The Mental Load of Being a Black Woman at Work

You're good at your job. You know this. Your track record shows it. And still — somehow — you find yourself working twice as hard to prove half as much. Getting second-guessed in meetings. Left off email threads. Asked to take on responsibilities that aren't yours, because someone else won't step up and you're the one everyone expects to hold it together.

And when you name what's happening — when you say out loud that something is unfair, that you're being treated differently — you watch the room shift. People get uncomfortable. Maybe you get labeled. Maybe you start wondering if you're the problem.

You are not the problem.

What you're describing has a name. Microaggressions. Systemic inequity. The invisible tax that women of color — and Black women especially — pay every single day just to exist in professional spaces that were not built with them in mind.

It shows up in small ways that don't feel small at all. The colleague whose ideas get celebrated when yours were dismissed. The manager who questions your judgment in front of others. The expectation that you'll lead, mediate, and hold the team together — without the title, without the pay, without the credit. The slow, grinding realization that the rules are different for you, and that almost nobody around you seems to notice or care.

That loneliness is real. And it is one of the heaviest things I see women carry into my therapy room.

Here's what makes this particular kind of pain so hard to process: you're not allowed to just be hurt by it.

You have to be strategic about it. You have to decide whether to say something or let it go. You have to calculate the risk of being perceived as difficult, as angry, as a problem — even when what you're actually being is honest. You have to perform composure while something inside you is screaming. And then you go home, and the performance is supposed to just... stop? You're supposed to decompress and rest and show up whole for your life outside of work?

It doesn't work that way. The body keeps score. The exhaustion accumulates. And at some point, the armor you put on to survive the workday starts to feel like it's fused to your skin.

Some of the women I work with have told me they didn't realize how much they were carrying until they finally sat down and said it out loud in a room where they didn't have to manage anyone's reaction.

That's what I want to offer you.

Not a space where your anger gets reframed as something to manage. Not somewhere you have to explain the texture of your experience from scratch, or justify why something that "seems small" is actually not small at all. A space where you can be as pissed off as you want. Where your emotions aren't too much — they're wanted here. Where you are seen as a full, complex, brilliant human being, not flattened into a stereotype or a demographic.

You've spent so much energy being perceived correctly in spaces that weren't built for you. This is not one of those spaces.

The workplace stuff never stays at work. It threads through everything — your self-worth, your sense of safety, your relationships, your body. The constant hypervigilance of navigating a system that wasn't designed with you in mind is exhausting in ways that are hard to articulate, even to the people who love you.

That's why this work matters. Not just to help you cope with what's happening — but to help you understand how it's landing in you, why it hits as hard as it does, and what you actually need to feel like yourself again.

Because the goal isn't just to survive your job. It's to have a life that feels worth coming home to.

I work with women across Texas — virtually, and in person in Kyle — doing exactly this kind of depth-oriented work. If you're a woman of color navigating workplace stress, microaggressions, or the particular exhaustion of being expected to be everything to everyone at work, I see you.

And I'd love to talk.

Book a free consultation here. We'll explore what you're carrying, what's underneath it, and whether this work feels like the right fit. It's not a sales call. It's just a real conversation — which, if you're anything like the women I work with, might be exactly what you need.

You don't have to keep carrying this alone.