Living at the Intersections

Blog 1. Standing in Full Colour: The Intersectional Navigation of a Black, Disabled, Female Professional

Every morning, before I step out the door, or before I log into another Teams meeting, I mentally prepare to switch codes.  Switching to a more digestible version of self.  Quite literally, dimming my own light…  It is strategic, and emotionally it has felt necessary.

Whether it is by adjusting my tone, softening my expressions, regulating my body language or double-checking my words I am overly aware that I am not doing so for clarity, but for comfort, and not my own comfort either. 

I am saddened that this has become the unspoken ritual for so many, whether this is consciously done or has become an unconscious but engrained behaviour, especially in professions like social work, where we are expected to be endlessly empathetic, endlessly competent, endlessly present — yet we are rarely we met with that same grace in return. 

Now, add being a woman, or more distinctly, being a disabled woman — and not “visibly” so, meaning that my chronic illnesses are not always seen, often not believed or accommodated either. This is the triple tax. The invisible weight.

Social work, at its best, is about connection and understanding, social justice... But what happens when the system you work within barely understands you? When connections with you tend to lean into your need to conform?  When the people around you only feel comfortable when you shrink yourself to fit their expectations? What does it cost, to show up unauthentically you?

It costs energy.

It costs psychological safety. 

It costs authenticity.  And some days…

It costs peace.

The Need to Switch Is Not Always a Choice

People often assume code-switching is a tactic; a clever skill we have mastered and this can be true. We know how to navigate rooms, translate language, bridge gaps between cultures.  In fact, we can do this so well, that oftentimes this process occurring goes unnoticed by many. 

But for clarity: just because we can switch codes, it does not mean that this is always through choice.  Sometimes, switching codes can feel like a necessity and this may result in a huge cost emotionally as it is a decision rooted in survival, not choice.  

If I want to be heard in a meeting, I cannot speak how I might speak with a sibling. If I want to be promoted, my caseload is the least of my worries in terms of things to manage; I am also required to manage the comfort levels of those in power.

It is an exhausting and constant modulation.  An unrelenting negotiation between those two loaded positions of either being “too much” or “not enough.”

Working twice as hard for half the recognition.

There is a silent curriculum for Black women in professional spaces:

Be excellent, but never intimidating.

Be confident, but not too assertive.

Be yourself, but only the version that people can digest. 

Ironically, this is just another curriculum designed to measure us against someone else’s ruler; a Western ruler that refuses to bend around the borders of my ethnic heritage.  A ruler that belongs to someone who does not look like me.

An expectation remains that I will need to do more; both emotionally and physically, to be seen as competent; the goal posts forever moving.  The likelihood of achieving my goals wavering too.  My expertise second-guessed, my voice interrupted, my boundaries tested. 

And when I advocate for myself, or when my body reminds me it is fighting a battle unseen, I fall at risk to labels such as “aggressive,” “difficult,” “unwell,” or “not resilient enough.”

The Emotional Toll No One Talks About

The reality is that on some days the exhaustion is at peak level before I have even begun the day.  Not just physically; although that is real too, but emotionally. The strain of being in 'on mode', of filtering, of editing, of anticipating... is a weariness that many Black women carry in silence.

It is not just a workday.  It is a lights, camera, action – full on performance day – every single day.

A role I neither auditioned nor applied for, but one I have learned to deliver with grace.

Some days I dare myself to show up unfiltered. To be my full self. To be able to just speak without needing to first calculate the impact of my Blackness, my femininity, my disability, all colliding in real-time…

A Collective Story

I am not alone in this. There are many in this position, daily.  Black women in helping professions. Black women who live with invisible disabilities. Black women who switch codes so often, they sometimes forget which is their default setting.

We do it because we care about our work, communities, and our survival. But this does not mean we should have to do it!

A Path to Change

This is more than a conversation about diversifying workplaces. First, we must create cultures: Where people are safe to be diverse.

Where support is more than policy language.

Where betraying parts of ourselves is not the price of progression.

Until then, many of us will continue to show up excellent, exhausted, and divided between who we are allowed to be publicly and who we safely remain in private.

Still, we continue advocating for spaces where we can stand in full colour — not merely in palatable shades.