There’s a version of kindness that slowly kills you. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up dressed in patience, in grace, in the kind of love that tells itself I just don’t want to hurt him. It looks like being the bigger person so many times you forget you had a size to begin with.

I’ve been sitting with something lately. Not in a crisis kind of way. More in a finally have enough distance to see the whole painting kind of way. And what I see when I look back at a relationship from my past is this: I spent years practicing what organizational psychologist Kim Scott calls ruinous empathy, and I didn’t even fully choose it. It was chosen for me.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The Framework (Bear With Me, This Is Necessary)

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott maps out four quadrants of leadership behavior based on two axes: how much you care personally about someone, and how willing you are to challenge them directly. Ruinous empathy lives in the quadrant where care is high, and challenge is basically nonexistent.

It’s what happens when you care so much about not hurting someone that you fail to tell them the truth. You soften everything. You let things slide. You watch a problem grow because naming it feels like an act of violence against the relationship. You convince yourself that staying quiet is the loving thing to do.

Scott frames this mostly in the context of management. The boss who won’t give honest feedback because they don’t want their employee to feel bad, and then is blindsided when they have to fire that same person six months later. But this dynamic lives in our personal relationships just as loudly. Probably louder.

And here’s the part the framework doesn’t fully account for: sometimes you end up in ruinous empathy not because you’re conflict-avoidant or emotionally underdeveloped. Sometimes you end up there because someone has made accountability so costly that softening everything is the only way to survive the conversation.

That’s where my reflection begins.

When Accountability Becomes an Accusation

Someone from my past experienced normal accountability as an attack.

Not dramatic accountability. Not cruel accountability. I mean the ordinary kind. The kind where you say hey, when you do this thing, it affects me this way, can we talk about it? The kind that therapists coach couples toward. The kind that assumes two adults can hold a problem between them without one of them becoming the problem.

He couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t. The distinction matters less now than it once did.

What I know is that every attempt at honest conversation triggered a response so disproportionate that I started to dread being honest more than I dreaded the original issue. He would reframe my concern as criticism. He would reframe my hurt as an attempt to make him feel bad. He would reframe my asking for change as evidence that I didn’t love him as he was.

Over time, I stopped saying the true thing. I said the soft version. Then the softer version. Then eventually I said almost nothing at all, and I called that patience.

That’s ruinous empathy. And I was living inside of it.

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The More I Loved, The Worse I Became

Here’s the part that still trips me out when I say it out loud.

The more I tried to demonstrate love while also requiring accountability, the more I became the villain in the story he was telling himself. About me. About us. About what kind of person would dare ask him to be accountable.

I wasn’t being patient, even though I had been patient for years. Let that sit for a second. Years of waiting for accountability somehow became evidence of my impatience. The audacity.

I was talking down to him. I was emasculating him. I was cruel for needing what any healthy relationship requires as a baseline.

And I want to be clear: I call complete and total bullshit on all of it.

Because what was actually happening, and I can name it now with real precision, is that my love became the weapon used against me. Every genuine attempt at connection and repair got recast as an attack. Every boundary became proof of my deficiency. I wasn’t being a partner asking for reciprocity. I was being a difficult woman who didn’t know how to love right.

But it didn’t stop there.

Then came the other stuff. The stuff that had nothing to do with accountability and everything to do with making me small enough that I would stop asking altogether. Suddenly I had no friends. I was unattractive. He had fallen out of love with me years ago, years, and was only now finding the moment to mention it, right here in the middle of a conversation I started about something entirely different.

Each one landed like it was designed to. Because it was.

And when I called him out on it, when I said you don’t get to say those things and then act like this is a normal conversation, he swore he never said any of it. None of it. Looked me in my face and revised history in real time.

That is not a communication breakdown. That is gaslighting. And it works especially well on people who are already doing emotional backflips trying to be fair, trying to be kind, trying to find the version of the truth that doesn’t destroy someone who clearly cannot tolerate being accountable.

Forced into ruinous empathy is an understatement for what the beginning of that looked like.

But eventually? Eventually I just strolled up in that bitch, poured a glass of wine, and toasted my homegirl ruinous empathy. Because at some point you stop fighting the cage and start memorizing its dimensions. That’s not healing. That’s survival. And there is a difference.

The Psychology of What’s Actually Happening

Here’s the deeper cut: what he was doing had a name too. When someone consistently interprets accountability as attack, they are usually operating from a shame-based identity structure. Shame, not guilt, is the key distinction here.

Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. For people who live in shame, any feedback about their behavior doesn’t land as information. It lands as verdict. So when you say this thing you did hurt me, they hear you are irreparably broken and unworthy of love. Their nervous system responds accordingly with defensiveness, deflection, counter-attack, or collapse.

The attacks about my friendships, my appearance, his feelings disappearing years ago — those weren’t random. That’s a pattern called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a shame-driven defensive maneuver where the person being held accountable flips the script so fast that you end up defending yourself instead of continuing the original conversation. My guy tried to Uno reverse me and add a Draw 4 on top of it. Thiiiiiiiis dude. It works because it’s disorienting. You came in with a legitimate concern and somehow you’re now cataloguing evidence of your own worthiness.

And here’s what makes it so disorienting for the person on the other side: you can feel them suffering. You can see that they’re dysregulated. Your empathy is real. Your care is real. So you do what caring people do. You try to reduce their distress. You pull back. You soften. You apologize for your own need. You make the accountability disappear because watching them unravel feels like cruelty.

But managing someone’s emotional response to accountability is not empathy. It’s enmeshment. And doing it consistently doesn’t protect the relationship. It protects the dysfunction.

You become the emotional regulation system for a person who has refused to develop their own. And that job will hollow you out.

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What It Costs You

The price is not always obvious at first. It rarely is.

What I noticed first was that I got quieter. Not peaceful-quiet. Managed-quiet. The kind of quiet that knows too many exits and spends too much energy calculating whether this particular truth is worth this particular price.

Then I noticed that I stopped bringing my full self to the relationship. Because my full self had observations, needs, standards, and yes, feelings that sometimes inconvenienced him. So I started presenting an edited version. Smaller. Less demanding. More accommodating.

And here’s the spiritual violence of it: I thought I was being a good partner. I thought softening myself was an act of love. I had absorbed so thoroughly the idea that his comfort was my responsibility that I genuinely couldn’t see how far I had walked away from myself.

Ruinous empathy doesn’t just damage the relationship. It damages your relationship with your own discernment. After enough time being told that your perceptions are attacks, you start to wonder if they are. You stop trusting what you see. You start auditing your own reality before you even speak it out loud.

That is not a small thing to recover from.

The Part That’s Specifically for Us

I want to name this plainly: Black women are particularly vulnerable to being pushed into ruinous empathy and then blamed for the consequences of it.

We are socialized early and aggressively to manage the emotional environments of everyone around us. To be strong. To not make things worse. To keep the peace. To be soft enough not to be threatening and hard enough to hold everything together. We are rewarded for our flexibility and punished for our boundaries.

Researcher Cheryl Woods-Giscombé calls this the Superwoman Schema — the internalized expectation that Black women must be everything to everyone, suppress their emotions, resist vulnerability, and maintain an appearance of strength regardless of what it costs them personally. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a survival adaptation that gets mistaken for identity.

So when a partner weaponizes your care, when they make accountability so uncomfortable that your options are essentially say nothing or destroy him, we tend to choose silence. Because we’ve been taught that our voices are too much. That our needs are too heavy. That love means carrying what shouldn’t be ours to carry.

And when he tells you that your accountability is emasculation? That your needs are attacks? That somehow your years of patience were actually impatience? There is a part of you that has been prepared since girlhood to believe that. Not because you’re weak. Because you were trained.

Melissa Harris-Perry wrote that Black women in America are forced to navigate the crooked room — a space so distorted by stereotype and expectation that we contort ourselves just to appear to stand straight. Ruinous empathy in intimate relationships is one of the ways that contortion shows up. We bend. We quiet. We accommodate. And we call it love because nobody ever gave us a different word for it.

It is not weakness that got us here. It is a lifetime of conditioning dressed up as virtue.

Naming that doesn’t mean we stay. It means we understand why leaving was complicated in ways that go beyond the individual relationship.

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The Ending I Didn’t Know I Was Writing Toward

That relationship is over now. And I want to say that simply, without drama, because the simplicity of it is actually the point. It ended. And I am standing in what I can only describe as Act 2 of my own life, equal parts terrified and excited, which I’ve learned is exactly what freedom feels like when you’ve been managing someone else’s emotional chaos for long enough.

I’m in therapy. Shamelessly, gratefully, necessarily in therapy. Because the work of recovering your own perception, of learning to trust what you see and feel and need again, is not a solo sport. And I would rather do it right than fast.

And listen. I have to be honest with you because this is a judgment-free zone and The Culture Alchemist has never been about performing wellness.

Men genuinely give me the ick right now. Like a full-body, cellular-level response. Ya’ll can have them. I mean that with love and zero apology.

That might change. It might not. Either way I am not rushing toward anything that requires me to shrink, soften, or go silent to make someone else comfortable. Those days are retired. They have a plaque and a pension and they are not coming back.

What I know is that I would rather be here, a little unsteady in a new chapter, trusting my own instincts again, than comfortable inside a dynamic that was costing me everything quietly.

Act 2 is uncomfortable and spacious and mine. I’ll take it.

The Beginning of Getting It Back

If this piece found you, it’s probably because some version of this story is yours too.

The beginning of recovering from ruinous empathy, especially the kind you were pushed into and eventually just made your permanent address, starts with restoring your trust in your own perception.

Not performing confidence. Not making a dramatic declaration. Just quietly, privately, beginning to believe that what you saw was real. That what was said was said. That your needs were legitimate. That asking someone to be accountable to you was not emasculation or cruelty or evidence of your inability to love. That love was not supposed to require that level of translation and self-erasure.

The framework Scott gives us is useful not because it tells us what to do but because it gives us language. And language is how we stop being haunted by something we couldn’t name.

Ruinous empathy. The caring that doesn’t challenge. The softness that enables. The silence that slowly taught me that my voice was dangerous when it was actually just inconvenient for someone who had no intention of growing.

There’s a difference. It took me a while to really feel it.

I feel it now.

The Audacity of Becoming is a Substack for the people doing the interior work alongside the exterior work, leading, building, healing, and figuring out who they are in all of it. If this one sat with you, share it with someone who needs the language.

References

Scott, K. (2017). Radical Candor: Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. St. Martin’s Press.

Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism and Psychology, 7(1), 22-32. (Original source for the DARVO framework)

Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851-875.

