The Box You Never Asked For (And how to draw a new one and build your dream life inside it)
"I'd like to shine."
That's what she said to me this week. And she didn't mean in the arrogant, give me the attention and the glory. She meant that specific feeling when your skills line up with the work in front of you and you get to just be good at it. Where you're not shrinking or apologizing or hedging, you're operating at full power and it feels incredible.
You know that feeling. Whether you call it shining, feeling seen, being in a flow state, alignment, or something else. I know you know this...
And you also know the feeling she described to me next.
Feeling stuck. Feeling like she needed to take the safe road. To not want TOO much.
It's those annoyyyying voices again. 👋 Hello, committee of a$$holes! The narratives running in the background telling you what you're supposed to do, who you're supposed to be, how good girls behave. These are the "shoulds." The stuff you do because at some point you learned you were supposed to, even when nobody ever checked whether you actually wanted it or valued it at all.
We all have them - men included. Everybody gets programmed, that part isn't a woman thing. But this newsletter is about women, so let's talk about what gets programmed into us specifically, because the science here is wild (and a lot a bot maddening).
The box gets given to you
You know the stereotypes. Women are too emotional, too soft, too unstable to lead. 😡😡😡None of it true btw. As if recent events and men's explosions of anger on the global stage isn't enough to convince you of this...The research consistently finds that women's moods don't swing the way the myth claims, and that men's moods fluctuate just as much (sometimes more).¹
But the stereotype doesn't need to be true to do damage. It just needs to be in the air.
So what do we do? We fight it. We overcorrect. They say we're too emotional, so we become the most composed, most stable, most buttoned-up person in every room. They say we'll crack under pressure, so we refuse to crack, EVER, in front of anyone.
We are often told that this behavior is irrational. But I need you to repeat after me until you believe this deep down in your cute painted toenails: This is a completely sane response to a rigged game.
This isn't in your head
Women are judged more harshly than men. Not a vibe, an academic research finding, repeated across studies for decades.² In one study, reviewers rated the exact same resume as more competent and more hirable when it had a man's name on it.³ Same words. Same accomplishments. Different score.
And it gets worse once you're actually in the role. Women who show the very agency we associate with leadership get punished for it, rated less likable and more harshly than men doing the identical thing.⁴ The penalty for stepping out of the box is bigger for us. So women learn, correctly, that we have to be 100 percent qualified before we even raise our hand, while a guy with half the resume strolls in on a hunch.⁵
This is why so many of us are perfectionists. It's a survival skill you developed in an environment where your errors cost more. Of course you built that armor. I would argue it might have been irrational NOT to.
So I want to say this clearly, because I think a lot of advice gets it backwards: the perfectionism made sense. The over-preparing made sense. The staying-in-the-box made sense. You were reading the room and responding accordingly.
But then, somehow...
You end up living in it.
The armor you put on to survive becomes the walls of the place you live. You get so good at doing what you should that you forget to check whether you want it. You climb the thing you were told to climb, you become the composed unflappable person, you hit every mark, and one day you look up and realize you're somewhere you never actually chose. You just kept answering the question "what am I supposed to do here" and never once got asked "what do you actually want."
And asking, "Is this really the life I fought so hard for?"
That's the part I keep coming back to from that conversation. She didn't have a confidence problem. She knew exactly what shining felt like. What she'd lost track of was her own dreams. The thing she wanted before the shoulds got loud enough to drown it out.
So here's what I'll leave you with, since the voices clearly aren't going anywhere on their own. (Mine are definitely still yapping at me as I write this...)
You don't need permission to want what you want.
The box was given to you by people who were never going to score you fairly anyway, and you don't owe them or anyone else your whole life. The work that lights you up, the role, the recognition, the room where YOU GET TO SHINE, you're allowed to want all of it. Loudly. Without a perfect resume. Without waiting until you're 100 percent qualified. Without earning it through suffering first.
So I'll leave you this question:
What do you actually want? To quote the Spice Girls, like really really want? Not what you should want. Not what's allowed. What you wanted before anyone told you to want something else.
Start there. And This Week's Thing is here to help you do just that. 👇🏼
xoxo Kelsey
This Week's Thing
We think creativity means tearing down every wall. No limits, no rules, blue sky, just you and the infinite void chasing "The Big Idea."
That's not how it works. Faced with infinite options, most of us freeze. Ever been paralyzed by a bakery case with too many choices? Same energy, but for your whole life.
The research says the opposite of what the motivational posters say. Constraints don't kill creativity, they're the thing that makes it possible.⁶ Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't do it in 50 words or fewer. The limit forced the magic.⁷ My own academic research found the same pattern: name the constraints, work inside them, and that's where you'll find your genuinely most creative solutions.⁶
So the box from the top of this issue? There are two kinds. There's the one that got handed to you, full of other people's "shoulds." And there's the one you draw yourself, on purpose, out of the things you actually refuse to give up.
One is a cage.
The other is the freeing one, where your dream life lives.
This week, draw the freeing one.
Step 1. Name your constraints. Not the things holding you back, the things you won't trade. Your real non-negotiables. Maybe it's flexibility to travel. Living somewhere you love. A specific salary floor. Mornings with your kids. Whatever they are, get honest. These aren't limits on your dream, they're the edges of the problem you actually want to solve.
Step 2. Draw a box. Write or sketch every one of those non-negotiables along the outside. That's your frame. That's the brief.
Step 3. Now build your big dream inside it. Given those edges, what does the life look like? Not the watered-down "realistic" version, the actual vivid one. What are you doing on a Tuesday? Who's around? What does it feel like in your body when your skills line up with the work and you finally get to shine?
A Girl's Gotta Cite Her Sources
McFarlane, J., Martin, C. L., & MacBeth, T. (1988). Mood fluctuations: Women versus men and menstrual versus other cycles. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 12(2), 201–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1988.tb00937.x; Sommer, B. (1992). Cognitive performance and the menstrual cycle. In J. T. E. Richardson (Ed.), Cognition and the Menstrual Cycle. Springer-Verlag.
For an overview of the broader pattern of harsher judgment, see the backlash literature summarized in Painted Wolves (Medeiros, 2023), Ch. 1–2.
Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. PNAS, 109(41), 16474–16479. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109
Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2001). Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 743–762. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00239
Mohr, T. S. (2014, August 25). Why women don't apply for jobs unless they're 100% qualified. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
Medeiros, K., et al. (2018). Timing is everything: Examining the role of constraints throughout the creative process. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(4), 471–488. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000148
Haught-Tromp, C. (2017). The Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis: How constraints facilitate creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(1), 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000061