reaction is strategic. If becoming upset has historically caused everyone to retreat, soften their expectations, or abandon the subject, then emotional escalation becomes a very effective shield.

Whether the reaction is intentional or not, the outcome is similar. Everyone learns where the emotional landmines are. They learn which conversations create fallout and which realities require too much cleanup.

Eventually, people stop asking, “Does this need to be addressed?”

They begin asking, “Is addressing it worth the reaction?”

The direct communicator is often the person who decides that it is.

The Courage to Be Clear

For people who avoid direct communication, silence can feel like kindness.

Sometimes it is. Not every irritation requires a meeting. Not every thought deserves to be shared. Restraint is a form of emotional intelligence.

But silence is not automatically peaceful simply because no argument occurred.

Unspoken resentment does not disappear. It leaks into tone, distance, passive aggression, withdrawal, private complaining, and relationships that end without either person understanding what happened.

Avoiding an uncomfortable conversation may protect the present moment while quietly sacrificing the future of the relationship.

Direct communication gives people information they can actually use.

It allows someone to understand how their behavior is affecting you. It gives a relationship the opportunity to repair before resentment calcifies. It makes boundaries visible instead of expecting people to discover them through punishment. It replaces silent tests with actual choices.

This is why learning to speak plainly matters, even if directness does not come naturally to you.

Direct communication does not require becoming forceful, fearless, or confrontational. It can sound as simple as:

• “I didn’t feel comfortable with what happened.”

• “I think we are avoiding the real issue.”

• “When you do that, it changes how safe I feel with you.”

• “I know you may not have intended it this way, but this was the impact.”

• “I don’t agree.”

• “I need something different going forward.”

These sentences may not feel dramatic when written on a page. Saying them to someone whose approval matters to you can require enormous courage.

The courage is not in being certain that the conversation will go well. It is in accepting that clarity is sometimes more valuable than the temporary safety of remaining silent.

Directness Is Not Omniscience

Those of us who identify as direct communicators also owe ourselves a more honest examination.

Being willing to say what other people will not say does not make us inherently wiser than everyone else. We can be observant and still be wrong. We can correctly identify a problem and mishandle the person involved. We can confuse our interpretation with objective truth. We can speak from resentment while calling it honesty.

Direct communication becomes dangerous when it is fused with certainty.

There is a difference between saying, “This is what I noticed,” and announcing, “This is who you are.”

There is a difference between addressing how someone’s behavior affected you and appointing yourself the official interpreter of their motivations.

There is a difference between honesty that creates clarity and honesty that merely provides somewhere for your frustration to land.

Before speaking, it is worth asking:

• What am I hoping this conversation will accomplish?

• Am I addressing something that affects me, or am I trying to manage another person’s development?

• Have I allowed for the possibility that I do not have the entire story?

• Would I still say this if I could not control how the person responded?

• Am I offering information, setting a boundary, requesting change, or simply releasing emotion?

These questions do not exist to talk you out of speaking. They help you speak with precision.

Directness without self-awareness becomes intrusion. Directness without empathy becomes cruelty. Directness without discernment becomes exhaustion.

How to Reduce Projection

There is no perfect arrangement of words that can force another person to receive an uncomfortable truth gracefully.

This is an important reality for direct communicators to accept. We are often given the impression that if we are gentle enough, calm enough, and diplomatic enough, we can prevent other people from becoming defensive.

Respectfully, this has not always proven true.

When an observation touches something a person is deeply invested in avoiding, even the softest delivery may feel threatening. To you, it may be a conversation. To them, it may feel like the collapse of a story they need to believe about themselves.

You cannot eliminate projection. But you can avoid unnecessarily feeding it.

Speak about observable behavior rather than assigning character.

• Say, “You interrupted me several times,” instead of, “You never respect anyone.”

Describe impact without pretending to know intent.

• Say, “That comment embarrassed me,” instead of, “You wanted to humiliate me.”

Make the purpose of the conversation clear.

• Say, “I’m bringing this up because I care about our relationship and don’t want resentment to build.”

Be specific about what you need next.

• Say, “If there is a problem, I need you to speak to me directly rather than discussing it with everyone else.”

Then stop.

Do not bury a clear observation beneath twelve supporting arguments because you are terrified of being misunderstood. Do not overexplain until the conversation becomes a trial in which you are simultaneously the witness, prosecutor, defense attorney, and exhausted court stenographer.

Say what is true for you. Leave room for the other person to respond. Listen for information that may complicate your understanding.

If they disagree, that does not automatically mean they failed to understand you.

If they become defensive, that does not automatically mean you were wrong.

The goal of direct communication is not to produce the response you wanted. The goal is to create clarity about what is happening, what you need, and what the relationship can realistically hold.

Developing the Skin for What Comes Next

Even when you communicate thoughtfully, people may still misunderstand you.

They may call a boundary punishment.

They may call an observation an attack.

They may assign aggression to firmness or cruelty to your refusal to pretend.

They may reduce an entire pattern of behavior to your reaction to it.

This is part of the cost.

As a direct communicator, having thick skin does not mean becoming emotionally numb or refusing all feedback. It means learning to separate three different possibilities:

1. I communicated this poorly.

2. This person is uncomfortable because the truth is difficult.

3. This person and I genuinely understand the situation differently.

Maturity is being able to consider all three without automatically collapsing into shame or self-righteousness.

Sometimes you owe an apology for your delivery without retracting the substance of what you said.

• “I should not have raised my voice, but I still need us to address what happened.”

Sometimes new information should change your position.

• “I misunderstood part of the situation. I’m sorry. Here is what I see differently now.”

Sometimes the reaction tells you that the relationship only functions when you remain silent.

That is important information too.

The goal is not to become impervious to criticism. It is to become sturdy enough to examine criticism without immediately abandoning yourself.

The Discernment to Know When

Not everything that is true needs to be said by you.

This may be the hardest lesson for a direct communicator to learn.

Seeing a problem does not automatically make it your responsibility. Recognizing a pattern does not obligate you to drag everyone involved toward your realization. Some people receive lessons through conversation. Others insist on receiving them through consequence.

Before entering a difficult conversation, consider three things:

• Does this affect me?

• Can anything meaningful be changed?

• Has this person shown the capacity to participate honestly?

If the issue directly affects your well-being, your boundaries, your work, or the future of a relationship, speaking may be necessary even if the other person is unlikely to receive it well.

If the matter does not involve you, cannot be changed, or belongs to someone who has repeatedly punished every attempt at honest conversation, silence may not be cowardice. It may be discernment.

There are conversations we have because we believe repair is possible.

There are conversations we have because we need to make our position clear, regardless of whether repair follows.

And there are conversations we stop having because the pattern has already provided the answer.

Naming something and changing something are not the same act.

You can explain yourself clearly and still not be understood. You can identify a pattern accurately and still be unable to stop it. You can offer someone the truth and discover they would rather lose the relationship than interact with it.

At that point, continued explanation is not courage. It is self-abandonment, and at some point you have to learn to choose yourself.

Sometimes the most direct thing you can communicate is your departure.

A Practice, Not a Personality Type

Direct communication should not belong exclusively to the people who have always been comfortable with confrontation.

It is not a personality trait reserved for the naturally outspoken. It is a relational skill, and like every skill, it can be practiced.

If you tend to avoid difficult conversations, begin small. State a preference without apologizing for having one. Correct a misunderstanding before it becomes resentment. Tell someone when something has hurt you while the relationship still has a chance to repair it.

And when a direct person in your life raises something uncomfortable, resist the urge to evaluate only how the conversation made you feel. Ask yourself what it may be trying to show you.

Not everyone who makes you uncomfortable is attacking you.

Not every difficult observation is a verdict on your character.

Sometimes discomfort is simply the feeling of receiving information you did not previously have, or did not want to have.

To direct communicators, your willingness to name what others avoid is valuable. It can create clarity, protect people, interrupt dysfunction, and make real intimacy possible.

But your gift does not exempt you from tenderness. It does not make every observation necessary or every interpretation correct. Your responsibility is not simply to tell the truth. It is to develop the wisdom to know which truth is yours to tell, how to tell it responsibly, and when to let reality speak for itself.

Directness is a gift.

Discernment is the upgrade.

The goal is not to become quieter. It is to become more precise.

Speak when your silence would require you to betray yourself. Speak when the relationship deserves an honest chance at repair. Speak when the cost of preserving the comfort of the room is greater than the cost of disrupting it.

Then allow people to show you what they are capable of doing with the truth.

Your clarity is valuable.

Stop spending it everywhere.

About the Author

Doreen Caven is the co-founder of The Girls Like Me, a writer, and a creative strategist. Her work explores emotional power, self-approval, and the internal shifts that shape how women live, create, and see themselves.

A text message that lands funny or a resentment quietly collecting interest in the background might look like a minor infraction to the untrained eye. But leave it alone, and suddenly it’s the reason you’re awake at 3:01 AM wondering whether you should quit your job, move to Portugal, and start over entirely.

Enter the Department of Emotional Affairs.

Think of us as your super hot private investigators. We follow the emotional paper trail and examine the evidence behind your relationship dilemmas, workplace mysteries, friendship predicaments, and family entanglements.

After years on the job, we’ve learned that the argument is never about the dishes, and the tension is rarely about being five minutes late. It’s almost always about the thing underneath the thing.

That’s the part we’re interested in.

So grab your magnifying glass, review the case notes, and help us crack the code.

Let’s open our next file.

Submitted by: I Was Here First

Okay, I need an honest ruling because apparently everyone in my real life has already decided I’m wrong.

A few years ago, a friend introduced me to this girl she knew. The friend eventually moved away, but the two of us kept hanging out and somehow became friends without her.

We had fun together, but it became obvious pretty quickly that we looked at life VERY differently.

She’s extremely free-spirited. Very “this is who I am, take it or leave it.” She does whatever feels right, says whatever she thinks, and generally does not care what anyone else has to say about it.

I’m more traditional. I also have opinions.

One of our biggest disagreements was her decision not to have children. When she told me she wanted to be childfree, I advised her not to make such a permanent decision because she might change her mind later.

Did I bring it up more than once? Yes.

Did I occasionally joke that she might feel differently when she met the right person? Also yes.

She felt like I was judging her and refusing to respect a decision she had made about her own life. I felt like I was offering honest advice as a friend. She is also VERY opinionated, so I didn’t understand why she was allowed to share her opinions, but mine were suddenly unacceptable.

We eventually had a BIG fight, said some wild things to each other, and stopped speaking after that.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of it.

Except there was one tiny problem.

Before we fell out, we had already started bringing our separate friends together. Her friends became friends with mine, mine became friends with hers, and now everyone is sooo inseparable.

Everyone except us, obviously.

Now she’s at every birthday dinner, brunch, house party, and group trip. Which, fine. Adults are allowed to form their own friendships.

But she isn’t even cordial with me. She greets everyone around me and carries on as though I’m not sitting three feet away.

I’ve told my friends how uncomfortable it makes me, but they think she has every right to be cold after feeling judged by me. So apparently, I’m the villain now.

No one has asked me not to come, but no one will stop inviting her either. I’ve started declining because I don’t enjoy being ignored, and now I’m slowly becoming the outsider in a friend group I helped bring together.

I’m not asking my friends to inherit every disagreement I have, but shouldn’t their loyalty to me matter?

At this point, I feel like saying: You can invite her. I just won’t come.

But is that a boundary, or am I removing myself from a circle that nobody actually asked me to leave?

THE VERDICT

We’ve reviewed the file, interviewed the resentment, and examined the social seating chart.

The Department has reached its conclusion:

You are not being erased. But your refusal to accept the reality of the situation is starting to make you look like the problem.

Your former friend is allowed to decide that she no longer wants a relationship with you. Your mutual friends are allowed to maintain the relationships they formed with both of you. And you are allowed to feel uncomfortable being repeatedly ignored in a shared space.

All three things can be true.

Your friends do not have to inherit your enemies to prove that they love you. But “we’re staying neutral” cannot mean pretending there is no tension while two people sit across from each other in complete silence.

The problem is that what you consider hostility, your former friend may consider distance. She is not asking anyone to exclude you. She is not turning the group against you or demanding that your friends pick a side.

She has simply withdrawn her warmth from you. We know that sucks, but you don’t get to decide how warmly someone must behave after she no longer feels comfortable with you.

You can ask for basic civility. That is fair. But you cannot demand the same warmth you were once accustomed to, especially after taking it for granted.

THE EVIDENCE

Let’s begin with the original offense.

Your friend made a decision not to have children. You advised her against it, brought it up more than once, and joked that she might change her mind when she met the right person.

That was not simply a difference of opinion.

You were treating her decision as though it remained open for discussion because you had not personally accepted it. And if we are being honest, there was some judgment in that.

No one wants to repeatedly debate a personal decision that only they have the right to make, regardless of how pure your intentions may have been.

Being opinionated does not mean agreeing to become the subject of someone else’s ongoing review. There is a difference between telling a friend the truth when she asks for it and repeatedly commenting on a decision she has already made.

You were free to believe she might change her mind.

She was free to become tired of hearing about it.

You were free to disagree with her choices.

She was free to decide that being your friend no longer felt good.

Friendships should feel safe. If being around you meant having her personal decisions subjected to constant, unprovoked commentary, why would she want to continue?

That is the first piece of evidence you need to accept.

Now let’s discuss the friend group.

You keep returning to the fact that these were your friends first. We understand why that matters emotionally. You have history with them. You helped bring everyone together. You probably assumed that if this friendship ever ended, the group would naturally close ranks around you.

Instead, everyone stayed friends.

That can feel like betrayal even when no one has technically betrayed you.

But there is no custody agreement for mutual friends.

You may have helped create the group, but you do not own the relationships that formed inside it. Once her friends became close to yours, those friendships developed lives of their own.

There is no social return policy.

However, your former friend is not completely cleared of all charges.

There is a difference between refusing friendship and refusing basic acknowledgment. If two people regularly attend the same intimate gatherings, greeting everyone except one another creates tension the entire room can feel.

She does not owe you conversation, closeness, or forgiveness. But a brief hello is not reconciliation. It is simply recognition that another human being is standing there holding a mimosa.

Your friends are entitled to invite you both, but they cannot act surprised when the atmosphere starts developing its own weather system.

Still, their decision to invite her is not proof that they value her more.

The clearest evidence is that they continue inviting you too.

THE THING UNDERNEATH THE THING

This is not only about loyalty.

It is about the humiliation of watching someone thrive in a group you helped bring together after she decided she no longer liked you.

You expected the end of your friendship to change her place in the group. Instead, her relationships continued without you.

And that sh*t hurts, we definitely get it. Not having your friends completely in your corner always feels like hell. But the deeper injury is that your friends’ continued affection for her has forced you to confront the possibility that their version of what happened sees you as the aggressor, who deserves the punishment of her coldness.

You believe you were sharing honest opinions.

She believes you were judging her.

Your friends believe she has a point.

And every invitation she receives feels like another vote against you.

But invitations are not verdicts.

Your friends can believe you mishandled that relationship without deciding that you are a terrible person. They can understand why she is hurt without agreeing that you deserve to be socially punished forever. They can love you and still refuse to make your conflict their conflict.

The more you demand evidence of their loyalty, the more likely you are to create the exclusion you’re afraid of.

THE ACTION PLAN

A big part of the problem is that you are still defending your right to comment on your friend’s life instead of asking whether those comments were appropriate in the first place.

This is an opportunity to admit that you overstepped, drop the defense, and grow past the behavior. Your friends probably want to see that growth too, which may explain why they understand your former friend’s position.

If you have never sincerely acknowledged how your comments affected her, start there.

Not: “I’m sorry you were offended, but you know I was joking.”

Not: “I’m sorry, but you’re opinionated too.”

Not: “I was only telling you the truth.”

Try: “I’ve thought about the way I commented on your decision not to have children, and I understand why you experienced it as judgment. Even when I meant something as a joke, it didn’t feel like one to you. I’m sorry I kept defending my intentions instead of listening to the impact.”

An apology does not guarantee reconciliation. It simply means you are willing to be honest about your contribution to the ending.

Ask for Civility, Not Friendship

You are allowed to tell her that repeatedly being in the same room without acknowledging one another feels uncomfortable.

Ask whether the two of you can agree to a simple hello and basic courtesy at shared events. Make it clear that you are not asking to restart the friendship or pretend nothing happened.

She may say no.

If she does, you will have useful information. You can then decide how to manage shared spaces without continually hoping she will behave differently.

Stop Putting Your Friends on the Witness Stand

Your friends have already told you where they stand. They are not ending their friendship with her.

Continuing to ask why she is invited will make every gathering feel like a loyalty test. Eventually, they may begin excluding one or both of you simply to escape the pressure.

Tell them once that the dynamic is uncomfortable. Then release them from the role of jury.

Go to the Events You Actually Want to Attend

Do not decline every invitation and then resent everyone for making memories without you.

If it is your close friend’s birthday and you want to be there, go. Say hello to the room. Sit near people who make you feel comfortable. Stop monitoring whether your former friend acknowledges you.

You are not invisible simply because one person refuses to look in your direction.

Declining an event because the environment feels emotionally exhausting is a boundary.

Declining every event in the hope that your absence will force everyone to stop inviting her is an ultimatum wearing a boundary’s coat.

Know the difference.

Strengthen the Individual Friendships

Friend groups can make us forget that relationships also exist one-on-one.

Invite your friends to dinner. Call them. Make plans that have nothing to do with the group or this conflict. Strengthen your individual connections instead of treating every brunch as a referendum on your place in their lives.