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press. (Foundational research on the shame vs. guilt distinction)

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing. (Shame resilience theory)

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press. (Original framework for enmeshment in relational systems)

Woods-Giscombé, C. L. (2010). Superwoman Schema: African American women’s views on stress, strength, and health. Qualitative Health Research, 20(5), 668-683.

Harris-Perry, M. V. (2011). Sister citizen: Shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America. Yale University Press.

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.

Chiiiiiile.

Kennedy Ryan did it again. And I don’t know why I keep acting surprised. Every time this woman releases a book, she somehow slips past my defenses, sits down in my living room, and starts asking questions I wasn’t emotionally prepared to answer. Score wasn’t just a romance novel for me. It was a mirror. A conversation. And if I’m being completely honest, a little bit of a therapy session I didn’t schedule.

Let me get the obvious out of the way: yes, the romance was romance-ing. Yes, the chemistry between Verity and Monk was ridiculous. Yes, the sex scenes were excellent, and yes, some of them required me to close the book, stare at the ceiling, and collect myself. Respectfully. Kennedy Ryan writes intimacy the way great musicians play jazz. Technique. Rhythm. Emotion. Vulnerability. Nothing feels gratuitous because it’s never just about the act. It reveals something. Deepens something. And it works.

But Score elevated itself beyond a great romance the moment Verity Hill walked onto the page.

Verity exists at an intersection we rarely get to see handled with this much care in fiction. She is Black, bisexual, and living with bipolar disorder. And Kennedy Ryan refuses to flatten any of those identities into a plot device or a lesson. Verity is brilliant and complicated and talented and messy and deserving of love. Watching her journey pushed me into my own interior in ways I wasn’t expecting, not because our experiences are identical, but because Kennedy Ryan understands something too many writers miss: mental health isn’t just about diagnosis. It’s about relationships. It’s about shame. It’s about who shows up, who disappears, who panics, and who stays.

I have a brother who lives with bipolar schizophrenia. Anyone who has loved someone navigating severe mental illness knows there is no clean script for it. There are moments of fear and frustration and grief and love, enormous amounts of love, and an exhaustion nobody likes to name out loud. What impressed me most about Score was that Kennedy Ryan didn’t just show Verity’s inner experience. She showed the ripple effects: how family responds, how friends respond, how institutions respond. How the people who love you can still not fully understand what’s happening inside you, and how much that costs everyone. The depiction of mania felt particularly powerful because it wasn’t sensationalized. It felt human. It felt frightening. It felt heartbreaking. It felt real.

There’s one scene I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Police officers place Verity in handcuffs during a mental health crisis. And the question the scene kept forcing me to sit with was: what if her professor hadn’t shown up? What if there was no one there to advocate for her? What if the situation escalated? For Black people, those aren’t hypothetical questions. They are survival questions. Score doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but it asks them directly. It puts the reader in the discomfort and doesn’t let us look away, and that is exactly what good fiction is supposed to do.

I also want to name how much I loved the sheer abundance of Blackness in this book. Not trauma-centered Blackness. Not struggle-only Blackness. Not the kind that explains itself to a white gaze. Rich, layered, beautiful Black life. Black art, Black music, Black creativity, Black joy. The Harlem Renaissance backdrop added texture and depth that told me Kennedy Ryan genuinely loves Black culture. Not as decoration or backdrop, but as legacy. As inheritance. As resistance.

And Monk Bellamy. Whew. What I appreciated most was that Kennedy Ryan allowed him to be wounded without making him cruel. His hurt felt earned. His confusion felt earned. His journey toward understanding Verity’s experience felt authentic, not perfect, not instant, not magical. Just human. This isn’t a story about someone being saved. It’s a story about being seen. And that distinction is everything.

Share The Audacity of Becoming

What Kennedy Ryan accomplishes in Score is genuinely rare. A sweeping, sexy, emotionally satisfying romance that simultaneously holds space for real conversations about mental health, bisexuality, stigma, Black identity, masculinity, trauma, and healing. That is a lot of weight for one novel to carry and somehow it never feels heavy-handed. It feels lived in. It feels compassionate. It feels honest.

This book made me laugh, made me blush, made me cry, and made me think. And as someone who knows what it means to carry grief, to love people whose minds sometimes wage war against them, and to keep searching for language to describe the inexplicable, I found something in these pages that I wasn’t expecting to find.

Hope.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 Stars. Read it.

Last time, we talked about misalignment and how it’s an information problem, not a negotiation problem. Once you see it clearly, you stop trying to fix what was never broken in your favor to begin with.

But here’s the part nobody talks about: what happens after you identify the misalignment and actually set a boundary?

Because a lot of us set them. We set them in our journals. We set them in therapy. We set them in the voice notes we send to our best friends at 11pm. We have whole conversations about what we will and will not accept. We say it with our chest.

And then someone tests it, and we start explaining ourselves. Softening the edges. Offering context they didn’t ask for. Finding reasons why this situation is the exception.

Sis, the boundary doesn’t need your footnotes. You negotiating it does.

The Pattern Has a Name

Organizational researchers Glen Kreiner, Elaine Hollensbe, and Mathew Sheep spent years studying how people manage the line between work and the rest of their lives. Their landmark 2009 study in the Academy of Management Journal, which won the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for the best publication in work-family research, found that people use four types of boundary tactics: behavioral, temporal, physical, and communicative. The finding that tends to get skipped over in the summary version is this one: people who fail to consistently enforce their chosen boundaries don’t just experience conflict. They experience what the researchers called boundary violations, defined as behaviors and episodes that breach or neglect the desired boundary entirely. Chronic boundary violations, even small ones, accumulate into measurable erosion of wellbeing and engagement over time.¹

Death by a thousand “just this once” moments. Not because the violations are catastrophic. Because they are chronic. And because we keep letting them through.

What makes it worse is that the erosion is often self-generated. We are not just tolerating the violations. We are facilitating them every time we renegotiate what we said we wouldn’t accept.

Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci have spent decades building the framework known as Self-Determination Theory, and their foundational 2000 paper in American Psychologist is clear on this: autonomy, the experience of being the author of your own behavior, is not a personality preference or a luxury. It is a basic psychological need. When people cannot exercise autonomy, including the autonomy to say no and have it mean something, their intrinsic motivation and psychological wellbeing don’t gradually decline. They measurably collapse.² You think you’re being flexible. Your nervous system knows you’re being overridden.

And for Black women specifically? Catalyst researchers Dnika J. Travis, Jennifer Thorpe-Moscon, and Courtney McCluney coined the term Emotional Tax in their 2016 report Emotional Tax: How Black Women and Men Pay More at Work, defining it as “the heightened experience of being different from peers at work because of gender and/or race/ethnicity, and the associated detrimental effects on health, well-being, and the ability to thrive.” Their follow-up 2018 study found that nearly 60% of women and men of color surveyed reported being in a constant state of being “on guard,” consciously preparing to deal with potential bias or discrimination, and that this vigilance disrupted sleep, depleted wellbeing, and drove intent to quit.³

Your boundaries are not a personality preference. They are a health intervention.

What It Costs You Personally

The fawn response, first articulated by therapist Pete Walker as a fourth survival response alongside fight, flight, and freeze in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, is worth naming here because it explains a lot of behavior we misread as kindness or professionalism.

Walker describes fawn types as people who “seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others” and who “act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries.”⁴

Fawning is the pattern of appeasing others to neutralize threat. And it doesn’t always look like fear. Sometimes it looks like over-explaining your no. Sometimes it looks like offering three alternatives when someone didn’t like your answer. Sometimes it looks like saying “I just need to think about it” when you already knew.

The problem isn’t that you’re a people pleaser. The problem is that every time you negotiate with your own boundary, you teach yourself that your limits aren’t real. You train your brain to treat your stated values as opening positions, not conclusions. And over time, that wears something down in you that is genuinely hard to rebuild.

Personally, the cost shows up as resentment. Not at the person who crossed the line but at yourself, for letting them. And that resentment is quiet, and it compounds, and it poisons things that had nothing to do with the original violation.

What It Costs You Professionally

Here’s what the organizational research actually tells us: women who behave with agency, who set limits, advocate for themselves, and operate with directness, face a measurable social penalty. Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick documented this in their 2001 study in the Journal of Social Issues, showing that agentic women are evaluated as less likeable than their male counterparts displaying identical behavior. The researchers called it the backlash effect: negative social evaluation for violating prescriptions of feminine niceness.⁵

That penalty is real, and you should know it exists. But here’s the other half of that equation: the long-term professional cost of not holding your boundary is higher. Consistency reads as character. Inconsistency, even when it comes from generosity, reads as weakness.

In practice: when you say you won’t take on projects outside your scope and then you take one on because someone asked nicely, you haven’t built goodwill. You’ve established that your no is negotiable. And that information travels. People will ask again. And they’ll bring friends.

What It Costs You as an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship has a mythology problem. The hustle culture narrative has convinced a generation of founders that availability equals commitment, and that the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who said yes to everything in the beginning. That is a story written by people who either had safety nets you didn’t have, or who survived the burnout and edited the earlier chapters out.

The data is no longer ambiguous on this. A 2025 study published in Fortune reviewed surveys of founders and found that 87% of entrepreneurs reported experiencing anxiety, depression, or burnout, or all three. More striking: entrepreneurs who set work-life boundaries for themselves experienced dramatically less burnout. Nearly half of boundary-setters, 45%, reported low burnout. Compare that to just 6% of founders who struggled to maintain their limits. Non-boundary-setters were almost three times more likely to experience high burnout.⁶

Three times.

When you don’t hold your own limits as a founder, three things happen in sequence.

First, scope creep colonizes your business model. You started with a clear offering and now you’re doing seventeen things because every client brings a new “opportunity.” None of those opportunities are in your zone of genius. All of them are in your zone of exhaustion.

Second, your pricing signals your self-perception. Every time you discount, over-deliver without adjusting the agreement, or absorb work outside the contract because you don’t want to have the conversation, you are communicating something about your worth. The market listens.

Third, and this one is quiet but corrosive: you stop trusting yourself. Because you keep telling yourself what you will and won’t accept, and then you don’t honor it, and eventually your own word stops meaning anything to you. The consequences of that are downstream and serious.

The Shift: Why Holding the Boundary Is the Actual Work

Here’s the reframe: the boundary-setting is not the hard part. We’ve been in the self-help industrial complex long enough to know how to identify a limit and write it down. The hard part is what happens the first time, and the second time, and the fourth time, that holding it costs you something.

A relationship. A contract. Someone’s approval. Your own comfort.

And here is what I need you to understand: a boundary only becomes real the first time it’s tested and survives. Until then, it’s a preference. A hope. An intention. Intentions don’t protect you.

