Transcription
Trying to be understood is exhausting, and you need to realize you need to wake up to the fact that you're being misunderstood by people who don't even want to understand you to begin with. And if you look just beneath the surface of what you think is a misunderstanding, you'll actually see fear and a deep craving for safety. The other person, they fear what they don't understand. So they have to create a version of you that aligns with their reality. That gives them the illusion of safety, even if they're living in a false version of reality. And you think that safety means being understood by other people, because by being understood, you got the validation that you craved, that you needed to feel like your truth is real, and you've received permission to exist, permission to feel your truth. And ultimately, the puppet master is the patriarchy. God, I'm so tired of this word. The puppet master is the And the has socialized us to be this way. You can never be understood in a system that benefits from misunderstanding you, that needs to misunderstand you in order to function.
All right, DJ. Song request, the theme song. Hello baddies, welcome to law 32. I am your host Nikki. I am the baddest [ __ ] in the building. Not to be confused with you, who is also the baddest [ __ ] in the building. Thank you all so much for tuning in every week, for tuning into the laws, for being here from law number one, don't be humble. And you y'all are the original bodies. You are the OGs. You are the OBs, the original bodies. And I'm so grateful for all of you. If you're listening to this in early 2026, you are an OB. If you listen to this podcast in 2025, you are an OB. And if you listened in 2024, you are a true true OB. Like y'all are y'all were there from day one.
So, law 32, stop trying to be [ __ ] understood. This one is for you bodies, as much as it is for me, because it's been something I've struggled with a lot since being so famous. Like, oh my god. But like since, you know, putting myself out there and getting, I would say to date, I've probably gotten almost 30 million views across all platforms on all my stuff. And 30 million is a lot. When 30 million people see your work, see your face, see or hear something you have to say, a lot of them have opinions. And a lot of them are going to misunderstand what you're saying. If you've seen my recent posts with all the hate comments I've gotten from men, you'll know that people just don't want to understand. But we need to go a little bit beneath that, beneath that surface, and understand why they don't want to understand. And why are we so hell-bent on feeling understood to begin with? 'Cause like, who literally gives a rat's bunda if people understand us or not? Like, who cares? So, let's unlearn the crap. 'Cause there's a lot of crap here that we have to unlearn. Like I said earlier, trying to be understood is so, so exhausting. It is so draining. Most people do not want to understand you. They want to create a version of you in their head that either makes them feel better or worse about themselves. If this sounds familiar, it's because most people are victimelas. So, of course they want to mold you into a shape that fits their worldview.
Okay, let's say you are a heart shape. Okay, this is a weird analogy. Let's say you are a heart shape, but the person you're speaking to is a parallelogram. Okay, sorry. I can't. Why am I so unserious? Let me cook. You are a heart. They are a parallelogram. And instead of accepting you and understanding you as a heart, they're like, "No, no, no. This heart needs to fit cleanly into this parallelogram. So, I'm going to morph it and break it and deform it and misshape it so that it fits into the parallelogram." That's what they're trying to do because they don't want to understand you. They want to make you fit within the shape that they have taken. They're looking at you through a dirty lens. So, obviously, they're not going to see you for what you are, for who you are. They're not going to see you clearly. And their unwillingness to understand you is not your responsibility. It's not because they want to create a version of you that aligns with their reality. They want to create a version of that heart that fits into the parallelogram, regardless of whether or not that's right, regardless of whether or not it aligns with your reality, regardless of whether or not it's even true. That's what they want to do because they don't care about your reality. Your reality doesn't even exist to them. Your truth doesn't exist to them. They don't care.
