What We Mean When We Say 'Difficult'
The adjective follows women everywhere. It follows us into conference rooms, into relationships, into our own assessment of ourselves.
Difficult. The word gets applied to women with a frequency and ease that should concern us more than it does.
We use it to describe women who ask for things directly, who push back, who decline to perform the softness expected of them. We use it as a warning, passed between men in offices. She’s difficult. As though difficulty — the quality of requiring engagement, of not smoothing yourself over for convenience — were a character flaw rather than a function of having a self.
I’ve been called difficult. I’ve been difficult. I’ve also spent years performing easiness, which is its own kind of labor — one that nobody tallies or thanks you for.
The strange thing is what happens when we apply the same behaviors to men. A man who is direct is decisive. A man who pushes back has conviction. A man who holds his ground is someone worth reckoning with. The adjective doesn’t follow him. It follows us.
The Language We Inherit
Language shapes what we think is possible. When the descriptor for a woman who takes up space is “difficult,” we build that into the architecture of how women move through rooms. We teach girls to read that word on the horizon and correct course.
I’m interested in what we lose when we do.
Because the women I have known who earned that word — truly earned it, not as a slur but as a description — have often been the ones building something. Insisting on something. Refusing to let a thing go unexamined.
That is not difficulty. That is the particular courage of not dissolving.
What I’m Trying to Learn
I’m still learning the difference between being difficult and being clear. Between making things hard and refusing to make myself small. The line, I’m finding, is not always where I expected it.
But I’m increasingly convinced that the question isn’t how to stop being seen as difficult. It’s whether we’re willing to let the word lose its power over us. To hear it and ask: difficult for whom? And toward what end?
Because sometimes the thing being made difficult is worth making difficult.