You do not have to compete for your own friendships.

THE CLOSING ARGUMENT

Your friends are not required to dislike someone because you fell out with her.

And you are not required to disappear simply because the room has become uncomfortable.

Make the apology that is owed. Ask for basic civility. Then stop feeling sorry for yourself and accept that this discomfort is partly the result of your own behavior.

You do not get to overstep, defend it, and then expect the entire friend group to enforce the consequences against her.

You may have helped bring this group together, but everyone inside it is now free to form relationships without your permission.

Go to the birthday. Order your drink. Speak to your friends. Let her be cold if cold is what she has chosen.

Her refusal to acknowledge you may be unpleasant, but it is hers to choose. Your job is to sit with that consequence without allowing it to become your disappearance.

Take accountability. Keep your seat. And keep it moving.

Case Closed.

THE DEPARTMENT WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

Is refusing to pick sides emotional maturity, or is neutrality just betrayal with better branding?

Should her friends continue inviting someone who refuses to acknowledge her?

Does being friends first mean loyalty should lie with her?

Is the former friend setting a boundary or creating a hostile environment?

What’s your verdict? Leave a comment and let us know.

SUBMIT A CASE

Have a friendship dilemma, a weird text exchange, or a situation you keep overthinking?

Submit your case to The Emo Files by sending an email to the link in our bio with the subject line: EMO FILE Submission.

Tell us what happened, give us the context, and keep it anonymous. We’ll handle the rest.

Your ex cheated on you.

Six months later, you’re rolling your eyes every time his new girlfriend posts a selfie.

That girl has never even met you.

Your cousin betrayed your trust.

Now family gatherings feel tense, and somehow their teenage daughter—the one who was 3 years old when the betrayal occurred—is also getting the cold shoulder.

A friend hurts you.

Now the friend she made after your fallout feels awkward every time you’re in the same room, and she has no idea why.

Different stories. Same pattern.

Someone hurts you. Now, people who had nothing to do with hurting you are also carrying pieces of your pain. Their only connection to the original wound is the person who caused it.

One of the most frustrating things about being hurt is that closure is never guaranteed. The apology may never come. The accountability may never come. The explanation you deserved — the one that might have made sense of everything — may never come either.

The relationship ends. The friendship ends. Sometimes even the conversation ends.

But the pain doesn’t.

It stays. It waits. And when it goes unexamined, it has a way of quietly reshaping how we see everyone connected to the person who caused it. That’s when association starts feeling like guilt. A sister becomes responsible for her brother’s behavior. A new girlfriend inherits the weight of an ex’s betrayal. A coworker becomes guilty by proximity. Someone walks into a room carrying consequences for something they had nothing to do with and the person holding them responsible doesn’t even realize it.

Because it doesn’t feel like punishment from the inside.

It feels like protection. It feels like caution. It feels like a careful, hard-won discernment that pain teaches you. And that’s often what makes it so difficult to catch in yourself — because you’re not thinking I’m punishing this person.You’re thinking I’m just protecting myself.

Those two things can feel identical. They are not.

The person on the receiving end usually feels the unfairness before they can even name it. The person creating it often never does.

And why would they? Nobody thinks of themselves as the villain in this story. Nobody wakes up and decides to make a stranger pay for someone else’s mistakes (Unless you are a Disney Villain or Mama G). The internal narrative is never that transparent. It sounds more like:

Something about them feels off. I don’t trust people connected to her. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m just being careful.

The story we tell ourselves is about discernment. About wisdom. About protecting our peace. And sometimes it is. But sometimes the story is a comfortable explanation for something we haven’t been honest enough with ourselves to examine.

This becomes easy to sustain because at the same time, the people around us rarely challenge it. We’ve all watched someone treat an innocent person poorly because of who they’re connected to and instead of naming it, we explain it away.

She’s been through a lot. It’s complicated. That’s just how they are.

But “that’s just how they are” has made a lot of innocent people feel unwelcome in rooms they had every right to be in.

It’s ended friendships.

It has created workplace tension nobody can trace back to a source.

It has fractured families across generations.

And perhaps most importantly, it has convinced people they deserved treatment they never earned.

To be clear, this article isn’t about people who actually participated in the harm.

If a friend helped cover up a betrayal, that’s different.

If a family member knew what was happening and chose silence, that’s different.

If someone actively contributed to your pain, you’re allowed to make decisions accordingly.

This is about the people whose only crime was that they happened to share a last name, a friendship, a workplace, or a timeline with the person who hurt you.

Which brings us to an uncomfortable question.

Have you ever been this person?

Think about the people you’ve written off.

The people you’ve kept at arm’s length.

The people you’ve decided you didn’t like before you got to know them.

Ask yourself one simple question:

What did they actually do?

Not who they’re related to. Not who introduced them. Not who they remind you of.

What did they actually do?

Sometimes you’ll have a real answer.

And sometimes you’ll realize you’ve been reacting to a symbol instead of a person.

There’s a difference between protecting yourself from a threat and punishing someone for reminding you of one.

One is a boundary.

The other creates a victim.

You are allowed to be angry.

You are allowed to be hurt.

You are allowed to take your healing seriously.

But pain sent in the wrong direction rarely heals anything.

It just creates new wounds.

And somewhere out there, someone is replaying every interaction they’ve had with you, trying to figure out what they did wrong.

Why you seem cold.

Why there’s tension they can’t explain.

Why they never quite feel comfortable in spaces you both occupy.

They’re doing the quiet, exhausting work of trying to fix something they didn’t break.

Because they didn’t break it.

They were simply standing too close to the person who did.

About the Author
Joan Caven is a writer, creative director, and co-founder of TGLM Media. She builds emotionally intelligent brands and cultural products that explore connection, identity, and the everyday experiences shaping women’s lives.

A text message that lands funny or a resentment quietly collecting interest in the background might look like a minor infraction to the untrained eye. But leave it alone, and suddenly it’s the reason you’re awake at 3:01 AM wondering whether you should quit your job, move to Portugal, and start over entirely.

Enter the Department of Emotional Affairs.

Think of us as your… super hot private investigators. We follow the emotional paper trail and examine the evidence behind your relationship dilemmas, workplace mysteries, friendship predicaments, and family entanglements.

After years on the job, we’ve learned that the argument is never about the dishes, and the tension is rarely about being five minutes late. It’s almost always about the thing underneath the thing.

That’s the part we’re interested in.

So grab your magnifying glass, review the case notes, and help us crack the code.

Let’s open our first file.

Filed by: Bikini Season Is a Human Right

Okay so bear with me because there’s a little backstory...

One of my closest friends has a friend I absolutely could not stand for years. The reason in hindsight is so humiliating. We dated the same guy, at the same time. I will not be taking further questions.

Anyway, we all went on vacation together last summer, had a real come-to-Jesus moment, and somehow came out the other side actually liking each other. Now we’re really close. The shared shame really bonded us.

So of course we started planning a trip for end of summer this year, just the three of us.

Then my original friend had to drop out.

She was upset. She insisted we wait until she could come, which is closer to winter. We said we couldn’t — nonrefundable flights, reservations that were hard af to book.

She said... fine.

It is not fine.

She’s been distant and weird since then. I feel it every time we talk. I can’t even bring up the trip anymore, and honestly I’m already dreading posting pictures when I’m there. I can already hear the saxophones and I haven’t even left yet.

I really want to go.

Would I have loved for her to be there? YES.

But I really wish she wouldn’t be so emotional about something that was genuinely out of our hands.

I love this friend and I don’t want to lose her over this.

But I also need her to understand that I will be shaking my ass at a beach club this summer. That part is not up for discussion.

Am I wrong for going anyway?

THE VERDICT

We’ve been through the file, and this is simply one of those experiences that is going to be awkward whichever way you swing it. There is no clean getaway here.

You are going to have to deal with your friend’s heavy energy about being left behind, and she is going to have to look her disappointment in the eye and watch two people she cares about continue with plans she desperately wanted to be part of.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s annoying. And unfortunately, it’s exactly how adult friendships sometimes grow.

There is no bypass button for this moment. The only way out is straight through, which means communication—not avoidance.

The Evidence

The tricky part is that your friend isn’t just missing a trip. She’s missing the experience she imagined having. The stories. The memories. The inside jokes. The version of the summer where all three of you were there together. That’s why this feels bigger than flights and reservations.

The absolute worst thing you can do right now is pack a suitcase full of guilt. Because frankly, what is the point of flying across the world only to shake your ass half-heartedly at a beach club? …That’s sad.

First of all, you would be full of resentment. And let’s be real—bonding with the other friend over shared resentment toward the one at home is only going to cause more drama down the line. Half-hearted joy helps no one, and gossiping in the lounge chairs will ruin the foundation of the trio completely.

If you are going to insist on being there, then you better actually have the time of your life. Your friend is allowed to feel left out. You are not required to play the villain simply because she’s hurting.

The Action Plan

• Leave Room for the Feelings: Stop expecting her to just get over it. Let her be disappointed without catching a secondary case of guilt. You can care about her feelings without taking responsibility for fixing them.

• The Thoughtful Gesture: Bring her back a gift. A gift won’t solve the emotional problem, but it will be a nice gesture that communicates care. Make it a good one. Not an airport keychain purchased in a panic fifteen minutes before boarding. Something thoughtful that says, “We missed you. We thought of you while we were here.” The trip may have happened without her, but that doesn’t mean she has to feel forgotten.

• Start Planning What’s Next: Start talking about the winter trip neoooow, or if not in winter, sometime in the future to show that you need to redo the experience with her present. Let her feel like there are more memories to make ahead, because there absolutely will be.

Give her space to process. Let her know you wish she were there. That’s all you can do and then go on the trip and have y’all a BLAST. Let her get through her feelings, without carrying them with you. The more you keep needing her to be happy so you can feel at peace, the more frustrated you both will be.

The Closing Argument

Friendships survive missed trips. They don’t survive being treated like everyone’s made of glass.

Go to the beach club. Have fun. Trust the friendship. And allow everyone involved the grace to have their feelings.

Case Closed.

THE DEPARTMENT WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

• Fair decision or friendship foul?

• Was she wrong for going on the trip?

• What would you do if you were the friend who got left behind?

SUBMIT A CASE

Have a friendship dilemma, a weird text exchange, or a situation you keep overthinking?

Submit your case to The Emo Files by sending an email to the link in our bio with the subject line: EMO FILE Submission.

Tell us what happened, give us the context, and keep it anonymous. We’ll handle the rest.

One of the hardesssst things to do is click “send” on an email containing a link to a draft you just poured your whole soul into.

You know that exact, stomach-dropping feeling. You’ve been tucked away in your own little world for months, building something from scratch—an essay, a business idea, a creative framework. Then comes the terrifying part: you decide to let someone else see it. You send the link. You wait.

Instead of the encouragement you hoped for, the response arrives:

“It’s good, but I feel like something is missing.”

“I’m not sure this is really landing.”

“Have you considered going in a completely different direction?”

In a matter of seconds, the work disappears. You’re no longer evaluating the project; you’re evaluating yourself through the borrowed eyes of someone who didn’t spend a single night staring at the ceiling trying to solve the problem. Their hesitation becomes your hesitation.

Most people think feedback hurts because criticism is painful. But what actually hurts is the temporary abandonment of self-trust. The discomfort isn’t coming from their opinion—it’s coming from the sudden, jarring distance you’ve just created between yourself and your own judgment.

The right kind of feedback can sharpen you, expand you, and push you toward excellence. But the wrong kind acts as an absolute energetic drain, leaving you editing yourself into a version that feels more acceptable to everyone else and less recognizable to yourself.

To navigate this, you need two skills: understanding your specific Growth Style, and learning how to remain connected to your own authority while someone else’s perspective is sitting in the room.

Part One: Understanding Your Growth Style

We talk about feedback as though there is one universally correct way to receive it. There isn’t. Growth has specific internal conditions. A seed requires different conditions than a cactus—neither is defective because it fails to thrive in the wrong environment.

Understanding your Growth Style isn’t about becoming sensitive; it’s about knowing the exact blueprint under which your best thinking becomes available to you.

1. The Critique-Driven Learner

The Internal Condition: To you, clarity is the highest form of kindness, and vagueness feels like a waste of time. When someone points out a weakness, your first instinct is not defensiveness but curiosity. You view your work as separate from your identity, allowing you to look at a flaw without taking it as an insult.

• The Ideal Delivery: Blunt, structural, and straight to the point.

• How to ask for it: “Don’t hold back—what is the weakest part of this right now, and how would you strengthen it?”

• The Trap: Over-exposure to negativity. Constant demolition is not the same thing as growth. If every room you enter focuses exclusively on improvement, you will slowly lose the joy of creating.

2. The Encouragement-Driven Learner

The Internal Condition: For you, confidence is literal fuel. You do not grow in environments that focus exclusively on your deficits. If someone only points out what isn’t working without acknowledging the genius of what is, your nervous system goes into a defensive freeze. You expand when your strengths are used as the solid ground for your improvements.

• The Ideal Delivery: Balanced, collaborative, and framed through what is already working.

• How to ask for it: “What feels strongest here, and where could I bring more of that same energy to improve the rest?”

• The Trap: Tolerating hyper-critical environments out of a false belief that you need to “toughen up.” Many people confuse criticism with intelligence. You are not weak because encouragement helps you thrive; you simply know what keeps the engine running.

3. The Expansion-Oriented Learner

The Internal Condition: You are rarely interested in becoming slightly better; you want to become significantly bigger. Safe, conventional feedback leaves you feeling empty because it solves minor problems without opening larger doors. You want feedback that transforms the work and pushes you into spaces of creative risk.

• The Ideal Delivery: Future-focused, big-picture, and intentionally challenging.

• How to ask for it: “What would this look like if I pushed the concept much further? Where am I playing it too safe?”

• The Trap: Asking people with limited visions to evaluate expansive horizons. Many people can identify what is wrong, but far fewer can recognize what an idea is trying to become. Stop asking for feedback from people who prefer safety—they will only pull your big ideas down to a size they can comfortably manage.

4. The Reflective Learner

The Internal Condition: You process information deeply, slowly, and entirely in isolation. Immediate, real-time critique feels like an invasive disruption to your internal monologue. The value of an observation doesn’t arrive in the moment; it arrives hours or days later. You need open-ended questions that allow you to step back and locate the solution within your own timing.

• The Ideal Delivery: Question-based, spacious, and thought-provoking.

• How to ask for it: “What questions came up for you while reviewing this? Leave your notes with me so I can sit with them.”

• The Trap: Forced compliance. Because you need time to think, you often feel pressure to agree with someone’s critique on the spot just to end the tension. Mistaking urgency for importance will kill your vision. You are allowed to think before you decide.

The Real-World Friction: Most people give feedback according to the way they prefer receiving it. A Critique-Driven Learner can sound incredibly harsh to an Encouragement-Driven Learner. The point of understanding your style isn’t to control how other people communicate—it’s to stop personalizing every mismatch. Sometimes an uncomfortable interaction is just evidence that two people speak entirely different growth languages.

Part Two: Calibrating the Filter

Feedback is never an ultimate authority. It is simply raw data. One of the most liberating realizations you can have is understanding that feedback is not a verdict descending from a mountaintop. It is simply evidence of an encounter.

A person met your work carrying their own history, preferences, and fears, then reported back what happened inside them during that collision. In reality, feedback is something you interpret, test, and place beside your own internal authority before deciding whether it deserves to influence the vision.

To keep your filter calibrated, implement these five rules:

1. Separate the Work From the Soul

Feedback is an observation about something you created; it is not a measurement of your worth. When criticism lands particularly hard, create immediate distance by asking: “What exactly is being evaluated right now? The mechanics of this project, or my value as a person?” The work is allowed to have weaknesses; that does not mean you are weak.

2. Sift for the Gold, Leave the Residue

Some of the most useful feedback you’ll ever receive will arrive in terrible packaging. The person giving it may be clumsy, blunt, or lack emotional intelligence. Your job is not to police whether their delivery was perfect; your job is to locate the gold. Take the insight, and leave their tone and frustration on the floor.

3. Recognize the Autobiography

Not all feedback is actually feedback. Sometimes it is pure autobiography. A person who abandoned their own creative ambitions will almost always encourage you to play it safe. Someone deeply uncomfortable with visibility will question your desire to be seen. Before accepting a critique, ask yourself: “Am I receiving insight, or am I receiving someone else’s history?”

4. Build an Exit Ramp Before You React

Not every opinion deserves immediate access to your nervous system. When a comment triggers a defensive spike, that is your cue to pause. You do not need to explain, justify, or argue on the spot. Give yourself a boundary phrase and use it immediately: “I appreciate your perspective on this. Let me sit with it for a bit and see how it fits.” Then walk away and let the dust settle.

5. Treat Your Vision as a Premium Service

There is a highly vulnerable stage where an idea barely knows its own name. It exists more as a vague feeling than a fully formed thing. This is exactly when people panic and begin collecting opinions from a friend, a coworker, or a group chat—and then wonder why the original vision becomes impossible to locate.

Every opinion leaves fingerprints. Access and authority are not the same thing. Just because someone has been invited to look at the work does not mean they should be handed the blueprint to redesign it. Stop offering your vision to rooms that cannot afford the price of admission.

The Takeaway

The ultimate goal isn’t becoming better at taking feedback. The goal is becoming secure enough within your own skin that feedback can arrive without knocking you off your center.

It is about learning how to remain teachable without becoming easily influenced. To remain deeply open without becoming porous. To remain humble without abandoning your own judgment.

