johanna_mpho 🇿🇦 :
I’m a black woman living in South Africa 🇿🇦…. This has been my life, my mother programmed it into me so her employers would know I was a good black child worthy of being trusted and invested in. They paid for my education and let me live with them my whole life. I knew the performance: “be openly grateful when receiving gifts or kindness”, “do not show them your sadness, your tears, your dissatisfaction”, “their opinions matter, if you don’t please them you will be sent to the villages” and so I played the role of the happy, independent, care free, nonviolent, non-problematic young woman from age 3 to 29 … Now I play the same role at work, when does it stop? It doesn’t, your performance turns into a people pleasing complex, everything becomes transactional and you stay trying to prove your worth to everyone in your life because “If I stop playing this role, they may not like me” 😔
2026-08-05 16:15:39