We’re Not Missing Red Flags, We’re Being Trained to Ignore Ourselves

What I'm about to present to you is not complicated as we make it out to be but here goes:

Most red flags are obvious.

The problem isn’t that we don’t see them. It’s that we’re taught not to trust ourselves when we do.

From early on, many of us learn how to look straight at danger and rename it potential. We narrate male instability like a coming-of-age story. We frame our endurance as virtue. We confuse empathy with obligation.

So when things finally collapse, we turn the blade inward. How did I miss this? Why did I stay?

But the truth is quieter and sharper: We saw it. We just chose against ourselves to survive what’s been normalized.

We’re surrounded by images of women who look happy. Perfect photos. Loud laughter. Exciting relationships. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, they’re managing chaos, regulating grown men, making excuses, calling friends in tears.

The performance sells stability. The reality costs peace.

And here’s the part people don’t like to say out loud:

The worst men keep getting access because chaos is rewarded. Our culture romanticizes dysfunction.

“Ride or die.” “Build him.” “He’s broken, but he has money.” “I’m strong — I can handle it.” “If I leave, I failed.”

Meanwhile, men who are consistent, accountable, emotionally regulated get labeled boring, soft, or unexciting. So instability becomes attractive — not by desire, but by conditioning.

That isn’t coincidence. That’s training.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth we need to sit with: Many of us are not missing red flags. We are choosing against ourselves.

We’re taught to be chosen instead of choosing. Taught that loneliness is worse than chronic stress. Taught that self-sacrifice is feminine. Taught that danger makes us worthy of rescue.

Add financial pressure. Add fear of starting over. Add religious narratives about waiting, enduring, praying someone into becoming better. Add friends who shame singleness and tell us a “piece of a man” is better than none.

That’s not love. That’s a survival strategy dressed up as romance.

So how do we actually help women? Not by listing red flags. Everyone knows the list.

We teach upgrades.

Discernment matters. Unease is information. That tight feeling in your chest isn’t insecurity — it’s pattern recognition. You don’t need proof to leave. You need alignment.

Leave quietly or leave cleanly. But when you leave, don’t return.

Potential is not a trait. A man is not who he could be. He is what he repeatedly does without supervision.

Love does not create responsibility. It exposes what already exists. If his life was unstable before you, it will be unstable with you.

The first red flag is not something he does. It’s how you feel around him.

Do you feel calm or anxious? Understood or constantly explaining? Chosen or merely tolerated? Are you shrinking to keep the peace?

Charm doesn’t matter. Apologies don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Your nervous system does.

Your body registers truth long before your mind negotiates excuses.

The bar isn’t low. It’s being deliberately undermined.

By men who benefit from low expectations. By a culture that shames single women. By people who glorify suffering as strength. By economic systems that punish independence. By belief systems that sanctify endurance over dignity.

So when you say, “I hate what we accept,” know that you’re naming a collective injury — not a personal failure.

Love is not proven by tolerating dysfunction. Standards don’t scare good men. They filter them.

Leaving early isn’t cruelty. It’s self-respect acting on time.

Women don’t need better instincts. We need permission — especially from each other — to honor the ones we already have.

This is not a call to hardness. It’s a return to alignment.

To choose yourself without apology. To trust what your body already knows. To stop bleeding quietly for stories that never heal you.

This is a message from one woman to another: You are not broken. You were trained.

And training can be undone.

Keeping My Options Open, Explained

People sometimes ask what I mean when I say I like to keep my options open. The assumption is usually hesitation or lack of clarity. For me, it is neither.

In everyday life, keeping my options open means I do not rush into definitive yeses or nos when flexibility serves me better. My work is not rigid, and my capacity shifts. Because of that, I am careful about what I commit to, especially when it involves time. I do not promise every weekend in advance. Sometimes I genuinely do not know how I will feel or what will be required of me in the moment. I function best with room to move. I prefer presence over pressure and spontaneity over being overscheduled.

This is not avoidance. It is discernment.

Where this changes completely is in dating and relationships.

Keeping options open does not apply once I have chosen someone. I do not believe in half-choosing people. If I am in a relationship, there is no mental reserve list and no parallel considerations. The person I am with is not optional. They are chosen. That does not mean obligation or loss of autonomy. It means intention.

If I were to treat someone as an option, I would not expect them to take me seriously. Nor should they. Respect requires clarity. Commitment, when it exists, deserves to be clean.