And there are several reasons for this, both on their side and on yours. Let's start on their side first. So, the majority of people are self-absorbed. You've heard this many a time on my show. You've heard this from day one. People are self-absorbed. They are existing within their own universe where they are the sun and everything orbits them. When we interact with somebody, we're entering their universe and they're entering ours. But the problem is, most people don't even think that way. The only universe that exists is theirs. So, when they talk with someone or they're in a disagreement with someone or they're trying to understand something and it doesn't make sense to them, they just revert back to, "Well, my truth is the only truth, my reality is the only reality, my universe is the only one that exists," as if there isn't an infinite number of parallel universes, each of which exist and each of which are true. And you know what I'm thinking about right now? Religion. It's the same self-absorption. "Only my God exists, only my religion exists, and if you are part of another religion or believe in some other God, then you are damned to hell." Let alone the Abrahamic culture fighting over the same God, but that's besides the point. So, that's the other person. The people who don't want to understand you are imprisoned in their own minds, and they are supremely self-absorbed.
On the other hand, is you. The reason you're so hell-bent on being understood by everyone is because you need permission to exist. You believe that your truth is only valid if other people understand it. And when someone understands your truth, they'll validate it, and they'll give you that permission to exist. See where I'm going with this? And this is driven in part by a deep fear of being misunderstood. Because if you're misunderstood, then you don't have that permission to exist. Then you're not validated. Then your truth is not real. It's not validated by somebody else. So you don't have permission to feel that. Because understanding means permission. "If they understand me, they'll see it my way." And if they understand me, I'll be safe. So it's driven by fear, but at the same time, it's also a little bit self-absorbed. I'm going to call y'all out for it right off the bat. And I'm calling myself out, too. It is a little bit self-absorbed, but it's mainly driven by fear. And fear needs to be managed by control. For example, patriarchy, and which I'm going to discuss soon when I give you the patriarchy loophole and how we can exploit that. And this is going to be a little bit different 'cause I'm going to give the loophole a little bit later, but fear needs to be managed by control. And people who want to control others can't even control themselves to begin with. You can't control other people's beliefs. You can't change someone's mind. You can't make them see things your way. But you can control their perception of you.
If you listen to my Girly Law Power number 14, always be the center of attention, or if you read that hack in my book, again, number 14, that's another one that I had to revamp and update significantly. You can control people's perception of you. You can. Because women are judged by their appearances. I mean, everyone is, but women especially are judged by their appearance, and if we have a goal of how we want to be perceived, we can work backwards, and we can dress for the part, and we can carry ourselves accordingly, and control the way people perceive us. But when you are so concerned with being understood, and you're always over-explaining yourself, or even explaining yourself when you don't have to, you're damaging other people's perception of you. You're making yourself seem desperate, desperate for validation, desperate for understanding, and people can sense that. Especially people who want to be manipulative or controlling, they can sense when someone is driven by fear. That's why I always say, be emotionally detached, Girly Love Power number six, because when you're driven by fear, fear of whatever you're going to lose because you're attached to it, for example, fear of being misunderstood, whatever it is, when you're driven by fear, people's little manipulation antenna are going to pick up on that. And not even just people who want to manipulate you, because it's not, you know, not everyone is out to get you, of course, we're not victimella. Even people who have a regular relationship with you, because people take your lead. People look for cues in your own behavior, and your body language, and the way you carry yourself, they're looking for cues to see how they should treat you, to see what they can get away with. Because people will push you as far as you let them, and if you look like somebody who's always craving validation, who's craving permission to exist, who's driven by fear of being misunderstood, fear of not being validated, then anybody, anyone who has any sense in their head will pick up on that, and they will respect you less. Because at the end of the day, people don't want to be around somebody who desperately needs them. You're not a child. You're not in a daycare. You're not there to be taken care of and babysat. People want to feel wanted, but not needed. Does that make sense, class? Do we understand?
Now, of course, not all of this is your fault. Like I said, the has programmed us to be very dependent on validation, especially on male validation, and hopefully we've all unlearned that at this point. Everybody listening has taken that male validation and flushed it down the toilet. But, there's also other factors that play into it, like childhood experiences and trauma. And something that Chase Hughes said that I loved, I've quoted him a few times on this show, he says that people's beliefs are like outdated software. Because they're often informed by childhood offense and trauma. They're informed by things that happened in the past that might not happen again, that might not be true anymore, but they still are shaped by those experiences. So, you're probably like this, I'm probably like this, and guess what? 99.99% of people you interact with are like this, too. So, you're literally interacting with people who are programmed by an outdated software. They're running on like iOS 1. Okay? And we're on iOS, I don't even know what the iOS's are at this point, but they are outdated. Okay? They're very outdated.
