You Are Not Allowed
On recognizing manipulation disguised as wounded silence, and no longer playing the role it requires.
It's taken me a few months to find a place to write from again. I have a notebook filled with topics, ideas, letters to myself. What I realize is that I want to start writing from lived experience—things I noted and encountered over decades of interactions with people.
I can start to name them now, putting words to patterns, allowing a narrative of identification to come through. I can't promise you a structured format anymore; the writing will exist how it wants to be written.
Here's the first one, born out of dysfunctional interactions across my professional life. The "you" I'm addressing isn't one person—it's an archetype built from years of recognizing the same pattern in different faces. I wrote it because I feel many women have been in this place before, and it deserved to be named.
I know what you’re doing when you go silent.
The freeze, the wounded retreat, the way you shut down the moment I ask you to look at your part in something. You want me to feel like I’ve done damage by expecting accountability, like my request for clarity and honest communication is an assault on your character.
I’ve watched this play out enough times to recognize the choreography—you need me to chase, to soften, to wonder if I pushed too hard, asked for too much, was too direct. You need me tangled in the logistics of your reaction instead of standing in the simple truth that I asked a reasonable thing and you couldn’t tolerate it.
The confusion you’re trying to create doesn’t land here.
I spent years caught in that loop, replaying conversations to figure out where I went wrong, how I could have said it differently, what approach might have made you capable of meeting me. I thought if I just found the right words, the right tone, the right moment, you’d suddenly be able to own something, to sit in discomfort without making it my fault you were uncomfortable.
That was me believing the problem was my delivery when the problem was your unwillingness to be accountable for anything, ever. What I see now is the machinery. The shutting down wasn’t hurt, it was a psychological strategy of manipulation.
The silence wasn’t processing, it was punishment for making you feel less than. You fold in on yourself or puff up with indignation because someone had the audacity to suggest you contributed to a problem, and that threatens something so fragile in you that the only response you have is to make me the aggressor.
My clarity becomes cruelty. My request becomes attack.
And I’m supposed to spend my energy untangling your reaction instead of noticing that you still haven’t addressed the original thing. I won’t do it. I wasn’t going to chase your withdrawal or manage your defensiveness or find softer and softer ways to say things that shouldn’t require softening.
I wasn’t going to wonder anymore what’s wrong with me that I keep encountering this, as if expecting someone to engage honestly is a character flaw. The pattern became clear, you didn’t want resolution — you wanted dominance. You wanted me destabilized enough to forget what I actually needed, apologetic enough to drop it, exhausted enough to stop asking. Thus allowing you to believe your stories and not hold accountability.
I see through it now, even when you don’t see it in yourself. You can keep the silence. I’m not filling it anymore. And you know what, it isn’t leverage anymore. It’s just silence.