So yes, I keep my options open with my time, my energy, and my schedule. But not with people. When I choose, I do so with my eyes open and my feet planted.

Clarity is kindness, and choice carries responsibility.

Staying Whole While Staying Employed

There is a particular kind of advice that circulates in workplaces like handed down folklore. It sounds protective. It sounds seasoned. It often comes wrapped in the language of survival. But survival thinking, when left unchecked, quietly trains women to become smaller than their capacity.

I am not interested in disappearing gracefully inside a system. I am interested in remaining intact while I extract what I need.

This is about workplace survival as a woman and as a human. Not hardened. Not naïve. Whole.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Hypervigilance is not strategy

Treating the workplace like enemy territory at all times does not make you sharp. It makes you legible. When you never build rapport, never offer context, and never allow measured vulnerability, people do not read you as disciplined. They read you as closed. And closed people are easy to sideline.

Observation is powerful. Suspicion without calibration is noise. Presence steadies rooms more than fear ever could.

2. Influence lives between exposure and silence

Oversharing costs you. Total opacity costs you too. Influence does not come from confession or concealment. It comes from discernment.

Knowing what to share, when to share it, and with whom is a skill. Women are often told to either bare everything or guard everything. Both positions remove agency. The middle ground is where leverage breathes.

3. Discipline is not avoidance

Rules like never drink with coworkers, never date at work, coworkers are never your friends are not wisdom. They are often fear dressed up as principle.

The real skill is judgment. Adults who cannot modulate tend to replace discernment with superstition. Boundaries are not walls. They are gates. Gates require attention.

4. You cannot build leverage while living half gone

Exit strategy matters. Always. But living like you are already gone prevents you from building power where you are.

Some women are stalled because of racism. That is real. Others are stalled because they never invested in the systems they hoped to extract from. Power is relational. Proximity matters. Competence must be seen to convert.

You do not have to pledge loyalty to build leverage. You do have to participate with intention.

5. HR is a function, not a villain

Human Resources exists to protect the company. That is not a scandal. It is a structure.

Understanding this does not require paranoia. It requires documentation, boundaries, clarity, and emotional restraint. Panic weakens your position. Precision strengthens it.

6. Collective suspicion erodes personal authority

The most corrosive advice is the kind that turns entire groups into hazards. Once you assign fixed motives to people based on race, gender, or identity, you stop navigating power and start rehearsing grievance.

Yes, racism exists. Yes, corporate spaces can be hostile. But power does not move on slogans. It moves on incentives, proximity, reliability, and demonstrated competence.

Discernment sees individuals inside systems. Wisdom adapts without hardening.

7. Shrinking is not protection

Advice that requires you to be invisible, isolated, permanently guarded is not protecting you. It is disciplining you on behalf of the very system it claims to resist.

I refuse strategies that demand the erosion of my humanity as the price of safety. Warmth and authority are not opposites. Femininity and rigor are not liabilities.

8. Survival is not the goal

The goal is not to survive corporate America. The goal is to extract what you need without becoming smaller in the process.

I move with breath, not reaction. I observe before I engage. I build quietly. I document cleanly. I protect my people and my principles.

I am not here to be consumed by a system. I am here to move through it intact, strategic, and whole.

That is not rebellion.

That is sovereignty.

No, This Was Not a Conquest of Venezuela

People keep saying, “Trump conquered Venezuela.”
That word is doing too much. and explaining too little.

What happened is not conquest in the historical sense. It is not annexation. It is not colonization with flags and governors and settlers.

It is something colder, more familiar, and far more American.

This is about drugs and access to resources.

Let’s be precise.

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Conquest looks like ownership. This looks like leverage.

When a country conquers another, it absorbs territory, populations, and long‑term responsibility. Borders move. Sovereignty ends.

That is not what the United States has done here.

What the Trump administration has done is remove a head of state, apply overwhelming military pressure offshore, and declare itself the temporary manager of conditions until outcomes favorable to U.S. interests are secured.

That is not conquest. That is control without custody.

The language tells on itself.

“We’re going to run the country until…”
“Judicious transition.”
“Peace, liberty, and justice.”

These are not words of empire. They are words of intervention with an exit clause.

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Reason One: Drugs

The first justification has been consistent, even when the narrative shifts: narco‑trafficking.

Maduro and his wife were not framed as wartime enemies. They were framed as criminals.

Captured. Transported. Charged.

That matters.

The United States did not declare war on Venezuela. It executed what it claims is an international law‑enforcement action, backed by military force.