So if I had to explain everything I just said in one sentence, it would be this: Your need to be understood by everyone is driven by a fear that if others misunderstand you, then you are unsafe because you don't have permission to feel your truth and to exist. That was a run-on sentence and it was way too long. And you know I don't like run-on sentences. If you've read my book or my newsletter, you know I'm like, my sentences are short and to the point. They're short just like me. I'm 5'1. But anyway, that is this part in a nutshell.
Now, let's turn our attention to an example of a woman who existed within an industry that profited from her being misunderstood. Britney Spears began her musical career at age 16 when she released the song "Baby One More Time" in 1998. And her image from the get-go, from the time she was a 16-year-old child, was both innocent, kind of the girl next door, and seductive. Now, that image was not controlled by her. Her PR team, her manager, and her extremely controlling father who had a conservatorship over her were the ones who were pulling the puppet strings. And from the very beginning, her team, the media, and the music industry did not want to understand her. They wanted to project this perverted, pedophilic, patriarchal image onto her. This disgusting fantasy onto a 16-year-old child. And it wasn't just the men behind the scenes who were pulling the puppet strings. It was also women who were brainwashed by the uh to villainize her. Like in this example in an interview with Diane Sawyer in 2003 when Britney was 22 years old.
"What happened to your clothes?"
"I have on clothes now."
"I know, but what's this about?"
"No kidding, what is it about?"
">> What is it about?"
">> Yeah. It's about doing a a beautiful picture."
"Is it about shocking people?"
"About shocking? You know what? I'm comfortable in my skin. I think it's an okay okay thing to um express yourself."
"Have you seen, I hate to bring this up. Like Kate Hudson, she's 22, she's in sheets. Jennifer Lopez, she poses very provocatively sometimes. Like Christina Aguilera. What's what's the big deal when I do it? Like, come on. You know? I don't understand. I think everybody always thought you had a different relationship to young girls. Everyone now, they look back and they're like, 'What happened to your sweet image that you used to be?' And I'm like, 'Then when I came out, you thought I was too provocative.' It's like you can never win."
Ugh, gosh, every time I hear this clip and I listened to it a few times preparing this, oh my god, it would infuriate me the same amount every single time. Like, I could not get desensitized to it. It's disgusting. And this wasn't even the worst one. There are so many disgusting interviews that she had to sit through where people were asking her things about her virginity, about her breasts, about her body as a teenager or as a young girl in her early 20s. So they sexualized her when she was a girl, and then they shamed her when she embraced her sexuality as a young adult, like Diane Sawyer did. And when she started to shed a little bit of that innocent persona and try to take control over her image in the early and mid-2000s, they framed her as crazy, as unstable, a bad mom, somebody who was who should be in a psych ward, who should have her kids taken away from her by child services. When she shaved her head in 2007, she was 25 years old. And I remember seeing that picture of her. I think she was holding an umbrella and bashing about to hit like the window of a car or something. I remember that picture of her so vividly because it scared the crap out of me. I would see that everywhere I went. Like if I went to the store, the grocery store, anywhere you went at that time, magazines were everywhere. That picture was on the cover of every single one. And I was scared of her at the time. And it wasn't until years later when she finally was able to get out of that fuck-ass conservatorship and write her memoir and really take control of her image and her narrative and her story, that we started to see that she was a complete puppet of the industry and was completely used, abused, and misunderstood.
