Hey,
Some feelings exist that we don’t know how to speak about. So they find other exits, through silences, distance, a sharp tone at the wrong time, or that “I’m fine” which sounds less like reassurance and more like a warning!
And mostly, women are often expected to understand the whole unsaid thing. To translate it. Absorb it. Know it better. Love it better. But what happens when love becomes emotional labour for pain someone else was never taught to name?
In this #Edition57, we are talking about emotional literacy, the myth of “man up,” and why women should not have to become safe houses for everyone else’s unprocessed hurt.
Inside this edition:
👉 The Labels We Learn to
📚 What she’s reading, watching, listening
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her
Take what you need. Leave what you don’t.
👉 Act Like A Man, Break Like A Human
We talk a lot about mental health now. Tell people to ask for help, go to therapy, feel their feelings, take a break, breathe. But most of us were never actually taught how to feel, we were taught how to perform.
“How to be fine, stay productive, not to make the room uncomfortable, to smile through the things & to say “I’m good” when our body is quietly keeping score.”
And for men, especially, this emotional training begins before they even have the words for it. They learn that crying is too much, being soft is unsafe, needing help is embarrassing, and silence is somehow more respectable than honesty.
And this stays, until the whole set of instructions becomes, Man Up.
For them, their pain stays unnamed.
And what is not named starts showing up as silence, as anger, as distance, as control, as the kind of emotional absence other people are expected to keep making room for.
And too often, women become the place where all of it lands. ❤️🩹
Mothers become emotional shock absorbers. Sisters become translators. Girlfriends become therapists. Wives become rehabilitation centers. Daughters become peacekeepers in rooms where grown men never learned how to say, I am hurt.
And, listen to yourself closely now…
This is one of the biggest lies women are handed, that love means absorbing what someone else refuses to understand about themself. It makes you decode every silence. Care starts meaning like making space for every mood.
That being “a good woman” means staying soft around someone else’s sharp edges…
But love is not supposed to mean becoming the container for another person’s unprocessed pain. And, this is why emotional literacy matters, it's not a soft skill. It is a survival language. It is knowing when to cry instead of harden. When to name the feeling before it becomes someone else’s wound. When to write it down because the page can hold what people cannot. When to set a boundary because love is not the same as absorption. And when to ask for help before collapse becomes the only proof of pain.
Maybe healing is not just therapy, medication, or self-care.
Maybe it is also learning to say:
I am scared.
I am overwhelmed.
I need help.
This is not yours to carry.
Maybe that is the real work. To believe pain before it becomes a crisis, and to stop asking women to carry what others were never taught to feel.
🔍 Currently, Her
💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.
📗 Read: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Still resonant for its insistence on self-respect over belonging. Jane’s refusal to shrink herself emotionally or morally, feels especially relevant for women navigating constant labelling and emotional load.
🧜♀️ Watch: Mermaids, Directed by Richard Benjamin
This film understands that love can coexist with resentment and that daughters notice far more than they’re given credit for → Watch if any relationship in your life is loving, complicated, and unfinished.
🎧 Listen: The Outlive the Labels Podcast — Mary Kaye Holmes
A show about survivors, overcomers, and people who refuse to let one chapter become their whole name. This podcast’s a reminder that healing often begins by outliving the labels we were handed → Play when you’re ready to stop being defined by what you had to survive.
✨ For the week when love stops meaning emotional absorption
🗞 Her World, This Week
🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.
💔 A Bounce House Tragedy Shakes a Soccer Tournament: A children’s soccer tournament in Belgium turned tragic after a bounce house was lifted by a gust of wind, killing 7-year-old Jean Kylian Essombe and injuring three others. Authorities are now investigating whether the inflatable was properly secured.
🏛️ Trump Was Blinking During Maternal Health Meeting: During a White House meeting on maternal and reproductive health, Donald Trump was seen with his eyes closed for several moments. To the internet’s reaction, the White House later said he was blinking, not sleeping.
🩺 PCOS Gets a New Name, PMOS: PCOS has officially been renamed PMOS, shifting the focus from “cysts” to what the condition really is, i.e. a complex hormonal and metabolic disorder. Experts say the change could help women get clearer diagnoses and better care around a condition that affects 1 in 8 women.
😴The Sleep Spot for Healthier Aging: A new Nature study says the sweet spot for healthier aging may be around 6.4 to 7.8 hours of sleep. Too little or too much sleep was linked to higher biological aging markers across brain and body systems.
🏀Lisa Leslie’s Legacy Gets Set in Stone: LA Sparks will honor the WNBA icon with a statue outside Crypto.com Arena. From championships to the league’s first dunk, her legacy didn’t just shape the Sparks, but helped shape women’s basketball.
💡 Her Spotlight
Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.
Jennifer Coolidge (@jennifercoolidge) – For years, Jennifer Coolidge could have remained boxed in as the sexy older woman, the comic relief, the exaggerated blonde. But she outlived the label. She became something fuller: funny, strange, vulnerable, excessive, lonely, and very iconic.
She reminds us that women are often turned into types before they are allowed to be people. And sometimes, a woman stays long enough for the world to finally see her whole.
🤍 Note to Her
Her Weekly Download has a new drop now:
Two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – and a Sunday news special to help you enter the week with the women-first stories worth knowing.
✨P.S. Send this to her, the one who is always reachable, but maybe not always met.
Because the best kind of perspective is the one we pass woman to woman 💚