What happens when the systems surrounding us become the operating conditions inside us?

There are rules nobody has to tell us anymore because we know them well. We know what makes a good woman, a respectable employee, a grateful child, a supportive wife, a strong man, a successful person, a good Christian, a respectable Black person.

We even learn when we're becoming a little too much.

Nobody necessarily sits us down with a handbook and explains all of this. We pick it up from the people who raise us, what we see rewarded, what gets criticized, what makes people uncomfortable and what seems to make life go a little easier.

By the time we're adults, most of us know the operating conditions pretty well.

That's what interests me.

Somewhere between being taught how the world works and figuring out how to survive inside it, we can begin enforcing those rules ourselves. Nobody has to remind us anymore. We know when to soften our voice, lower our expectations, be grateful, wait our turn, make somebody else comfortable or question whether we're asking for too much.

We mistake conditioning for identity, obligation for destiny, and compliance for character.

And once that happens, the system has accomplished something remarkable. It can step back.

We've become very good at managing ourselves.

The Partnership Begins Early

Most of us don't choose our first systems. We are born into them: our family, race, gender, religion, class, culture and country.

We arrive and begin learning that this is what we do and this is what we don't do. This is what people “like us” can expect, what a woman should tolerate and what a man should provide, how respectable people behave and, my personal favorite, this is what God expects.

We accept that this is what success looks like and this is what we should be grateful to have.

Some of what we're given is valuable. It gives us identity and belonging. Some of it carries wisdom earned by people who survived things we will never have to survive because they did.

I don't believe everything handed down to us should be thrown away simply because it's old. My father used to say, take the meat and leave the bones.

The problem is that children aren't particularly good at determining which is which.

So we absorb both.

Eventually inherited instructions can begin feeling like personality.

That's just who I am.

Maybe.

But I think some things deserve another look.

When Survival Becomes Identity

I think about women who raised daughters from survival. Some of the lessons they passed down were practical and necessary: keep some money of your own, know how to feed yourself, pay attention, don't depend completely on anybody.

That's wisdom. Keep that.

But survival can carry other instructions along with it. Keep the peace. Don't embarrass your husband. Don't make a man feel small. Be grateful somebody wants you. A good woman sacrifices. Family comes first. You can pursue your dreams later.

And the big one: don't be selfish.

A woman can sincerely believe she's preparing her daughter for a successful life because she's teaching her what allowed her to survive hers. I don't think we acknowledge that enough. Sometimes what looks restrictive from one generation was protection in another.

But what happens when the conditions change and the instruction doesn't?

The daughter may no longer need the same survival strategy, yet she can spend another thirty years faithfully following it. She teaches it to her daughter, who may teach it to hers, and somewhere along the way nobody remembers what danger the rule was originally designed to protect them from.

It simply becomes what good women do.

That's how survival can become identity.

And eventually the daughter says, That's just the kind of woman I am.

Again, maybe.

Or maybe she's exceptionally good at operating a system she inherited.

Invisible Infrastructure

I've been thinking a lot about infrastructure lately.

Infrastructure is easy to ignore because when it works, we experience the result without thinking about everything required to produce it.

You turn on the faucet and water comes out. You use your phone and the call connects. You walk into a functioning home and things are where they need to be.

Someone remembered. Someone anticipated what would be needed. Someone replenished it, scheduled it, noticed it or handled it before anybody else had to think about it.

Women have occupied this position for generations. We have been invisible infrastructure beneath families, careers, churches, communities and institutions.

I want to be careful with that observation because there is nothing inherently diminishing about supporting another human being. I have done it proudly.

I've contributed ideas that someone else presented. I've helped make another person's achievement possible. I've watched my husband receive praise for something I knew I had engineered somewhere behind the scenes, and I have genuinely felt proud.

That's my husband. He's a reflection of me. It's okay.

Then occasionally, underneath that pride, another little voice would show up.

Hey. I did that.

Both things can be true.

