Don’t Call Her Difficult When She Was Surviving

Hey,

There are women who are called impatient, difficult, reactive, too sensitive – when really, their bodies learned urgency long before they ever learned safety.

In Edition 63, we are talking about survival, tenderness, and why the people who know our wounds don’t get to use them as proof against us.

Inside this Download:
👉 She Wasn’t Born Impatient
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Maybe that is why Off Campus hit so close.

Some words hurt more because of who says it. Not because, maybe you have heard that before, or maybe you have even said that about yourself. But when it comes from someone who knows the story behind that, it lands completely differently.

Women are not born impatient. They were taught, very early in life, that safety could disappear anytime. And then, years later, the world looks at the survival response and calls it a personality problem

A woman is called impatient when she needs clarity. She’s called dramatic when her body remembers danger. She’s called difficult when she reacts from a place that was once left completely alone. But… this does not mean survivors are beyond accountability. Pain doesn’t give anyone a free pass to hurt others. Love cannot become a place where every reaction is excused and every wound becomes untouchable.

Naming a pattern and using it as an attack are 2 different things. Saying, “I think this is hurting us, can we talk about it?” and saying, “You are so impatient,” like the wound itself is evidence against her, are also 2 different things. 

And… the person who knows why and where it hurts has a responsibility to speak carefully near that place. Loving someone with trauma is not about walking on eggshells, never disagreeing, or never feeling tired. Rather, it is about understanding that some words do not arrive alone. They carry history with them.

“Being called impatient” may sound like:

You are too damaged.
You are too inconvenient.
You are still not healed enough to be easy to love.

And so many women know this feeling a lot better.
Being expected to be honest about what happened, but not grow around it. To have a disrupting story, but never let that story interrupt anyone else’s comfort.

This society wants women to survive everything,
then behave like survival left no marks.

So, don’t ask: “Why is she like this?”
But, ask: “What happened in her life that made her reaction make sense?”
And, that change in the question changes the room. It doesn’t remove any responsibility for any reactions or whatsoever. It just adds better context.

Women should be able to tell their patterns (or their survival responses) and still be able to expect that people who love her not to throw them back at her mid-fight. She can still be healing and be hurt by someone using her unhealed parts as vocabulary.

And… You know it when someone touches your old bruise. You know it when someone stops trying to understand you and starts trying to just win the argument. And maybe that is why stories like Off Campus stay with us. Not because they give us a perfect man, but because they show something many survivors still don’t get to see in real life.

A survivor does not need to be treated like glass.
She needs to know that the person holding her
will not use the broken parts as a weapon.

So no, she was not born impatient.
She was rushed by fear, or raised around instability, or had to become alert before she ever got to become carefree, or her nervous system is still trying to protect a younger version of her who had no one in the room. 

And maybe love, real love, does not call that ugly. Instead it learns how to speak to it. Not by excusing everything, but by remembering that the person who knows your wound does not get to press it and call it honesty.

💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.

📕 Read: Unreasonable Women by Justine van der Leun
A deeply reported book on violence, imprisonment, and the criminalization of women who survived what they were never protected from.
🎧 Listen: Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette
This album feels like a woman refusing to make her pain polite just so others can digest it better. Hit play when “too much” starts sounding like truth instead of a flaw.
🎬 Watch: Maid — Netflix, 2021
A story about emotional abuse, motherhood, poverty, and the impossible work of leaving when the world keeps asking for proof. Survival is rarely neat and women are often judged hardest when they are trying to save themselves.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

🕯️ A Survivor Speaks In Court: A Yazidi woman has alleged in an Australian court case that she was enslaved, beaten, and repeatedly raped in an Islamic State household in Syria.
🚨 Campus Safety Failed Five Women: A man has been charged after prosecutors say he attacked five women, including four students, on UCLA’s campus in under an hour.
⚖️ Abortion Access Faces New Pressure: Anti-abortion activists in New South Wales are backing a bill against “sex-selective abortions,” though medical experts say it is based on misinformation and could restrict abortion access.
💊 When Side Effects Stay Silent: A 23-year-old woman’s experience with post-SSRI sexual dysfunction is bringing attention to a poorly understood condition involving lasting sexual and emotional side effects after antidepressant use.
🎙️ Women Reporters Face The Heat: Donald Trump’s attacks on the press are again drawing attention for how often they target women reporters personally, especially when they challenge him.

Found her voice. Loved her clarity. Needed you to see her.

Justine van der Leun (@jvanderleun) is an award-winning journalist, author, and the woman behind the book we recommended today. UNREASONABLE WOMEN.

What’s most special about her is her refusal to let women become headlines without their full stories being heard. She became a journalist by being “chronically nosy,” meaning wanting to read people’s journals, look through their stuff, ask what is considered too many questions.

Sometimes, the questions women are told not to ask are the same questions that expose what power tried to bury. Unreasonable is often just the word society uses when a woman refuses to disappear quietly.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who has been called too much, too difficult, too impatient – when really, she was only learning how to survive. 💚