Shalom Schwartz, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, spent decades building and validating his Theory of Basic Human Values, with research supported by data from 82 countries. His work is consistent on one key finding: people who act in alignment with their stated values report higher psychological wellbeing and stronger relational outcomes than those who are contextually “flexible” about their values under social pressure. The flexibility feels like wisdom in the moment. The data says otherwise.⁷

You are not being difficult. You are being coherent.

So what does holding actually look like?

It looks like saying what you said and not offering a discount on it when they push back. It looks like not answering the email after hours just because you technically could. It looks like ending the client relationship you said you would end in Q1 instead of renegotiating the terms in Q4. It looks like telling the committee no without a paragraph of reasons why.

A Word to My Entrepreneur Sisters Specifically

The people who will negotiate hardest with your limits are often people who like you. They’re not bad actors. They’re just comfortable with you, or they need what they think you have, or they’ve learned over time that you’re moveable.

You trained them. You can untrain them. Not with a manifesto. With a pattern of behavior. One held limit at a time.

And yes, there will be a transition period where it feels like you’re losing things. You might be, temporarily. What you are not losing is yourself. And at a certain point in this life, past a certain number of seasons of giving yourself away in pieces, you start to understand that self-preservation is not selfish. It is the work.

The Closing

You already know what your limits are. You’ve written them down. You’ve said them out loud. You’ve nodded along to every conversation about protecting your energy and honoring your capacity.

The question isn’t whether you know what they are.

The question is whether you trust yourself enough to keep them when it’s inconvenient.

That’s the whole thing, actually. The boundary is just information. The trust is the practice.

Don’t negotiate with misalignment. Don’t negotiate with people who show you who they are. And stop negotiating with the limits you set for yourself in a moment of clarity just because someone found your number.

Your no doesn’t need a footnote. Let it stand.

What reflection are you sitting with? Drop it in the comments. Where have you been the one negotiating against your own limits, and what finally made it stop?

Sources + Further Reading

¹ Kreiner, G.E., Hollensbe, E.C., & Sheep, M.L. (2009). Balancing borders and bridges: Negotiating the work-home interface via boundary work tactics. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4), 704–730. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2009.43669916

² Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

³ Travis, D.J., Thorpe-Moscon, J., & McCluney, C. (2016). Emotional tax: How Black women and men pay more at work and how leaders can take action. Catalyst. https://www.catalyst.org/research/emotional-tax-how-black-women-and-men-pay-more-at-work-and-how-leaders-can-take-action/

Travis, D.J. & Thorpe-Moscon, J. (2018). Day-to-day experiences of emotional tax among women and men of color in the workplace. Catalyst. https://www.catalyst.org/insights/2018/emotional-tax-women-and-men-of-color-in-the-workplace

⁴ Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote. https://www.pete-walker.com

⁵ Rudman, L.A., & Glick, P. (2001). Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 743–762. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00239

⁶ Murphy, M. et al. (2025, September 12). We studied America’s entrepreneurs and found too many were burned out, anxious and depressed. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/09/12/we-studied-entrepreneurs-burnout-anxious-depressed-wellbeing/

⁷ Schwartz, S.H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

Support LeadHers in Bloom as a part of Riley’s legacy here: givebutter.com/leadhers-in-bloom

Today is May tenth.

It’s Mother’s Day. It’s also Riley’s birthday. She would have been three.

I don’t know what three looks like on her. I never got to find out. What I do know is what she felt like at full term, kicking me in my lungs, dancing in my belly like she already had a whole personality and just needed a stage. What I know is all-day sickness so relentless that laughing too hard made me throw up. What I know is the particular joy of a baby who makes herself completely, undeniably known before she ever takes a breath outside of your body.

She gave me that. Immense joy. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. Riley gave me joy.

She came out beautiful. Light-skinned like me but looking just like her father, which honestly was a little rude after everything I went through. She had congenital heart disease. She was stillborn.

And then my body tried to take me with her.

The placenta got stuck. They had to scrape it out of me. I lost so much blood my teeth were chattering. I remember that specific detail more than almost anything else. The chattering. My body shaking from the inside out while the room moved around me in that way that tells you something is very wrong and there is nothing you can do about it.

In that moment, I understood something I carry to this day. There are experiences that make you want to die not because you’re giving up, but because the pain is so enormous your whole system says enough. I felt that. Sometimes I still do. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending doesn’t honor her, and it doesn’t honor the women reading this who know exactly what I’m talking about.

I have a dog named Rocket. An Aussiedoodle. He turned four a few weeks ago. He has these eyes, these almost-human eyes, and I know some people think it’s strange, but I see Riley in them sometimes.

I don’t need anyone to understand that. It’s mine.

Rocket came into my life and he just… loves me. Without conditions, without agenda, without needing me to be okay first. On the days when grief still finds me in a corner I thought I’d swept clean, he is there. He has been there. I thank God for him more than I can explain.

I do the work I do because of Riley.

Black Girl Assembly. The pipeline, the infrastructure. The investment in Black, Brown, and Indigenous girls and women. The belief that their lives and their leadership matter before the world tells them otherwise. All of it, at its root, is because of her. I want to live a life and leave a legacy that reflects how much I love her. I want to build something she would look at, wherever she is, and feel proud of.

That’s what keeps me moving. Not hustle. Not grind culture. Love. Her love living through mine.

So today, on Mother’s Day, on Riley’s birthday, I want to say this to every person who holds the specific weight of loving someone they never got to keep:

To the foster parents. The adoptive parents. The trans moms. The grandparents who stepped in and stepped up. The aunties who raised children that weren’t legally theirs and loved them like they were. The tribes and the villages. The mothers of living children who are still grieving something. And especially, especially, the bereaved mothers. The ones carrying babies in memory instead of arms. The ones who know what it is to love someone your whole life in a matter of months.

I see you.

I love you.

I am you.

Happy Mother’s Day, Riley. Mama’s still here.

On Saturday, April 25, Megan Thee Stallion told the truth on Instagram. She said her boyfriend cheated. She said she had been holding him down through a brutal Mavericks season and his bad treatment of her. She said he could not commit to monogamy after a year of her showing up like a wife in training, cooking for his family at Thanksgiving, doting on him in public, and putting his name in her mouth with love. She said she was done. She signed off and asked for a real break.

Within hours, the response was not concern. It was strategy.

Stephen A. Smith dropped a forty-two-minute YouTube rant explaining why she should have kept the breakup private. Charlamagne Tha God told his audience that women need male friends who would have warned them away from a man like Klay in the first place. DJ Akademiks logged on to mock her with championship-ring jokes. Lil Duval, Cam’ron, and a parade of podcast hosts lined up behind them. A WNBA player named Lexie Brown had to publicly disclose she was receiving death threats because her name got within five feet of the story.

Megan packed up her Broadway run two weeks early.

Let me name what we are watching with the precision it deserves. This is misogynoir. The term was coined in 2008 by queer Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey to describe the specific brew of anti-Black racism and misogyny that targets Black women in popular media and culture. It is not regular sexism with a tan. It is a discrete and identifiable system, and this past week we got to study it operating in real time, on a global stage, in 4K.

The pattern is the point

This is not Megan’s first season as the target. In 2020 her industry friend Tory Lanez shot her in the foot and the same digital coalition mobilized to tell us she lied. They called her a setup queen. They masculinized her body. They wrote that she deserved it. When the conviction came, they recalibrated and called her vindictive. When she healed in public, they called her thirsty. When she finally found a man who took her home to meet his family, they tried to humiliate him into leaving her. When that same man cheated and she named it, they told her she should have stayed quiet.

There is no winning configuration. That is not a glitch in the system. That is the design.

The social psychology of this is well-documented. When Black women succeed, are loved, are believed, or are heard, they violate a hierarchy that has been organizing American culture since this country wrote its first laws. The slut shaming, the body commentary, the ridicule of her tears, the celebration of her heartbreak, the demand that she suffer in silence, all of it follows a script that was written long before Megan Pete picked up a microphone. Sojourner Truth named this pattern at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron. We just have new podcasts.

The loyalty test we keep failing on purpose

Pay attention to who showed up to defend Klay Thompson. A man who has not said a single public word in his own defense. A man whose father reportedly called Megan’s Thanksgiving dinner the best food he had ever tasted. A man who, according to Megan and the unfolding reporting, did the very thing she accused him of doing.

The men with the largest microphones in Black media chose him anyway. They chose the spectacle over the sister.

Stephen A. asked why we had to dog the brother out. Charlamagne questioned whether the relationship was even serious enough to justify her telling the truth in the first place. They told women to be more discerning, more private, more strategic with their pain. Nobody told Klay to be more accountable.

This is the loyalty test that Black women have been failing on purpose for generations. We are told that protecting the race means protecting the men in it from the consequences of their own choices, even when we are the ones carrying those consequences in our bodies, our credit scores, our therapy bills, and our reputations. We are told that telling the truth is betrayal. We are told that our healing is a public relations problem.

It is not. It is leadership.

What I want every girl in the Assembly to take from this week

At Black Girl Assembly, we are raising girls who will one day tell the truth in public. Some will tell it on stages. Some on TikTok. Some in HR meetings. Some in their own kitchens, to a man who promised her better than she got. Every one of them needs to understand, before her moment arrives, what is happening in this story right now.

Six things to put in your pocket.

One. The pile-on is not about you. It is about what you represent. Megan represents a Black woman who survived being shot, who built a Popeyes franchise empire, who graduated from college, who took herself to Broadway, and who refuses to apologize for enjoying her own life. That is the actual offense. Your version of that offense will look different. The response will rhyme.

Two. They will weaponize your softness against you. Megan cooked the greens. Megan posted the reels. Megan cried at the curtain call. Every act of her tenderness is now being rebranded as evidence that she was naive, thirsty, or trying too hard. Soft is not a safety strategy, and it never was. Soft is who you are. Stay soft and add discernment.

Three. The men who claim to protect you will defend the man who hurt you when his fame is bigger than your truth. This is not a personal failing of any one Black man you love. It is a cultural pattern with documented receipts. Adjust your expectations of public defense accordingly. Build your council of real ones in private.

Four. You cannot earn your way out of misogynoir with respectability. Megan has the Grammys, the degree, the businesses, the fan base, the receipts, and the work ethic. She still got it. Stop performing for people who will pile on no matter what you do. Spend that energy on your own becoming.

Five. Telling the truth in public is leadership, even when the cost is loud. What Megan modeled on Saturday is exactly what we teach in the Accelerator, the Assembly, and the Collective. Name what happened. Name your boundary. Move accordingly. Do not stay inside a story that requires your silence to function.

