On Being Described Correctly

I keep binoculars on the windowsill. Not because I'm good at birds — I'm aggressively average at birding and I'm still not a fan of bugs — but because learning them taught me something I use every day at work.

You don't identify a bird by matching it to the picture. The picture is the least reliable part. You learn a bird by its habits: how it holds itself on a branch, where it feeds, what it does right before it flies. Silhouette and behavior tell the truth faster than color does. Once you know that, you start seeing birds you've walked past your whole life.

I read people and organizations the same way. Not by what's on the page. By the habits.

To that end, I'll say: you can be described accurately and still be described wrong.

This happened to me. Every line of my bio was true. The titles were real, the sector was right, the work was good. And the whole thing pointed at a version of me who had been retired for years. I was doing judgment work and being scoped like staff. I was advising the room and being introduced as the person who managed the function. Nothing was false. Everything was late.

That's a specific condition and it deserves its own name. It isn't a confidence problem. The people I work with have plenty of confidence — what they have is an old file that nobody thought to update, including them.

I notice this most in Black women, and in people who have spent their careers working slightly outside the shape a room expected.

We tend to build very good frames. Precision was the price of entry, so we got precise. Competence was the cover charge, so we became undeniable. And the frame works — that's the part people miss. It works so well you carry it years past the point where it fits, because it has never once failed you and there's no obvious moment to set it down.

The setting-down is the work. Deciding what you actually do now, at the altitude you actually do it, and then saying that plainly and repeatedly until the room catches up. It's less dramatic than reinvention. It's mostly a matter of telling the truth about your own growth in public, on purpose, before someone else assigns you a smaller version.

I did that for myself first. I stopped selling my presence and started selling my judgment, which turned out to be two entirely different products and it is honestly still unnerving. But I'm taking what I've learned and am learning and am sharing it with others. A few at a time, in long conversations where I say what I see and offer strategies about how to own and occupy more of yourself in your work, whether out of necessity or otherwise.

Organizations have the same condition, just with more people carrying it.

Most of them arrive believing they have a communications problem. Usually the message is fine. Somebody smart wrote it. What's off is upstream — a distance between what the organization says it values and what it actually does on a Tuesday, and language is where that distance surfaces first, because words are honest even when we aren't. You can feel it in a paragraph. Something is being managed.

The fix lives upstream too. Get the thing sound at the source and the messaging mostly takes care of itself.

Back to the introduction: I named the practice Fieldnote deliberately.

A fieldnote is what you write down before you know what it means. The observation, kept faithfully, ahead of the interpretation. That's what a first conversation is: read the terrain, note what's actually there, let the pattern arrive on its own schedule. It usually shows up in the third thing someone says, not the first.

It also describes how I'm built. I read symbols for a living and, apparently, for fun — I know what random flowers mean, I can tell you something (some of the time) about what your astrology chart says, too, and I keep track of the weather more than any one person should. My best thinking happens out loud with another person; my recovery happens alone with just me and those flowers. And I don't make a real decision before ten in the morning or before sleeping on it, but somehow it always comes together. I spent years reading these as contradictions. It's just the design. Depth gathered in private, delivered live.

So this is a place for fieldnotes. On how people get described, and by whom, and what it costs when the description runs behind the person. On what changes when a woman decides to be legible on her own terms instead of translatable on everyone else's.

Sometimes I'll be writing about institutions. Often I'll be writing about somebody who is much further along than her own bio admits.

For now, I write when there's something worth saying. If this struck a chord with you, send me an email at hello[at]fieldnotestrategies.co and I'll send the next one.