This is the DEA model scaled up to a nation‑state.

Label the leadership criminal. Remove them physically. Destabilize the protection networks. Fracture the security apparatus. Force cooperation from whoever remains.

This is decapitation, not domination.

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Reason Two: Resources . specifically oil

The second motive is not hidden. It was stated plainly.

Venezuela sits on 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. the largest on Earth.

Heavy, sour crude.

Exactly the kind of oil the United States needs but does not naturally produce in large quantities.

Control of access to that oil. who extracts it, who refines it, who profits from it, who stabilizes prices with it. is far more valuable than owning Venezuelan land outright.

You don’t need to conquer a country to benefit from its resources.

You just need:

• A compliant transitional authority

• Offshore military pressure

• Sanctions relief as incentive

• American companies positioned as “rebuilders”

That’s not conquest.

That’s asset management.

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Why the U.S. does not want to “own” Venezuela

Ownership is expensive.

Running a country means:

• Feeding people

• Securing borders

• Managing infrastructure

• Absorbing blame for every failure

The U.S. learned that lesson the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This administration ran against forever wars.

So instead of ownership, the strategy is outsourced stability:

Apply force. Remove obstacles. Secure resource flows. Leave governance to locals who understand the terms.

If it collapses later, the U.S. can say it gave Venezuela a chance.

That is not how conquerors talk.

That is how investors talk.

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Why calling it “conquest” is sloppy

Calling this a conquest makes it sound ideological.

It isn’t.

This is transactional.

Drugs threaten U.S. domestic stability.
Oil stabilizes U.S. economic power.

Everything else. the speeches, the moral framing, the talk of liberty. is narrative insulation.

Useful. Familiar. Optional.

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Venezuela’s future is still unresolved

This is not democracy yet.

It is not even regime change in the full sense.

It is a forced opening.

The remaining power struggle inside Venezuela. between civilian elites, security forces, and the democratic opposition. will determine whether this becomes renewal or simply a reshuffling of the same system.

And whatever happens next, one thing is already settled:

President Trump owns the outcome.

Not because he conquered Venezuela.

But because he chose to touch it.

Conquest takes land. Control takes access. The second is cheaper. and more common.

Radical Honesty for 2026

2025 was a good year.

Not because everything went perfectly, but because clarity finally outweighed confusion.

So here’s my only real advice for 2026:

Be real with yourself.

Radically real. Radically honest. Radically grounded in reality—not vibes, not captions, not coping mechanisms disguised as faith.

Walk into this year with your eyes open and your stories straight.

🗣️ Be blessed.

Now let’s talk.

1. Traveling on a budget is still traveling.

If you got there and slept without roaches or crackheads—you traveled. Nobody gives out medals for airline loyalty.

2. Every uncomfortable moment is not trauma.

Sometimes it’s just growth knocking without a soft voice.

3. Passive aggression is still aggression.

If you can’t say it directly, you’re still saying it sideways.

4. If every year is hard, every single year, pause.

At some point, it’s not the season. It’s the system you’re standing in. Change something.

5. You cannot save someone who is happy in hell.

Stop volunteering as a rescue mission where no evacuation is requested.

6. Yes, you can ruin your own blessings.

That doesn’t mean you’re cursed forever. God gives instructions and free will. Outcomes follow choices. Period.

7. Half the things people swear God said… He never mentioned.

Sometimes it’s intuition. Sometimes it’s ego. Sometimes it’s fear wearing scripture.

8. Don’t raise your kids like you’re doing them a favor.

They didn’t ask to be here. Stewardship isn’t charity.

9. Your kids will grow up and figure you out.

All of it. So live accordingly.

10. One of the worst men you can get is the one who couldn’t pull his type and settled for you.

Resentment always shows up later.

11. Broke men believe in hypergamy too.

They just don’t know the word. That’s why they swear they’ll choose a Home Depot cashier over a serial degree-holder, while offering nothing but audacity.

12. Start keeping some things to yourself.

Especially big dreams. Everybody doesn’t need access to your blueprint.

13. Persistence doesn’t guarantee success.

Sometimes it just guarantees experience. Know when to pivot.

14. Who you are in private is who you actually are.

Public presentation is just branding.

15. Everything is not going to go your way.

And thank God for that, some closed doors are structural protection.

16. If your business struggles with client retention, look inward.

People return to what they value. Always.