Six. Choose your inner circle like your becoming depends on it. Because it does. Notice who quietly showed up for Megan. Notice the WNBA player who received death threats for being adjacent. Your circle is your infrastructure. Audit it like the strategist you are.

What this means in your workplace and your leadership

If you are reading this from a corner office, a Slack channel, or a board seat, the pattern does not stop with celebrity breakups. The same dynamics show up in your performance reviews, in your one on ones, in the way the Black woman on your team gets labeled difficult for stating a need that a white colleague gets praised for raising. The same dynamics show up in who gets believed when workplace harm gets reported. In who gets the benefit of the doubt and who gets the documentation file.

If you are a leader, your job this week is to notice the pattern and refuse to reinforce it. Do not laugh at the meme. Do not forward the take. Do not let the lunch table conversation organize itself around the same script that punished Megan for being a human being.

Choose the sister over the spectacle. Every single time.

If you manage Black women on your team, ask them how they are doing this week. Some of us are tired. Some of us are not surprised. All of us are watching.

The audacity it takes

The audacity of becoming is the audacity to keep telling the truth even when the room organizes against you.

Megan keeps doing it. Sojourner did it. Anita did it. Tarana did it. Our girls are watching every one of them, and they are watching every one of us.

Be the kind of auntie, manager, executive, friend, mother, mentor, and culture worker who breaks the pattern instead of feeding it. That is the work. That has always been the work.

We are still that woman. We are not going anywhere.

-----

Sources and further reading

• CNN, [“Furious fans rally to Megan Thee Stallion after breakup with Klay Thompson”](https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/entertainment/megan-thee-stallion-klay-thompson-breakup-cec), April 27, 2026

• Salon, [“No matter what she does, Megan Thee Stallion can’t win”](https://www.salon.com/2026/04/30/no-matter-what-she-does-megan-thee-stallion-cant-win/), April 30, 2026

• HuffPost, [“Megan Thee Stallion’s Breakup Brought Out Something Ugly In Black Men Online”](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/megan-thee-stallion-klay-thompson-sexist-backlash_n_69f11374e4b01910ba19fa32)

• NewsOne, [“On Megan Thee Stallion, De-centering Men, And Choosing Ourselves”](https://newsone.com/6858634/megan-thee-stallion-choosing-ourselves-black-women/)

• Bleacher Report, [“WNBA’s Lexie Brown Says She’s Received Death Threats over Klay Thompson, Megan Thee Stallion Breakup”](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/25424021-wnbas-lexie-brown-says-shes-received-death-threats-over-klay-thompson-megan-thee-stallion-breakup)

• National Women’s Law Center, [“A Terrible Storm: Megan Thee Stallion, Misogynoir, and Leaving Black Survivors Unprotected”](https://nwlc.org/a-terrible-storm-megan-thee-stallion-misogynoir-and-leaving-black-survivors-unprotected/)

• Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021

• Northwestern Magazine, [“Chatting With Moya Bailey”](https://magazine.northwestern.edu/voices/moya-bailey-misogynoir-racism-misogyny-merriam-webster-digital-apothecary)

• The Kansas City Defender, [“Guilty At a Glance: Megan Thee Stallion, Misogynoir, and Shattering the Perfect Victim Narrative”](https://kansascitydefender.com/opinion/meg-the-stallion-misogynoir-tory-lanez/)

• LevelMan, [“The Klay Thompson Conundrum”](https://www.levelman.com/the-klay-thompson-conundrum/)

• Basketball Network, [“Charlamagne Tha God Says Megan Thee Stallion–Klay Thompson Breakup Is Overblown”](https://www.basketballnetwork.net/off-the-court/charlamagne-tha-god-says-megan-thee-stallion-klay-thompson-breakup-is-overblown)

-----

If this resonates, share it with the women in your life who need to read it today.

For more of this kind of work, find me at alchemyforchange.com or Black Girl Assembly.

Lucille Simon had not slept in three days. Not because of the baby, who was, by some miracle, a quiet child. Naomi slept the way Lucille wished she could: deeply, completely, with no knowledge of what waited on the other side of consciousness.

It was the knowing that kept Lucille awake. The knowing that had settled into her bones like a fever she couldn’t sweat out. She’d found the photographs four days ago, tucked inside a hollowed-out Bible in the back of the closet. The irony of the hiding place would have made her laugh if the contents hadn’t made her vomit.

Peter had always been meticulous. That was one of the things she’d loved about him, back when love was still a word she could attach to his name. His shirts pressed with military precision. His tools organized by size and function in the garage. His schedule, predictable as a metronome. She’d mistaken all of it for discipline. For the steadiness of a man who had his life together.

She’d been wrong about a lot of things. But she had never been wrong about what she saw in those photographs.

Bodies. Women’s bodies. Not whole. Arranged in patterns she didn’t recognize but that spoke of ritual, of intention, of someone who took pleasure in the geometry of suffering. And in several of the photographs, caught at the edge of the frame like an afterthought, she could see his hands. She knew those hands. Knew the scar across the left knuckle from when he’d punched through the kitchen window the night Naomi was conceived. Knew the gold signet ring his father had given him that he never took off, not even in the shower.

She’d put the photographs back exactly as she found them. She’d closed the Bible. She’d walked to the bathroom and thrown up until there was nothing left. Then she’d washed her face, picked up her daughter from the crib, and held her until Peter came home.

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He’d walked through the door whistling. He always whistled some tune she could never quite place. He’d kissed the baby’s forehead, asked what was for dinner, and sat down at the table like a man whose biggest concern was whether the Saints would cover the spread on Sunday.

That night, lying beside him in the dark, she’d made two decisions. She was going to get Naomi out. And she was going to make sure Peter Simon never touched another woman again.

* * *

* * *

Her cousin Raymond picked up on the second ring. He always did. Even when he was neck-deep in a case at Quantico, even when the Bureau had him running on fumes and cold coffee, Raymond Greer answered the phone when Lucille called. She was the only family he had left who still talked to him, and they both knew it.

“Lu?” His voice was careful. He could hear it already. Whatever was on the other end of this call was not a holiday check-in.

“Ray, I need you to come down here. Don’t ask me why on the phone. Just come.”

He was quiet for a beat too long. Raymond had spent twelve years in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, and the silence meant he was already reading between the lines. A woman who never asked for help was asking for help. A woman who’d married a man Raymond had never liked but kept his mouth shut about was calling at eleven o’clock at night with a voice that sounded like cracked glass.

“I’ll be there by morning,” he said.

“Bring your credentials.”

Another silence. Then, very quietly: “Lu. Is he hurting you?”

She looked down at Naomi, asleep in the portable crib she’d moved into the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to be more than arm’s reach from her child ever again. She thought about the bruises along her ribs that Peter had put there two weeks ago when she’d asked him why he came home at four in the morning smelling like copper. She thought about how he’d grabbed her jaw so hard she’d heard something click, leaned in close, and whispered, “You don’t want to know the answer to that, baby.”

She thought about the photographs. The hands. The ring.

“It’s worse than that,” she said. “He’s hurting everybody.”

* * *

Raymond arrived before dawn. Lucille had coffee waiting and the photographs spread across the kitchen table, each one in a clear plastic bag because Raymond had told her not to touch them again. Naomi slept through all of it. Lord, that child could sleep.

She watched Raymond’s face as he went through the photographs. She’d seen her cousin handle a lot. He’d profiled killers whose body counts hit double digits. He’d sat across from men who collected teeth the way other people collected stamps. But she saw something shift behind his eyes as he reached the fifth photograph. His jaw set in a way that told her he wasn’t just looking at evidence. He was looking at the work of someone who enjoyed what he did.

“How long have you known?” he asked without looking up.

“Four days.”

“Has he hurt the baby?”

“No. Not yet. But Ray…” She sat down across from him and made him look at her. “He told me something last month. I thought he was trying to scare me. Now I think he was bragging.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said the women he sees, the ones who go missing, they don’t go missing on their own. He said it like a joke. Like he was testing me to see if I’d flinch.” She paused. “Then he said, ‘Some people create art. Some people are the canvas.’”

Raymond closed his eyes. When he opened them, the agent was fully in control. “You’re going to give me a statement. Everything. Every bruise, every threat, every time he came home smelling like something he shouldn’t have been near. I’m going to take these photographs to my unit chief, and we’re going to build a case. But Lucille, I need you to understand something.”

“What?”

“When this comes out, your life here is over. His name, your name, Naomi’s name, all of it gets dragged into a courtroom and put under lights. The press will camp outside your door. And if he finds out you’re the one who turned the photographs over before we can get him in custody…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

Lucille looked at the crib. At her daughter’s tiny fist curled near her mouth. At the small, perfect life she’d somehow managed to make inside a house of horrors.

“I know,” she said. “That’s the other thing I need to talk to you about.”

* * *

They sat on the porch while the sky turned pink at the edges. Naomi was in Lucille’s arms, still sleeping, and Lucille held her like she was memorizing the weight.

“He has another daughter,” she said. “Older. Maybe eight or nine by now. Her name is Celeste.”

Raymond looked at her. “From before you?”

“From during me. He was with her mother the whole time. I don’t know if that woman knows what he is. I doubt it. He’s good at hiding. He hid it from me for six years.” She pressed her lips to Naomi’s forehead. “But that little girl has his blood in her the same way this one does. And I need you to know that, in case it matters later.”

“In case what matters?”

Lucille turned to face him full on. Her eyes were dry. She was past crying. “In case the darkness in him didn’t stop with him. In case it passed down. You study these people for a living, Ray. You tell me: does it pass down?”

Raymond didn’t answer for a long time. Lucille respected that. A man who studied monsters for a living didn’t throw around easy reassurances. When he finally spoke, his voice was measured.

“Genetics loads the gun. Environment pulls the trigger. It’s not inevitable.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Yes. It’s possible.”

Lucille nodded. Then she held Naomi out to him. The baby stirred, opened her eyes briefly, and settled against Raymond’s chest like she’d been there before.

“Take her,” Lucille said. Her voice didn’t crack. She wouldn’t let it. “Raise her. Keep her away from this name and everything attached to it. Give her yours. Love her like she’s your own, because after today she will be.”

“Lu, you don’t have to—”

“Yes I do.” She stood up and smoothed her dress. “If I keep her, she grows up as Peter Simon’s daughter. That follows a child. That shapes a child. And if anything in her is like anything in him, being raised in the shadow of what he’s done will water it instead of starving it.” She looked out at the street, at the neighbors’ houses, at the whole world that didn’t know yet what lived inside hers. “You know how the mind works. You can watch for it. You can catch it early if it shows up. I can’t do that. I don’t have the training or the distance.”

