Hey,

You’re describing something you’ve noticed over time. And almost immediately, the response from the other side comes: “But not everyone.” “I know someone who isn’t like that.” “That’s not always true.”

Now the conversation feels smaller. Flattened. What’s strange is that it doesn’t feel like disagreement. It feels like misalignment. And for a long time, many of us internalize that feeling as our own fault. As if we’re being too emotional, too general, too dramatic. But, we aren’t. We’re just peaking in patterns. And the response we’re getting is anecdotal.

#Edition17 is about this mismatch where we try to change ourselves rather than teach someone something.

Inside this edition:
⏳ Why explaining more doesn’t work with men
📚 What she’s watching, reading, buying this week
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

This isn’t about what’s not. It’s about what is and what it is for you. 

Psychology has a name for this mismatch: concrete thinking v/s abstract reasoning.

Abstract thinking allows someone to talk about trends, averages, and repeated experiences without needing every individual example to fit perfectly. It’s how we make sense of complex systems, relationships, workplaces, cultures, power dynamics. Concrete thinking, on the other hand, collapses big ideas into individual cases. When someone hears a pattern and immediately reaches for an exception — “But I know a guy…” — they aren’t necessarily disagreeing. They’re thinking on a different level.

One is speaking about distributions. The other is responding with anecdotes. These are not the same conversations. And explaining harder rarely bridges the gap because the issue isn’t clarity. It’s cognitive orientation.

Why Women Feel This So Often: Women, by necessity, become fluent in patterns.They notice emotional cycles. Social dynamics. Repeated behaviors. What tends to happen, not just what happened once.

This isn’t intuition in the mystical sense. It’s pattern recognition shaped by experience. But when women bring that language into conversations especially with men, institutions, or systems trained to prioritize literal proof and individual cases, they’re often met with rebuttals instead of reflection. That’s when women start:

Not because they’re wrong but because they sense the conversation won’t hold the depth they’re offering.

Why Explaining More Doesn’t Work: When someone responds to a pattern with an exception, they aren’t missing information. They’re operating at the edge of how abstract their thinking goes.

Pointing out more examples won’t suddenly expand the conversation. It just exhausts the person trying to be understood. This is why so many women leave conversations feeling drained rather than resolved. They weren’t unheard — they were unmet.

Understanding this does something powerful.

It removes the impulse to persuade at all costs, helps women recognize when a conversation has reached its natural ceiling, and restores a sense of calm where there used to be self-doubt.

Not every insight needs consensus. Not every pattern needs to be defended. Not every space is capable of holding abstraction. And once a woman sees that clearly, she can choose something different. She can:

This quiet shift isn’t about proving anyone wrong but about recognizing where you’re being asked to speak smaller than you are. When we understand the difference between pattern language and anecdotal rebuttal, we stop questioning our perception. We stop translating our inner knowing into something more “acceptable.” We stop mistaking cognitive mismatch for personal failure.

And that’s when conversations change, not because everyone suddenly understands, but because women do. We know when depth is possible. And when it isn’t. And that knowledge, quietly, returns something precious: 

Peace.

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

🎬 Watch: A Separation (Dir. Asghar Farhadi)
A marriage ends, but certainty dissolves with it. No one here is entirely right or wrong — only human, defensive, and trying to survive with dignity intact. The tension comes not from drama, but from moral friction → Watch when you’re questioning whether doing your best is ever enough.

📘 Read: Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert
A sharp cultural reckoning with how pop culture teaches women to compete with themselves — and each other. Smart, unsettling, necessary → Read when you’re ready to unlearn what you were sold as empowerment.

🫖 Try: Pique Sun Goddess Matcha
It’s less “fix yourself” and more “support your system” → Try when you want your mornings to feel intentional, not demanding.

January calls for rituals that actually make you feel amazing—and Pique’s Sun Goddess Matcha is mine. It delivers clean, focused energy with zero jitters, supports glowing skin and gentle detox, and feels deeply grounding. Smooth, ceremonial-grade, and crave-worthy, it’s the easiest way to start your day clear, energized, and glowing from the inside out.

Get Up To 20% Off

✨Things that meet you where you are without asking you to harden first.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

📉 Why AI panic didn’t repeat: DeepSeek shook markets last year by challenging U.S. tech dominance. Its latest releases didn’t — signaling power has stabilized, not shifted.
🩺 Abortion access tightened again: A new report shows Trump’s first year back in office weakened emergency abortion care, clinic funding, and access to abortion pills — even in states where it’s legal.
🤖 AI used to sexually violate women: After Grok AI generated non-consensual sexualized images of real women — including Princess Kate — UK regulators stepped in, raising urgent questions about women’s digital safety.
💔 Divorce + hidden crypto: As millennial divorces rise, many women are discovering crypto assets only during separation — exposing how easily wealth can be hidden from spouses.
🕯️ Who Renee Nicole Good was: After a woman was killed during an ICE operation, attention turns from viral footage to her life, her family, and the human cost of enforcement.

Found her. Loved her. Needed to honour her.

@alishadinapop is building fashion from conviction, not trends. She’s the founder of Zion Christian Clothing, a label where each piece begins as a prayer, a scripture, or a thought she’s been sitting with, and slowly becomes something wearable. What stands out isn’t just the belief behind the brand. It’s the clarity. The intention. The absence of irony.

✨ Curious to explore what she’s creating? Visit zionchristianclothing.store or follow @zionchristianclothing.

If this edition helped you recognize where depth is possible, imagine what the coming days will do. Starting next week, Her Weekly Download lands Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — with thinking that respects pattern, not anecdotes.

✨ P.S. Know a woman who’s tired of over-explaining? Send her Her Weekly Download. Because the best kind of wisdom is the one we pass woman to woman → Send it her way

💚 Join the circle ↓