Here’s the thing: Being nice is worthless if you’re just going to feel resentful about it in the end. You might as well just be outspoken and state your needs from the outset. Because as much as people resent assertive women, they resent disingenuous, overly friendly, secretly furious women even more. Maybe you need to ask yourself, “How secretly furious am I?” I can certainly understand why you’d feel so angry. By simply showing up and being a woman, you’re asked to satisfy an incredibly tangled and contradictory set of demands. You are supposed to be assertive but not too assertive. You are
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