Confidence was never meant to come from unanimous approval. True confidence is knowing how to stay in a committed relationship with yourself while other people are offering their perspectives. The most powerful women listen carefully, discern thoughtfully, refine what needs refining, protect what needs protecting, and remember that no matter how many opinions enter the room, the final responsibility belongs to the person holding the vision.

The work is yours. The growth is yours. And no one else gets to dictate how far you are capable of taking either one.

About the Author

Doreen Caven is the co-founder of The Girls Like Me, a writer, and a creative strategist. Her work explores emotional power, self-approval, and the internal shifts that shape how women live, create, and see themselves.

There are people you can spend three hours with and leave feeling lighter, sharper, more like yourself.

And then there are those people who somehow leave you feeling:

• Vaguely embarrassed for no clear reason

• Emotionally disorganized

• Defensive over things you can’t quite name

• Like you need to replay the entire conversation in the shower later

Nothing “bad” actually needs to happen to feel this way after hanging with these people. I mean, there is no screaming. No obvious disrespect. No dramatic betrayal.

But for whatever reason, your nervous system feels something and quietly leaves the function before your body does.

I think a lot of emotionally perceptive women know this feeling intimately. The problem is that most of us were never taught how to identify subtle emotional dynamics unless they became undeniably toxic. So, we dismiss ourselves and we say things like: “Maybe I’m overthinking” or “Maybe they didn’t mean it like that” and my favorite “Maybe I’m just too sensitive”

And all the while, your body is doing its best to submit a formal incident report.

Sometimes “Weird” Is Information

Feeling weird after your interaction with someone is not nothing. Weird is your first draft of the truth, before you talked yourself out of it.

Remember that your nervous system is not dramatic. It doesn’t manufacture discomfort for fun. So when something feels off after an interaction, that feeling is your pattern recognition working, quietly cataloguing tone shifts, energy withdrawals, and moments where the room tilted slightly in a direction you didn’t choose.

Weird is just what we call it before we have better words.

Why You Feel Drained After Conversations

Your nervous system is keeping score even when you aren’t.

That’s why certain interactions linger long after they’re over. You leave brunch and suddenly feel insecure about things you were perfectly fine with two hours ago. You share good news and somehow end up feeling like you need to downplay it. You open a text and immediately feel tension in your chest — despite the message technically sounding “normal”.

Nothing you could point to. Everything you can feel.

A lot of emotional dynamics work this way — through implication, tone, timing, energy shifts, strategic distance, subtle dismissals. Not dramatic moments but small ones repeated consistently until your body starts bracing before your brain even knows why.

And most of us were taught to override that signal entirely. To be polite. To be fair. To give the benefit of the doubt so many times that we stopped having any doubt left to give.

Common Emotional Dynamics That Are Hard to Name

When you can feel the pattern but you don’t have words for it, it can keep you stuck. Without language, we can’t make clear decisions and this keeps us negotiating with our own intuition.

Here are a few dynamics that are more common than most people admit:

Soft competition — When someone in your life consistently reframes your wins as a comparison opportunity. You got a promotion; they mention their salary. You’re excited about a trip; they describe a better one. There’s no direct put-down, just a persistent redirection of attention.

Performative support — Showing up for the parts of your life that are publicly visible while being strangely unavailable for the parts that actually cost something. Present for the celebration. Absent for the crisis.

Selective availability — Someone who is warm and engaged when they need something from you, and vague or slow-to-respond when you need something from them. Not ghosting. Not absence. Just a very calculated distance.

Emotional labor imbalance — You manage their feelings. They do not manage yours. You track their moods, soften your delivery, and edit yourself constantly. They do not return the consideration. Over time, this gap becomes the texture of the entire relationship.

Access without accountability — They have consistent access to your time, energy, and emotional investment but have never taken responsibility for the ways they’ve impacted you. You remain available; the dynamic never gets addressed.

None of these are dramatic. All of them are exhausting.

Why You Keep Dismissing Yourself (And How to Stop)

The reason emotionally intelligent people often stay in confusing dynamics the longest is precisely because of their emotional intelligence. They’re good at understanding other people’s perspectives. They can always find a generous explanation. They’re practiced at patience.

Which means their threshold for naming something as a problem is higher than it should be.

If this is you, here’s the recalibration:

• Confusion is data

• Tension is data

• Recurring emotional exhaustion is data

You do not have to build a court case before you’re allowed to trust your own experience. Sometimes the issue isn’t that you’re “too sensitive”. Sometimes your emotional pattern recognition is functioning perfectly.

How to Stop Feeling Bad After Talking to Certain People

The most powerful thing you can do is name the pattern. Not to build a case. Not to label anyone a villain. You stop negotiating with your own intuition once you can call it (whatever strange feeling you are having) by its name.

Language creates clarity. Clarity creates choice. Choice creates agency.

That sequence — from vague discomfort to clear decision — is entirely dependent on having the right words.

Once you can say “ oh this is soft competition” or “this is definitely access without accountability”, you stop spending energy trying to figure out if something happened. You already know what happened. Now you can decide what to do about it.

In Conclusion…

Sometimes the most validating thing in the world is realizing: “Oh my God. That’s exactly what this is!”

Which is why we created Is There A Word For This?

We wanted language for the strange emotional dynamics women experience constantly but struggle to explain clearly.

Not clinical therapy language. Not vague “protect your peace” advice.

Actual words for:

• Selective availability

• Soft competition

• Performative support

• Delayed boundaries

• Emotional labor imbalance

• Access without accountability

Because once you can identify a dynamic clearly, you can finally decide what to do with it intentionally — instead of sitting in emotional fog trying to convince yourself nothing happened. Which, unfortunately, many of us have a PhD in.

[Get Is There A Word For This? →] A digital reference guide to the emotional dynamics women experience but rarely have words for.

It…being that thing that used to make your life feel like yours.

Problem is, you’ve been saying that for about two years now.

So, what’s up?

Genuinely. Because from the outside, nothing is.

You wake up. You move through your day. You answer emails. You make plans. You show up to dinners where people laugh and even say, “Omg…I love your life.” You smile. You nod. You agree.

Because on paper, it’s true. This is the life you wanted.

You have the vision board receipts to prove it. The journal entries. The “five year plan” you actually stuck to. You mapped this out. The career, the city, the version of yourself you were working toward. You were methodical about it in a way most people aren’t.

Which is exactly why it’s so hard to explain. Everything checks out. Nothing is missing. And yet something is.

It feels ungrateful to even acknowledge the glitch. You tell yourself you’re being spoiled, or dramatic, or that you’re inventing problems. So you suppress the disconnect and keep moving.

And when it does show up, it’s not loud about it. There’s no crash or dramatic breaking point. It’s smaller than that.

It’s more like opening your calendar and feeling a flicker of resistance to things you chose. Or looking at the career you built… or the home you curated—the one with the exact linen sheets and the “right” zip code—and realizing you don’t remember the last time you felt truly rested inside of it. It’s also hitting a milestone and immediately moving on instead of sitting in it or being in the middle of a “good moment” and noticing, quietly, that you’re not fully there.

You’re not unhappy or overwhelmed. You are just… not inside it.

It’s like your life is happening slightly in front of you. Like your life is happening to you.

The choices that got you here were good ones.

Smart ones. Thought-through ones. Choices that made sense to everyone — including you.

You made those choices — but as a specific version of yourself.

This version came with certain fears. Certain priorities. Certain ideas about what would make her feel secure, respected, impressive, safe.

…but while that self built this life carefully, she didn’t know you’d eventually have to live inside it after you stopped being her.

Because you stopped being her.

But when?

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly.

Through things you outgrew, learned, or stopped needing to prove.

Your instincts shifted. Your tolerance changed. And what impresses you now is quite different from what impressed you then.

And the life around you never got the update. It’s still running on the old version of you… which creates a particular kind of loneliness: being celebrated for a version of yourself that no longer exists.

It doesn’t feel like failure. It doesn’t feel like burnout either. It doesn’t feel like much of anything you can point to — which makes it very easy to ignore and nearly impossible to describe.

Because what would you even say?

“I think my life makes sense but doesn’t feel like mine anymore” is not exactly a clean complaint.

So you don’t say it. You just keep going. And quietly, underneath all of it, something stays unresolved.

There’s actually a name for this.

Identity lag. (Kinda anticlimactic name for something that’s been quietly reorganizing your entire inner life, but here we are.)

It’s what happens when your life keeps moving on the timeline you set but your sense of self has already moved somewhere else. The milestones keep coming. The structure holds. Everything looks like progress. But the person hitting those marks isn’t quite the same as the one who set them, and somewhere underneath the functioning and the excelling, you feel that.

Identity lag shows up in the pause before committing to something you used to want without thinking. It’s the strange flatness after a win. It’s the way your own routines start to feel like they belong to a stranger.

It isn’t loud enough to be a “problem,” but it’s present enough to make your existence feel like a performance.

The hardest part isn’t the lag itself. It’s that nothing in your environment will tell you it’s happening. You have to notice it yourself.

And once you do — once you really do — a question tends to follow.

Would I choose this again?

As the person you actually are today… not the person you were taught to be, or the person you were when you started.

That question shifts everything because it doesn’t let you hide behind gratitude or logic. It’s not asking whether your life is good. It’s asking whether it’s still yours.

And if that question makes you pause… pay attention to that. You already know more than you’re saying.

About the Author
Joan Caven is a writer, creative director, and co-founder of TGLM Media. She builds emotionally intelligent brands and cultural products that explore connection, identity, and the everyday experiences shaping women’s lives.

So much of being alive is fighting past the scarcity mindset we were conditioned to absorb from the moment we opened our eyes. It’s everywhere. Parents raised the same way. TV blasting the same messages. Schools reinforcing the same teachings. Most of us have sat with a pressure in our chest, never feeling quite enough, always feeling distant from the perfection that seems just out of reach, a spot only a few can attain.

It could have started from being a younger sibling and realizing that to be seen, you needed to be as good as or better than someone ahead of you. Maybe it’s watching the news and absorbing how people of your race are treated as a little less than other groups. Or realizing that the boys in your class are met with far less judgment and suspicion than the girls doing the exact same thing. It could be that your friend somehow attracts more people her way because she is called pretty.

In so many ways, you learn that life operates in a hierarchy. And the default option you’re trained into is standing on the balance beam, hoping to tip yourself into the higher position.

The Machine

Comparison is just what we do. And once we enter the game, we become major players.

You feel a wash of panic when you realize you have to pick a favorite color. You choose a favorite player, a favorite team, a favorite member of a girl group. The freedom to enjoy variety is nowhere near as celebrated as the act of selecting your allegiance. It goes on and on until you are so deep in it that life begins to look like that. Everything becomes an option, every choice carries enormous weight, and whatever you didn’t choose starts to feel like a loss.

There was a moment I can trace it back to.

My Sagittarius self, still very much operating inside this mindset, but starting to think for myself a little. I remember realizing that just because everyone preferred something a certain way didn’t mean I had to. I could like something else. And the reaction to that felt disproportionate. As if choosing one thing automatically made another thing wrong. As if preference had to come with judgment attached to it.

No, I would insist. This just works for me.

But that’s not how it works for a lot of us. We are trained to believe that selecting one thing means disqualifying another. That liking something has to come with a quiet hierarchy built into it. Even when we are the ones being chosen within that system, there is often that small, almost automatic thrill. The one that whispers that being selected means being better.

And that is the part that runs deep.

The idea that everything has a place and is equally great, even if just different, is not something we train for. We train to feel a loss when the thing we prefer isn’t centered. And we train to feel a small thrill when we are the one selected. Because that’s what this world is built on: pitting great things against each other so we remain fragmented by comparison instead of strengthened by our differences.

Whether you win or lose within that mindset, you have already lost, because you were insecure enough to notice and question. That takes you out of just living and into performing a version of yourself you’ve defined, which is always more limited than the vastness of what’s actually possible.

What it costs everyone

The hierarchy mindset doesn’t only hollow out the people at the bottom. It hollows out everyone who believes in it.

The ones who are not favored and still believe in the hierarchy lose access to themselves, constantly measuring, constantly adjusting, performing a version of who they are rather than discovering who they might actually be.

But the ones who are favored and still believe in the hierarchy carry their own tax. Being preferred, being at the top, means living with a permanent low hum of fear. Fear of losing the position. Fear of the effort required to maintain it. The enjoyment that comes with being chosen is more performed than deeply felt, because peace is much harder to access when there is so much internal paranoia and perceived hostility surrounding you.

The Garden

I’ve been working hard to rid myself of this programming. Small corrections in the way I speak, the way I look at things I like. I can be more drawn to one thing without that making another thing lesser.

And on the flip side, learning to accept not being the favorite. Not letting rejection define me or stop me from trying entirely. Breaking, inch by inch, out of the hierarchy mindset so I don’t stay blind to all that is in front of me. I want to be able to enjoy variety, and I want to do so without needing the quick fix of comparison to create fake value that ends up costing me.

Imagine walking into a garden and refusing to enjoy the flowers unless you find the specific type you came there for. Everything becomes ugly and boring when you are that fixated on one thing. You walked into something beautiful and missed it entirely, looking for one kind and overlooking everything else.

How tragic. It’s actually kind of sad, because here’s the truth: when you practice noticing what’s good about other people’s lives, their work, their choices, even when it has nothing to do with you, you train your mind to recognize value in general. And that makes it easier to see your own, especially in moments when no one is pointing it out.

It works the other way too. If you’re constantly picking people apart or assuming the worst about them, you don’t just leave that mindset out there. You carry it back onto yourself. You start thinking that’s how people are seeing you too.

But when you let yourself appreciate what’s good in others without comparing it to yourself, just enjoying it for what it is, you build a more generous way of seeing. And that same lens naturally includes you. You don’t need to be the one chosen to feel solid. You can recognize what works for someone else and still keep showing up as yourself, still put in effort, still let yourself shine.

There is so much more enjoyment and freedom when you are not monitoring, measuring, and comparing. There is no real winning there. That’s the trick that keeps you small, restless, and constantly reaching. Because the hierarchy is there to taunt you. To teach you that once something is better, you must be worse. That your role is to adjust accordingly. To shrink. To behave. To know your place.

But once you step outside of that mindset, you start to see people differently too. No longer as the judge and jury of hierarchy placement. When someone looks at you and immediately places you beneath them, it no longer feels defining. It feels revealing. They are not seeing you fully. They are seeing you through a system they also exist inside of. A sorting mindset that has already reduced everything, including themselves, into categories.

And that system has limits.

So you don’t respond to it. You don’t correct it. You don’t fight to be repositioned within it. You just keep moving. You keep doing what you do. You keep shining.

And that’s the part that unsettles people. Because your refusal to stay where they’ve placed you exposes something. That the structure they are operating within is not as fixed as they thought. That it requires participation to hold. And even for the ones at the top, it was never as fulfilling as it was supposed to be.

When you stop needing to win the comparison to feel worthy, you stop needing the comparison at all. And that is the exit. Not ranking higher. Not finally being preferred. Just stepping off the scale entirely.

And then there is the resentment people carry toward those who seem to live outside of it. The ones still living, regardless of where they’ve been placed, or what they’ve chosen. For many of us who have lived into our 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, driven by a desire to live as our true selves, this will feel extremely familiar. Following the pull toward a path that isn’t the hierarchy’s favorite and dealing with the resentment that comes with it.

Maybe you chose something different than what was expected. Maybe you decided you don’t want children, and your life keeps getting treated like a phase to correct. Maybe you’re openly queer in a deeply traditional family, and people treat your honesty like it’s something they have to recover from. Maybe you’re not religious in a deeply religious family, and every gathering turns into the same conversation. Or maybe it’s something else. Choosing a life you don’t expect anyone else to join you in.

And because of that, you’ve experienced it. The resentment. The bullying. The loud, sometimes shocking dismay people express when you step outside of the hierarchy system prescribed by your family, your friends, or your immediate society. You’ve sat in those moments where your life becomes a discussion. Where your choices are picked apart, measured, and evaluated. Where people try to place you back into something that makes sense to them.

You can feel it happening. That shift from being a person to being positioned. And if you’re honest, you can feel the pull to explain yourself. To soften it. To make it more acceptable. To find a way to still be understood within the structure they recognize.

What you’re witnessing, more often than not, is grief.

If you get to exist fully outside of the hierarchy and still feel joy, the hierarchy starts to lose its authority. That is a hard thing to sit with when your life has been shaped around earning your place within it. Your life begins to read as a contradiction to everything they organized themselves around. Your ease feels offensive. Your choices feel like rejection. Your joy feels like proof that something about the system might not be true.

So the reaction becomes bigger than you. What you represent unsettles something. You are not just living differently. You are showing that it was always an option. And that is where the grief lives. Not in you, but in the realization that the life they built may not have been the only way to live.

The weight of the world’s expectations only exists if you agree to carry the scale. When you finally set it down, the world doesn’t end; it begins. You realize that you were never a rank to be assigned or a category to be filled. You were always a garden, meant to grow in every direction at once, accountable to nothing but the light.

The trick of the hierarchy is making you believe that “better” is the goal, when the goal has always been “free.” You don’t need to win a game that was designed to keep you small. You just need to walk away from the table. Walk away from it, look around at the vastness of what’s left, and finally, for the first time, just breathe.

Because the ultimate gag isn’t that you finally won… it’s that you realized you never had to play.

About the Author
Doreen Caven is co-founder of The Girls Like Me and writes about emotional power, self-approval, culture, and the internal shifts that shape how women live, create, and see themselves.

