Episode 3: The Cost of Staying Too Long

Episode 3: The Cost of Staying Too Long

What has staying cost you?

We often celebrate the courage it takes to leave toxic environments, but we rarely talk about the cost of staying.

In this deeply personal episode Rosie reflects on the quiet ways prolonged exposure to unhealthy spaces can erode our sense of self. She explores how identity, confidence, creativity, health, financial opportunities, relationships, and even joy can slowly diminish when we remain in environments that no longer honour our humanity.

Drawing on her own experiences as a Black feminist activist, Rosie unpacks the pressures many women, particularly Black womxn face to endure rather than establish boundaries. She examines how resilience is often misunderstood as endless sacrifice, and why choosing yourself is not abandoning the cause but reclaiming your agency.

This episode is an invitation to pause and ask an important question:

What parts of yourself are you sacrificing simply to stay?

If you've ever found yourself questioning your instincts, shrinking your voice, or carrying the weight of expectations that no longer serve you, this conversation is for you.

True strength isn't measured by how much suffering we can survive.

It's measured by how courageously we choose to honour ourselves.

Trigger warning: This episode contains discussions of workplace toxicity, emotional harm, gaslighting, discrimination, and the long-term impact of remaining in unhealthy environments.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Speaking Through My World with Rosie Whitman, part of the Feminist Frontlines Initiative, where we use the microphone as a tool for justice. This is a space where my three passions of women in Africa and arts meet in conversation, storytelling, healing, reflections, and courageous dialogues, with amplified voices, preserve a story, and explore the issues that are shaping our lives, communities and our continent. Thank you for listening. Let's speak to my world. Where is your heart today? Welcome to episode three. Over the past two episodes, we've been walking a very special journey together. In episode one, I shared why physically removing myself from a space that was making me unwell became an act of self-preservation. In episode two, we explored what happened after I left, how our bodies can continue carrying the weight of prolonged stress, and why healing is about teaching our bodies that they are finally safe. Today I'd like to take the conversation a little deeper. Because before we fully understand healing, we have to ask ourselves rarely uncomfortable questions. What has staying cost you? When we speak about toxic environments, we often focus on the courage that it takes to leave. But I think that we've been asking the wrong question. Perhaps the real question is, what did it cost us to stay? You see, for me, leaving wasn't the hardest part. Staying was. Staying slowly asked me to negotiate with myself. Every time I ignored my intuition, every time I explained away behavior that made me feel very uncomfortable. Every time I accepted disrespect in the name of the cause. Each and every one of those times, I was paying a price. The problem is that those costs don't arrive all at once. They arrive quietly, almost invisibly. Until one day you wake up and realize that you're no longer living as yourself. You're surviving as someone, someone else's version of you. Looking back, I can see that the first thing I lost was my health. It was my relationship with me, my relationship with myself. I stopped trusting my instincts. The very instincts that guided me through my life and career suddenly became things I questioned. Was I overreacting? Was I too sensitive? Did I misunderstand? Maybe I'm the problem. Those questions became louder and louder than my own knowing. Soon I began shrinking myself. Not because anybody explicitly asked me to become smaller, but because shrinking felt easier than constantly defending my humanity. I spoke less, I questioned myself more. I carefully edited my own words, made myself more, I suppose, acceptable. And somewhere in the process, I began losing sight of why I was there in the first place. I entered the space because I believed in transformation. I believed in justice. I believed in strengthening feminist movements across our continent. I believed in the security of our community. But somewhere along the line, I became so busy surviving in the environment that I no longer had the energy to contribute in the way I had always intended to. That was one of the greatest losses. Not simply losing myself, but losing the purpose that I that had actually brought me there. Of course, there were other costs too. My confidence, my creativity, my health, financial opportunities that I turned down because my energy was consumed in this place. Friendships had changed because I no longer recognized myself. And perhaps the greatest lust of all, joy. I wasn't laughing the way I used to. I wasn't dreaming, I wasn't imagining what came next. I was simply enduring. As feminists, resilience is something that almost became sacred to us. And so lately I've been asking myself whether we've actually misunderstood