I can love contributing to someone else's success and still recognize my contribution. I can choose to stand beside, behind or in front of somebody depending on what the moment requires. The position isn't really the issue.

The problem begins when support becomes the culturally approved ceiling for your power.

Your intelligence is wonderful when it advances someone else. Your ambition is admirable when it doesn't interfere with his. Your competence is valuable because everybody can depend on it.

Then you decide to use all that intelligence, ambition and competence to advance yourself.

Now let's see how everybody feels.

When Competence Requires Reassurance

This is something I find fascinating.

We say we value leadership. We admire intelligence, decisiveness, ambition, authority and vision. Then a woman walks into the room possessing all of those qualities and somehow another qualification appears.

Can she make everybody comfortable with it?

Be warm. Smile. Don't sound arrogant. Don't be intimidating. Don't make people feel stupid. Don't be too aggressive.

You can be confident. Just make sure everybody feels okay while you're doing it.

Why?

Why does confidence feel different when a woman refuses to perform reassurance alongside it?

And women aren't the only ones participating in this arrangement. Men were raised inside systems too.

A boy can learn that leadership belongs to him long before anybody knows whether he can actually lead. He may learn that providing financially completes most of his obligation, that domestic competence somehow diminishes masculinity, or that a wife's contribution is evidence of his success.

He didn't invent all of that.

He walked into a system that was already running too.

But inheritance doesn't make something true, and being assigned a position doesn't make a person qualified to hold it.

A title cannot manufacture leadership. Neither can gender.

Some people are extraordinary leaders. Some aren't. I think we create a lot of unnecessary misery when we insist that a person occupy a position simply because our system says that's where someone like them belongs.

When Goodness Requires Disappearing

Religion complicated this considerably for me because some of these instructions came with divine authority attached to them.

This is personal. I'm not saying every religion teaches women to disappear, and I'm certainly not saying every interpretation of Christianity does.

I'm talking about what I absorbed.

Submission could become goodness. Sacrifice could become goodness. Endurance could become goodness. Being thankful for what I had could become more virtuous than admitting I wanted something different.

And once God gets attached to an instruction, questioning the instruction can feel an awful lot like questioning God.

That's powerful.

What's interesting to me now is that the Bible itself contains women who acted. Women decided things, strategized, led, took risks and moved when they believed something needed to be done.

Yet the religious imagination I developed for myself was considerably smaller.

Be good. Be grateful. Be supportive. Wait. Pray. Endure.

Maybe God will change the circumstances.

I spent years thinking that was faith.

My understanding is different now. I no longer see God and my own capacity to create as being in competition with each other. I can pray and move. I can believe and build. I can be profoundly grateful for my life and still say, I want more than this.

I can love someone without abandoning myself to prove that the love is real.

There was a time when even writing that would have frightened me.

Some days it still does.

That's another thing I'm learning to examine. When an idea frightens me, I want to know what exactly has been threatened.

Sometimes the answer is illuminating.

The System Doesn't Have to Be in the Room

This is where the whole thing starts getting really interesting to me.

Eventually nobody has to tell the woman to shrink. She knows when she's getting too big for the room and corrects herself.

Nobody has to tell the employee not to ask for more. She's already calculated what someone like her should reasonably expect.

Nobody has to tell a child that a particular dream is unrealistic. Eventually the child learns to edit the dream before saying it aloud.

Nobody has to tell the believer that wanting more might be selfish. She questions her own desire before anybody else gets the opportunity.

At some point, the ceiling moves inside.

And because the voice enforcing it sounds like our own voice, we stop asking where it came from.

That's when partnership becomes management.

We entered into relationship with a system. We learned how to function inside it. We adjusted ourselves to its expectations, and eventually those expectations became part of the way we understood ourselves.

Think about how efficient that is.

The system doesn't even have to be in the room anymore.

External Limits and Internal Ceilings

Now, I want to be very clear about something here.

There are real systems operating outside us. Racism is real. Sexism is real. Economic inequality is real. Education changes opportunity. Geography matters. Family wealth matters. Connections matter. Disability can affect access. History matters.