One of the most important things I have learned about creation, and I mean real creation, building TGLM from the inside out, chasing ideas before they have a name, pouring yourself into them until they feel alive, executing on faith, pivoting in real time, holding the whole thing together with your bare hands, is that there is a time to sit with the work and a time to step away from it.

And learning to tell the difference, really tell the difference, not just intellectually but in your body, in your gut, that might be the whole thing.

Because here is what happens when you don’t know.

You step away because you need to. Because something in you knows the work needs space, that you need space, that forcing it right now would produce something hollow. A caption that sounds like everyone else. An essay that moves but does not land. A version of the thing that looks finished but does not feel true.

And instead of trusting that, you turn on yourself.

You call it laziness. Avoidance. You decide you are not disciplined enough, not serious enough, not the kind of person who can actually see something through. You build a whole case against yourself out of what was actually just rest.

And then you try to create from inside that case. From inside that story about who you are. You open the document anyway. You stare at it. You produce something just to prove you can, and it costs you more than it gives.

Creating from inside that story doesn’t move the work forward. It just makes the distance between you and it feel permanent.

How you arrive matters.

Not just what you produce. How you get there. What it costs you. Whether you recognize yourself inside the work when it is done. Whether the essay still sounds like you. Whether the idea still has the thing in it that made you want to make it in the first place.

That is the part nobody talks about.

Everyone talks about the output. The post, the launch, the numbers, the next thing. Nobody talks about what it does to you to get there the wrong way. Using a general guide that was never built for the way your mind moves. Borrowing someone else’s process and wondering why it does not fit, why you feel behind even when you are producing, why the work feels like something you are managing instead of something you are making. Pushing through conditions you do not understand because you thought pushing harder was the only way through.

It is not.

The relationship to the work matters.

Your moments of rest are not evidence of your limitations. They are part of the process. The week you do not post. The idea you cannot crack yet. The version of the thing you delete because it is not right and you know it is not right even if you cannot say why.

The seasons where nothing seems to be moving are often where the most important things are forming. In ways you will not be able to name until later. Until the piece comes out whole. Until the framework suddenly has language. Until you realize the pivot you made six months ago was not a detour, it was the direction.

Sometimes you have to change to create the work. Sometimes the work changes you first. Sometimes it moves in directions you did not plan before it becomes itself.

You already knew some of this.

You felt it in the ideas that arrived at the wrong time, when you were tired, when the runway was short, when the conditions were not right but the thing showed up anyway. You felt it in the projects that took longer than they should have and were better for it. In the launches you held back because something was not ready, even when the calendar said go.

But you had not built enough authority in yourself yet to trust it. You did not have language for what you were inside.

So you second-guessed it. You overrode it. You called it confusion when it was actually your own flow moving the way it moves.

Your flow does not move in an orderly sequence. It never did.

And that was never the problem. The problem was not having a framework that honored that. That named it. That helped you locate yourself inside it instead of measuring yourself against someone else’s version of how this is supposed to go.

That is why we built the Creation Anthology.

Not a system. Seven emotional conditions of creating, so you can sit with them, find yourself inside them, and build the kind of authority in yourself that lets you trust what you already know.

Because aligned creation is not about following a process.

It is emotional intelligence in action. It is knowing which room you are in. It is understanding what that room needs from you, not what a productivity framework says you should do, not what worked for someone else, but what this room, your work, this moment, is actually asking of you.

That is the work.

And it is worth doing right.

Before the Anthology drops, we wanted to give you a way in.

What Room Are You In? is a free guided tool built on a simple idea: that what you’ve been experiencing in your creative process isn’t random, and it isn’t a personal failing. It has a shape.

This is a way to locate yourself inside it. To see where you are, and understand what you’re in.

You’re not off track. You’re in a room.

What Room Are You In? is just a glimpse into the The Creation Anthology ( on sale tomorrow) where it lives in full. Seven rooms. Seven emotional conditions of creation. The language, the framework, the depth. Everything you have been reaching for when you could not explain why the work felt the way it felt.

Join the waitlist to access the What Room Are You In? tool for free, plus a special launch price for the Creation Anthology.

→ Get What Room Are You In? free right here. [LINK]

One of the most difficult places to find yourself is at a crossroads with a beloved friendship. It is an even harder place to be when the reason you have reached this level of purgatory is not because you and your friend had a falling out. Hurtful as that can be, at least it makes sense.

No. It is far more excruciating when you can no longer bear witness to her relationship with a toxic romantic partner.

Because you hate him with a burning passion. And she is fully aware that you do. And also, sort of the reason why you do.

Over the course of the scourge that has been their relationship, she has bombarded you with story after story of his cruelty, selfishness, and narcissism. And frankly, you have had enough. Enough of him. Enough of the stories. And enough of nothing ever being enough to justify the end of their god awful relationship.

You have had moments of hope when it seemed like this could finally be it. Surely he could do no worse.

You have been on the phone for hours with her, listening, praying with her, lifting her up and pouring life back into her. Crafting the perfect breakup texts. Planning “girl fuck him” vacations. Imagining futures where she returns to the carefree version of herself you remember so well.

You have fantasized about seeing your friend come back to life.

Alas, the dream never seems to come to fruition. Back again she goes into the arms of Hades, and somehow you are expected to be right there beside her, playing the recurring role of trauma dump bucket.

Well fuck that.

This time you refuse to be part of this toxic fucking cycle. Even if she has not yet, you have finally reached your limit.

And you know what. You are not wrong for getting there. In fact, let me be the first one to assure you that you are not alone. You are exactly where so many good friends have unfortunately found themselves.

Contrary to popular belief, it does not make you a bad friend for needing to take a break from it all.

You are not a bad friend for no longer wanting to sit in the front row of this shit show.

There is an unrealistic expectation that our friends are meant to be endless sources of comfort. A permanent shoulder. Ever present for us to continually dump our problems upon.

And while having a friend willing to listen to us moan, wail, cry, whine, and dissect our problems from every possible angle is a true blessing, it is not one we should ever feel entitled to.

Because our friends are humans too.

They have a reasonable limit for how much they can take. They do not exist solely to be listening ears for our problems. They also have their own lives happening in tandem and are carrying their own burdens too.

And while they may happily support us, offer advice, and hold space for our heartbreak, we must also recognize the sacrifice behind their care and concern.

Because treating them as someone who is only good enough to vent to, but not actually listen to, makes all their efforts feel irrelevant. Like a waste of their time.

They feel disrespected. Ignored. Unimportant.

And our friendships should mean more to us than that.

If you are reading this and feel slightly taken aback by the idea that your friends’ feelings actually matter when it comes to the decisions you make with your romantic partners, good. I am glad I can introduce this concept to you.

It is called prioritizing all the relationships in your life, not just the one you have with your romantic partner.

In a society where we have only recently begun acknowledging that romantic relationships do not trump all others, it is no wonder there is so much pushback when anyone dares to criticize your own.

Who here has lived the experience of being branded a secret hater for calling out the behavior of a loved one’s boyfriend, only for it to be proven right later?

And to speak even more honestly, perhaps we too have been on the opposite end. Wondering why one of our friends is going so hard against a partner and wishing they would just stop.

Some of us have even fallen out for good over daring to say something direct.

No one wants to be branded the embittered evil witch for speaking up.

So many of us sit biting our tongues, hoping to do more than give watered down versions of what we really want to say.

It is literally purgatory until you decide that being a good friend is not worth your silence, your pretense, your performance, or your presence if it does not allow you to be free.

And yet the moment you choose yourself, by speaking, by stepping back, by being absent, the bad friend label rises up anyway.

To be fair, there are reasons that label is applied so easily.

In relationships with toxic partners, the likelihood that some form of abuse is occurring is exceedingly high. Even if it is not physical, the cycle of extreme lows and fleeting highs alone often signals emotional abuse.

You can barely recognize your carefree friend anymore. She is being stripped of her self worth right before your eyes.

She is caught in a cycle.

And she has been exposed to such consistent levels of disrespect that escalation barely registers anymore. What feels shocking to you feels normal to her. What feels intolerable to you feels like just another chapter of their unique love story.

“You just don’t understand.”

To most people, walking away from your friend when she is clearly in a low place can look like abandonment. This is when you are supposed to be the beacon of light. Constant. Strong. Guiding her away from this wretched place.

But here is the part people rarely acknowledge.

You already did that.

For months. For years.

You served your time.

And now your own light is barely flickering.

So now you find yourself at a crossroads. You love your friend and want the best for her, but you no longer want to be as invested in her life decisions as you have been.

You need to pull back.

You need your energy back.

You need to invest in your own life.

And you have every right to want and do all those things.

There comes a point in life where you learn that you cannot force people to do what they are not ready to do.

Their lives belong to them.

While you may share parts of your life together, you cannot live their reality for them. Your purpose on this earth is to live your own life and experience your own reality.

If that means emotionally disengaging from the choices your friend continues to make, then that is exactly what you should do.

Because she is fully attuned to her own emotional needs and the needs of her romantic partner.

She is not thinking about yours.

Once you embrace a path of disengagement, the chances that your relationship with your friend will shift are high. The pattern of her venting to you, unloading her pain, and then reuniting with her partner mirrors the very cycle she is trapped in.

Your disengagement may feel jarring because it interrupts the rhythm she has grown accustomed to.

And in my experience, there is no delicate way to disengage.

Especially if you confront the situation head on and communicate that you are no longer willing to listen to her vent fruitlessly unless she is truly ready to accompany it with permanent action.

She may feel hurt by your honesty and pull away. And if she does, that is okay.

Advice is only well received when someone is ready to hear it.

She may need time to reach that conclusion herself. It is not your responsibility to drag her there.

Disengaging is also a way to avoid becoming that overly invested friend who slowly morphs into the preachy and judgmental one.

Being there for your friend also means allowing her to live the choices she makes. There is only so much you can do after giving your advice.

You showed up. You cared. You said what needed to be said.

Sometimes that has to be enough.

Because we love our friends, and because we are less entangled in the dynamic, we often see things they cannot see as clearly. As much as we might wish to be their eyes, we cannot be. Forcing them to move the way we think they should only pulls us deeper into outcomes that are not ours to live.

Sometimes people have to arrive at an insight on their own. It is that realization, the moment when the pattern finally becomes undeniable, that allows them to break it. Our insistence that they follow our way may actually slow that lesson down.

One of the most difficult things we are sometimes called to do as friends and family is step back energetically and allow people to grow at their own pace.

But if you have made the difficult decision to do that, there is also a lesson on the other side of it.

Just as your friend is allowed to be present for the life she has chosen, you are also allowed to be absent from what has become too heavy for you.

Your lesson in that dynamic is learning how to send your best intentions without remaining a muted but ever present part of the show.

Let her know you love her and that you will always be there for her, but that you need a break from being so emotionally invested in this cycle.

You may not receive the understanding response you hope for.

But it is far better to have one honest uncomfortable conversation than to let resentment build until one day you say something so sharp it drives a deeper wedge between the two of you.

About the Author
Doreen Caven is co-founder of The Girls Like Me and writes about emotional power, self-approval, culture, and the internal shifts that shape how women live, create, and see themselves.

And if you’ve ever tried to build something, a project, a business, a body of work, even a version of your life you actually want, you already know this.

Some days the work feels electric. Ideas are moving, things are connecting, and you’re quietly convinced you might actually be onto something.

Other days you open the same document, look at the same project, and think: What was I even trying to do here?

You question the idea.
You question the direction.
Sometimes you question yourself.

Most people interpret this as inconsistency. A sign that something is wrong with them or with the work.

But creation moves through conditions. And the conditions shift, sometimes within the same week, sometimes within the same day.

The strange thing is that almost everyone experiences this. But very few people have language for what they’re inside of while they’re building. So when the conditions change, it feels like failure instead of process.

That’s why we started thinking about the creative process as rooms.

Not stages you graduate from. Not a linear path with a clear destination. Rooms. Different interior conditions the work moves through while it’s becoming what it’s going to be.

Sometimes you stay in one longer than you expected.
Sometimes you return to one you thought you’d already left.
Sometimes two exist at once.

Below are a few notes from inside some of them. Not instructions. Just honest observations from being in the process.

Room I — Where Creation Breathes

Before the work can be good, it has to be allowed to exist.

A lot of people skip this part. They want the work to prove something immediately, that it’s valuable, that it’s impressive, that it justifies the time they’re giving it.

But creativity collapses under that kind of pressure. When the work is responsible for saving you, financially, emotionally, professionally, the act of making it becomes something else entirely.

The work gets lighter once it stops being responsible for saving you.

Room II — Where Clarity Lives

People talk about clarity like it arrives before the work begins. Like you’re supposed to have it figured out before you start.

In reality, clarity forms slowly. Through the act of staying with something long enough to see what it actually is.

You start with something rough, a direction, a curiosity, a feeling that something might be there. And then you stay with it long enough to find out what survives contact with real work.

Most ideas sound convincing at first. The real ones are the ones that keep revealing more the longer you work on them.

Also worth noting from this room.

Some ideas just return. You try to move on. You start something else. You convince yourself it wasn’t practical anyway.

And then months later, or a year later, there it is again.

Those are usually worth paying attention to. Not every returning idea is the one, but the ones that matter have a way of refusing to disappear.

Room III — Where Trust Is Built

This is the room where almost everyone panics.

Because nothing looks like progress yet. You’re showing up. You’re working. But there’s nothing visible to point to. Nothing impressive to show.

This is the stage where people quietly abandon things, not because the work isn’t working, but because they can’t see it working yet.

What’s easy to miss is that something important is forming here. Judgment. Discernment. A steadiness that no outcome can give you.

Roots grow before anything blooms.

Room IV — Where the Work Becomes Itself

One of the hardest creative instincts to develop is knowing when not to share something yet.

Not every stage of the work is meant to be visible. Some parts of the process exist only so the work can quietly change shape, so it can become what it’s actually trying to be before it meets the world.

Sharing too early doesn’t just risk misunderstanding. It risks your belief in the work before that belief is strong enough to hold its own.

Some ideas need privacy while they’re forming. Not secrecy. Just space.

Room V — Where Growth Gets Honest

When the work starts to grow, people assume the doubt disappears.

It doesn’t. It changes shape.

Early on, you wonder whether you’re capable at all. Whether you have what it takes. Whether the idea is even good.

Later the question becomes more specific. Can I keep this aligned with what made it worth doing in the first place?

Growth makes the work bigger. It also makes the decisions sharper. And the version of you that started the work isn’t always the version being asked to sustain it.

That gap is worth paying attention to.

Room VI — Where Imagination Is Free

This room is interesting because imagination almost always arrives before the audience does.

You had an idea when it was just yours. Before anyone had an opinion about it. Before you knew who it was for or how it would work.

Then slowly practicality enters the room. You start thinking about what people will understand. What will land. What seems achievable. What feels safe enough to try.

Sometimes that improves the work. It gives it shape, focus, a reason to exist in the world.

And sometimes it quietly edits out the instinct that made it yours.

Room VII — Where Everything Belongs

Eventually something becomes clear that isn’t always obvious at the start.

Creative work rarely comes from a single version of you.

The disciplined version shows up some days. The impulsive one shows up others. Some days you know exactly what you’re making. Other days you’re figuring it out as you go.

For a long time, that can feel like a problem. Like you haven’t figured yourself out yet.

But integration isn’t choosing which version is the real one.

It’s building enough capacity to let them all create.

These are the seven rooms.

What you’ve read here is one note from inside each one.

Inside The Creation Anthology, every room opens fully. The conditions that define it, the questions it asks of you, and the transformation that happens when you move through the moment instead of mistaking it for failure.

Because once you can name the room you’re in, the process stops feeling random.

The Anthology isn’t here to fix the hard days.

It’s here so when the work gets quiet, slow, or confusing, you don’t immediately assume something has gone wrong.

It gives you somewhere to stay inside the process long enough to understand what the work is asking of you.

And what it’s slowly turning you into while you build it.

Most good work isn’t abandoned from lack of talent.

It’s abandoned from misreading the moment.

The Creation Anthology is coming.

Join the waitlist to be the first to enter the rooms.

(Creation Anthology)

Have you ever walked away from a conversation with a friend replaying everything you said? Or pre-edited your excitement with your work colleague before sharing good news? Or learned, over months or years, exactly which version of yourself keeps things smooth when in conversation with a mentor?

You don’t call it control. You don’t want to. That word feels too harsh. This person isn’t yelling or forbidding anything. In fact, they could even be incredibly articulate about boundaries, healing, and emotional maturity. And might be the person in your life who seems most committed to growth.

And that’s exactly what makes it so hard to see.

Expanding the Framework

For decades, we have been building our understanding of coercive control in romantic relationships. We know the signs: isolation from friends and family, financial manipulation, monitoring behavior, escalating restrictions. This framework has helped countless people—particularly women—name what was happening to them and leave dangerous situations.

This work remains essential. Intimate partner violence and coercive control in romantic relationships continue to be pervasive, dangerous, and underrecognized. Nothing about expanding the conversation diminishes that reality.

However, the same dynamics that researchers identified in abusive partnerships—the micro-management, the erosion of autonomy, the strategic undermining of confidence—can show up in other relationships too. Coercive control is a pattern of behavior, not a relationship category.

Friendships. Mentorships. Partnerships. Professional Relationships. Family. “Chosen family”. While these relationships don’t carry the same level of physical danger as intimate partner violence, they carry their own form of harm. And they come with almost no cultural scripts for recognizing the pattern or getting out.