When she released her memoir in 2023 called "The Woman in Me," she basically laid it all out and finally shared her truth on her terms. And she even discussed the Diane Sawyer interview that we heard a few moments ago. She said she was forced by her dad to do it. Here's a little excerpt from that: "It was completely humiliating. I wasn't told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100% embarrassing. I was too vulnerable then, too sensitive to do this type of interview." And after her memoir was published, clips of that interview resurfaced on social media, and people were calling on Diane Sawyer to publicly apologize, which she never did. But, that's just one example of the many of the many instances where the press, the media, her own manager and PR team and father, and even society wanted to misunderstand her. The people in Hollywood behind the scenes profited from misunderstanding her, and people on the other side, fans, society, haters, they could use that any way they wanted to warp her into whatever shape that suited them, or to even turn her as a into a scapegoat for the nasty, disgusting, backwards-ass morality of the . And this example was one of the easiest ones I've ever thought of, because as soon as I started writing this law, I'm like, "Example, Britney Spears." I don't think any of my examples have ever come to me that easily and that quickly. And it's so heartbreaking. I had a lump in my throat preparing this part of the episode, because it's so sad.
And like Britney, you can't be understood in a system that needs to misunderstand you in order to function. And that leads me to our patriarchal loophole. The I'm so tired of this word. The pe The patriarchy needs to misunderstand you both as an individual and as a woman in order to function, because it is functioning based on a lie that men are superior, that they are the natural leaders, that they are the ones who need to take control of society and of people and of women and children. It's operating based on a lie, and that lie is a way to control the fear that's underlying it. Because the patriarchy fears women. And like I said earlier, fear needs to be managed by control. So as soon as you spot a system that is based on control, you should know right off the bat that it is a response to a fear. And that makes its foundation extremely shaky. 'Cause when the revolution comes, you're going to realize that the whole system is an empty shell. And the way, or one of the ways the system controls you, is by thinking you need validation. You need permission to feel your truth. Because the system doesn't believe women. The system can't believe women because if it did, then it would crumble. Because women are calling out the system for what it is. That's why people like Chris Bru- Cabro- I don't even want to say his name. That's why people like that are making millions of dollars and have careers that are flourishing. Because they're all based on silencing women. Because when women speak and open their mouths, they call out injustice. They call out the shaky foundation on which the system is based. Why do you think people hate me so much? Why do you think my podcast gets so much hate? Why do you think there was always some idiot in my comment section running his mouth? Because they can't stand the truth. Because they fear the truth.
So the system controls you by making you believe that you need permission to feel your truth. And it also wants to exhaust you by making you over-explain yourself time and time again. And beg for understanding, beg for validation. These are things that are exhausting. They're emotionally draining and they're ongoing. 'Cause you need to prove yourself and over-explain yourself to hundreds of people over the course of your life, maybe even thousands. So, with this information, you now have the code. You understand how the back end of this patriarchal software works. That's the whole premise of my book. That's literally why I called my book "How to Hack the Patriarchy" 'cause it is a janky ass software programmed by a stupid ass code and if we understand it, we can figure out where the bugs are, where the viruses are and completely rewrite it on our own terms. So, now that you have the code, this puts you in a position of power. When you understand how the back end works, you can put your foot in its back end. So, when you seek understanding from people and over-explain yourself, you're playing right into the patriarchy's hands. And I'm going to discuss this soon.
So, what this means for you:
Number one, stop acting like your truth has a burden of proof. You don't have to prove anything. If your truth is your truth, then it is your truth, okay? If that's what you feel and that's what you experience, then that is your truth. There does not need to be a burden of proof. You are not in court. You don't have to prove anything. And next week's episode is going to be about how to stop over-explaining yourself. So, it's going to go hand in hand with what I'm discussing today and I'll leave this at that. Stop acting like your truth has a burden of proof.
