I was watching a video the other day.
A Nigerian woman speaking about her divorce.
She said something that stayed with me.
She talked about how, while she was married, she lied about her marriage constantly. Not because anyone asked her to. Not because she was trying to deceive anyone in particular. It was instinctive.
Whenever marriage came up, she made hers sound good on paper.
She said she didn’t think of herself as a liar. But she had been taught that a good woman protects the image of her marriage. That a good wife makes her husband look good. That shaping the story was part of the role.
So she did.
She talked about romance that didn’t exist. Gestures that never happened. She mentioned flowers she had bought for herself as if someone else had given them to her.
Now that she’s out of the marriage, she feels compelled to tell the truth. And doing that feels shameful too. Undoing the lie exposes her. But she said something important.
The lying wasn’t about dishonesty.
It was about survival inside a story she was expected to uphold.
That video unlocked something for me.
Because I’ve seen this exact behaviour in organisations. And I’ve been on the receiving end of it more than once.
In a previous role, my colleagues pooled money to get me a farewell gift when I was leaving the organisation. A spa day. Thoughtful. Kind.
The CEO withheld it.
She later told the team she had already given it to me. I found out after I’d left. Quietly. Indirectly.
I hadn’t attacked her. I hadn’t undermined her. I hadn’t even gone around telling stories. But something about me had clearly crossed an invisible line.
Inside her version of events, she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was maintaining order. Preserving authority. Avoiding exposure.
And no one questioned her.
Not because they were bad people. But because they were inside her world. Her narrative. Her power.
Questioning her version would have cost them something. So the cost landed on me instead.
At the time, I didn’t have language for what had happened. I just knew I had been recoded as the problem.
What made it harder was the context.
This was an organisation that taught self-awareness. Blind spots. Leadership development. Listening. All the right language.
But the language only flowed in one direction.
Downward.
In another role, something similar happened.
We were told to dress well for a meeting with a visiting VP. Big deal. I didn’t usually dress up. My role wasn’t customer-facing.
That day, I did.
When it was my turn to present, the MD interrupted. Took over my presentation. Asked me to leave the room.
No explanation.
At the time, I made it about my clothes. About her style. About jealousy. I searched for reasons that kept the situation small enough to digest.
I didn’t yet understand power. I was junior.
Years later, I worked with other VPs. Different contexts. Different dynamics. Some of the practices I put in place went on to become global best practices. Other teams learned from them.
The difference wasn’t my competence.
It was permission.
Who was allowed to be seen.
Who was allowed to speak.
Who was allowed to know what they knew.
That’s the part people don’t like to talk about.
We often collapse intent and impact into the same thing. We assume that because someone didn’t mean harm, no harm was done. Or because they tell themselves a clean story, the story must be clean.
But organisations, like marriages, teach people what they’re allowed to say.
They teach you when to smooth over. When to protect the image. When to carry the cost quietly so the structure doesn’t have to examine itself.
And when someone doesn’t instinctively do that, when they speak plainly, or hold precision, or don’t participate in the quiet editing of reality, the response is rarely direct confrontation.
It’s subtler.
Narratives shift.
Access changes.
Gifts are withheld.
Meetings are reframed.
Stories are told about you, not with you.
The message lands without being spoken: know your place.
What’s difficult to explain, especially when you’re junior, is that none of this feels malicious in the moment. The people doing it often see themselves as reasonable. Principled. Even kind.
In their own mental model, they’re maintaining balance.
That’s why these moments are so disorienting.
You’re not being punished for bad behaviour.
You’re being corrected for epistemic overreach.
For knowing something you weren’t meant to know yet.
For seeing something you weren’t supposed to name.
For disrupting the story simply by standing inside it without editing yourself.
I don’t think these incidents are isolated. And I don’t think they’re personal.
They’re pressure points. Moments where self-image diverges from reality. Where values stop applying upward. Where power protects itself without ever calling it that.
The Nigerian woman wasn’t lying because she was dishonest.
She was lying because the truth had no safe landing place inside her marriage.
In those organisations, truth had no safe landing place either.
And when truth has nowhere to go, someone always pays the cost of holding it.
Often quietly.
Often junior.
Often without language for what just happened.
It took me years to understand that what I was experiencing wasn’t confusion. It was clarity arriving before permission.
And that’s a lonely place to stand.
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