A Reckoning with Boundaries, Power, and the Need to Feel Superior
The Rubble and the Rebuild
Somewhere between Beyoncé humming “My House” and me typing 5:03 PM — had me all the way messed up into my phone, something in my chest clicked.
I used to think power was proving I could hold it all. Every emotion. Every wound. Every unmet need from the people around me. I thought healing meant smiling through it like I was auditioning for the “most evolved” award. To be lovable, I thought I had to be spiritual enough to rise above the mess, strategic enough to never offend the people who offended me, and polite enough to leave the room without a trace.
But life, like the best albums and the most honest friendships, doesn’t work like that. Healing is not a quiet staircase to enlightenment. It is a drag. A scream. A holy mess. A reintroduction.
In my conversation with Niquana on the She Don’t Work Like That No More™ podcast, we unpacked it all: survival masks, failed friendships, spiritual weaponization, leadership betrayal, and the loud grief of being misread.
And one thing was loud and clear:
The exact place where they had us messed up… was the exact place we started finding ourselves again.
The Performance of Being Okay
Let’s be honest. Superiority isn’t always about thinking you’re better than everybody else. Sometimes it’s about needing to feel like you’re not about to fall apart.
It’s performance as protection. A show so good you forget you’re acting.
And then one day… you forget your lines, and realize you were never meant to be in this play anyway.
Niquana named it with a gut-punch kind of honesty. She talked about the organizations that weaponized “care,” the leaders who claimed to see her and then punished her the moment she was fully visible. The exhaustion of being misunderstood. The constant pressure to prove her worth with perfection, poise, and political correctness even in all-Black, queer-led spaces.
At one point, she asked a hiring manager straight up:
“Are there any white people at this organization?”
Not because she had a problem with whiteness. But because she could not take another microaggression. Another joke with a blade hidden inside. Another coded comment that sent her spiraling in the car after work.
She needed rest. Understanding. Space to stop performing the myth that she was fine.
That’s the part of the Performer pattern people don’t talk about: the need to feel superior is often born from the fear of being dismissed.
As adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, we all have the right to feel good without apology, without strategy, without survival mode as the driver. But for many women especially those conditioned to lead in high-stakes, high-mission environments the idea of prioritizing softness feels like comedy. There’s always someone to save, something to fix, some metric to prove.
And when proving becomes a lifestyle, the mask doesn’t just stay on. It starts thinking it’s your face.
The Sunken Place Isn’t Just a Movie ..It’s a Memory
There was a moment Niquana described that stuck to my ribs. Sitting across from a leader who once said they cared about her, only to watch them rewrite her story on the way out. No celebration of her impact. No acknowledgment of the hundreds of youth she mentored. Just picking at a single “example” to shrink her legacy into a cautionary tale.
That’s when she said it felt like the sunken place. That strange space where you’re present, but not protected. Where someone else starts narrating your worth like they’ve been holding the pen the whole time.
And here’s the thing: that moment is stitched into the bodies of so many women.
It’s when the Controller pattern steps up to the mic.
The need for power disguised as structure.
The urge to manage other people’s brilliance instead of letting it bloom.
The subtle digs that sound like “I just want to help you grow,” but feel like surveillance.
And yes…. sometimes it’s not even men doing it. Sometimes it’s other women. Women in charge. Women with titles. Women who say it’s about “the mission” but are quietly terrified of losing their seat at the table.
This is what happens when Martyrdom and Control hold hands.
When the Martyr pattern convinces a woman leader that no one works as hard as she does. That she’s sacrificed too much to let someone else shine. That she has to carry the emotional weight of the whole mission.
Instead of cultivating others, she micromanages.
Instead of celebrating wins, she withholds.
Instead of mentoring, she manipulates.
And she often doesn’t even know she’s doing it because she’s too exhausted to notice.
Harm doesn’t always come from hate. Sometimes it comes from burnout. From self-abandonment. From women who’ve had to survive the system by becoming part of the very machine.
We don’t excuse it. But we do understand it.
Because the need to feel superior is often inherited. From mothers. From institutions. From scarcity. From unhealed roles that ask women to be gods, guards, and givers all at once.
Pack Light — The Psychology of Letting Go
Erykah said it. Niquana lived it.
“Bag lady, you gon’ hurt your back…”
And in a world that teaches women to carry it all the harm, the shame, the applause, the performance too many of us have become expert collectors of emotional debt.