the word, or perhaps whether society has misunderstood it for us. Resilience was never meant to mean endless suffering. It was never meant to tolerate disrespect. It was never meant to sacrifice ourselves for institutions, movements, or people who are unwilling to do the same for us. Somewhere along the line, resilience became confused with endurance. And those are not the same thing. Endurance simply says, keep going, no matter what it costs you. Resilience says you deserve to recover. As black women, we are often taught to carry impossible loads. And we're taught to carry those loads with grace. We need to remain composed and be grateful, keep the peace, choose the collective over ourselves, work twice as hard, speak half as much, perhaps even survive. But I don't believe survival is the highest calling of our lives. I strongly believe we deserve joy, rest, safety, dignity. My defining moment, one moment that remains etched in my memory, particularly around the space that I left. I'd arrived the day before one of our meetings, and I was wearing one of my favorite t-shirts from the One in Nine campaign. And across the front of the shirt, it reads, feminists in action. Those words have always meant something to me, not because feminine feminism is an identity aware, because it is, but because it's something I practice and I always live through. And during this this uh arrival, one particular person, somebody who has shown many signs of disrespect towards me, uh, obviously in pub in private and not in public, looked at my t-shirt, smirked, and said, What action? Feminists just know how to make noise. And because I had clocked on to this person's behavior and character, um, I wasn't surprised, and of course, this wasn't the first dismissive comment that they've made to me. Nor was it the first attempt to undermine feminist organizing or diminish the work that so many people have dedicated their lives to. But at that moment, something really shifted inside of me. By then I'd noticed uh his patterns. Uh they were also one of the people who spoke openly to me in private about the corruption, the dysfunction, the toxicity of a specific space. And they shared their concerns freely behind closed doors and our WhatsApp messages in private calls. Yet, when the same issues needed to be addressed collectively, I found myself standing alone. They also encouraged other people in the group to do the same with me, and sometimes I was encouraged to raise really difficult conversations and the patronizing tone of maybe you should say something. But when I did, I did it in silence, and silence filled the room. Slowly I realized I'd become the donkey, that person that was carrying everyone's discomfort. Their silence became my visibility, and unfortunately, visibility carries consequences. It was an incredibly painful lesson. Not because people disagreed, but because I recognized how easily systems teach us to protect ourselves rather than to protect each other. I also saw something else. How quickly patriarchal cultures recruit women and gender non-conforming people to defend the very subsystems that diminish them. Patriarchy survives not only through the actions of men, and when it was and when it is these women or gender non-conforming people who will gladly stand up and defend the patriarchy and in the same breath undermine disrespect, show defensive actions towards another woman, even if that woman is a woman speaking from authority, those people are dangerous. They're creating an even more violent situation. When that happens, the damage extends far beyond one individual. As I said, it makes the territory violent. It weakens the movement, it discourages leadership. And when I say it weakens the movement, it weakens the movement for women, for feminist spaces. Because as we are actively working to dismantle the patriarchy, but it is those who are upholding it, and as I said, it's not just the men, it makes those feminist spaces and communities difficult to secure further funding. It silences the future voices before they even begin speaking, it undermines the work that they're doing. It's gatekeeping. Painfully, it teaches younger feminists that telling the truth comes at a great cost, even in spaces that are meant to protect them. So going back to that evening that I arrived before our meeting, I went back to my room and I prayed, called on my ancestors and angels and asked for clarity. Not revenge, not victory, just clarity. And the next morning I woke up with this most beautiful sense of peace. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't asking whether I should stay. I already knew the answer. My responsibility was no longer to convince others, it was now to protect myself. Looking back now, I realized something so profound. Leaving wasn't wasn't abandoning the movement. Leaving was refusing to abandon myself. Because sometimes we think choosing ourselves means choosing against others, and it doesn't. Because strength isn't measured how much suffering you can survive. Strength is measured by how courageously you honor your own humanity. Once again, thank you so much for spending time with me. Until next week, continuously ask yourself where is your heart today?