There’s no hotline for leaving a controlling friend. No legal framework for exiting a coercive mentorship. No broad social permission to walk away from someone who hasn’t “done anything obviously wrong.”

The Threshold Question

Not every difficult friendship is coercive control. So how do you know the difference?

Ask yourself: Am I more free since knowing this person or more careful?

Coercive control isn’t measured by intensity. It’s defined by the steady erosion of self, and revealed in repetition—the steady, daily editing of your plans, opinions, and ambitions to accommodate someone else’s emotional reactions and protect their power.

When Control Sounds Like Healing

We live in an era of widespread emotional literacy, and because of that, therapy speech is everywhere. We have the language now. We know about attachment styles, nervous system regulation, trauma responses, and boundaries.

And some of us have learned to use that language for mutual growth, AND also for quiet domination.

To be clear, emotional sophistication isn’t required for coercive control. Simple tactics like withdrawal, gossip, and social exclusion work perfectly well—we just call them ‘friend drama’ instead of control. But when these same dynamics arrive wrapped in therapeutic language, they become almost impossible to see. It sounds like growth, not manipulation.

Whether the control uses sophisticated psychological language or straightforward social manipulation, the pattern is the same: one person’s behavior systematically erodes another person’s autonomy. The sophistication just determines how visible it is.

Here’s how control wrapped in “therapy speech” typically shows up as a pattern:

• They consistently regulate your emotions instead of their behavior

  Instead of taking responsibility—“I’m sorry, I crossed a line”—they might say, “I think you’re reacting from a wound right now.” When this becomes the default response, your feelings are framed as the problem. Their behavior rarely gets examined, and emotional literacy becomes a tool for deflection rather than understanding.

• They repeatedly frame disagreement as emotional immaturity

  You’re not wrong. You’re “not self-aware yet,” “still healing,” “projecting,” or “not regulated.” Suddenly, you’re defending your emotional development instead of the actual issue. Over time, this quietly establishes a hierarchy: they are the “emotionally evolved” one, and you are the one who needs to catch up.

• They use therapeutic language to manage your behavior

  “I need you to take responsibility for how you’re showing up.”
  “I’m setting a boundary around this energy.”

  On the surface, it sounds reasonable. But often, the “boundary” isn’t about them—it’s about you staying small, not challenging them, and suppressing inconvenient emotions. A real boundary controls the self. Coercive control tries to manage you.

• They become the authority on your inner world

  “I know you better than you know yourself.”
  “I can tell when you’re spiraling.”
  “I can feel when you’re off.”

  Eventually, you defer to their interpretation of your emotions instead of trusting your own. Self trust collapses, and your internal compass gets quietly overridden.

• They stay calm while you become smaller

  They are composed, articulate, gentle, slow spoken. You over explain, apologize for tone, carefully word everything, and replay conversations afterward. Calmness doesn’t mean they’re right. It can be strategy. The pattern is clear: their composure is a tool, and your discomfort is the message.

When Control Looks Like Fragility

Control doesn’t always come from the person who seems more evolved than you. Sometimes it comes from the person who seems more fragile.

This is harder to recognize because we associate control with dominance—someone who is confident, composed, and authoritative. But control is about one person’s behavior systematically limiting another person’s autonomy. And fragility can be just as controlling as superiority.

You know this dynamic if:

• You can’t share good news because they’ll spiral about their own failures
• You can’t set boundaries because they’ll have a breakdown
• You can’t disagree because they’ll cry, shut down, or hint at self-harm
• You’re constantly managing their emotions to prevent their collapse
• They’re always the “victim” but you’re the one walking on eggshells

They might be genuinely struggling. They might actually be in pain. But if the pattern is that you consistently edit yourself to manage their emotional state, that’s control—even if they never raise their voice, even if they seem powerless, even if you’re the one who appears “stronger.”

The therapy speech version sounds like:

“I’m just really triggered right now and can’t engage.”
“My nervous system can’t handle conflict.”
“I’m in survival mode and need you to hold space for me.”
“Your boundary is activating my trauma.”

Legitimate trauma responses exist. Genuine emotional capacity limits are real. But when these phrases are used consistently to avoid accountability, shut down conversations, or make your needs impossible to express—that’s weaponization.

The simpler version looks like:

Crying to end every difficult conversation. “I’m too depressed to deal with this right now”—every time you try to address something. Threatening self harm when you try to leave. Playing helpless so you have to manage everything while they claim they “can’t handle” responsibility.

If you are confused, ask yourself: Does their fragility consistently result in you becoming smaller, more careful, more responsible for their wellbeing than your own? Do you feel like their emotional caretaker rather than their equal? Can you ever bring up your own needs without it becoming about their inability to handle it?

This type of control is insidious because it hides behind vulnerability. You can’t call it out without feeling cruel. How do you set a boundary with someone who says boundaries hurt them? How do you leave someone who might fall apart?

But the pattern is the same. Your autonomy erodes. You edit yourself. You manage their reactions. You feel trapped… not by their strength, but by their fragility.

Impact > Intent

What makes this especially difficult is that many people engaging in these patterns don’t see themselves as controlling.

Those who position themselves as wiser believe they know what’s best—they see themselves as protective, evolved, guiding you toward growth.

Those who position themselves as more fragile believe their needs are simply survival—they’re just trying to cope, to stay afloat, to get through their struggles.

Neither is twirling a metaphorical mustache. Both might be deeply invested in you—and simultaneously unable to recognize how their behavior limits your autonomy.

Good intentions might explain the beginning of a pattern. But sustained control—especially after harm has been named, after boundaries have been stated—reveals something else…A choice to prioritize their own sense of rightness (or their own emotional stability) over your autonomy.

Intent and impact are separate things. Someone can care about you and still erode your autonomy. Someone can be genuinely struggling and still train you to manage their emotions over your own. At a certain point, repeated impact outweighs claimed intent.

We’ve Been Experiencing This Since Adolescence

Many women first experienced coercive control not in adult relationships, but in adolescent friendships.

The controlling “best friend” in high school. Sometimes she was the girl who decided who was in and who was out—the dominant one. But sometimes she was the fragile one who needed you to manage her emotions, and always had a crisis when you made other plans or spent time with anyone else. Different tactics, same result: you walking on eggshells, editing yourself, managing her reactions.

We called it “mean girls”. We called it “girl drama”. What we didn’t call it was coercive control—even though the pattern was identical. Isolation from other friendships. Micro management of behavior and choices. Undermining of confidence. Emotional consequences for non-compliance.

Adolescents get some developmental grace—they are still learning empathy, testing boundaries, figuring out who they are. Not every messy teenage friendship is coercive control. But sustained, systematic patterns that erode autonomy don’t stop being harmful just because the person doing it is 16.

The cultural narrative told us this was normal. A developmental phase. Something girls do. We were expected to grow out of it, toughen up, learn to navigate it.

But the impact of those early experiences varies widely. Some women emerged from controlling adolescent friendships with clear boundaries—they learned what they won’t tolerate and can spot the pattern early in adult relationships. They run when they see the signs.

Others learned that this is what close relationships feel like. That intimacy comes with surveillance—or constant emotional caretaking. That being chosen means being managed—or being needed. That love requires careful performance—or perpetual rescuing. For them, encountering similar dynamics as adults doesn’t trigger alarm—it triggers recognition. “Oh, this feels like friendship”. Which makes it harder to name as control, harder to leave, harder to trust that something is genuinely wrong.

What This Means in Practice

So what do we actually do with this information?

If you’re recognizing this pattern in your own relationships: Start by trusting what your body already knows. If you’re constantly managing one person’s reactions, rehearsing conversations before they happen, or feeling more careful than free—that’s worth examining. The question isn’t “Is this person bad?” but “Am I more myself since knowing them, or less?”

Distinguish between discomfort that expands you and discomfort that contracts you. Someone who challenges you leaves you feeling temporarily uncomfortable but ultimately MORE capable, more trusting of yourself. Someone who controls you leaves you feeling smaller, more dependent on their validation, less sure of your own judgment.

If you decide to address it: Be prepared for pushback. Emotionally sophisticated controllers might pathologize your boundaries: “You’re being reactive,” “This is your abandonment wound talking.” Vulnerable controllers might respond with breakdown: crying, claiming they “can’t handle this right now,” or suggesting you’re abandoning them in their time of need. Either way, hold steady. Your right to autonomy doesn’t require their approval or their emotional stability.

The Social Tax of Leaving
When you try to exit a controlling relationship, expect pushback—and expect them to control the narrative with mutual friends.

Emotionally sophisticated controllers use therapeutic language: “She’s going through something.” “She’s not regulated.” “She has wounds she hasn’t processed.” “I tried to hold space for her, but she wasn’t ready to do the work.”

Vulnerable controllers position themselves as the victim: “She abandoned me when I needed her most.” “I was going through so much and she just left.” They might cry to mutual friends, play helpless, or hint that you caused their current crisis.

Others use simpler tactics: “She’s being dramatic.” “She just cut me off for no reason.” “I have no idea what happened—she just turned on me.” Or they say nothing at all but their coldness speaks volumes, forcing others to choose sides.

Suddenly you’re not someone setting a boundary—you’re the problem. The unstable one. The dramatic one. The one who couldn’t handle a normal friendship.

This narrative control is real and difficult. Some people in your shared circles will believe their version. Some will distance themselves from you to avoid the drama. Some will pressure you to reconcile “for the sake of the group.”

You cannot control this narrative war, and trying to will exhaust you. What you can do:

• Tell your truth to people you trust, once, clearly, without over explaining

• Accept that some relationships will be casualties of leaving

• Recognize that anyone who believes the controller’s narrative without checking in with you wasn’t going to support your autonomy anyway

• Understand that time often clarifies things—patterns eventually reveal themselves

The social cost is real. It’s also not a reason to stay.

Worried you might be engaging in these patterns?

If you tend to position yourself as the wiser/more evolved one: When you give guidance, are you helping someone build trust in themselves or trust in you? Notice if you feel threatened when people make choices you disagree with. Notice if you withdraw when people don’t defer to your judgment.

If you tend to position yourself as the more fragile/wounded one: Do people walk on eggshells around you? Are you consistently unable to engage with conflict? Do your crises happen when someone tries to set a boundary? Notice if people manage your emotional state more than their own.

For everyone: If someone has named harm or set a boundary, your response reveals more than your initial intent ever could. Can you hear them without making it about your pain? Can you take accountability without collapsing?

What comes after

Rebuilding self trust after a controlling relationship takes time. You’ve been trained to doubt yourself, to defer to external authority, to manage someone else’s emotional landscape instead of inhabiting your own. Give yourself patience as you relearn to trust your own perceptions.

Healthy relationships will feel strange at first—maybe even uncomfortable. When someone doesn’t punish you for disagreeing, doesn’t interpret your emotions for you, doesn’t require careful performance—it can feel unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity is not a problem. It’s a recalibration.

Recognizing control when it’s happening doesn’t mean becoming suspicious of everyone or avoiding emotional depth. It means building relationships where power is genuinely mutual, where emotional intelligence serves connection rather than manipulation, where you can be fully yourself… and not just the version that keeps things smooth.

About the Author
Joan Caven is a writer, creative director, and co-founder of TGLM Media. She builds emotionally intelligent brands and cultural products that explore connection, identity, and the everyday experiences shaping women’s lives.

You remember excitedly writing it down with urgency. Working on it. Focused on bringing it to life. You had the whole thing in your head. The energy. The possibility. The feeling that this time was different.

And then life happened, and your great shiny idea stayed dormant. Trapped in a draft tower forever, like Rapunzel among the docs resting place of your other great big shiny ideas.

How many drafts have sat in a folder for a year. Maybe two. Unopened.

And when you get the courage, on the days you’re feeling a little bold or a little down (depends on how you like your dopamine), you reopen one. And to your delight, it still feels like you. The idea is still good. The instinct was right.

But something is different now.

The excitement is no longer an urgent thrill. It’s more nostalgic.

Like: aww, how cute of me to think I could do this.

The hope has thinned. What once felt like a beginning now feels like proof.

Proof that you start things and do not finish them. That you get momentum and then lose it. That no matter how real it felt at the start, you always seem to arrive at the same place.

Stopped.

After enough times of restarting and hitting the same wall, the question stops being about the project. It becomes personal.

Do I actually have what it takes?

Other people start and execute. Other people start and succeed. You watch it happen and you cannot explain why the gap between having an idea and becoming someone who sees it through feels so impossible to close.

The shame of trying compounds. The drafts accumulate. The tower fills up.

So you use that feeling to define yourself. The one who cannot finish. The one who stops midway. The one who is just like that.

That definition is not the truth. But it starts to feel like one.

And here is what that feels like over time, beyond the unfinished drafts themselves.

The ideas do not stop coming. They keep arriving with the same urgency and excitement. But your relationship to them changes. You start greeting new ideas with skepticism instead of momentum. You stop trusting the pull because you think you have learned that the pull does not lead anywhere. Not for you.

You open a new document and somewhere underneath the excitement is a wicked little voice already waiting for you to abandon it. The witch at the bottom of the tower, making sure nobody gets out.

That is not a creativity problem. That is an identity built around not finishing.

And the longer it runs, the more it limits what you allow yourself to begin, invest in, and believe about what is possible.

Here is what is actually happening.

You do not avoid finishing because you are lazy. You are not undisciplined. You are not someone who does not care enough or is not serious enough. Those stories feel true but they are not the mechanism.

You avoid finishing because finishing produces meaning. And right now, the meaning feels dangerous.

Pause for a second.

When you do not finish something, what are you afraid it will prove?

• That you are not as good as you thought?

• That you do not follow through?

• That you only love beginnings?

• That you cannot sustain momentum?

• That you do not have what it takes?

• Or something other than that.

Notice whatever came up.

That fear is what is running the pattern. But it never feels like fear when it is happening. It feels like logic.

Opening the document and deciding you need more research before you can really begin. Telling yourself the timing is not right. Pivoting to a new idea because this one suddenly seems less original or doable than you thought. Sharing it before it is ready, half hoping for validation and half hoping someone gives you a reason to let it go. Going quiet without ever making a conscious decision to stop. No dramatic ending. Just a slow fade away you can always explain.

You are not protecting yourself from the work. You are protecting yourself from what the outcome might mean.

As long as it is unfinished, it is still potential. And potential cannot judge you.

But once something becomes real, it can be interpreted. It can land. It can miss. It can confirm something you do not want confirmed.

So the work becomes heavy because it is carrying more than itself. It is carrying your self-concept.

That is the real strain.

The problem is not that the work is slow. It is that the work has been assigned a verdict.

You have tied your identity to the outcome, and now every stall feels like self-evidence.

That is why you start and stop.

You do not lack ideas. You have so many. You do not lack talent. The dream appears in your head because it is for you to see through.

You stop because getting to the end of the work feels like reaching a verdict. One you are not sure you have built the capacity to receive and keep going.

The distinction that changes everything

Here is the thing nobody tells you early enough.

You are not the project. The project is not you.

They feel like the same thing, I know. When it stalls, you feel stalled. When it flops, you feel like the flop. You have been living inside the work like it is a direct report on who you are. But it is not.

The project can be wrong for the moment. Wrong for the audience. Wrong for who you were when you started it. It can be shelved, pivoted, dissolved entirely and none of that is a verdict on you. That is just creative work doing what creative work does.

But you still have to be someone who creates. And keeps creating. And that does not end because a draft went cold.

The project ends. The creator continues.

The pace of the project, or the outcome even after release, does not stop the creator who understands their function is to create and keep creating.

Once you actually feel the difference between those two things, you get to relax. Because the pattern only has power when you let every outcome become self-definition.

What staying actually builds

When you stop forcing the work to prove something and just stay with it, your thinking gets sharper. You develop a feel for what the work actually needs. When to push. When to leave it alone. When the resistance means something and when it is just the wicked witch at the bottom of the tower being dramatic. You start to trust your own read.

And that right there is everything.

It may not show up in any metric, or be a value other people can recognize immediately. But building that capacity changes how you move. How you feel about yourself and your work. What you attempt. How you return to it. What you believe you are allowed to build and keep building.

Every time you come back without making the pause mean something terrible about you, you quietly dismantle the story that said you couldn’t. Every return is a little more hair let down. A little more ground gained.

That is where you begin to build in a different way. You are no longer weighed down by the heft of dragging yourself to the finish line. You are liberated by what you are building in yourself by staying in a healthy relationship with the work.

And that changes how you approach the outcomes you cannot control. It doesn’t feel like a sentence anymore. Because the part you have learned to hold onto is this: you are someone who trusts your own timing. Who respects your pace. Who has built a relationship of trust with yourself.

And that is not nothing. That is actually the whole thing.

This is why the Creation Anthology exists.

I built this because I kept having the same conversation with creators at every stage. Stuck. Talented. Convinced the stalling meant something about them.

It doesn’t. But you need somewhere to work that through. Somewhere that understands the problem is not the work—it is what you have decided the work means about you.

This week, we are specifically in Room III: Internal Authority.

Most creative frameworks treat the “starting and stopping” cycle as a scheduling issue. Room III treats it as an identity shift. This is where we learn the kind of inner authority that survives the middle space, where the work challenges your pace and you trust yourself enough to stay in the room anyway.

In Room III, you aren’t just finishing a project. You are producing a creator who is:

• Steadier: You no longer collapse when the work gets difficult.

• Clearer: You distinguish between a natural pause and a defensive fade.

• Rooted: You build the internal durability to hold your own potential without needing it to “prove” you.

The question was never whether you had good ideas. It was whether you believed the outcome had the right to define you.