Something shifted for Niquana when she started writing it down. Not to stew on it. Not to plot revenge. But to release it.
She called it her digital burn book.
Not full of petty clapbacks. Full of weight. Moments that froze her. Words that cut deep. Glances that reminded her she was being watched, not seen.
She’d log it: Coworker had me messed up at 5:13 PM. Then let it go.
That’s Pleasure Activism in practice. Not the Instagram version. The political, personal, embodied kind. The kind that says:
Your life does not have to be a performance for the comfort of others.
Your softness is not a liability.
Your boundaries are not a negotiation.
When Beyoncé dropped Cowboy Carter, she didn’t perform perfection. She didn’t over-explain her genre shift. She let the discomfort sit. She honored it as part of the message.
And when people asked “Where’s the glitter? Where’s the visuals? Where’s the Beyoncé we’re used to?” she responded with presence, not performance.
Wholeness might be off-tempo to the world. But it’s right on time for the soul.
That’s what Niquana was doing too. Showing up with a chair she already built.
Where You Got Me Messed Up Is Where I Found Myself
Some people have altars. Some people have burn books. Some of us have both.
This isn’t about vengeance. It’s about voice.
Where you got me messed up is where I saw the system. Named the survival script. Stopped handing out grace coupons to people who hadn’t earned the right to stay.
For Niquana, that moment was layered:
A mentor who gave power with one hand and pulled the rug with the other.
An organization that praised her publicly but tried to mute her voice privately.
A friend who vanished until the opportunity was too loud to ignore.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, a voice inside her said:
Protect the room before you protect the relationship.
We are taught to be peacemakers. Martyrs. The smiling face in the group photo even when our backs are breaking.
But there’s a line between kindness and self-erasure. Between humility and hiding. Between community and codependence.
The healing lives in the decision to no longer betray ourselves for access.
We cannot fix a space that was built to misunderstand us.
We cannot boundary our way out of someone else’s scarcity.
We are not meant to stay where we are consistently asked to be smaller for the greater good.
And how good is it really if we disappear to keep it alive?
When Niquana said, “I love people. But I love me too. And I love me first,” it wasn’t a clapback. It was a curriculum.
Because what thrives around you depends on what you water within you.
This isn’t ego. It’s ecology.
We are learning to center our voice not as resistance, but as resonance.
And when she said, “Where you got me messed up is where I’m checking you,” that was wholeness speaking. A woman standing in her center and saying:
I will not let your lack become my lens.
This is She Don’t Work Like That No More.
This is why the podcast exists.
To let women hear themselves in stories that aren’t watered down.
To name the sneaky, performative, manipulative, superior, and chaotic patterns leadership has normalized.
To unhook from the applause that comes with being agreeable.
To give every woman especially the ones told they were “too much,” “too loud,” or “too direct” a space to return home to herself.
Because we weren’t born to be palatable. We were born to be whole.
Closing Reflection: When the Mirror Starts Talking Back
If you’ve made it this far, maybe you’ve been there too.
Maybe you’ve stared down a performance review, a gaslighting manager, a silent boardroom, or a friend who suddenly couldn’t clap for your joy.
Maybe you’ve watched someone try to fold you into a smaller version of yourself, and somewhere deep in your chest, you said: No. More.
Maybe that’s when you started building a world where you no longer had to audition for worthiness.
This is not just Niquana’s story. This is ours.
We are building lives that feel good from the inside.
We are learning how to live well, not just live through.
So if you’re setting boundaries, grieving what never protected you, and showing up with heart, I see you.
You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re becoming.
Podcast Episode: The Need to Feel Superior — Listen to my conversation with Niquana Clark on the She Don’t Work Like That No More™ podcast.
Leadership Quiz: What Kind of Leader Are You, Really? — Find out which leadership survival pattern shows up most for you and how to shift from survival to strategy. Take the quiz →
Book Drop: Wounded to Whole: A Leadership Pattern Companion Guide — Learn how the Performer, Martyr, Controller, and Chaos Driver patterns show up in leadership, and how to interrupt them with wholeness. Download the book →
When they try to tell you who you are, let your body interrupt the story.
When you remember who you are, let your boundaries become blessings.
And when the world tries to box you in — write it down. Say it out loud. Let it go.
This ends with us. And it begins again… with you.
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