A system that cannot tell the difference between accountability and threat is not compassionate. It is broken.
I recently learned that some people at work have a not-so-nice nickname for me.
Miranda Priestly.
I learned this the day after I called off work, unable to function under the accumulated weight of trying to hold everything together. The strain showed up physically, disrupting ordinary life as my own nervous system overwhelmed the limits of what my body could contain.
I felt ashamed in the way only adults with good lives are allowed to feel ashamed—quietly, privately, with no useful story attached.
The timing was strange. To be read as powerful when I felt completely uninhabitable. To be told I was cold, sharp, above it all at the exact moment I felt most powerless.
The funny thing is, I love Miranda Priestly. Or at least what she represents: authority without apology. A woman unwilling to perform emotional labor for free. She is self-possessed, exacting, uninterested in cushioning her competence so others feel more comfortable around it. She does not explain herself. She does not narrate her worth. She is the opposite of how I experience myself. I spend most of my time afraid I’ve misunderstood the room, that I’ve taken up more space than I’m allowed.
Which makes the insult confusing. But only on the surface.
I work in social services, an emotionally exhausting field where compassion is the stated ideal, but performative humility is the real currency. And that performance is unevenly enforced. Especially in nonprofits. And especially by those who equate suffering with moral purity.
There is an unspoken hierarchy of legitimacy. If you can demonstrate visible suffering—trauma, marginalization, chaos—then you’re allowed sharp edges.
Power is tolerated, even celebrated, when it’s justified by pain. But if your hardship isn’t obvious, you’re expected to make it legible. To showcase your wounds. To locate your authority inside suffering that fits a recognizable category.
Values get distorted into a kind of social currency system. One where certain biographies function like poker chips, and others disqualify you from the table entirely.
I am seated at a table where the rules are unspoken but enforced: ante up your pain, or fold. Trauma is currency. Guilt is belonging. Competence without self-flagellation reads as a provocation.
And if your life looks a little too intact, too stable, or too easy, the rules change. You’re expected to be endlessly deferential, endlessly grateful, endlessly accommodating. Not because you’re kinder, but because you’re morally suspect.
I am a college-educated, white, heterosexual, happily married mother with a stable home and a church community. I do not build my identity around guilt, confession, or personal hardships. I do not narrate every difficult experience I’ve had to justify my presence in the room.
Ordinary as it is, this combination is not read as harmless. It lands as incorrect, if not unsafe.
So when I am competent, it reads as arrogance. When I am quiet, it reads as coldness. When I set boundaries, it reads as entitlement. And when I don’t perform the emotionally palatable version of a privileged white savior social worker on demand, people fill in the blanks for me.
Miranda Priestly.
What they don’t see is the cost of containment. After years of managing chaos—my own and other people’s—you learn how to move through the world without showing your organs. You learn how to sound calm when you’re not. You learn how to hold standards. You learn how not to bleed publicly.
To people who wallow in emotional turbulence, that reads as dominance.
I’ve built a kind of protective exoskeleton that allows me to function. And sometimes that armor works too well; it convinces others I’m untouchable when I’m actually drowning.
There is something quietly violent about realizing that a woman’s private collapse can coexist with a public myth of power. About how competence becomes a provocation. About how shame thrives in secrecy while others project authority onto you. That you can be sobbing in a bathtub one night and intimidating to strangers the next morning. That the version of you that people resent is not the one you recognize. And for better or worse, it’s the one that holds power.
Maybe the most unsettling part isn’t the insult itself, but what it reveals: how little room there is for women like me to be contradictory, to be fully human.
Either confess or perform.
Bleed or smile.
Explain yourself, or be explained.
When suffering becomes the price of moral legitimacy, competence will always look dangerous, and restraint will always be misread as a threat.
But restraint is not avoidance. It is a choice: to take responsibility for one’s inner life, to limit the impact of one’s pain on others, to do the work without making oneself the work.
A system that cannot tell the difference between accountability and threat is not compassionate. It is broken.
