Earlier, I wrote about how surviving inside oppressive workplaces—especially as someone from a historically excluded group—is profoundly limiting. This week, I’ve been reflecting on how that survival isn’t just a “tough phase,” but a systematic narrowing of the soul.

Survival requires us to hide the very parts of ourselves that signal aliveness: our intuition, our creativity, and our emotional truth. To stay employed, I learned how to disappear. I learned how to isolate.

Survival often requires me to hide parts of myself, particularly the parts that signal aliveness: my intuition, my creativity, my emotional truth. To stay employed, I learned how to disappear and isolate.

In my most recent role, I experienced deep harm, though at the time I told myself I was simply “getting through.” Looking back, I can see how that harm quietly saturated my daily life, manifesting in ways I was taught to ignore:

• The dismissal of my identity: I led a team that did not respect me. When I brought this to my supervisor, he dismissed the reality that my leadership—as a Black, neurodivergent, non-binary person—was being intentionally underestimated.

• The weight of microaggressions: I endured constant “small cuts” from direct reports that eventually required formal mediation, yet the burden of “professionalism” always remained on me.

• The erasure of my labor: My relational and creative work was minimized, while white peers were celebrated for less impactful output. I was excluded from conversations where I was the subject-matter expert, and my gift for discernment was reframed as being “too critical.”

• The weaponization of connection: When I shared parts of myself during “icebreakers,” that vulnerability was co-opted to build a case against me. I learned the hard way that there is a vast difference between vulnerability for extraction and vulnerability within a community of care.

• The lack of accommodations: I spent untold energy trying to decode my leader’s “executive speak,” which felt like a foreign language that never translated into clear action. The refusal to provide clarity wasn’t just a matter of communication style; it was a failure to accommodate my processing needs, leaving me to do the double work of translating and executing simultaneously.

• The failure of leadership: I worked under a conflict-avoidant leader who lacked the tools to coach or protect me. In an environment that feared repair, I was told to “give more grace” to those causing the harm.

Have you experienced any of these? Have you pushed your experiences down, diluting them to “just surviving” when, in reality, it was trauma?

Each of these moments slowly eroded my sense of self. Harm wasn’t just professional — it was personal. It felt like not wanting ever to set foot in that office again. It felt like keeping my camera off because I could not bear to be performative. It felt so awkward smiling at my boss who practiced false allyship while quietly allowing my erasure.

This is what “surviving” at work often looks like.

Surviving teaches us to narrow ourselves — to mute our instincts, dull our joy, and tolerate what hurts without a path toward repair. We’re taught to call this professionalism. Maturity. Being a team player. Adulthood. I’m not talking about every workplace. I’m talking about the ones that make you feel hollow day after day. The ones that leave you numb. The ones that, when you finally leave, make you feel like you’ve been through a fire and don’t know where to begin again.

Survival is a state of emergency. And no one is meant to live in an emergency forever.

So, what happens when the body finally can’t do it anymore? When you’re waking up in the middle of the night, panicked about money, replaying conversations, wondering if you were the problem?

Part of my work as an Identity Reclamation Coach is guiding the journey back to ourselves. For me, that meant moving through these three pillars:

Self-Trust: Not in the story work told about you, but in your own. Work will always try to author a narrative that justifies your harm. But we get to write something else. For me, that meant reclaiming what I was taught to see as a flaw. As a neurodivergent person, I was told my clarity and pattern-seeing were “too much.” I now name that truth differently: I have an extraordinary ability to notice what doesn’t make sense, to locate the cracks in systems that pretend to be whole.

Solidarity: Too often, we suffer alone inside structures designed to isolate us. We need places to speak honestly about our exhaustion, our rage, our grief. Not to be fixed, but to be witnessed. Not to be optimized, but to be held.

Praxis and imagination: We were raised inside a story that says work is the center of life — the place we earn worth, safety, and belonging. But that story has roots in white supremacy, capitalism, and extraction. What happens if we loosen our grip on it? What happens if we treat pleasure, rest, creativity, and connection as technologies of resistance — small Davids against work’s Goliath? What happens if we let ourselves imagine a life that isn’t organized around being useful to someone else?

adrienne maree brown in 2012 wrote the following:

“We must continue to develop new desires, a deeper capacity to see what is, as opposed to what is for sale. Everything we have been taught that is designed to keep us participating in our own oppression, our societal mind prisons, our safe victimhoods, our 99/47% niche wherein we can safely rebel as a group without actually transforming ourselves – all of this has to be shaken off so we can be part of the evolutionary thrust that vibrates within us.”

Healing doesn’t begin with fixing ourselves. It begins with telling the truth about what we survived. It begins when we finally allow ourselves to feel the grief and the exhaustion—making room for the joy of a renewed, self-authored purpose.

become a soul spacer

For those of us trying to remember who we are outside of the 'hustle.' Subscribe to my newsletter for zines and sense-making on the journey back to self. It’s a quiet corner for existential reflection, healing rituals, and the radical act of reclaiming your identity from harmful narratives and systems.