“And the other girl? Celeste?”

“I can’t save her. I’ve only seen her once, and her mother doesn’t know me. But you can keep an eye out. If something happens with Celeste later, at least you’ll know she exists. At least someone will be paying attention.”

Raymond held Naomi closer. The baby had fallen back asleep, her breathing soft and steady against his collarbone. He was a man who tracked predators across state lines, who could read a crime scene the way musicians read sheet music. But standing on this porch, holding this child, he felt the full weight of what his cousin was asking.

Not just to raise her daughter. To stand guard over a bloodline that might carry something terrible inside it. To watch for the cracks. To love this child enough to see her clearly, even if what he saw scared him.

“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “I’ll take care of all of it.”

Lucille kissed her daughter one more time. Long and slow, breathing her in. Then she stepped back and folded her arms across her chest like she was holding herself together by force.

“One more thing,” she said. “After this is done, after he’s arrested and the trial is over, I’m going to disappear. I don’t want Naomi looking for me. I don’t want anyone looking for me. Let them think I’m dead if they need to. It’s better that way.”

“Lucille.”

“I’m not being dramatic, Ray. I’m being practical. A dead woman can’t be used as leverage. A dead woman can’t be found and hurt to send a message. And a dead woman can’t be the reason her daughter gets pulled back into something she was supposed to be free of.”

Raymond started to argue but stopped. He looked at her face and saw something he recognized from twelve years of studying people who’d made irreversible decisions. Lucille wasn’t asking for permission. She was informing him of the plan.

“Does anyone else know she exists?” he asked. “Naomi. Does anyone know you had a child?”

“The neighbors know I was pregnant. I’ll tell them the baby didn’t make it. By the time anyone has reason to question that, I’ll be gone and the records will be whatever you make them.”

He nodded slowly. “And if she ever comes looking for you?”

Lucille’s jaw tightened. Something flickered across her face that might have been grief, but she swallowed it whole before it could reach her eyes.

“Then you did your job wrong,” she said. And went inside.

Raymond stood on the porch for a long time after the door closed, holding a baby who didn’t know yet that the world had just split in half around her. The sun was fully up now, warm on his face, and somewhere down the street a woman was calling her children in for breakfast.

He shifted Naomi to his other arm and took out his phone. He had calls to make. A case to build. A man to put in a cage.

And a child to raise who might one day need saving from her own blood.

So this is the April pick for The Audacity of Reading, and I need us to talk about it.

Quick premise for anybody who hasn’t touched it yet. An alien corporation shows up, claims Earth violated some galactic contract nobody knew existed, and proceeds to strip the planet for parts. Most of humanity is gone in the first few pages. The survivors get funneled into a multi-level underground dungeon that doubles as the set of an intergalactic reality TV show, watched by billions of aliens across the galaxy for entertainment. You level up. You pick a race. You loot. You fight bosses. You try not to die on camera. And if that sounds like Dungeons & Dragons met The Hunger Games met The Truman Show and they all went out drinking, you are tracking correctly.

Our guy Carl is a Coast Guard vet who gets caught outside in his boxers and a pair of slippers chasing his ex-girlfriend’s pampered show cat, Princess Donut, when the invasion hits. That is the outfit he is stuck with for the apocalypse. Boxers. Slippers. A cat who thinks she is better than everyone, and honestly, she might be right. Once they descend into the dungeon, Donut becomes sentient, gains the ability to talk, and immediately starts acting like the diva she always was in her heart. Their dynamic is the whole thing. Carl is dry, tired, deeply moral, and trying to hold onto his humanity while the game tries to strip it. Donut is theatrical, petty, brilliant, and fiercely loyal in the way cats are when they decide you are theirs. I laughed out loud more times than I can count. I also got quiet more than a few times, because this book is doing more than it looks like it’s doing.

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Now here is my real recommendation. Read book one if you want. But get the Audible. I started with the physical book and enjoyed it, then switched to the audiobook for book two and realized I had been playing on easy mode (see what I did there?). Jeff Hays, the narrator, is doing something I genuinely haven’t heard before. Every character has a distinct voice. The AI that runs the dungeon sounds like a passive-aggressive customer service rep with something to prove. Donut sounds exactly like a prissy little queen who will cut you. And Carl sounds like Patrick Warburton, which, if that name doesn’t land for you, think Kronk from Emperor’s New Groove or the narrator from The Tick. That low, earnest, slightly exhausted rumble. Perfect. The audiobook has ambient sound design, crowd noise, system notifications, the whole thing. It’s a production.

Here’s what surprised me most. Matt Dinniman is not just writing a fun romp about a man, a cat, and a dungeon. He is writing about empire. About extraction. About what happens when a more powerful civilization decides your planet, your labor, your suffering, and your death are content. The aliens running the show are bureaucrats and shareholders. The game exists because a corporation is behind on its numbers and needs ratings. The contestants are disposable because the audience finds their pain entertaining. If that doesn’t sound familiar, I don’t know what to tell you. Dinniman goes after corporate greed, celebrity culture, the way systems flatten people into characters, and the cost of being watched while you’re trying to survive. He does it without preaching. He lets the story carry it.

By book two, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, the stakes sharpen. The world outside the dungeon starts paying attention. Sponsors get involved. Politics creep in. Carl starts realizing that the only way to beat a rigged game is to stop playing by its rules and start playing with them. I won’t spoil a thing. But I will say this: the moment when Carl decides he is not going to let these people turn him into a spectacle is one of the most quietly powerful things I’ve read this year. I felt that in my chest. Because who among us has not been told to perform our pain for the comfort of people who would never survive what we’ve survived.

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Is it for everyone? No. There is language. There is violence. There is one memorable scene involving drug-dealing llamas that I am not going to explain to you. It is absolutely not for kids. But if you love world-building that treats you like a grown person, if you love dry humor layered over real stakes, if you’ve ever played a game where you had to grind through a boss to get to the story, you will find a home here.

Now let’s talk.

But here’s what I’ve been sitting with lately, usually around midnight, with Rocket (that’s my Aussiedoodle for those who don’t know) sprawled across my legs like he pays rent, while my brain decides sleep is optional: did I miss red flags, or did I see them and just... decide love was a good enough reason to keep it moving?

Because there’s a difference.

Missing a flag means you genuinely didn’t see it. Looking away means you saw it, felt it somewhere in your chest, maybe even named it quietly to yourself, and then got up the next morning and chose the relationship anyway. That’s not ignorance. That’s a decision. And I’ve had to get really honest with myself about which one I was doing. Both answers have shown up. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not running from it either.

The harder question, the one that doesn’t have a clean answer, is whether I was so out of alignment with myself that I couldn’t even recognize misalignment with someone else. When you’ve spent years shrinking, accommodating, quietly rounding your edges so everything fits a little smoother, you stop being a reliable narrator of your own life. You don’t know what fits anymore because you’ve been reshaping yourself to fit everything.

Read that again if you need to. I’ll wait.

Now let’s talk about this love is enough thing, because it’s not. And our elders knew it. The ones who really loved us said it plainly. The ones who told you love is enough were either lucky, lying, or hadn’t been tested yet. Either way, that’s not a blueprint. That’s a hope.

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I didn’t plan this.

That’s probably the most honest way to start this, because if you know anything about me, you know I’m a planner. A thinker. A person who will sit with something for weeks before I say it out loud. But every now and then, something moves through me that won’t wait for a content calendar or a clean outline or the right moment.

That’s what Between Sessions is.

It’s not a therapy blog. It’s not a trauma dump. It’s not me performing healing for an audience. It’s what happens in the in-between, between the sessions, between the chapters, between the version of me I was and the one I’m still becoming. The thoughts that show up at midnight when Rocket Raheeme Levy is the only one in the room and my brain decides sleep is overrated.

It’s me being honest. With myself first, and then with you.

These posts won’t follow a schedule because real moments don’t. They’ll show up when something moves me enough to write it, when I’m sitting with something too big to keep to myself, when I think you might be sitting with the same thing and need to know you’re not alone in it.

That’s the whole point actually. Not to have answers. Not to wrap it up neat. Just to say the thing out loud and see who else needed to hear it.

So if you’re here for the polished essays and cultural commentary, that’s still coming. That’s not going anywhere. But every once in a while, I’m going to pull up a chair and get real with you in a different way.

This is that chair.

I’m glad you’re here.

— Rochelle

Let me say the thing first, so we’re clear.

Black women are the architecture. We are the ones showing up to the town halls, running the nonprofits, feeding the block, mentoring the girls, writing the grants, organizing the vigils, building the programs nobody funded until we proved they worked. That is not in question. That has never been in question.

But I want to talk about something that lives underneath all that service. Something I’ve been watching for a long time and finally have language for.

A lot of us know how to serve a community. Fewer of us know how to be in one.

Those are not the same thing. Serving a community can happen from a distance. You can run a whole program for people you never actually sit with. You can pour into a neighborhood you don’t trust your peers in. You can be the face of a movement and still not pick up the phone when another sister is trying to build something two blocks over. Service is a posture. Community is a practice. And the practice is where a lot of us get stuck.

Where I live, I watch it play out in real time. The cliques. The “well, she’s not really from here” whisper when somebody new moves in with ideas and momentum. The word transplant used like an accusation. The quiet math people do before they decide whether you’re worth a warm introduction: What school did you go to. What does your company clear. Who already co-signed you. Whose table have you sat at. If you don’t pass the audit, the door stays cracked but never opens. And the city stays exactly where it was five years ago, because the people with the most to offer each other are busy guarding their corners.

Here’s the part I refuse to pretend about: a lot of the work is still real. The women doing it genuinely want their communities to rise. I’m not here to question anybody’s heart. But I am going to say out loud that some of the work is also ego. Some of it is about being seen doing it. Some of it is about being the one they call, the one on the flyer, the one in the photo, the one the mayor thanks. And both things can be true at once. The work can be genuine and ego-driven. The impact can be real and the motive can be about legacy, visibility, or needing to matter. That doesn’t cancel the good. It just explains why the progress is so slow.

Because ego doesn’t share. Ego hoards contacts. Ego watches a younger woman struggle with something ego already figured out and says nothing, because teaching her would mean she might catch up. Ego treats information like currency and relationships like inventory. Ego is why the same five names are on every panel in the city while a hundred other brilliant women are home wondering why the door never opens for them.

Now before somebody reads this and gets slick, let me close a door.

I already know what some of y’all are about to say. Rochelle, I have to be careful. I don’t know these women. I don’t know what they’re like. I’m protecting my business. Stop. We are not talking about that and you know we’re not.

