Worthy Wednesdays

Issue #52 - When Legibility Becomes a Cage

💡 The most expensive thing you do is make yourself legible to systems that will never fully see you.

Legibility became your survival strategy. Conforming became your currency. Palatability became your protection.

You've learned to translate yourself into language that institutions, industries, and algorithms can process. You've packaged your complexity into LinkedIn summaries, elevator pitches, and bio boxes that fit character limits. You've flattened your edges to fit the frame, something marketable.

You've made yourself understandable and learned to express yourself in ways that made others comfortable. Professional. Categorisable.

But legibility has a price: what once kept you safe begins to cost you your voice, your originality, your belonging and your freedom.

Your multiplicity becomes a "slash" career that people squint at.
Your depth becomes "overqualified" or "hard to place."
Your range becomes a red flag instead of a resource.
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The system rewards coherence, but your coherence might be costing you your truth.

1. You have a “public version” and a “real version” of your work. You become professionally polished in ways that erase your texture.
The story you tell at networking events versus what you are actually building. Your “brand” becomes a two dimensional version of your three dimensional self. Strategic, but stripped.

2. You feel exhausted after explaining yourself
Not because the conversation was long, but because the translation required you to compress, simplify, and perform legibility for an audience that still won’t quite get it.

3. The most interesting parts of you have no box to check
Forms, profiles and professional categories cannot hold your actual value, so you lead with what fits, not what is true.

4. You feel unseen in spaces where you are visible
Visibility is not the same as recognition. You can be highly visible and profoundly invisible at the same time.

Stop auditioning for systems that require you to be smaller than you are.

Instead, try this:

Name one place where you've been performing legibility at the cost of integrity.

Then ask:

"What would I do, build, or say if I didn't need this to make sense to anyone but me?"

Your illegibility might be your edge. The parts of you that do not fit categories may be the parts that create new ones.

Begin by noticing where you translate yourself for comfort instead of connection. Reclaim a detail, a nuance, a contradiction, a belief, a story that refuses to be simplified.

Let your self-expression reflect your full experience.
Let your voice hold angles instead of straight lines.
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🔍 Deepen The Inquiry

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• Audre Lorde – "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" ​
  A foundational text on refusing to contort yourself for comfort or comprehension. Listen to this audio reading of it.
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• Erich Fromm – “Escape from Freedom“​
  An exploration of why we voluntarily surrender our complexity to fit predefined roles. Fromm examines how we inherit social structures and expectations before we’re even born, and the hidden satisfaction some find in conforming rather than claiming their full, uncomfortable freedom.
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🚶‍♀️This Weeks Worthy Move

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Choose one space where you’ve been translating yourself into something more palatable, understandable, or “professional.”

Then practice staying untranslated:

• Write the real version of your bio that doesn’t perform for anyone.
• Speak in your full voice rather than your strategic voice
• Answer “what do you do?” with what you’re actually building, not what sounds credible.
• Let one piece of your work or identity remain unexplained.
• Let a nuance stand where you would normally collapse it.
• Stop pre-justifying your choices to audiences who weren’t asking.

The cage isn’t always locked. Sometimes you’re just so used to performing legibility that you’ve forgotten you can stop.

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🌙 WISDOM WHISPERER​
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Why this whisper? We think keeping ourselves small, translatable, and palatable will keep us safe. It doesn't. The parts of you that you've learned to silence, compress, or perform away, they don't disappear. They accumulate as tension, exhaustion, and a growing distance from yourself. When you claim your full, complex identity and refuse to perform legibility for systems that will never truly see you, you're not just liberating yourself. You're creating permission for others to do the same. Your untranslated truth may be exactly what shifts the world you are here to build.