17. Hard work alone is not the cheat code they promised.

Connections and likability move doors faster than grind culture admits. Skills are teachable. Personality takes work—and self-awareness.

18. Y’all have got to stop lying so much.

Especially to yourselves.

19. Start over as many times as you need to.

Quitting on life is the only real failure. The finish line is the graveyard—don’t arrive early.

Maxim for 2026:

Reality rewards clarity. Honesty creates leverage. Delusion is expensive.

Walk accordingly.

When Disrespect Becomes Normal, the House Weakens

My Response to this video:

Black Women Are the New Beckys
byu/CarolineJhingory inBlackboard

Disrespect inside the house, it doesn’t matter if it’s subtle or overt, weakens the house. I don’t take this as anti–Black woman rhetoric. I take it as intra-Black truth. And the truth is, ignoring it doesn’t free us. Acknowledging it is the first step toward clarity.

This didn’t start with reality TV. Every era has had its scapegoat: the shows of the 80s, church politics, family color hierarchies, gossip. Media doesn’t invent the behavior, it amplifies it, gives it a costume, and whispers permission in our ears. And what I’m seeing most now are Great Pretenders.

Bougie. Baddie. Unbothered. Read her. Check her. None of that is character. It’s posture. Aggression dressed as confidence is not confidence, it’s strain. True confidence doesn’t need an audience, and it doesn’t humiliate someone else to breathe. You can always tell because when the costume comes off, when the lights fade, many of these women are miserable.

I don’t agree that Black women are “becoming white women.” But I do see how micro-aggression has been normalized in spaces where proximity to money, status, or visibility is treated as virtue. Access becomes superiority. Ignorance wears heels. And yes, men sometimes instigate it, reward it, hide behind it. The influence of LGBT culture is complicated too—not about identity, but about imitation. We borrow sharpness and call it wit. We borrow hardness and call it survival. But borrowed armor never fits right—and it cuts the wearer first.

What worries me most is the refusal of self-agency. Impulsiveness masquerading as empowerment is still destructive. When women harm other women, it exposes how deeply conditioned we are to turn on each other. Acknowledging this isn’t betrayal. It’s the first adult step. This behavior doesn’t protect us. It isn’t a safety net.

The real question is: what culture are we willing to stop feeding? This isn’t a reality TV “Real World” confessional. This is life—with consequences that linger, and no reunion episode to fix it.

Micro-aggressions among Black women don’t build boundaries. They chip away at the brain, the spirit, and the house itself. Sisterhood is not a costume. It’s not posture. It’s presence. And if we don’t defend it, the house will collapse—not from outsiders, but from within.

 

When Understanding Is Mistaken for Endorsement: A Reflection on Agency and Accountability

I’m beginning to take note of a recurring corrosive pattern. Almost every time discussions arise around abuse, injustice, racism, or even the seemingly simple matters of relationships, boundaries, and self-agency, the conversation sidesteps the real casualties. It avoids the weight of consequence.

Instead, what surfaces is a rhetorical maneuver: a shift from the lived experience to historical abstraction. Slavery is invoked, Christianity is weaponized, and suddenly, the person articulating their understanding (not their endorsement) of abuse or systemic inequity is positioned as the perpetrator of moral failure. This insistence that acknowledging reality equals condoning it is absurd.

The moment someone speaks from lived awareness or observance, they are told they are “endorsing victimhood” or “embracing abuse.” Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Understanding is not approval. Insight is not complicity. Agency is not guilt.

Consider this: a discussion about a woman abusing a man, or even a white woman exercising abusive power over a Black man, is suddenly reframed as a discourse on systemic slavery and religious oppression. My point was clear: there is a distinction between systemic forces and individual self-agency. There is a difference between what a structure enforces and what a person chooses. Yet merely stating this distinction transforms one into the “bad girl” in the eyes of those unwilling to separate conceptual clarity from moral accusation.

This is not a matter of arrogance. It is not a matter of insensitivity. It is a reflection of a culture unwilling to confront complexity without collapsing it into moral binaries. To contest your life, to defend your awareness and integrity, should not become an indictment of character. Yet the pattern is persistent, and it is exhausting.

To witness, to name consequences, to recognize patterns, and to assert agency are not sins. They are acts of survival, of discernment, of ethical rigor. And when others attempt to weaponize history against your lived insight, remember: the axis does not orbit perception, it defines it.

History, systems, and faith carry weight. Individual choice carries power. Conflating the two is a strategy of distraction, not justice. Recognize it. Name it. Move with your axis intact..