Rapunzel does not stay in the tower. Neither do you. But it will keep feeling that way until you stop asking the work to decide who you are.

The TGLM Creation Anthology. Seven rooms. Seven emotional conditions of creative work.

Room III: What are you learning to trust?

Join the waitlist below.

(Creation Anthology Access)

“When you begin to create something new, what’s the first thing that starts to feel heavy?”

What came back didn’t shock us.

It confirmed something we already know about the girls in this room.

We don’t dream small. Our dreams are big.

The kind of big that makes you hesitate before saying it out loud. The kind that feels slightly unreasonable next to your current circumstances.

There’s a particular restlessness that comes with that. When you can see the thing clearly, the way it looks, the way it feels, what it would mean, and the almost physical urge to watch it exist somewhere outside your own head.

That longing isn’t random. It’s not a phase. It’s not you being unrealistic.

It’s real.

And the clearer the vision gets, the harder it becomes to pretend it’s just a passing thought. Clarity raises the stakes.

And then the pressure shows up.

And it doesn’t sit quietly in the corner. It walks into the middle of the room and says, I’m the owner of this house.

What You Said

You didn’t sugarcoat it. You told the truth.

• I don’t get to “just try” anymore.

• If it flops, I’ll feel stupid for even believing in it.

• I can’t hide behind potential anymore.

• I should’ve started this three years ago.

• I’m afraid of how much it will demand from me.

• The thought of being judged before it’s ready.

• I need this to change my life.

• I don’t know if I have the capacity right now.

• I need it to work because I don’t have a safety net.

• I don’t want to build something I’ll resent.

We read every single one. And what kept striking us wasn’t just what you were naming, it was how clearly the weight knew exactly where to land.

The outcome pressure. It can’t just be something you’re exploring. It has to become something real. Something that justifies the time, the belief, the risk of telling people about it at all.

The identity pressure. The fear that this will finally expose whether you actually have what it takes, or whether you’ve just been someone with ideas this whole time.

The visibility pressure. The specific dread of being seen mid-process. Of looking confused or inconsistent at a stage of life where you feel like you should know better.

The timeline pressure. The weight of feeling behind before you’ve even begun, like everyone else got a head start you didn’t know you needed.

The stability pressure. Creating while money sits in the background of every single decision. Needing the thing to work not just creatively but practically. Needing it to make the hard years mean something.

And then there’s the one that doesn’t get named as often, but showed up just as clearly.

The exhaustion pressure. The fear that you don’t have the energy to see it through this time. The pattern of getting excited and then disappearing, and how heavy it feels to know that about yourself. The not wanting to hype yourself up again. The not wanting to care too much and get hurt. The wondering whether you have the capacity right now, or whether starting something new is just going to be another thing you build and then quietly walk away from.

That one sat with us longest. Because most of us have never separated the work from what we think the work proves about us. Every unfinished project becomes evidence. Every abandoned idea becomes part of a pattern. And that pattern starts to feel like your answer. Next week we’re going directly at that.

We’re not writing from the other side of this. The anthology was made inside of that same tension, the big vision, the real life, the pressure arriving before the work has had any room to breathe. We’re writing from inside it, same as you.

None of what you’re feeling is you being in your head. You’re creating with real stakes attached, and the weight is an accurate read of what’s actually in the room. The hard part isn’t that those things are wrong to care about. It’s that they all arrive at once, right at the moment you try to begin. Before you’ve had room to just be inside the idea. Before you’ve had a chance to fall for it a little.

That’s when creating starts to feel like something you have to earn before you’re allowed to experiment with it.

The Creation Anthology was written for exactly this.

Seven rooms, each one named for a different emotional condition that shapes how we create. You don’t move through them in order. You go where the weight is sitting. You stay as long as you need to, and you come back when the season shifts.

• Room I, What holds you? Loosen your grip on the outcome long enough for the work to breathe.

• Room II, What keeps returning? Follow what persists even when urgency tries to rush you elsewhere.

• Room III, What are you learning to trust? Build authority before anyone else confirms it.

• Room IV, What needs holding before it’s shared? Let belief grow stronger than the urge for exposure.

• Room V, What does growth expose? Expansion reveals what you’re really creating from.

• Room VI, What wants more freedom? Imagination moves without being negotiated down.

• Room VII, What is ready to be held together? All the versions of you stop competing and start coexisting.

What your responses confirmed is what the anthology was already built to hold.

The problem was never whether you’re ready. It’s that we keep asking creation to carry too much, too early, before we’ve had the chance to simply be inside it.

The rooms give you somewhere else to stand.

Waitlist is open, link below. We’ll see you inside.

Creation Anthology Access

Doreen Caven is the Co-founder of The Girls Like Me. She builds creative work at the intersection of emotional connection, storytelling, and cultural strategy. She writes from inside TGLM Studio—the space where TGLM develops its creative frameworks, cultural storytelling, and original works—usually found somewhere between open tabs and big ideas.

There is a tendency to label someone as strong so we don’t have to fully register how much they are carrying. It becomes a way to sort them into a category that feels settled and convenient. Capable enough to manage everything already on their plate. Capable enough to require less checking in. Capable enough to absorb what spills over from everyone else.

Over time, the word starts reshaping how people interpret what they see. You can speak openly about everything you are navigating and people still walk away focused on the fact that you handled it. The attention stays on your endurance. It drifts past the skill it took. The intelligence it required. The level of organization, foresight, and emotional regulation it demanded.

“Strong” turns complex effort into something that sounds natural, automatic, almost built into you. As if this is simply how you were made, and not something you had to develop, refine, and use in real time while life was actively happening to you.

“You are so strong” is often offered with admiration. And sometimes it is accurate. Strength can be something you are proud of. The capacity you built. The steadiness you cultivated. The ability to recover, regulate, and keep moving when things were uncertain or heavy.

The problem begins when strength stops being a reflection of what you have lived through and starts functioning as an assignment. When it becomes the reason more is handed to you without discussion. The reason people assume you will adapt. The reason people stop checking whether you should have to.

Sometimes it is about being seen as someone who will keep functioning no matter what is placed on her.

The Origin of the Stabilizer

For a lot of people, strength didn’t start as personality. It started as survival.

You learned very early how to read a room. Not as a skill you were taught, but as something you developed quietly, out of necessity, because the cost of being caught off guard was too high. You learned how to feel tension before anyone named it. How to read a shift in someone’s tone and adjust yourself before anything was said out loud. You learned how to stay composed because big reactions often made bad situations worse. You learned that if you could manage yourself, you could sometimes manage the chaos around you too.

And because no one was doing that for you, you learned how to do it for yourself. You became the one who built yourself up. Who sat with your own ideas long enough to believe in them. Who risked the awkwardness of reaching, connecting, advancing, without anyone clearing the path first. You figured out how to keep moving without a lot of external evidence that you should.

That kind of self-sufficiency is real. It is earned. But it also teaches the people around you something they never forget — that you don’t require much. That you will figure it out. That the space they would normally have to hold for you is available for other things.

Later in life, people give those skills beautiful names. Maturity. Emotional intelligence. Resilience. And they can be those things. But for many people, those skills were built in environments where you had to become emotionally self-sufficient very quickly. Where being easy made life safer. Where compartmentalization wasn’t a wellness strategy — it was the fastest way to keep things from getting worse. You pushed yourself to the back to keep the peace. You learned to make yourself small enough to not be a problem.

And when those skills follow you into adulthood, people see capability. They see someone who holds it together. What they don’t see is where it came from, or what it cost to build it.

They mistake survival intelligence for personality. And then they rely on it like it was always meant for them.

When You Become Emotional Infrastructure

Once people recognize that you can absorb pressure, regulate chaos, and keep moving without collapsing, they start organizing themselves around that ability.

It may not be malicious or even conscious, but it happens consistently. Your steadiness becomes useful. Your emotional range becomes something people learn to lean on. And slowly, what started as admiration turns into access — access to your time, your labor, your regulation, your ability to make things make sense when they stop making sense for them.

And the line between being valued and being relied on starts to blur.

They bring you their confusion. Their heartbreak. Their decisions they’ve already half-made but need someone to confirm. Their spirals at midnight. Their versions of events where they are never quite the problem. They bring you the things they don’t want to say out loud anywhere else, and they bring them without asking if you have the capacity, without checking what is already on your plate, without wondering if today is a day you might need the same thing from someone.

Over time, without anyone saying it directly, your relationships begin organizing themselves around what you can hold. Your presence becomes associated with relief. You become the place people go when they don’t want to fall apart alone. And you are expected to receive all of it — not just with patience, but with skill. In the right tone. At the right temperature. Molded to what they need in that moment, not what would actually be true or useful or honest. You are not expected to show up as a person. You are expected to show up as a service.

And there is something they don’t tell you about being that for people. When you are someone’s emotional mirror — when you are the one reflecting back what they can’t see in themselves — they don’t always thank you for it. Sometimes they resent you for it. It is easier to be angry at the mirror than to look at what it’s showing. So they get to come to you shattered and raw and real, and you get to absorb it, process it, hand it back in a form they can tolerate, and then watch them walk away lighter while you stay exactly where you were, holding everything they left behind.

And if something shifts because of what you said, because of what you held, because of the space you created for them to figure something out — they will rarely trace it back to you. The credit dissolves. What remains is the expectation that you will do it again.

Your presence becomes associated with relief. But relief, for most people, is not something they think to be grateful for. It is just something they return to.

The Quiet Cost of Being the One Who “Has It Together”

The more self-sufficient you appear, the more people assume you need less. Less reassurance. Less checking in. Less space to be overwhelmed. Less patience when you don’t have the answer. Less grace when you are slow, or stuck, or not yet okay. You are expected to be fine because you usually are. Expected to recover quickly because you usually do. Expected to handle things privately and show back up without making it anyone else’s weight to carry.

And for a long time, you do. You get very good at it. You learn how to process quietly, how to surface only once you’ve already done most of the work on yourself, how to present your pain in a form that doesn’t ask too much of anyone. You edit it down. You make it manageable. You package it so it lands without disrupting anything.

But need doesn’t disappear because you’ve learned to carry it neatly. It accumulates. And when it finally surfaces — when you are tired enough, depleted enough, human enough to let something show — it doesn’t come out the way people are used to receiving things from you. It comes out with edges. With urgency. With the full weight of everything you didn’t say the ten times before this one.

And people don’t know what to do with that.

Because you are so strong. Because you always handle it. Because the version of you they have organized themselves around does not have needs that arrive like this — unpolished, unmanaged, impossible to quietly absorb and move past. Your need feels, to them, like a disruption. Like something has gone wrong. Like you are being, somehow, unfair.

“Surely you can handle this. You always do.”

And what they don’t say, but what sits underneath it: why are you being like this.

The sympathy is thin. The patience is short. The people who have brought you their worst moments without apology become suddenly uncomfortable with yours. They never learned how to hold you because they never thought it necessary.

Being strong doesn’t cancel out your need to be supported. It just means that by the time you ask, you realize the people who have depended on you are not sure how to even begin.

The Labor of Constant Translation

When you are the stabilizer, you get very good at editing yourself. Constantly.

You take in what they are saying, process what they actually mean, feel your own reaction to it, and then set that reaction aside — all before you open your mouth. You figure out which tone will keep things from escalating. Which truth they can hold right now and which one will make them defensive. Which parts of yourself need to be softened so that what you say can actually land, rather than becoming the thing the conversation is suddenly about.

You do all of that in seconds. And nobody sees it.

Nobody asks if you want to be having this conversation. Nobody checks if you are carrying something of your own today. You are not approached as someone who might be mid-thought, mid-grief, mid-something. You are approached as a resource. And resources don’t need a moment to collect themselves. Resources are just available.

So you make yourself available. You funnel everything they bring you back to them in the form they can receive it. You swallow the direct truth because everyone hates the moment a strong friend tells the truth. And you have learned, slowly and repeatedly, that when the truth comes from you it rarely arrives as truth. It arrives as you thinking you know everything. It arrives as you being harsh, or superior, or unable to just be supportive. The insight that would have helped them gets buried under who they have decided you are when you offer it. So you learn to sand the edges down. To introduce your observations sideways. To ask questions you already know the answers to, just so the conclusion feels like theirs. You do the work of knowing and then hand them the credit for it, because that is the only version they can receive without resistance.

You swallow the observation that would actually help them because it would land wrong and then you would become the problem. You become the bigger person so many times that being the bigger person stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only language you know how to speak.

And over time it gets hard to locate yourself inside any of it. Hard to know where your natural reaction ends and your adjusted one begins. You can go years without saying a thing exactly the way you felt it. Years of presenting yourself in the form most likely to be received without disruption.

The Moment You Stop Over-Functioning

There comes a moment when enough is enough. You may have already reached it. You may be on your way. But one of the quiet gifts of being the kind of person you are is that something inside you eventually switches on. You have spent so long building a self that is reliable — and that self has been watching. Taking notes. Taking care of you even when you were busy taking care of everyone else.

It knows when it’s time.

Culture may complicate it. Religion may ask you to override it. Other people’s needs may crowd the signal. And for a while, you may let them. But a strong person in tune with their inner life knows the moment they have to protect themselves. It doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it is just a quiet, firm, unmistakable knowing. And once you feel it, it is very hard to unfeel.

So you stop.

It starts with just deciding not to do a few things you never agreed to do in the first place. Wanting more presence. Wanting care that doesn’t always have to be initiated by you first. Wanting to say something honest without bracing for the fallout. Stopping the habit of smoothing every emotional surface in a room before anyone else has even noticed it shifted. Stopping the habit of pre-solving problems that aren’t yours to carry. Stopping the habit of making yourself easy when easy is costing you everything.

And the reaction can be stunning.

Because the people around you have never had to account for what you were doing. They benefited from it the way you benefit from air. Present always, taken for granted completely, never once considered until it was gone. And when you stop, they don’t see someone who was exhausted finally putting something down. They see someone who has changed. Someone who is difficult now. Less accessible. Someone who has become, somehow, less than what they were.

“You’ve changed.” As if that is an accusation. As if staying exactly the same, for their comfort, was always the agreement.

What they don’t say is what they mean: you are no longer as useful as you were and I don’t know what to do with that.

And then comes the guilt. The quiet withdrawal. The way certain people suddenly need you urgently the moment they sense you pulling back, because what they miss is not your absence but the function they depended on. Then, when that doesn’t work, come the traps designed to make you explain yourself, defend yourself, prove that you are still a good person. As if your goodness was ever located in how much you were willing to absorb.

But here is the part that will almost make you laugh. When you stop over-functioning, the people who were relying on you don’t fall apart. They figure it out. The things they claimed they couldn’t do without you — they do them. Quietly, without acknowledgment, without ever crediting what your presence was holding together. They adapt. Because they were never as helpless as the dynamic required them to appear.

And something else becomes clear. Giving more never guaranteed protection. Being reliable never guaranteed being handled carefully. A lot of what looked like dependence was actually laziness. A lot of what felt like they need me was actually this is easier for them if she carries it. When you stop, you see it plainly. Being needed and being valued were never the same thing.

When you stop over-functioning, it becomes very clear who was relating to you and who was relying on you. And that clarity, as painful and annoying as it is, is the beginning of something true.

The Point Where Losing Yourself Feels Scarier Than Losing People

Once you see how easily you can disappear inside what people need you to be, it becomes very hard to keep performing it just to keep the peace. You start to notice the shape of what you have been doing. How much of yourself you edited. How much you swallowed. How long you have been living at a size that was comfortable for everyone else.

And you realize that you cannot keep being this version of yourself because of how much it costs you. How much it drains the energy you need to direct yourself. How much suppressing yourself to be there for people in the way they need — managing yourself, editing your help — takes away from you becoming more fully yourself. Becoming a more advanced version of you.

This moment is where you find out who is actually for you.

The people who are for you will be stunned at first. Change can surprise even the people who love you. But they adjust. They make room for you taking your energy back. They become curious about who you are when you are not performing. They try. They ask. They stay even when you are less convenient, less available, less easy. They don’t need you to be the same person you were when that person was disappearing. They just need you to be honest, and they will meet you there.

The people who are not for you will make their absence feel like your fault. They will call it distance. They will call it you changing. They will call it selfishness, harshness, difficulty. They will reach for whatever word makes your protection sound like a problem. Let them. Their displeasure is not yours to absorb. Their label of you is not yours to disprove. You are not under anyone’s control, and their discomfort with your boundaries is not a reason to redraw them.

Reclaiming Strength As Choice

You deserve to protect yourself. That is not a radical statement. It is the most basic thing. But for someone who has spent years making themselves available, making themselves easy, making themselves useful — it can feel like the most foreign thing you have ever been asked to believe.

So say it slowly if you need to.

You deserve to be discerning with who gets access to your energy. You deserve to set boundaries in your own best interest without explaining them into a form that is easier for someone else to accept. You deserve to speak with clarity. To say what you feel directly, in your own tone, at your own intensity, without managing how it lands for people who have never extended you the same courtesy. You deserve to distance yourself from people who want your labour but not your truth. You deserve to not care how they label you for it. If your honesty makes you harsh in their eyes, if your directness makes you aggressive, if your boundaries make you difficult — that is information about them, not instruction for you.

You are not here to be easy to use.

And slowly, strength starts to feel like something different. Less like endurance. Less like a job you didn’t apply for. More like authorship. You decide who gets access. You decide where your energy goes. You decide when to show up fully and when to stay home. Being strong becomes what it probably always should have been — a skill, a capacity, a gift you offer when you choose to, to people who know how to receive it.

