corporate amerikka will try to make you feel stupid. you’re not.

a love letter to anyone who’s been the only one in the room

i was the only black woman in almost every meeting i sat in this year.

every single one. enterprise saas consulting. seven figure contracts. rooms full of white men with linkedin titles longer than their actual experience. and somehow i was the one being talked to like i didn’t know what i was doing.

i’d say something in a meeting. silence. white man would say the same thing twenty minutes later with different words. nods around the table. “great point, mark.”

i’d send an idea in slack. crickets. it would show up in someone else’s deck the next week with no attribution.

i’d push back on a bad technical decision. suddenly i was “difficult.” “not a team player.” “maybe not the right fit.”

mark could push back on the same thing and be “a strategic thinker.”

and the cherry on top? i always had to be ten steps ahead just to be considered acceptable.

my boss once pulled me aside to tell me i wasn’t “dressed professionally enough” for a meeting.

meanwhile, our counterparts — the people we were meeting with — were rolling in wearing hoodies. nike shirts. one guy literally wore basketball shorts to a meeting where seven figures were on the line. nobody said a word to him. in fact, he was always applauded :)

but my outfit was the problem.

it was never about the clothes. it’s never about the clothes. they were looking for a reason. any reason. because if they could find something — anything — to flag about me, then they didn’t have to deal with the fact that i was outperforming everyone in that room.

it’s exhausting. you spend half your energy doing the actual work and the other half pre-empting whatever bullshit critique is coming next. did i smile enough? was i too direct? are my earrings too big? is my hair “too much” today? did i email back fast enough? did i email back too fast and now seem desperate?

let me tell you something that took me too long to learn.

corporate amerikka is not a meritocracy. it has never been a meritocracy. it is a system designed to make certain people feel small so that other people can feel big without earning it.

and the cruelest part is how good it is at the gaslight. you’ll sit in those meetings questioning yourself. am i not explaining it right? am i too direct? am i too quiet? do i need to soften this? do i need to be more aggressive? was that idea actually bad? should i have worn the blazer?

no.

the idea was good. you explained it fine. the outfit was fine. they just don’t want to hear it from you. and they need a reason to dismiss you that doesn’t make them look bad, so they’ll invent one. clothes. tone. “executive presence.” “communication style.” pick a code word, it’s the same thing.

i spent months — literally months — of my one precious life on this earth wondering if i was the problem. wondering if i needed to learn how to “communicate better.” wondering if i was being too sensitive. wondering if maybe i wasn’t as smart as i thought i was because nothing i said seemed to land.

then i’d go home, open my laptop, and build entire functional products in a weekend. ship them. get real users. real revenue. real feedback that wasn’t filtered through someone else’s ego.

and i’d think — wait.

if i’m so stupid, how did i just build this?

if i don’t know what i’m doing, why does jem social have paying customers?

if i’m so hard to work with, why do my own clients renew with me every year?

if i’m “unprofessional,” why do my own customers email me telling me how grateful they are to work with me?

the math wasn’t mathing.

because the math was never about me. the math was about a room that was never going to give me credit no matter what i did. i could’ve cured cancer in that meeting in the right blazer and mark would’ve taken the slide.

i walked away from a $10k/mo contract last week. ten thousand dollars a month. gone. by choice.

and you know what i felt? relief. not panic. relief. because the cost of staying wasn’t $10k a month — it was my entire sense of self. it was my creativity. it was the part of me that knows i’m good at what i do. it was every morning i spent picking an outfit that wouldn’t give them ammunition.

they were getting that for $10k. that’s not a deal. that’s theft.

if you’re reading this and you’re in one of those rooms right now — the only one. the one with the ideas nobody listens to until someone else says them. the one being told to “tone it down” or “smile more” or “dress more professional” while the dudes across the table are in nike shorts — i need you to hear me.

you are not stupid.

you are not difficult.

you are not too much.

you are not underdressed.

you are in a room that was built to make you doubt yourself so that the people who built the room don’t have to share it.

that’s a different problem. and it’s not yours to solve by getting smaller, or quieter, or more “appropriate.”

the work you do on your laptop at 11pm — the side project, the app, the freelance thing, the substack, the little business you keep telling yourself isn’t “real” yet — that’s the real one. that’s the thing nobody can take credit for. that’s the thing that compounds. and nobody is going to police what you wear while you build it.

i’m not telling everybody to quit their job tomorrow. i know everybody’s situation is different. i know rent is real. i know the apps don’t pay everybody’s bills yet.

but i am telling you to stop letting them tell you who you are.

build the thing on the side. ship it. let real users — not coworkers, not managers, not bosses worried about your blazer — tell you whether you’re good at what you do. the market doesn’t care about your race or your gender or your hoodie. it cares whether the thing works.

and the thing you build? it works.

i know because the version of you that survives that room every day and still has the energy to create something afterward — that version of you is already doing the hardest part. building from a place of exhaustion. building anyway. building in spite of.

corporate amerikka will try to make you feel stupid because it needs you to feel stupid. that’s the whole engine.

don’t give them the fuel.

cheers…to building your own room ❤️