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There is a real kind of discernment that protects your work from people who are trying to get over, and every Black woman reading this can smell those people from a mile away. That is not a skill we have to debate. That is in the starter pack. The woman who wants to pick your brain for three hours and ghost you. The one who wants your contact list but won’t offer hers. The one whose whole pitch is vibes and an Instagram follower count. We clock them before they finish the sentence. That is not gatekeeping. That is literacy.

What I’m talking about is different and you know the difference. I’m talking about the woman who is clearly competent, clearly building something real, clearly not a threat to anybody’s bag, and still can’t get a callback. I’m talking about the sister whose resume and receipts are already public. We have Facebook. We have Google. We have LinkedIn. We have a mutual in common and a thirty-second check we could run before lunch. The information is there. The excuse of “I just don’t know her” is doing work it was not designed to do, and we all know it.

So let’s not confuse discernment with distance. Discernment protects you from extractors. Distance protects your ego. One is wisdom. The other is a hiding place. Pick the right one.

And the cost of choosing the hiding place is not abstract. The cost is that our cities move slower than they should. The cost is that Black women burn out running parallel versions of the same program because nobody would collaborate. The cost is that a sister with a good idea gives up because she couldn’t get a single introduction. The cost is generational. We are losing time we do not have to lose.

Now. Let me tell you what the other side looks like, because I’ve seen it.

I’m part of a group chat, literally called The Group Chat, built by Kalyana Williams, and what happens in there is the thing I’m trying to describe. It is a room full of powerful Black women who are actually in community with each other. Not performing sisterhood. Practicing it. Somebody drops a question and three women answer before lunch. Somebody’s launching and the room amplifies it without being asked. Somebody’s going through it and the room holds her without making it a whole production. And here’s the part people miss: it works because there are boundaries. Everybody still has to get their own work done. Nobody’s being drained. The community isn’t a demand, it’s a resource. That’s the distinction. Healthy community doesn’t mean unlimited access to you. It means you’ve decided these people are worth the access you do give.

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That’s the model. And it’s not complicated. It’s just not what a lot of us were taught.

So what actually changes this? A few things, and I’ll keep it plain.

Stop running the qualifier. Before you decide whether a sister is worth your warm introduction, notice if you’re auditing her. Where she’s from, where she went, what she clears, who already vouched for her. If you wouldn’t want somebody running that math on you, don’t run it on her.

Share the thing you wish somebody had shared with you. The contact. The template. The warning about the client who doesn’t pay. The name of the grant officer who actually answers. That information cost you years. Giving it to her does not cost you anything.

Let “not from here” stop meaning “not one of us.” Somebody moved to your city with vision and drive. That’s not a threat. That’s reinforcement. Treat it that way.

Celebrate loud and resource quietly. We are already good at the hype. “Go girl, you doing it” is in our mouths easy. The harder part is the quiet resourcing. The intro email, the DM with the lead, the five minutes on the phone when she’s stuck. Both matter. The second one is what actually moves her.

And hold your boundaries without weaponizing them. You don’t owe everybody access. But there’s a difference between protecting your peace and using “boundaries” as cover for cliquishness. Know which one you’re doing.

I’m not going to end this with a poster line. I’ll just say what’s true. We are the architects. We are the blueprint. And the most powerful thing we could do, the thing that would actually shift the cities we live in, is learn how to be in a room with each other without scanning for threat. Imagine if that was the standard. Not the exception, not the Group Chat unicorn, not the one retreat where everybody cried and then went home. The standard.

Sheesh is right.

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I am going to be a little vulnerable with you today, because I think that is the only way this conversation actually means something.

I used to write poetry. Short stories. Fiction. Long essays that went somewhere real. I painted. I did theater. Graphic design. I was creative across the whole spectrum, not just in one lane, but all of it, and it felt like breathing.

Somewhere in the middle of building a career and a reputation and capacity for everybody around me, I let most of that go quiet. And what took its place was a habit I did not even notice forming: helping everybody else build their thing.

I am good at it too. It’s actually crazy. I can see someone’s vision clearly, sometimes clearer than they can, and I will pour into it with everything I have. I will be in the comments before I finish reading. Yes. Do this. Build this. The world needs this. And meanwhile my own writing, my own creative work, my own ideas for programs and things that actually move people, all of it sitting there. Waiting. Brown and dry while everybody else’s grass is looking lush.

I know I am not the only one.

This is not me trying to persuade you to be less generous. Please hear that before we go any further. Celebration is sacred. Showing up for each other matters deeply, especially in a world that has never been in a rush to celebrate us. The problem is not that we cheer. The problem is the imbalance: how freely and fully we pour into someone else’s vision versus how reluctantly and conditionally we invest in our own.

And I say “we” because the research backs it up and my own behavior confirms it. This is a pattern, not a personality flaw. And patterns have origins worth understanding.

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Why do we do this?

Let us start with what the research actually says, because this goes deeper than a confidence issue.

In childhood, girls are clear about their ambitions. Their goals are grand and they make no apologies for them. But over time, something shifts.  Women tend not to receive the same recognition for their achievements as men do, which leads to a gradual erosion of their ambition.  And when ambition stops being rewarded, we stop feeding it. We redirect that energy somewhere safer: toward other people.

Most women come to associate ambition with egotism, self-aggrandizement, or manipulation. To appear feminine, women face the reality that they must provide or relinquish scarce resources to others, and recognition is indeed a scarce resource.  So we give it away. We hand it to everyone else in the room and quietly wonder why we feel invisible.

For us Black women, this gets layered in ways that are specific and documented. The “Strong Black Woman” schema, defined by Dr. Cheryl Giscombé in a 2010 peer-reviewed study, describes a woman who, because of the necessity of survival, suppresses emotions, resists vulnerability, and manifests strength while embodying an obligation to serve others as breadwinners, caretakers, and nurturers.  We did not make this up. We inherited it. And internalizing that ideology has been associated with limited self-compassion and emotional inhibition.  Which means that for many of us, the impulse to put ourselves last is not weakness. It is a survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness.

Women of color leaders are being depleted while navigating harm at the interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels, distracting and derailing energy, creativity, and attention from the work they actually came to do.  And yet we keep showing up for everyone else first.

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Here is the other thing happening that nobody talks about enough.

Cheering is safe. Building is not.

When you pour into someone else’s dream, you get the emotional reward of contribution without the vulnerability of exposure. You get to feel useful, even visionary, because you spotted her potential, didn’t you? But your dream stays tucked away. It cannot fail if you never fully launch it. It cannot be judged if you never fully show it. You keep it perfect and intact and private, which means it can never disappoint you.

Supporting someone else is one of the most sophisticated forms of self-protection that exists, and it does not look anything like fear from the outside.

Impostor syndrome among women is deeply embedded in societal and cultural norms. Women are expected to excel in multiple roles while juggling career ambitions with family responsibilities, leading to a constant fear of not measuring up. The emotional toll is greater, leading to chronic anxiety and isolation.  And one of the quietest ways that fear shows up? We stop raising our hands for our own ideas. We raise them for other people’s instead.

There is also the way that helping feels like productivity. When you spend three hours helping a friend map out her content strategy, your brain genuinely registers that as a good use of your time. Something got done. You were focused and effective. But nothing on your own list moved. And because helping felt productive, it is easy to mistake it for progress toward your own goals. It is not.

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Here is what this costs us, beyond just the time.

A lifetime of navigating structural barriers and accruing emotional labor can have uniquely potent effects on the health and wellbeing of Black women.  We are not just losing creative hours. We are losing creative identity. When you are constantly tuned in to other people’s visions, you lose signal on your own. You start absorbing their ideas, their aesthetic, their language, and then wonder why your own voice feels murky and hard to find. It did not go anywhere. You just stopped listening for it.

And your community loses something too. Because what you are sitting on, the thing you keep watering down or delaying or quietly talking yourself out of, somebody out there actually needs that. Not a version of it. Not someone else’s adjacent take on it. Yours.

So what do we actually do?

First, let us stop calling devotion to your own work selfish. It is stewardship. You were given something to build. Leaving it unbuilt because you were too busy applauding everyone else is not humility. It is neglect, and I say that with all the gentleness I have.

Second, protect your creative energy before the day gets in. Before you open your phone. Before you check the notifications. Before you go see what everybody else is working on. Give yourself first access to your own ideas, even if it is only fifteen minutes. That ritual matters more than it sounds.

Third, learn to distinguish between genuine generosity and reflexive self-erasure. You can celebrate another woman’s win and still close the app and go work on yours. Those two things are not in conflict. What is in conflict is spending four hours a week invested in other people’s brands and zero in your own, then wondering why you feel invisible.

And finally, ask yourself the question directly: if you came across someone with your ideas, your experience, your perspective, and your body of work, would you be in the comments telling her to go?

If the answer is yes, then you already know what to do.

The only thing left is to become the person who shows up for yourself the way you show up for everybody else.

I am working on it too. We go together.

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Stop Treating Identity Like a Dropdown Menu

I need to talk about something that keeps coming up in conversations about race, identity, and belonging. It usually starts with a question that sounds innocent enough: would you want to be Black?

And every time I hear it, I think the same thing. Race is not a character selection screen. You do not get to scroll through options, weigh the perks, and make a choice based on which culture looks good from the outside. That framing treats identity like an aesthetic decision. It is not. It is lived structure, lived consequence, and lived culture all at once.

People who romanticize Blackness from a distance tend to want the parts that are visible and consumable. The music. The language. The fashion sensibility. The cultural fluency that makes rooms more interesting. What they do not sign up for is the profiling, the medical dismissal, the pay gap, the code-switching exhaustion, the workplace dynamics where your competence gets relabeled as aggression, or the persistent expectation that you perform at double the standard for half the recognition.

That gap between what people admire and what they are willing to confront is not an accident. It is a pattern. And in my work as a culture strategist, I see it play out in organizations, institutions, and communities every day: people who want proximity to Black culture without accountability to Black people. They want the influence without the investment. The aesthetic without the reckoning. And when you name it, suddenly the room gets uncomfortable.

Blackness Is Not a Pain Narrative

Here is where the conversation needs more nuance, because the other side of this coin is just as damaging.

There is a tendency, even among well-meaning people, to reduce Blackness to struggle. To treat the entire experience as a catalog of suffering that exists primarily for other people to learn from, feel moved by, or build allyship around. That flattening is its own kind of disrespect.

Blackness is also scholarship and experimentation. Faith traditions that hold families and communities together across generations. Kitchen tables where the real theology happens between the foil pans and the unsolicited life advice. Hair rituals that are as much about connection as they are about care. Humor that moves at frequencies you either understand or you do not. Intellectual traditions, artistic innovation, and communal genius that exist alongside hardship, not just in response to it.