Not a cage. Not a role. Not a replacement for who you are.

Yours. Finally, completely, yours.

About the Author
Doreen Caven is co-founder of The Girls Like Me and writes about emotional power, self-approval, culture, and the internal shifts that shape how women live, create, and see themselves.

Think about the last time something came to you, a concept, an image, a direction you wanted to take your work. For a moment, it just felt alive. Interesting. Yours.

And then the other voice arrived.

Will this go anywhere? Has someone already done this? Is this the right time? What will people think? Can it scale?

The idea was barely born and it was already on trial.

This is why the act of creation is audacious.

It is the act of bringing something from inside of you into form: from dreaming, to conceiving, to believing, to moving through doubt, to allowing something to exist outside of you anyway.

It is one of the most vulnerable things we do as humans.

Doing it honestly requires protecting something most of us were never taught to protect: the original reason we wanted to create at all.

The version of the idea that existed before expectation. Before pressure. Before timelines. Before the question of whether it would work.

That version is not a starting point you move past. It is a signal you return to.

Most people stop being able to hear it long before they realize what they have lost.

That version matters more than we are told. And protecting it is harder than it sounds.

Creation changed for me the moment I realized I was asking too much of it before I even began.

I wanted it to prove I was talented.
I wanted it to prove I was worthy of being seen.
I wanted it to prove I could be successful.
I wanted it to prove I was not behind.

Before I could even hear what the work was trying to say, I had already decided what it needed to become.

I was asking it to carry outcomes.
Timelines.
Proof.
Security.

And it made the process heavier than it needed to be.

It made me rush things that needed time.
Doubt things that were still forming.
Walk away from ideas that had not even had the chance to become themselves yet.

The Pattern Most of Us Live Inside

Our lives are full. Scheduled. Demanding.

In a world that rewards urgency and output, creating without the end in sight can feel risky. It can feel irresponsible. It can feel inefficient.

That pressure changes how we read our own creative process.

Many creators do not abandon ideas because they lack talent. They stop because no one told them that creation requires a different kind of momentum, one that feels intentional rather than urgent.

They mistake foundation-building for lack of progress. They mistake uncertainty for misalignment.

If you have ever assumed something was wrong with you because progress was slow or unclear, you were likely inside the normal creative process.

Creation is not a straight line.

What I Discovered Building TGLM

I have created inside systems designed for speed, performance, and predictability. I have seen what it is like to create for external validation and scale.

During a design project that spanned multiple seasons, we built intentional collections rooted in a larger story. At one point, we tested something different, a collection we called the easy buy. Something designed to reach beyond our core audience. Something more immediately relatable sitting alongside our story-driven work.

It became the hit.

Demand expanded quickly. From the outside, it looked like success.

But every time we sat down to make more of it, something felt off.

We were no longer co-creating with the idea. We were working for it. Serving it.

Our original collections came from a genuine place. But once the detour worked, expectation shifted. We felt beholden to the results.

The more we gave people what they wanted, the less space we had for anything else.

We stopped enjoying what we were making. We started doubting our taste. We felt apologetic for it.

We started chasing demand and left the intent behind. We started looking outside of ourselves to decide what came next, moving further from our center.

When we eventually found our way back, we realized something harder.

The audience that had formed around us was not there for our original vision. They were there for what we had been producing to meet their demand.

We were trapped inside our own success.

That was when I understood the difference between work that succeeds and work that sustains you.

Success can happen even when you are misaligned. Sometimes especially when you are misaligned.

Misaligned work is often more familiar. More palatable. Easier to receive.

But it costs you something to keep producing it.

It costs your ability to hear what wants to come through you next. It costs your freedom to follow what is actually interesting to you. It costs your relationship with your own creative instinct.

Across more than a decade of self-expression, I learned that not all creation feels the same from the inside.

Some work makes you sharper while you make it. Clearer. More honest. More certain about what belongs to you and what does not.

Other work can succeed externally while leaving you disconnected from yourself inside the process. Always chasing the moment that will change everything, only to find it replaced by the next thing you think you need to reach just to feel okay again.

What I came to understand, and what I had no language for before, was this:

I had been asking my creativity to carry certainty. Validation. Direction. Safety.
Before I could hear what the work was trying to say, I had already decided what it needed to become.

Building From Alignment

I am currently building TGLM: creative work centered on emotional wellness, cultural storytelling, and immersive experiences, to help women recognize themselves more clearly and live as themselves now.

Building it has meant discovering what it is while making it. Staying out of the way enough to let it become itself. Trusting it to become what it wants to be.

Creating this way taught me something simple and difficult at the same time.

The difference is not about effort. It is not even about outcome. It is about whether I am creating in a way that requires me to override myself in order to continue.

The work can be demanding without being depleting. The pace can be unscripted and still sustainable.

Aligned creation is creating in a way that does not require you to disconnect from yourself in order to continue. It is staying connected to your own thinking while the work is forming. It is letting the work grow while you grow with it.

Success can feel incredible. But there is something more stabilizing than success, work that does not ask you to become someone else in order to finish it.

That is where you stop performing your life and start living inside it.

It allows you to create without feeling at odds with yourself. It allows you to speak honestly to the audience your work naturally finds. It allows you to be visible without feeling distorted by visibility.

The Emotional Rooms of Creation

Creation does not move in stages you complete and leave behind. It moves through conditions you return to in different forms as the work develops.

Building TGLM made these conditions visible to me, something I could recognize through feeling, acknowledge through name, and move through with intention.

The emotional rooms creation moves through:

Release.
Clarity.
Internal Authority.
Self-Recognition.
Expansion.
Imagination.
Integration.

You have been in these rooms. You just did not have language for them yet.

The Creation Anthology was built from this understanding.

It is a digital experience presented in seven emotional rooms: a space you move through, return to, and use to stay connected to yourself while the work is still forming. Each room combines written frameworks, curated visual works, and reflective prompts designed to meet you exactly where you are in the process.

Most frameworks ask you to arrive ready. This one meets you where the work actually lives: in the middle of forming, before you have language for it, before you know where it is going.

Authoring your life through what you make is one of the most intimate things you will ever do. That process deserves a framework as expansive as the full range of what you are building.

This is an invitation to create from the inside out, not from what you think the work needs to become, but from what it actually is.

If you want to be there when the doors open, join the Creation Anthology waitlist here.
[Creation Anthology access]

I am really glad you are here.

Doreen Caven is the Co-founder of The Girls Like Me. She builds creative work at the intersection of emotional connection, storytelling, and cultural strategy. She writes from inside TGLM Studio—the space where TGLM develops its creative frameworks, cultural storytelling, and original works—usually found somewhere between open tabs and big ideas.

I still remember the moment I realized I was performing low maintenance like it was a full time job. Before that, I honestly thought I was just a cool-stress-free- non- fussy-type of girl. The kind of woman people often describe as “low maintenance.”

I could sit in the middle seat on a long drive without fussing over the window. I could watch whatever movie everyone else wanted to see (even if I’d been looking forward to something else all week). I could even skip meals when the group wasn’t hungry without making it a thing. I was easy going, down to earth, adaptable. I wasn’t stressful like those other women who would actually say what they wanted, sometimes causing the whole group to deviate from plans to accommodate their needs. I never needed anything that badly. Nothing was ever such a big deal. And I mean, everyone liked me so…..

[Storytime… and I’m really ashamed to admit this..lol but here it goes….]

One summer, I was visiting a friend in New York and him, his assistant and I were walking to a picnic in the park. I spotted a sorbet shop on the way that I really wanted to try. Not in a passing “that looks nice” kind of way, but in a way where I was actually dying for it. It was hot as hell and I’d honestly been looking for something tasty, cool and refreshing for the walk.

But….I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t want to stop because I felt like if I did, I would be wasting everyone’s time. We had this picnic to get to—a picnic that was literally just going to be the three of us sitting on a blanket in Dumbo Park, playing we’re not really strangers, with sandwiches we’d grabbed from a deli. No schedule, no reservations, no time pressure whatsoever. Still, I could not bring myself to be the reason we stopped for ten minutes to get ice cream.

Wild.

My friend noticed me looking. He stopped walking and asked if I wanted to go in. I did my usual thing: “Oh no, it’s fine! We should keep going.” He looked at me for a long moment and then gave me a mini lecture, right there on the street, about why I needed to let myself want things. Why it was okay—necessary, even—to occasionally be the reason plans adjusted by ten minutes. And why the people who cared about me would actually want to know what I wanted instead of having to guess or, worse, never knowing at all.

We got the gelato. It was excellent. And my life hasn’t been the same since.

That moment cracked something open. It made me start paying attention to all the tiny ways I was contorting myself to take up less space, need less attention, want less accommodation. How I’d turned self denial into a personality trait and called it being low drama. How I’d mistaken the absence of my own needs for the presence of maturity.

Sigh. It’s a lot to unpack.

After reading the comments and messages we received on ‘Patterns In Emotionally Intelligent Women Who are Stuck’, I kept seeing the same theme emerge: so many of us have learned to pride ourselves on being low maintenance, on being the cool girl, the easy going friend, the team player who never rocks the boat. We’ve confused flexibility with self abandonment and mistaken our ability to suppress our needs for proof that we don’t have any.

So I figured it would be good/ beneficial to talk about what “low maintenance” actually costs and what patterns show up when a woman builds an identity around needing nothing.

Patterns I Notice in Women Who Pride Themselves on Being “Low Maintenance”

There’s a particular kind of woman who will laugh off a ruined birthday dinner, who never seems to need much from her partner, who prides herself on being “chill” when plans fall through. She’s the friend who always says “I’m fine with whatever!” when choosing a restaurant, even though she’s been craving Thai food all week. She’s the employee who volunteers to stay late again, insisting it’s “no problem at all” while her dinner plans evaporate. She’s easy going, flexible, understanding. She’s low maintenance—and she’ll tell you so herself, often with a hint of superiority over those “dramatic” women who make demands.

But beneath this performance of effortlessness lies a more troubling pattern: a systematic minimizing of one’s own needs that has nothing to do with genuine contentment and everything to do with preemptive self abandonment. Watch closely, and you’ll notice she’s doing a version of these four things, over and over and over again…

1. Minimizing needs before they become inconvenient

The low maintenance woman has developed an acute sensitivity to the moment just before her need might become burdensome to someone else. She’s hungry, but notices her partner isn’t suggesting dinner yet, so she mentions she “could eat” but is “not starving.” She wants to talk about something that’s bothering her, but they seem tired, so it becomes “not a big deal” before she’s even opened her mouth. She’d prefer not to go to their friend’s party, but she can already sense their disappointment, so her preference evaporates before it’s fully formed.

At work, she’s mastered the art of making her needs invisible. She needs clarification on a project, but her manager seems busy, so she’ll “just figure it out.” She deserves credit for the idea that shaped the entire campaign, but bringing it up might seem petty, so she lets it slide. She’s overwhelmed with her workload, but everyone else seems to be handling it fine, so she must just need to be more efficient. Her need for recognition, for reasonable boundaries, for clarity becomes reframed as wanting special treatment.

With friends, the pattern continues. She wants to see the movie she’s been excited about, but her best friend suggests something else, and suddenly her preference becomes “I’ve heard that’s good too!” She’s hurt that she’s always the one initiating plans, but she tells herself everyone’s just busy. She needs support after a difficult week, but everyone else’s problems seem more pressing, so hers can wait. Or better yet, hers can be repackaged as “just venting” rather than actual distress requiring actual support.

She’s the woman standing outside the gelato shop, already walking past it before anyone even knows she wanted to stop.

This isn’t flexibility. It’s a hyper vigilance born from the belief that her needs are inherently too much. She’s learned to perform a cost benefit analysis in real time: is this need worth the potential awkwardness, disappointment, or conflict it might create? The answer, she’s discovered, is usually no. Better to minimize it now, reframe it as a want rather than a need, a preference rather than something that matters. Better to make herself smaller before someone else has to ask her to shrink.

What makes this particularly insidious is that it works. People do find her easier to be around. She requires less negotiation, less accommodation, less emotional labor from others. Her boss appreciates that she never pushes back on unreasonable requests. Her friends love that she’s always available, always agreeable. Her partner finds her refreshingly uncomplicated. And in the short term, this strategy successfully avoids conflict. But it also ensures that her needs remain perpetually unmet, not because others refused them, but because she never allowed them to exist in the first place.

2. Preemptively adjusting expectations

The low maintenance woman is always one step ahead, adjusting her expectations downward before reality has a chance to disappoint her. Her partner forgot their anniversary…or Valentine’s Day? Well, she never expected much anyway— “We’re not really anniversary/ Valentine’s people.” They haven’t planned anything for her birthday? She’s already decided she “doesn’t care about birthdays” and would rather “keep it lowkey.” They are late again? She expected it, actually prefers the extra time to herself.

Her best friend bailed on plans for the third time this month? She’s recalibrated the entire friendship—they’re “not the kind of friends who see each other regularly,” more like “people who catch up every few months.” Her friends forgot to ask about the job interview she was nervous about? Well, she “doesn’t like making a big deal” of things.

At work, she’s a master of expectation management. Passed over for promotion again? She tells herself she “wasn’t ready anyway” and “doesn’t want the stress of management.” Her contributions go unrecognized in the meeting? She “doesn’t need the spotlight” and is “happy to be a team player.” Promised resources or support that never materialized? She should have known that “things move slowly around here” and she needs to be more “patient and understanding.”

This preemptive expectation management masquerades as emotional maturity. After all, isn’t it wise not to set yourself up for disappointment? Isn’t it healthy to be realistic about what people can offer?

But there’s a difference between adjusting expectations based on reality and adjusting reality to avoid having expectations at all.

What’s actually happening is a form of emotional self defense that doubles as self erasure. By expecting nothing, she protects herself from the vulnerability of wanting something and not receiving it. But she also eliminates any possibility of being genuinely delighted, surprised, or prioritized. She’s made herself so easy to disappoint that disappointment becomes impossible… but so does satisfaction.

The tragedy is that she often frames this as acceptance or maturity, when it’s actually a kind of resignation. She’s not accepting people as they are. She’s accepting less than she wants and calling it enlightenment. She’s not being realistic. She’s being preemptively pessimistic to avoid the risk of hope. And in doing so, she never gives others the opportunity to rise to an occasion she’s already decided they’ll fail.

3. Joking about what actually bothers them

Listen carefully to the low maintenance woman’s jokes, and you’ll hear a catalog of unspoken grievances.

“Haha, I guess I’m just furniture at this point!” when her partner scrolls through his phone during dinner.
“I should start charging rent for how often your friends crash here!” when she’s exhausted from hosting.
“Wow, I’m amazed I still remember what you look like!” when he’s been working late for the third week straight.

With friends, the jokes shift but the message doesn’t.

“Guess I’m just the backup friend!” when she finds out about plans she wasn’t invited to.
“I’m basically a therapist, but without the paycheck!” after another one sided emotional dump.

At work, humor becomes the socially acceptable way to acknowledge exploitation.

“Haha, should I just put a sleeping bag under my desk?” when she’s working seventy-hour weeks.
“Pretty sure my job description didn’t include this, but here we are!” when she’s picking up everyone else’s slack with no additional compensation.

Humor becomes the acceptable container for feelings that don’t feel safe to express directly… especially for women who are highly attuned to other people’s comfort and emotional reactions.

The joke performs two functions: It releases just enough pressure that the feeling doesn’t build to an explosive confrontation, and it provides plausible deniability if anyone suggests she’s actually upset. “I was just joking! I’m not mad!”

This pattern reveals a deep distrust in the legitimacy of her own feelings. Somewhere along the way, she learned that her anger, frustration, or hurt weren’t appropriate responses to legitimate grievances. They were overreactions, drama, too much. So she’s found a middle ground: she can acknowledge the thing that bothers her, but only if she immediately undercuts it with humor, signaling that she’s not really affected, that she’s cool, that she can take it.

The people on the receiving end of these jokes are let off the hook entirely. They can laugh along, reassured that everything is fine, that she’s not actually bothered. And she participates in that reassurance, even as resentment quietly settles beneath the surface. The joke becomes a pressure valve that ensures the system never has to actually change.

4. Calling flexibility maturity

Perhaps the most sophisticated form of self deception is the reframing of self abandonment as evolved consciousness. The low maintenance woman has convinced herself that her lack of needs reflects emotional maturity, spiritual growth, or psychological health. She’s “not needy” like other women. She’s “secure” enough not to require constant validation.

She prides herself on being the cool girlfriend who doesn’t need regular date nights and doesn’t mind last minute cancellations.

At work, she’s the “team player” who never advocates for herself because she’s “not motivated by money or recognition” like those careerist colleagues. She’s “just happy to do good work” and “doesn’t need her ego stroked.” She’s mature enough to understand that “it’s not about individual achievement” and that “good work speaks for itself”—even as she watches less capable, more self promoting colleagues move ahead of her.

With friends, she’s “low-drama” and “easy going.” She understands that “everyone’s busy” and that “friendships change” and that it’s immature to expect the kind of consistent presence she secretly craves. She’s evolved beyond needing to be prioritized.

Having needs becomes evidence of insecurity, while suppressing them becomes evidence of strength. Wanting attention is needy; accepting neglect is independent. Expressing disappointment is immature; swallowing it is growth. Advocating for yourself at work is pushy; accepting being undervalued is being a team player. The woman who asks for what she wants is high maintenance and demanding; the woman who wants nothing is enlightened.