Number two, remember the law of inversion. I discussed this in law 30, use people's big egos to your advantage. What you see is not true a lot of the time. What you're seeing is a defense mechanism, not someone's truth. Remember the Wizards of Waverly Place theme song? "Everything is not what it seems." That's exactly it, okay? The other person who's misunderstanding you has a fear. They fear silence. They fear things they can't understand. They fear gaps. Remember law 16, master the art of silence? People are uncomfortable with gaps. They're uncomfortable with silence because they equate it with rejection. They don't know what to do with it. And if something doesn't fit their narrow worldview, they have to project something familiar and comfortable to make them feel safe. People have a status quo bias. We want what's comfortable. We want what's familiar. We're afraid of change. So next time you find yourself in a tense or an emotionally charged conversation, ask yourself this: Are they listening to understand me? Or are they listening so that I can finish speaking or they can find a gap so they can jump in and say their peace? If it's the latter, that conversation is probably not going to go anywhere.
I remember having a conversation with one of my bosses a few years ago that was so emotionally draining. It was so emotionally draining. I had a headache for the rest of the day. He had a bone to pick with me because I had just denied my vacation for me to compete at Nationals 'cause I had to take a few days off and fly out to compete. And I was already in talks with them because I'm like, "Y'all need to help a girl out." So already at that point, they were not on my team. And then they had a bone to pick with me. So he said, "You know, you're bothering us about your vacation, and you're also somebody who doesn't work beyond 9:00 to 5:00 or on evenings and weekends." And I'll never forget it, because the whole time I was trying to explain how I I worked overtime when the projects needed me to. I worked overtime. I've stayed till 7:00, 8:00 p.m. I've worked on weekends. I've done all these stupid things that they wanted me to do when it was needed. But he was not hearing it. He did not even understand. When I would talk to him, he would pout. He would cross his arms, take a huge breath, he'd be like, and start pouting, as if telling me, communicating to me that nothing you say is going to change my mind. And at the end of that conversation, he said the exact same things he said at the beginning. Because nothing I said landed. 'Cause he didn't have that conversation to hear me out. He had that conversation to say his peace. So, be aware of what the goal of that conversation is. Do they want to hear you out, or do they want to insert themselves? Again, if it's the latter, ask yourself if it's even worth your energy.
An interesting finding I heard from Brené Brown during one of her talks was that in emotionally charged conversations, up to 70% of what someone hears is shaped by their own beliefs. So, most of the time, especially in these tense conversations, you're not going to change their mind, because that's not what they came into this conversation for. Think about it like this: You probably have a drawer in your kitchen with a few different types of colanders. You probably have a colander that is very finely made, so that nothing goes through. And you might have a bigger colander for rinsing vegetables, for example, and that has bigger holes or slits in it. Some people, their mind, their beliefs are like those tiny, those colanders with the really, really, really tiny holes in them. Nothing will get through. Other people might be more open-minded. They might have the colanders with the big slits in them. So, understand what kind of colander you're facing. So, that was number two. That was a little bit long, but it was really important.
Number three, understand that people who crave understanding are the easiest to manipulate. Like I said earlier, when you crave understanding, it's because you're driven by fear. Fear of being misunderstood, fear of not getting the validation you need for your truth, fear of not getting permission to exist. And manipulators, like I mentioned, have finely-tuned antenna that are going to pick up on that fear. And not just manipulators, but regular people. 'Cause when you're driven by fear and you're desperate, they're going to respect you less. When you're like, "Please, ma'am. Please, sir. May I have some permission? May I have some validation?" When you're acting like Oliver Twist, people pick up on that and you have a pattern. Manipulators look for patterns. And chances are, if you're driven by that fear, it's not just in one context, in one setting, it's across the board. So, that makes you predictable. And predictable people are the easiest to manipulate.
