Someone I absolutely adore told me I should watch the The Polygamist on Netflix, and when I tell you I am triggered, please believe me. And that is the inspiration for this post because watching the main character made me realize that I knew her. She resides in me and in so many women I know. And it is all because somebody somewhere sat down, drafted the most impossible set of expectations in human history, and decided an entire generation of women should be held to them. They skipped the interview. Forgot the offer letter. Bypassed negotiation entirely. Just said “Here are the terms, good luck, and please smile while you figure it out. Competitive benefits package includes absolutely nothing.”
And those requirements they were something else. See if this sounds familiar.
Rule 1: Be assertive. But not aggressive. There is apparently a line, and you are expected to know exactly where it is at all times, adjust in real time, and smile while you do it. They skipped the training. Forgot the handbook. But expected us to figure it out and not make it weird.
Rule 2: Be independent. But not so independent that you make people uncomfortable. Your self-sufficiency is inspiring right up until the moment it becomes inconvenient for someone else, at which point it is a personality flaw that needs to be addressed.
Rule 3: Be gracious. But not a pushover. Be warm. But not too available. Be ambitious. But quietly. Be attractive. But do not rely on it. Do not flaunt it. Do not walk into a room like you know you have it together because that is a lot for people and we really need you to consider how that lands.
In other words be everything. Take up just enough space. We’ll let you know if you’ve crossed the line, although we will never tell you where the line is.
In spite of that an entire generation of us showed up. On time. Dressed appropriately. Ready to perform. Because we were paying attention. We watched what happened to the women who colored outside those lines. They were called difficult. Labeled. Selectively ostracized in ways that were just subtle enough to be deniable but just effective enough to be a warning. The consequences delivered the message that nobody would say out loud. We learned early that the rules stayed unwritten precisely because unwritten rules are harder to challenge. You cannot argue with something nobody will admit exists. So you internalize it instead. You get efficient at it. You become so skilled at managing everyone else’s comfort that it stops feeling like labor and starts feeling like character.
We called it being professional. Being likable. Being the kind of woman people wanted in the room. Honey, what it actually was, was exhausting.
Think about it, we spent decades doing a full meteorological assessment every time we walked into a room. Reading the temperature. Adjusting the volume. Figuring out who needed us smaller today and accommodating them before they even had to ask. We were so good at the calibration that we forgot we were doing it. We thought it was just how we were wired. Turns out it was just how we had been trained.
If we are being honest, some of us are still doing it. I still catch myself standing in rooms I have more than earned the right to be in, feeling the urge to make myself a little more digestible, a little more palatable, a little less of whatever I sensed the powerbrokers in the room decided was too much for the occasion. So many of us are still shrinking in spaces we built with our own hands.
And then an interesting thing happened, the younger women showed up. And baby, they did not come to play. They came to dismantle.
They are naming the game out loud. Refusing rules they did not agree to. Setting boundaries with a matter-of-factness that would have required our generation to submit a formal request, two character references, and a notarized apology. They skipped the audition for anyone’s approval. They walked right past the palatability performance that audiences were never going to reward with a standing ovation anyway. They walked in, looked at the job description, said absolutely not, and then had the audacity to mean it.
They are letting their ambition be loud. Their boundaries be firm. Their beauty be their own. Their independence be a feature, not an apology. They are taking up space like they were always supposed to, and the freedom in that is genuinely something to behold. It is boldness. It is self-possession. It is what it looks like when a woman decides her wholeness is non-negotiable. This is what liberation looks like when it arrives without asking permission first.
And yes, sometimes the old training stirs when we watch them. Some part of us that got very good at surviving wants to pull them aside and explain how this works. Soften the edges a little. you know the thought pattern, “You’ll catch more flies with honey, baby.” But that voice is a habit. A very old, very tired habit that kept us safe inside a system that was never designed for our flourishing. We can love that version of ourselves for surviving and still decide we are no longer available for that particular assignment. Because here is what we know now that we did not know then.
The job description was always a fiction. A remarkably effective strategy for keeping capable women so busy managing perception that they never got around to managing their own lives. The impossible balancing act was the point. Keep a woman busy performing too much and not enough simultaneously and she has zero energy left over to be a threat to anyone’s comfort. We were succeeding at surviving a system that was never designed with our wholeness in mind. That distinction matters.
And we did survive it. More than that. We built entire lives inside of it, raised children inside of it, ran organizations inside of it, kept whole families afloat inside of it. All while making sure nobody felt inconvenienced by our excellence. If that is not superhuman, I do not know what is.
And to be sure, that was extraordinary. It was also never the ceiling.
The younger women are doing something we always deserved to do. They are just doing it first, loudly, and without asking for permission. And the most powerful thing we can do is leave the cautious distance behind. Join them. Cheer them on. Let them remind us of what we were always allowed to be. Because unshackling does not have an age limit. Nobody is too seasoned for freedom.
It happens in a thousand small decisions to stop shrinking. Some days you make them easily. Some days the calibration kicks in before you even realize it and you have already made yourself smaller in a room that had more than enough space for all of you. That is okay, sis. You notice it. You file it. You try again. And then you try again after that. Grace is part of this process too.
If you are somewhere in the middle of that process, still standing in the dressing room of your own life trying to figure out what actually fits when you stop wearing what somebody else picked out, hear this. You are allowed to be assertive and warm. Independent and loved. Gracious and firm. Ambitious and unbothered. Attractive and completely uninterested in making that convenient for anyone. You are allowed to walk into every room and take up the space your life has actually earned you. You get to draw your own line.
The job description was always a fiction. Hand it back. Turn in your badge. Exit the building. The younger women already left. Let’s catch up.