But this isn’t maturity. What it is, is a particular adaptation to environments where expressing needs was unsafe, unwelcome, or unsuccessful. True maturity includes the ability to identify your needs, communicate them clearly, and maintain them even when doing so creates temporary discomfort or conflict. It means understanding that relationships—romantic, platonic, professional—require negotiation, that your needs are as legitimate as anyone else’s, that asking for what you want isn’t an imposition but an invitation to genuine connection and mutual respect.

The low maintenance woman has confused emotional suppression with emotional regulation. She’s mistaken the absence of conflict for the presence of harmony. She’s called the silencing of her own voice serenity, when it’s actually just silence.

The Hidden Costs

The performance of low maintenance comes with costs that aren’t always immediately visible.

There’s the slow accumulation of resentment that builds when needs go consistently unmet. In romantic relationships, this resentment can corrode intimacy until she realizes she’s sharing a bed with someone who doesn’t really know her. In friendships, it creates a brittleness where one thoughtless comment can shatter years of accumulated, unspoken grievances. At work, it breeds a cynicism about her own value and a bitterness toward colleagues who seem to advance simply by asking for what she’s too “mature” to request.

There’s the loneliness of never being fully known because you’ve never revealed what you actually need. Her partner thinks she’s genuinely unbothered by their lack of effort because she’s never said otherwise. Her friends think she’s genuinely fine being the one who always adapts because she’s performed that role so convincingly. Her colleagues think she’s genuinely content with her role because she’s never indicated she wants more.

There’s the relationship imbalance that develops when one person consistently accommodates while the other is consistently accommodated. In romantic relationships, this can create a dynamic where her partner never has to develop the skills of consideration or compromise. In friendships, it can result in one-sided relationships where she’s the eternal supporter, never the supported. At work, it creates a dynamic where she’s endlessly exploited, assigned more work, given more responsibility, but rarely compensated or recognized proportionally.

And perhaps most painfully, there’s the loss of self that occurs when you spend so long minimizing your needs that you eventually lose touch with what they are. The low maintenance woman may wake up one day unable to answer the question “What do you want?” because she’s spent so long not wanting anything that the wanting muscle has atrophied entirely.

The Path Forward

The path forward is to recognize that having needs, expressing them, and expecting them to be considered isn’t maintenance at all. It’s the basic requirement of any relationship between two full people, whether that relationship is romantic, platonic, or professional.

This means learning to distinguish between genuine flexibility and self abandonment. Genuine flexibility is agreeing to Indian food when you were thinking Italian, because you genuinely don’t have a strong preference and you like Indian too. Self abandonment is saying you’re fine with Indian when you really wanted Italian, you’ve been craving it all week, and you always defer to others’ preferences. Genuine flexibility is staying late occasionally when a work deadline genuinely requires it. Self abandonment is staying late routinely because you can’t bring yourself to set a boundary, even though it’s destroying your work-life balance.

This means experimenting with expressing needs before they become minimized. “I’d really like to go to that movie we talked about” instead of “I’m fine with whatever.” “I need you to be on time tonight. It matters to me” instead of pre deciding that their lateness is fine. “I need credit for this idea in the meeting” instead of letting someone else present your work.

This means noticing when you’re about to make a joke to deflect from a real feeling and considering whether the feeling deserves to be stated directly instead. Every grievance doesn’t require a serious conversation, but some do. And the ones that keep coming up in your “jokes” are usually the ones that need to be addressed honestly.

This means questioning whether what you’re calling maturity is actually resignation. Are you genuinely unbothered by your partner’s behavior, or have you just decided being bothered is immature? Are you genuinely content with your position at work, or have you decided that ambition is crass? Are you genuinely fine with the imbalance in your friendship, or have you decided that needing reciprocity is needy?

This also means learning to stop at the gelato shop. To let yourself want the ice cream. To let your wanting occasionally be the reason plans shift by ten minutes. To trust that the people who genuinely care about you would rather spend ten extra minutes getting you something you want than speed walk past your unexpressed needs.

The truth is that being truly low maintenance would mean your needs are met so consistently that they require little ongoing attention—not because you’ve eliminated them, but because they’re respected as part of the relationship’s foundation.

A relationship where both people’s needs are regularly considered requires less maintenance than one where suppressed needs eventually erupt into crisis or resentment. A workplace where your boundaries are respected requires less ongoing emotional management than one where you’re constantly depleting yourself. A friendship where reciprocity is the norm requires less maintenance than one where you’re perpetually accommodating.

Until then, what we’re calling low maintenance is often just a woman who’s learned to maintain everyone’s comfort but her own. And the cost of that performance is nothing less than herself.

About the Author
Joan Caven is a writer, creative director, and co-founder of TGLM Media. She builds emotionally intelligent brands and cultural products that explore connection, identity, and the everyday experiences shaping women’s lives.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This Sunday, as I was flipping through Netflix trying to decide what to watch, I came across one of my faves….Girlfriends but I just couldn’t get myself to hit play because the last thing I wanted to do was to watch Joan be… Joan.

Now don’t get me wrong, my girl (and namesake) is a complete G. A successful lawyer, STUNNING, with a fabulous wardrobe to boot.

She seems to have it all, yet season after season, Joan keeps circling the same place—accepting less than she wants, explaining to her friends why some man’s inconsistency “makes sense,” and clinging tightly to the idea of commitment while avoiding the clarity real commitment actually requires: the decision to walk away.

She reads the books. She goes to therapy. She can tell you exactly what someone’s patterns are within minutes of meeting them.

The woman can see everyone else’s relationship problems with surgical precision.

But her own? Hmmmm…

With Marcus, she struggled to choose. He wanted clarity; she needed more time.
With Brock, she stayed hoping he would become ready.
With Ellis, she explained away emotional unavailability.
And with Aaron, she stayed in a relationship marked by uncertainty—where inconsistency became “he’s working through things,” where asking for more felt unreasonable, and where her emotional intelligence slowly turned into a case for why staying made sense.

She’s so emotionally intelligent, so capable of empathy and understanding, that she sometimes uses those very skills to rationalize away her own needs.

And that’s a thing. A thing that I have experienced from myself and other emotionally equipped women around me. And it got me thinking.

Sometimes, you’re not stuck because you don’t know better. You’re not stuck because you can’t articulate what’s wrong or because you lack self awareness. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—you might be stuck because of how well you understand yourself, how articulate you are about your patterns, and how skilled you’ve become at managing your own emotional experience.

You know all the right frameworks. You can name your attachment style, identify your triggers, trace your behaviors back to their origins. You’re doing the work—therapy, journaling, meditation, all of it. And yet, somehow, you’re still here. Still waiting. Still making yourself smaller. Still explaining yourself into circles.

Frustrating… right?

So let’s outline these patterns—which by the way aren’t signs of weakness or lack of growth. They’re often signs of too much growth turned inward—emotional intelligence weaponized against your own needs, self awareness that’s become a substitute for action, and empathy that’s been stretched so thin it no longer includes you.

These patterns are sophisticated. They wear the language of healing. They disguise themselves as spiritual maturity, emotional regulation, or self trust. And that’s exactly what makes them so hard to see.

If you recognize yourself in what follows, know this: these behaviors made sense once. They kept you safe, made you lovable, helped you survive environments where your needs weren’t welcome. The question isn’t whether they served you then—they did. The question is whether they’re serving you now.

…and recognition is the first step to reclaiming your power.

1. Over explaining clarity

You already know what you want. You already know what feels wrong. But you’ve been taught that your knowing isn’t enough—that you need to justify it, rationalize it, make it palatable for others.

So you build cases. You gather evidence. You prepare for cross examination of your own feelings. You explain and reexplain, hoping that if you can make it logical enough, reasonable enough, airtight enough, then maybe it will be accepted. Maybe then you’ll have permission to trust what you already know.

This made you safe once—when your feelings were dismissed or your boundaries were challenged. Explaining everything became armor.

The truth: Clarity doesn’t require a defense. The impulse to over explain is often a sign that you’re seeking permission for something that only requires your decision.

2. Confusing patience with emotional discipline

You call it patience when you tolerate inconsistency. You call it maturity when you silence your needs. You’ve reframed endurance as virtue, convincing yourself that staying calm while being undervalued is emotional intelligence.

But there’s a difference between patience that serves growth and patience that serves avoidance. One is rooted in trust and timing and the other is rooted in the fear of being “too much.” You’ve become so good at regulating your emotions that you’ve regulated away your boundaries.

This made you safe once—you learned early that having needs made you a burden. So you turned your emotional intelligence inward, using it to manage yourself instead of expecting others to show up.

The truth: Real patience serves your growth. What you’re practicing is self-abandonment with a sophisticated vocabulary.

3. Waiting to be chosen while calling it self trust

You say you’re trusting the timing, trusting yourself, trusting the process. But underneath, you’re still waiting—for them to step up, to see your worth, to meet you where you are.

You’ve convinced yourself that not chasing is the same as choosing yourself. That waiting with dignity is self respect. But self trust isn’t passive. It doesn’t sit still hoping someone will finally pick you. It doesn’t dress up inaction as spiritual surrender.

This made you safe once—waiting felt safer than risking rejection. Being patient meant you couldn’t be accused of being needy or demanding.

The truth: Self trust is active. It’s making the choice yourself instead of waiting to be selected. It’s knowing you don’t need to be picked to move forward.

4. Pride in needing very little

You’ve made a badge of honor out of being low maintenance. You pride yourself on not asking for much, on being easy, on carrying your own weight plus theirs.

You don’t complain. You don’t make demands. You’ve trained yourself to need less and less, mistaking it for strength. But somewhere along the way, you confused self-sufficiency with worthiness—as if needing nothing makes you more deserving of love. As if the smaller you make yourself, the more valuable you become.

This made you safe once—you were rewarded for being easy. The less space you took up, the more you were praised. So you made yourself smaller and smaller, calling it independence.

The truth: The less you need, the less you receive. And you’ve been treating deprivation like a virtue.

5. Intellectual bypassing of emotional needs

You’ve turned self awareness into a spectator sport. You can articulate exactly why you feel what you feel, trace it back to childhood, name the attachment style, identify the pattern.

But knowing why hasn’t changed anything. “I know why I do this” has become the end point instead of the starting point. You analyze your feelings instead of feeling them. You understand your needs instead of meeting them. You’ve become so sophisticated at explaining your own behavior that you’ve mistaken insight for transformation.

This made you safe once—understanding gave you a sense of control when you had none. It was safer to live in your head than to risk being vulnerable in your heart.

The truth: Self awareness without action is just well informed suffering. You don’t need another framework. You need to let yourself want something and then ask for it.

6. Hyper responsibility for others’ emotional experience

You can see all sides. You understand why they did what they did. You’ve developed such deep empathy that you can rationalize almost anything—and you do.

“I can see why they did that” has become a reason to tolerate harm. You manage everyone’s comfort at the expense of your own truth. You’ve made yourself responsible for their emotional regulation, their growth, their journey. And meanwhile, your own needs sit in the waiting room, patient and polite and never called.

This made you safe once—you learned that keeping the peace was your job. That your emotional intelligence was most valuable when used in service of others’ comfort.

The truth: Understanding someone’s behavior doesn’t obligate you to accept it. Empathy is not the same as endurance.

7. Performative healing

You’re doing all the work. Therapy, journaling, meditation, books, courses, frameworks. You’re collecting tools and insights, optimizing yourself, becoming the healthiest version of you.

But you’re so busy healing that you never actually ask for what you want. You’re working on yourself so you’ll finally be worthy of receiving—but the finish line keeps moving. There’s always one more layer to process, one more pattern to break, one more version of yourself to become before you’re ready.

This made you safe once—self improvement felt like the answer when nothing else worked. If you couldn’t control how others treated you, at least you could control how evolved you became.

The truth: You don’t need to be healed to be worthy of love, respect, or your own desires. Sometimes growth isn’t another course—it’s asking for what you want right now, as you are.

8. Mistaking accommodation for compatibility

You pride yourself on being flexible, easy going, adaptable. You can fit into any container, adjust to any circumstance, make it work with almost anyone.

But flexibility has become formlessness. “I’m easy” actually means “I’ve made myself shapeless to fit your shape.” You’ve confused your ability to accommodate with evidence of compatibility. You bend and bend and bend, and call it compromise. You say you’re low maintenance when what you mean is you’ve stopped maintaining yourself.

This made you safe once—being adaptable was praised. Being easy made you valuable. So you learned to contort yourself into whatever shape kept you chosen.

The truth: Compatibility isn’t proven by how much of yourself you can suppress. It’s found in how much of yourself you can be.

What is the point of all of this?

If this made you uncomfortable, sit with that.

Discomfort often points to where we’ve been protecting patterns that no longer serve us. Your emotional intelligence is real—but it may have been turned inward for too long, managing your own needs instead of honoring them.

These patterns made you safe once. They don’t have to make you small forever.

Here’s what to try:

The next time you catch yourself explaining why someone’s behavior makes sense, pause and ask: Am I seeking understanding, or permission to stay?

The next time you feel proud of how little you need, ask: What am I not asking for—and why?

The next time you call it patience, check: Is this serving my growth, or my fear of being too much?

You’ve spent years becoming fluent in everyone else. What would happen if you became fluent in yourself?

The version that just knows what she needs and goes after it. The one who trusts her gut enough to walk away without a 10 page explanation.

Your emotional intelligence isn’t the problem, but it’s time to stop using it against yourself.

About the Author
Joan Caven is a writer, creative director, and co-founder of TGLM Media. She builds emotionally intelligent brands and cultural products that explore connection, identity, and the everyday experiences shaping women’s lives.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It’s Sunday.

The holidays have started creeping into everything.

Lights are up in windows. Conversations have shifted to travel plans and end-of-year check-ins. No one knows what day it is anymore. Every choice suddenly comes with a justification. It’s the holidays.

The year isn’t over yet, but everything you’re planning belongs to next year.

This is the in-between. You’re still finishing things, but already tired of finishing. Still responding. Still adjusting. Still pretending one more push won’t take more out of you than you planned to give.

Behind you is a year full of growth. Some of it orchestrated by you. Other parts handed to you by life, chisel included. You laughed. You cried. You ended things. You started others. You realized you had more in you than you even knew, more range, more stamina, more discernment.

Some days stretched you. Some days surprised you. There were moments that felt heavy, and others that felt light enough to remind you why you keep going. Wins you didn’t plan for. Joy that arrived without warning. Laughter that cut through weeks you thought you’d only survive.

It wasn’t tidy.

But it was very real.

And it all mattered.

Ahead of you is another year already forming. Plans. Dreams. A hope of undeniable, tremendous growth. The audacity to see your ideas through.

The patience to trust that the future version of you can carry what you’re planting now.

And right now, it’s just you, holding all of it.

This is where pressure lives.

In the urge to justify your rest. In the fantasy of starting the next year with a big bang. In the hope that 2026 will somehow fix everything you wish had gone differently this time around.

That’s a lot to ask of someone who doesn’t have a crystal ball.

But girl… we get it.

We’re just like you. Dreamers with Big vision. Always thinking about what’s next, what’s possible, what could be better, what hasn’t happened yet. So the idea of pausing…. of doing nothing on purpose…. can feel uncomfortable.

Borderline unhinged.

And still.

If there was ever a moment to pause…. even briefly, without justification….it’s now.

This stretch isn’t asking for more output.

It’s asking for space.

Time to do nothing. Time to settle. Time to let your nervous system catch up to everything you’ve already lived through this year. Time to practice trusting the flow instead of trying to outwork it.

Because rest isn’t something you earn at the end of clarity.

It’s what creates clarity.

You can’t sprint through a whole year and then demand brilliance on command. You don’t need to prove anything right now. You’ve already done so much this year. Truly.

Enough to justify rest.

Enough to justify ease.

Enough to justify being a lazy piece of sh*t for a minute — if that’s what your soul is asking for.

So in that spirit…

Your girlssss are taking a Sunday newsletter break.

Cue the fireworks.

For the last ten Sundays, you’ve been right beside us as we built The Approval Letters universe. You met the girls from the Mentally ILL group chat — Lota, Ibi, Zoe, and Leah. You watched them fumble, stretch, overthink, leap, retreat, and try again, all while getting closer — slowly, imperfectly — to themselves.

Lota began as the perfect critic, fluent in discernment and refinement. She learned that starting doesn’t reward certainty. It rewards willingness. Beginning asked her to release control and tolerate the discomfort of not being impressive yet.

Ibi moved through the world with ease, skilled at keeping things smooth. She chose clarity instead and learned that truth doesn’t break connection. It filters it.

Leah knew how to hold her ground. What she learned was when to leave it. She discovered that staying isn’t always strength, and that walking away can be a form of self-respect.

Zoe showed up for a long time as the chill girl. Unbothered. Never the problem. Which often meant never prioritizing herself. She learned that you can be easygoing and still protect yourself, and that self-abandonment in the name of keeping the peace is still abandonment.

All of our girls are still in motion. Still figuring it out. But the magic has always been in the trying. In letting yourself live, test, and begin without knowing the outcome. Not being great yet — and still being Great (hello?).

That’s really all any of us can do.

Try. Keep trying. Live from the core of yourself. Rest. Self-correct. Find your way toward versions of yourself you feel more and more comfortable … and most at home being.

We’ll be back soon with the next season and more from the girls.

Thank you for reading, for staying, for engaging, for letting us feel connected to you.

We hope you have the loveliest holiday. Enjoy the break. Let yourself be unfinished. Let yourself rest without a resolution. Let yourself exist without trying to extract meaning from every moment.

The becoming will still be there when you return.

With love, always,

Your girls,

Doreen & Joan