And that leads me to point number four. How much or how little you explain yourself directly correlates with how you appear. The more you explain yourself and the more you over-explain, the more common, the more desperate you appear. Think about a well-respected person you know, maybe at your workplace or a family member, a friend, whoever. Do you find her explaining herself? Probably not. She probably gives directions or gives her opinion, and that's it. And we respect people like that. They stand on business. This is a business, an establishment. This is a business, an establishment. So, we respect them because they're not desperate. They're not like, "Oliver Twist, please. Please understand me. Please, ma'am, understand me." They're not like that. Okay? They want more porridge, they go take more porridge. And remember this, complete and utter honesty is something only the powerless and the leeches believe in. Think about it like this: we're all holding our cards. Someone with a nasty, janky-ass hand is going to want to see everybody else's hand. Right? The powerless. Somebody who wants to cheat is going to want to see everybody else's hand. The leeches. So, you don't need to show your whole hand. In fact, you're doing yourself a disservice by doing that. You show the card that serves you, if it serves you at all, and that's it. You don't need complete and utter honesty. You don't need to over-explain yourself. Sometimes, you don't even need to explain yourself to begin with.
Number five, sometimes it serves you to be strategically misunderstood. Maybe if I were to go back to the corporate world and do something differently, I would be misunderstood in the way that I'd look like I was a corporate slave, even though I couldn't care less about the company. People might misunderstand you, and the way they misunderstood you might even be better than the reality sometimes. Let them believe that. Who cares? In your workplace, in your life, sometimes you'll you'll understand, your intuition will tell you you're being misunderstood, and you can kind of run with that. So, if there's one thing to take away from this, it's to check your fear. Check what's underlying that need for you to be understood. For me, it was a fear that people are going to turn on me, especially if I posted something and people misunderstood it and they hated it. It's one thing for men to hate stuff and misunderstand things. I don't care. But, when it's a lot of women or even my own followers, it's like a little bit scary. I'm like, "Oh, are people going to turn on me? Is everyone going to unfollow me? Is everyone going to boycott me? Are people going to cancel me?" But, then I realized, who cares?
When I was preparing my episode on religion, you all know that that was the biggest episode I've ever produced. It took me over a month of researching. It was a 2-hour recording. I had to take three breaks. I was also cat-sitting my cousin's cat. He was with me while I was recording. It was a mess. And I spent probably 20, 30 hours editing it. It was huge. It was a huge episode. Before that, when I was writing the episode and bouncing some ideas off of some friends and people close to me, a lot of the time I don't tell people my topics, but this one I was really excited about. So, I told a few people. And some people were like, "Oh, religion is such a touchy subject. It's so sensitive. You should stay away from it. You're going to offend people." Somebody else was like, "Aren't you afraid of losing a bunch of followers and offending people?" I'm like, "No. No, if you listen to that episode, you will know it is a professionally produced piece of art. It is great. And if you don't agree with it, so be it. You don't have to." And I went into that episode with so much positive energy and so much confidence, and it showed in my work because I wasn't afraid of being misunderstood.
So, if there's one thing to take away from this today, it is to start peeling those layers of the onion and start to unpack that fear and the reasons why you need that permission and that validation for your truth. Okay? Next week's episode, like I said, is going to be about how to stop over-explaining. So, I didn't get too much into the concrete things you can do today. I'm going to save that for the next episode.
Now, before we close off, let's talk about exceptions. There are no exceptions. End of episode. Just kidding. This is one of those rare laws where there aren't any exceptions. Obviously, if you're a flight attendant and you're explaining the evacuation procedures to the passengers, yes, everyone needs to understand that. But, what people don't need to understand is your truth, your experiences, your your being. You don't have to explain yourself to anyone. You don't have to explain your desires, your goals, your intuition because more than anything, you deserve to be at peace and to live your truth without having to justify that to anyone. You deserve that to yourself and you deserve that to the 5-year-old inner child, the little girl living within you who wants you to protect her. And that's where we're going to pick up next week.
All right, until next time. Don't forget that you're the baddest [ __ ] in any building that you set foot in. In the meantime, stay bad. Love you. Bye. Thank you to all the baddies who are supporting on Patreon. Shout out to Kate, Danny, Adriana, Mina, Gemma, Priya, Shera, Katia, Melissa, May, Naomi, Niloufar, Adelaide, Nadia, Faith, Amy, Melinda, Sophia M, Sophia K, Jayda, Rozelle, Amara, and Cat. Thank you all so much for your support.