“When Assertiveness Was Not Mine to Claim”

I grew up in a culture where assertiveness, especially from women, was quietly policed and loudly shamed. It was called rude. It was called disrespectful. Sometimes, it was labeled manish or too Western—a betrayal of softness, of humility, of the unspoken ideal of womanhood we were meant to emulate.

In the Caribbean, manish is not just a word—it is a verdict. It is spoken with a curl of the lip or a cut of the eye. It is hurled at girls who speak without hesitation, who look adults in the eye, who walk into a room with shoulders lifted and heads upright. It means: you are out of place. You are too forward. You are too much. You are not what a girl is supposed to be.

In my world, to ask directly was to demand. To disagree openly was to offend. To take up space was to threaten. And so, assertiveness was not just discouraged—it was coded as dangerous, even unfeminine. Over time, I learned to read the room, not for safety, but for silence. I learned to cushion every sentence, smile when I wanted to speak, and shrink in moments when my spirit needed to stretch. But I felt it in my body. Every time I swallowed a truth, every time I softened a no into a maybe, I felt a dissonance building between who I was taught to be and who I inherently was.

You see, my assertiveness never came to hurt others. It came to protect myself. It came to clarify, not to control. But without the cultural permission to stand in that truth, my assertiveness always felt like an imposition, like a foreign body moving through a space that had no language for it. And because it was unfamiliar to others, it made me feel unfamiliar. Othered. As though I had stepped outside a boundary that no one had ever drawn, but everyone expected me to see.

There is a quiet pain in being labeled too much when all you are doing is being clear. There is loneliness in being seen as difficult when you are merely trying to be whole. And there is grief in realizing that the parts of you most essential to your dignity were framed as defects. I have had to re-learn what it means to speak up, not with guilt, but with groundedness. I have had to untangle assertiveness from aggression, from shame, from exile. And I have begun to understand that being assertive is not a failure of character—it is an act of self-trust.

If you, too, were raised to believe that clarity is cruelty, that strength is unbecoming, or that your voice must always yield—know this:

Your assertiveness is not a betrayal. It is a birthright.

To be clear is not to be cruel. To be firm is not to be unfeminine. To be whole is not to be disloyal. You deserve to be heard. Without shrinking.Without apology.Without explanation.

And I know I am not alone.

Across generations and geographies, others are rising too—unlearning the silence they were taught to wear, remembering the shape of their own voices. We are not being difficult. We are not being disrespectful. We are becoming whole. And in reclaiming our assertiveness, we are not just healing ourselves—we are quietly rewriting the terms of belonging for those who come after us.