And the diaspora is not a monolith. Blackness in the South carries different textures than Blackness in the Northeast. Black American experience overlaps with but is not identical to Afro-Caribbean, African immigrant, Afro-Latine, or Black British experience. We share certain inheritances. We navigate overlapping systems. But the specificity matters. Collapsing all of it into one narrative is its own form of erasure.

Full humanity means all of it. The political and the personal. The strategic and the soft. The ancestral and the everyday. You do not get to decide which parts deserve recognition.

What This Costs Black Women Specifically

Everything I just described at the macro level plays out with surgical precision at the personal level when the person absorbing it is a Black woman.

I do this work for a living. I study these dynamics, I design programs around them, and I still have to navigate them in my own life. So I am not speaking theoretically. I am speaking from the intersection of research and lived experience.

The expectations placed on Black women are stacked in ways that would be absurd if they were not so structurally reinforced. Be brilliant but not intimidating. Be nurturing but do not have needs of your own. Speak up but stay within the acceptable range of volume and emotion. Lead but do not make anyone uncomfortable with the reality of your leadership. Be excellent but make it look effortless. Carry everything but never mention the weight.

These are not just cultural pressures. These are operational demands being made on a person who is rarely compensated, protected, or supported at the level of what she is being asked to produce.

The Praise That Functions as an Assignment

In my consulting work, I teach organizations to examine how language operates inside their cultures. So let me apply that lens here.

Listen to the things people say about Black women in their workplaces, their families, their communities, and their movements:

“You’re so strong.”

“You always show up.”

“You’re a natural leader.”

On the surface, those are affirmations. Underneath, they are performance reviews for a job nobody officially hired you to do. What they actually communicate is: we have observed that you will absorb things without complaint, overfunction without being asked, and maintain composure under conditions that would break other people. We have calibrated our expectations around that. Please do not stop.

Now ask the follow-up question. Who is resourcing you? Who is protecting your time, your energy, your capacity? Who is making sure your brilliance is being compensated and not just consumed? In most cases, the answer is nobody. And the system was designed that way. It runs on the assumption that Black women will keep producing under any conditions, and it rewards the people around them for never having to address that.

That is not strength being honored. That is labor being extracted with better language.

When Your Boundaries Become the Problem

This is the part that tells you everything you need to know about the arrangement.

When Black women set boundaries, the response from the people who were benefiting from the absence of those boundaries follows a predictable script. Suddenly you are “different.” Suddenly you are “difficult.” Suddenly there is a conversation about the “energy in the room,” and the energy they are referring to is your refusal to keep subsidizing everyone else’s comfort with your overextension.

That reaction is not personal confusion. It is a system recognizing that a resource is being redirected. And the discomfort it creates is diagnostic. It tells you exactly who was profiting from the previous arrangement and how little they had invested in maintaining it fairly.

In my work, I call this the difference between being needed and being considered. People, organizations, and systems know how to make Black women essential. Central to operations, critical to culture, indispensable to outcomes. What they consistently fail to do is consider those same women. Care for them. Protect their capacity. Ensure that what is being asked of them is proportional to what is being returned.

Essential but Not Considered

This is the dynamic I want to name most directly, because it is one of the most normalized patterns I encounter in organizational culture work.

Relied on but not relieved. Celebrated in public, unsupported behind closed doors. Given visibility when what was needed was protection. Given recognition when what was needed was compensation. Called “powerful” when what they actually mean is: we noticed you survived conditions that should never have been acceptable.

People come to Black women for clarity, strategy, emotional translation, conflict resolution, cultural intelligence, spiritual grounding, and crisis management like she is an always-available service with no billing department. Then they are genuinely surprised when she is exhausted. That surprise tells you everything. They were never treating her as a person with limits. They were treating her as infrastructure.

And when that infrastructure decides to prioritize itself? When she rests, she gets called distant. When she holds a line, she gets called cold. When she chooses herself, she gets called selfish. When she stops narrating her every decision for the comfort of others, she gets called hard to read.

What all of that actually means is: they were more comfortable with her depletion than her self-possession. They preferred the version of her that was available, accommodating, and running on fumes, because that version did not require them to examine their own contribution to the problem.

What Shifts When You Stop Volunteering

Here is what I want to sit with, because this is where the conversation moves from diagnosis to disruption.

When a Black woman internalizes, truly internalizes, that her worth is not located in her endurance, things start reorganizing. The guilt that used to be effective loses its leverage. The overfunctioning that felt mandatory starts feeling optional. The chronic urgency that other people manufactured to keep her responsive starts getting evaluated instead of automatically answered. The rescue reflex gets interrogated. The cycle of absorb, perform, smooth over, repeat starts breaking down.

And people push back. Not because she is doing something wrong. Because her recalibration exposes the arrangement. It makes visible who was benefiting from her silence, her extra labor, her emotional flexibility, her willingness to absorb the cost of dysfunction she did not create.

A Black woman with boundaries, discernment, standards, and options is not just making different personal choices. She is a structural disruption. She is a reallocation of resources that were never hers to give away for free. And that is precisely why the resistance comes.

Black women do not need to become smaller, quieter, or more convenient in order to be properly valued. The people, systems, and institutions that require your diminishment are the ones that need restructuring.

That is not a motivational quote. That is an organizational reality. And it is the foundation of the work I do.

FROM NAMING IT TO BUILDING SOMETHING DIFFERENT

This Is What Alchemy for Change Was Built For

If you recognized your own experience in this article, I want to be clear about something: naming the pattern is necessary, but it is not sufficient. You can see every dynamic at work and still not have the tools, the support, or the space to move differently. That is the gap I built Alchemy for Change to address.

Alchemy for Change is a benefit corporation that partners with organizations and individuals to transform workplace culture, develop authentic leadership, and build equitable systems. We center the experiences of Black and Brown communities while creating sustainable impact for all. Our approach combines organizational psychology, equity frameworks, healing-centered practices, and creative strategy to deliver measurable, lasting change.

Revenue from our paid consulting, coaching, and training engagements directly funds free and subsidized programs, scholarship seats, and community resources for marginalized communities. When you work with AFC, your investment reaches further than your organization.

The UnShrink & Lead™ Accelerator

This is the flagship program and the one most directly connected to what this article names. The UnShrink & Lead Accelerator is an 18-week transformational hybrid leadership program designed for Black women across the diaspora: professionals, entrepreneurs, creatives, and community builders.

It is not a program that teaches you to assimilate better. It is a space to develop your voice, your executive presence, your ambitions, and your boundaries in an environment that does not require you to perform palatability to access growth. The program includes power mapping, executive presence development, guest expert sessions, peer accountability, and a certificate of completion.

If you read this article and the phrase “essential but not considered” landed somewhere you felt it, this program was designed with your experience in mind.

For Organizations Ready to Do the Internal Work

If you are reading this as a leader inside an organization and recognizing these dynamics in your own culture, that recognition is the starting point, not the finish line.

Culture Shift Consulting works with organizations ready to move from awareness to infrastructure. We offer culture diagnostics, equity friction audits, prioritized roadmaps, leadership enablement, and sustained implementation support across tiered engagements designed to meet you where you are and move you where you need to go. Leader Labs provides modular training workshops on psychological safety, equitable performance management, inclusive facilitation, conflict transformation, and allyship in action. These are not performative check-the-box sessions. They are skill-building engagements designed to shift behavior, not just awareness.

We also offer executive and group coaching with milestone-based plans, sponsor mapping, and advancement strategies for leaders who are ready to grow with structure and accountability.

The Ecosystem

Alchemy for Change is not a single program. It is an ecosystem of offerings designed to meet people and organizations at multiple entry points.

The Launch Lab is an 18-week hybrid accelerator for creative, neurodivergent, and emerging entrepreneurs who are building businesses on their own terms, from business model design through a live pitch showcase. The SoundShift Lab is a culturally grounded wellness program that uses music production, sound design, and audio engineering as tools for healing and self-expression with marginalized youth ages 13 to 18. The Culture Collective is a hybrid community for Black and Brown leaders, creatives, and changemakers on Mighty Networks, offering monthly workshops, networking events, accountability circles, curated resources, and group travel opportunities.

Every entry point leads somewhere. Every space is built on the same principle: you do not have to shrink to belong here. And every dollar invested in AFC’s paid services extends its reach into communities that need the work most.

The UnShrink & Lead™ Accelerator

18-Week Hybrid Leadership Program for Black Women Across the Diaspora

Learn more at www.alchemyforchange.com

hello@alchemyforchange.com | partnerships@alchemyforchange.com

LinkedIn | Instagram | The Culture Collective on Mighty Networks

© 2026 Rochelle Levy

Rochelle Levy is a leadership development expert, DEI strategist, culture shift consultant, creative director, and facilitator. Alchemy for Change is a benefit corporation offering culture shift consulting, leadership development, executive coaching, and facilitation, centering equity, wellness, and measurable impact.

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There’s a conversation I keep having with brilliant Black women who are exhausted. Not from the work itself, but from the constant negotiation. The daily labor of trying to make something fit that was never designed to hold them.

They’re negotiating with jobs that admire their output but won’t protect their peace. With partnerships that love what they bring to the table but keep moving the table. With organizations that recruited them for their perspective and then punished them for using it. With people who say “we value you” the same way someone says “we should hang out sometime.” Technically words. Functionally nothing.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you early enough: misalignment is not a negotiation problem. It is an information problem. The information is already in front of you. The question is whether you’re willing to receive it.

Let Me Say That Differently So It Lands Where It Needs To

When I say misalignment is not a negotiation problem, I mean that when something or someone is fundamentally out of alignment with you, the move is not to talk it into fitting. It’s not a communication issue. It’s not a “we just need to get on the same page” situation. The misalignment IS the page. There’s nothing to negotiate because the disconnect isn’t about terms or conditions or logistics. It’s about values, priorities, and what someone is actually willing to protect versus what they’re willing to perform.

When I say it’s an information problem, I’m reframing the entire dynamic. Misalignment isn’t withholding something from you. It’s actually telling you everything you need to know. Every contradiction, every broken promise, every pattern that keeps repeating despite every conversation you’ve had about it? That’s not a failure to communicate. That’s communication. You received the message. It just wasn’t the one you wanted.

And when I say the information is already in front of you, that’s the accountability pivot. Not blame. Accountability. Because now the question stops being “why won’t they change” or “how can I make this work” and becomes “why am I still negotiating with something that has already shown me what it is?” That gap between what we see and what we’re willing to accept about what we see is where we lose years. Health. Creativity. Money. Ourselves.

This plays out everywhere. Not just at work. In every space you move through and every relationship you hold. So let’s walk through it.