I'm a Black woman in America. I don't need anybody to explain structural inequality to me.

What I am interested in is what happens next.

Because somebody else's prejudice does not get to become a prophecy about my life.

Someone can underestimate me. I don't have to join them.

Someone can have an opinion about what a woman should earn, build, own or become. I don't have to negotiate against myself on their behalf.

Someone can look at my skin, my hair, my age, my sex or my background and decide exactly where I belong.

Okay.

Now what do I believe?

This is where self-concept becomes important to me. I don't believe positive thinking magically dismantles discrimination. I do believe there is tremendous danger in absorbing somebody else's limitation until I begin making decisions from it.

If the world tells me there's a ceiling and I begin lowering my own head every time I approach it, eventually nobody has to keep me beneath it.

I'll do that myself.

Systems establish external limits. Self-concept can become the internal mechanism that keeps those limits operating long after nobody is physically holding us there.

I refuse to participate in my own diminishment.

That doesn't mean pretending obstacles don't exist.

It means they don't get my cooperation.

When the Bargain Stops Making Sense

Something happens to many women as we get older that I find absolutely fascinating.

We start saying things we once swallowed. We stop attending things we don't enjoy. We become less interested in being universally liked. We look at obligations we've carried for decades and suddenly ask, Why am I still doing this?

People sometimes describe this as women reaching an age when they simply stop caring.

I don't think that's quite it.

I think some of us finally examine the bargain.

What did I give? What did I receive? What did I postpone? What did I abandon? What did I make possible for everybody else?

And what did I make possible for myself?

That last question can sting.

I've had to ask it.

I've looked at what I've contributed, what I've sacrificed and what I've spent years making possible for other people. Then I've looked at the return on that investment.

Some of it was absolutely worth it.

Some of it wasn't.

And once you know that, the old bargain becomes very difficult to keep making.

Maybe that's part of what happens in midlife. Time stops feeling unlimited. You begin understanding that every yes is being purchased with a piece of a life that actually has an ending.

Suddenly approval isn't worth what it used to cost.

The reality may have been there all along.

You're finally willing to look directly at it.

Who Benefits From the Version of You That You Learned to Be?

This question can get uncomfortable quickly.

Who benefits from the woman who never asks for credit?

Who benefits from the employee who believes gratitude should replace compensation?

Who benefits from the mother who believes everybody else's needs must always precede hers?

Who benefits from the man who believes leadership arrived automatically with his sex?

Who benefits from the child taught that obedience matters more than discernment?

Who benefits when people believe the circumstances they inherited are the boundaries of what they may become?

Sometimes there is an obvious answer. A person benefits. An institution benefits. A culture benefits.

But sometimes I think the answer may be nobody.

The people who taught us the rule may be gone. The circumstances that created it may no longer exist. Nobody currently in the room even remembers why everybody is doing it this way.

And we're still obeying it.

Now that is a system.

Sovereignty Requires an Audit

I don't think sovereignty requires throwing away everything we've inherited.

Some traditions deserve preservation. Some obligations are worth carrying. Some sacrifices are profound expressions of love. Human beings need systems. We need relationships. We need each other.

I just want to know what I'm carrying.

Is this mine?

Do I actually believe it?

Does it belong in the life I'm building now?

Would I choose this if nobody praised me for choosing it?

Would I continue doing it if nobody punished me for stopping?

And here's the question underneath all of them:

Am I acting from conviction, or am I acting from conditioning?

That's the audit.

There is a difference between choosing a life and becoming exceptionally good at performing the life you were trained to accept.

I think sovereignty begins when we can finally tell the difference.

The systems that raised me taught me a lot of the operating conditions. Some protected me. Some shaped me beautifully. Some carried wisdom I intend to keep.

Others have been running far beyond their usefulness.

Those don't automatically get to stay simply because they've been here a long time.

I get to look at them now.

I get to decide.

My father already gave me the instructions.

Take the meat. Leave the bones.

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