34. Don't Call Me Difficult
Some of us grew up watching other women – in our family, in the world around us – who asked for things or were clear about their needs get called difficult. Demanding. Too much. And we learned fast: don't be like them.
So we performed fine.
Said yes when we meant no. Hid how much things actually cost us. Kept the short to-do list off the wall where no one could see it.
This episode is about what we were actually learning — and what it's costing us now.
In This Episode:
Being called "difficult" often means you stopped hiding your needs
Invisible work is still real work — even when nobody can see it getting done
Equal load isn't always equal — the same Tuesday can cost three times more for an AuDHD brain
We can honor the women who came before us without replicating their suffering
Asking for what you need isn't weakness — it's how you stay whole enough to keep showing up
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She Came From People Who Crossed Oceans
Baba — my maternal grandmother — came from a small Jewish community in Latvia in the early 1900s. Her family fled persecution and built lives in Winnipeg inside a tight-knit immigrant community shaped by a political philosophy called doikayt — a Yiddish word meaning "hereness."
The idea: don't flee. Don't disappear into the dominant culture. And don't fight alone. Band together with every other oppressed group — across difference, without requiring anyone to erase who they are. The core belief was this: a world built for only one kind of person will break everyone else. The answer isn't to become someone you're not. It's to build different structures that hold everyone.
That's the same idea underneath neurodiversity. Different century. Same foundational understanding.
Baba grew up inside that belief and lived it. She and my Granddad organized together for decades — workers' rights, peace activism, working alongside First Nations communities on basic standards of living. She earned a peace medal for that work. It was her most prized possession.
The Woman With Burnt Fingers
Baba watched her mother go blind — and keep going anyway. Cooking by running her fingers along the hot plate edge to find it. And still organizing — still calling people from memory to sell raffle tickets for the movement, still showing up for the political work she'd given her life to.
That's a model of commitment that says: you pay the price. You keep going no matter what.
It's powerful. It's also unsustainable.
Baba learned something from that. This episode is what she did differently.
The Short To-Do List
Baba's to-do list was always shorter than my Granddad's. Even when she was young and able-bodied. We all saw it. We judged her for it.
What we didn't see: Granddad's work was visible. He built furniture. He renovated rooms. Baba's work was invisible — the phone calls, the organizing, the relational infrastructure that kept everything moving.
He never saw her needs as demanding. He just saw them as real. He built handrails and pulley systems so she could get around as her mobility changed. They were a team.
The Three Patterns We Inherited
When we grow up watching someone get labeled for having needs, we learn to hide ours. It shows up three ways:
"I'm fine" — When the need feels too big or too hard to explain, we carry it alone. Not because we're strong. Because we've tried before and it came out wrong.
Deflecting help — Someone offers and we wave it off. Accepting means admitting we have the short list. That we need the handrails.
The load we think is equal — We look around at everyone else managing and assume we must be doing something wrong. But the same meeting, the same Tuesday, the same workload can genuinely cost us three times what it costs the person next to us.
Equal isn't always equal. But nobody told us that. So we thought we were failing.
THE KEY INSIGHT
Baba didn't learn to ask in spite of being a revolutionary. She learned to ask so she could stay revolutionary.
Her peace medal didn't come from doing it all alone. It came from staying resourced enough to keep showing up.
Look at the women in your lineage who got called difficult — ask what they were actually asking for. Ask what work they were doing that nobody could see.
And if you've been hiding your needs to avoid that label: you come from a lineage of women who understood something the world is still catching up to.