What Misalignment Looks Like When You’re Honest About It

In your personal relationships, misalignment is the friend who only calls when they need something and somehow you’ve been rationalizing that for seven years because “that’s just how they are.” It’s the family member who crosses your boundaries every holiday and you keep preparing for it instead of addressing it because the cost of the conversation feels higher than the cost of absorbing it. It’s the partner who says they support your ambitions but gets weird every time your ambitions actually show up.

The information is right there. They’ve shown you what they prioritize. It just doesn’t happen to be your peace, your boundaries, or your growth. That’s not a conversation you haven’t had yet. That’s a conversation you’ve had repeatedly that keeps producing the same result. At some point, the pattern is the answer.

In your professional life, misalignment is the role that celebrated your voice during the interview and then shushed it in the first meeting. It’s the manager who says they value your leadership but micromanages every decision you make. It’s the organization that recruits Black women for optics and then punishes them for having the perspective that made them valuable in the first place. It’s the DEI budget that’s always the first one cut and the last one funded. It’s the promotion that keeps being “next quarter.”

The information is in the budget. It’s in who gets protected when things go sideways and who gets sacrificed. It’s in the gap between the mission statement and the org chart. None of that is hidden. It’s just uncomfortable to accept because accepting it means you have to make a move, and the move is rarely convenient.

In the systems and institutions you move through, misalignment is structural. It’s the school that talks about equity in its strategic plan but hasn’t changed a single policy. It’s the healthcare system that tells Black women their pain is manageable while the maternal mortality data says otherwise. It’s the workplace that brings in a consultant for a two hour training and calls it transformation. It’s every institution that responds to a demand for change with a committee, a taskforce, and a timeline that conveniently extends past everyone’s memory.

The information here is in what gets funded, what gets measured, and what happens when nobody’s watching. Systems don’t lie. They don’t have to. They just operate, and you can read their values by watching what they actually do versus what they say they’re committed to.

In your relationship with yourself, and this is the one nobody wants to talk about, misalignment is when you already know something doesn’t fit and you negotiate with your own knowing. It’s the gut feeling you override with logic. The boundary you set and then walked back because someone else’s discomfort made you uncomfortable. The dream you keep putting on the back burner because the misaligned thing in front of you is consuming all the energy that should be going toward building.

The information here is the most accessible and the hardest to accept, because it means trusting yourself more than you trust the situation. It means believing your own experience over someone else’s narrative about your experience. And for Black women who have spent a lifetime being told that their perception is the problem, that’s not a small ask. But it is the most important one.

Misalignment Tells You Who It Is the First Time

We have been culturally trained, especially as Black women, to see potential where there is only pattern. To extend grace where there is only repetition. To bring our whole toolkit to situations that don’t even deserve the free consultation.

Misalignment doesn’t show up confused. It shows up clear. It just happens to be dressed in language that sounds like possibility. “We’re working on it.” “We hear you.” “That’s on our roadmap.” “We just need you to be patient.” “This is how change happens, it takes time.”

No. That’s how stalling happens. Change has receipts. Misalignment has talking points.

When a role requires you to shrink the very thing they hired you for, that’s not a growth opportunity. That’s a bait and switch. When an organization keeps saying equity but the budget tells a completely different story, that’s not a work in progress. That’s a press release with no infrastructure behind it.

Misalignment is honest. We’re just socialized to translate it into something more hopeful than what it actually said.

The Real Cost of Negotiating With What Doesn’t Fit

Let me be specific about what happens when you keep trying to make misalignment work, because the consequences are not abstract. They show up in your body, your business, your relationships, and your sense of self.

You start performing instead of building. When the environment is misaligned, you can’t actually do your best work. You’re managing perceptions, code switching at Olympic levels, over explaining your expertise, and spending energy on survival that should be going toward strategy. You’re not thriving. You’re surviving in professional clothing.

You absorb the dysfunction as a personal problem. Misalignment is sneaky because it makes you think you’re the variable that needs adjusting. If you were just more patient, more strategic, more palatable, more willing to play the long game. But you’ve been playing the long game. The game is rigged. That’s not a you problem.

You delay your actual alignment. Every month you spend negotiating with what doesn’t fit is a month you’re not building what does. And this is the part that costs the most, because the opportunity cost of misalignment is invisible until you finally leave and realize how much time you lost trying to renovate a house that was never yours.

Your health starts sending you invoices. The jaw tension. The insomnia. The Sunday dread that starts on Friday. The mysterious inflammation that your doctor can’t fully explain but your nervous system understands perfectly. Your body is not being dramatic. Your body is doing accounting.

But What If It’s Almost Right?

This is where it gets tricky, because misalignment is rarely a dramatic villain. Sometimes it’s 80 percent right. Sometimes it’s a leader you genuinely respect in a system that genuinely doesn’t respect either of you. Sometimes it’s a mission you believe in attached to a culture that contradicts everything the mission promises.

And that “almost” is the most dangerous word in the English language when it comes to alignment.

Because “almost aligned” still means misaligned. A door that almost opens is still closed. A paycheck that almost reflects your value still doesn’t. A workplace that almost protects you still won’t when it matters.

Almost is not a foundation. It’s a negotiation tactic dressed up as proximity to something real.

Alignment Is Not a Luxury. It Is Infrastructure.

One of the things I talk about constantly in my work at Alchemy for Change is the difference between aspiration and infrastructure. Aspiration says “we want to be better.” Infrastructure says “here are the systems, the budgets, the policies, the accountability mechanisms, and the cultural norms that prove it.”

Alignment works the same way. It’s not a vibe. It’s not a feeling you get on a good day when the right people are in the room. Alignment is structural. It means the values match the behavior. The mission matches the budget. The words match the outcomes. The culture matches the commitment.

When alignment is present, you don’t have to convince anyone of your value. You don’t have to fight to be seen. You don’t have to translate yourself into something more digestible. The environment already speaks your language because it was built to, or it was willing to learn.

When alignment is absent, no amount of negotiation will build it from scratch. You cannot negotiate someone into valuing what they’ve shown you they don’t prioritize. You cannot strategize your way into belonging in a space that requires you to abandon yourself to enter.

So What Do You Do Instead?

You stop negotiating and start discerning. There’s a difference.

Negotiation says: how can I make this work? Discernment says: does this work, and what is the evidence?

Negotiation centers the relationship. Discernment centers the truth.

Negotiation asks you to compromise. Discernment asks you to be honest about what’s actually on the table.

Here’s what discernment looks like in practice. You look at behavior, not promises. You track patterns, not potential. You evaluate environments by what they protect, not what they promote. You give yourself permission to believe what you see the first time, the second time, definitely by the third time. And you build your own infrastructure so that walking away from misalignment is a strategic move, not a financial crisis.

But discernment is not something most of us were taught. Especially not as a leadership skill. We were taught to negotiate. To accommodate. To be the bridge, the translator, the one who makes it work. Discernment requires a completely different set of muscles, and it requires practicing them in every room you walk into.

This Is a Leadership Skill, Not Just a Personal One

Here’s where this gets bigger than any single relationship or role.

The ability to recognize misalignment quickly, respond to it honestly, and move from it strategically is one of the most important leadership capacities you can develop. Not just for your own wellbeing, though that matters enormously. But because the way you handle misalignment in your own life is the way you’ll handle it in every room you lead.

If you can’t recognize misalignment in a relationship, you’ll miss it in a team dynamic. If you tolerate it in a workplace, you’ll replicate it in the organization you build. If you override your own knowing in your personal life, you’ll second guess your instincts when the stakes are highest in your professional one.

Discernment is a through line. It connects how you lead yourself to how you lead others to how you move through systems. A leader who can read a room accurately, who trusts her own assessment even when it’s inconvenient, who makes decisions based on evidence instead of hope, who sets standards based on alignment instead of accommodation? That leader changes every space she walks into. Not by negotiating with what’s broken, but by building something that actually works.

That’s the leader the UnShrink and Lead Accelerator is designed to develop.

Not a leader who negotiates harder. A leader who sees clearly. Who trusts herself across every context she moves through, the personal, the professional, and the systemic. Who has the voice to name what she sees, the presence to hold her ground when she names it, the ambition to build beyond it, the boundaries to protect herself while she does, and the identity to do all of it without abandoning who she is in the process.

Voice. Presence. Ambition. Boundaries. Identity without assimilation. Those aren’t soft skills. Those are the tools of a leader who has stopped negotiating with misalignment and started building from alignment instead.

The Freedom on the Other Side

I want to tell you what happens when you stop negotiating with misalignment, because it’s not talked about enough.

You get time back. Not just hours in the day, but cognitive and emotional bandwidth that was being consumed by the constant labor of trying to make something fit.

You get clarity back. When you’re no longer contorting yourself to match an environment, you can actually hear your own thinking again. Your instincts get sharper. Your creativity comes back online. Your vision stops being filtered through someone else’s limitations.

You get health back. Your body starts to regulate. The tension loosens. You sleep differently. You laugh differently. You show up differently because you’re no longer showing up in defense mode.

You get your leadership back. Not the version of leadership that performs competence while managing dysfunction, but the version that actually builds. That sets culture instead of surviving it. That makes decisions from clarity instead of from chronic accommodation. That creates spaces where other people don’t have to negotiate their way into belonging either.

And you get to build. Not perform, not survive, not negotiate. Build. From alignment. On purpose. With intention. Toward something that actually fits.

That’s not a pipe dream. That’s what happens when you treat alignment as non negotiable infrastructure instead of a nice to have that you’ll get to eventually.

The Bottom Line

Misalignment is not a problem to be solved through patience, strategy, or exceptional performance. It is a condition to be recognized and responded to with honesty. And it shows up everywhere, in your friendships, your partnerships, your workplaces, your institutions, and your relationship with your own knowing.

The information is always in front of you. In the behavior that contradicts the words. In the patterns that repeat despite every conversation. In the budgets that reveal the real priorities. In the body that’s been keeping score long before your mind was willing to.

You were not put here to make broken systems comfortable. You were not given your gifts so that institutions could benefit from them while refusing to protect the person carrying them. You were not built to shrink, and you certainly were not built to negotiate your wholeness down to whatever size makes misalignment feel less guilty about what it’s doing.

Stop negotiating. Start discerning. And build from alignment, because that’s where the real work, the real joy, and the real power actually live.

The UnShrink and Lead Accelerator begins March 16th. If you’re ready to stop negotiating and start leading from alignment, applications are open now.

Rochelle Levy is the founder of Alchemy for Change and creator of the UnShrink & Lead Accelerator for Black women leaders. Her work sits at the intersection of culture strategy, leadership development, and institutional accountability. Learn more at [alchemyforchange.com].