Shonda Rhimes Would Be Really Disappointed in Me
The woman who coined "Badassery" told me I need to get my shit together.
So I'm halfway through “Year of Yes” and I literally cannot keep going without stopping to process this out loud. I know that's not how reading works, but I don't care.
Shonda Rhimes basically raised me. We have a whole relationship. Every week, every season, from my couch, we talk about fear, love, friendship, politics and joy. She is, without question, a certified badass. Wonder Woman energy, full stop.
Now if you know anything about her or the book, 2014 Shonda would've physically broken into a sweat reading that. This was a Black woman, an African-American woman who had taken over Thursday night television while the world was still catching up to the fact that it was ready for her and then kept showing up week after week until they proved it.
Despite all of it — the empire, the cultural footprint, the whole Shondaland thing — she would've immediately started deflecting. Too busy hoping nobody was looking directly at her to even register the applause, let alone say thank you and smile for it.
2025 Shonda though? Completely different woman. She doesn't just take the compliment, she owns it and that didn't happen by accident. That happened because of the “Year of Yes” and hard work that doesn't reward you quickly or hand you a trophy for showing up. The kind that completely rewires who you are if you let it.
Shonda, genuinely, you are a hero. Not just to me, but to every woman of every shape, size, color, background, field, and age who needed to see someone like you to do what you did.
You became who you deserved to be and you worked your ass off to get there.
Shonda is to me what Oprah is to Shonda.
The plot of the whole book, “Year of Yes” is to say yes to the things that scare you and then Shonda shows you what happened when she actually did it — what one word did to the entire shape of her life.
She called out three things in me that I'm genuinely not proud of:
One: I've been hiding.
Two: We all need a Cristina.
Three: Badassery is a word and a practice.
The thing about a book like this is that it's very easy to read it, cry, feel genuinely moved all the way to your core, and then slide it back onto the shelf where it sits and gathers dust. You walk past it sometimes and feel that warmth again, that thing that rose in your chest when you were reading, and then you remember you were doing something and you go back to it and the thing you were doing is never actually that important.
But halfway through this one I hit something that stopped me cold. I have been mixing up conviction and confidence my entire life.
They are not the same thing. Conviction? I have it in embarrassing quantities. Put me in front of something and I will stand there, chest out, feet planted, and say exactly what I think. I was raised to survive, to drag myself forward, to outwork anyone in the room because I grew up with less than most of the people in it. Conviction doesn't wait to be called. It just shows up. It's the loud thing, the fight thing, survival in a blazer pretending to be a personality trait.
Confidence is quieter than that. Confidence doesn't need to earn its place or argue for it. It just walks in already knowing it belongs. I don't think I've ever walked into a room like that. Not once.
My entire wardrobe is black. Every piece of clothing I own, every shirt, every dress, every coat — black. People can call it chic, minimal or timeless, if they're being generous.
I’ve come to realize it’s a camouflage. Black doesn't demand anything from the room. It lets you take up space without announcing it. It lets you stand there and be seen without actually being looked at and if I'm being honest, that's exactly what I want. I want to be impossible to ignore without ever having to be visible. I want to impress people without being seen by them.
People who know me would tell you I'm outgoing, confident, sure of myself. But those are just fight responses that consistently beats a flight response. I fight my way through every single room. My friends do this thing on game nights where you vote on someone based on what a card says, and I get "could network at a funeral" every time, unanimously, without anyone having to think about it. They mean it as a compliment and I take it as one.
I have a big job. I talk to people with bigger ones. I've been introduced, out loud, as "the next generation of badass" — a sentence that should land as empowering but mostly makes me glance over my shoulder to figure out who they're actually describing. I've won awards, sat on panels, held my own in rooms that were historically not built for someone like me, but for the life of me, I cannot take a compliment. Not even a little. I laugh it off, redirect it and wave it away like it's a wasp flying at my face.
I think so many women live in this exact spot. The gap between what people see when they look at you and what you actually feel standing there. Between performing capability convincingly and that quiet persistent question of whether you're even allowed to want more than this. We get told we're resilient, impressive, efficient, reliable, competent. But none of those words mean free.
Shonda talks about the couch and the brownies. How comfortable comfortable gets, and how easy it is for it to eat your actual life without you noticing. Mine isn't brownies. Mine is strawberry ice cream, pint-sized, paired with whatever show can swallow me whole for forty-five minutes so I don't have to feel the low hum of “something is wrong.”
I get through the day and I numb the night. In my world, I call that being strong.
I am twice the size I was and half the person I used to think I was. Not entirely physically. Mostly in the way that Shonda meant when she described hiding inside her work so she never had to actually show up as herself.
I didn't know I was hiding until she described it. Because she'd been doing it too.
That's the thing about being a good hider. You do it long enough and it stops feeling like hiding. It starts feeling like personality. Like strength. Like “this is just who I am” and somewhere in there you stop seeing that who you are has quietly gotten very, very small.
We all need a Cristina Yang.
I finished the book on a plane home to Florida, in the aisle seat, crying. Shonda created the person she needed before she knew how to be her. She wrote Cristina Yang — Sandra Oh, brilliant and infamous, the one who dances it out with you in the kitchen in the middle of the night and also tells you the truth when you're actively begging her not to — because Cristina was who Shonda was too scared to be in real life. She lived inside that character until she could live inside herself.
I have spent years watching Cristina Yang, Olivia Pope, Meredith Grey and Annalise Keating. Women who are audacious, unapologetic, brilliant and unbothered about taking up space. I've watched them and felt something split open in my chest and I have been calling that feeling admiration.
But admiration isn't the same thing as doing it yourself. Watching someone be brave is not the same as choosing to be brave. They are completely different acts.
I think a lot of us get stuck here. We fill our lives with the women we want to become — on screen, in books, in the Substacks we open before we're even fully awake and we call it inspiration. We let it feel warm and then we go back to surviving in black clothes that don't ask anything of anyone, including us. We watch other women expand and then we go home and fold ourselves smaller.
Shonda wrote Cristina because she needed a self that had already done it. Someone to borrow confidence from while she was still figuring out how to build her own.
I've been borrowing from Cristina for years. The difference is I never tried to return it. I watched her refuse to disappear and then I went home and wore black to disappear.
We all need a Cristina, as a person in your life, yes, but more importantly, as a voice inside you. The one that won't let you deflect the compliment. That won't let you run to the couch before you've even attempted that thing. That loves you enough to not let you call surviving the same thing as living.
If you don't have that voice yet, you can grow it slowly.
Badassery is a word and a practice.
Shonda added it to her Microsoft Word dictionary while she was writing this book and that detail is so perfectly her.
Badassery isn't about being perfect. It's about saying yes to the failure too, because failure is also where you find out you can get back up. It's the hard yes and the deliberate no. It's picking the uncomfortable thing on purpose, over and over, until discomfort starts to feel less like danger and more like proof that you're actually in your life rather than just moving through it.
I almost moved to Denver this year. I built a little checklist — mountains visible from the city, walkable, not actively hostile to women or queer people, a real airport. I signed a lease, wired a deposit and started telling people I was leaving Florida.
It felt like courage, but it wasn't. It was a new zip code, in the same country, same language, same everything. Just enough motion to feel like change without touching the actual structure of my life.
Conviction again. Adapt, fight, keep moving. Not confidence. Not expansion. Just me paying six thousand dollars to be a slightly different version of exactly who I already was, but with mountains.
Then the building turned out to be a nightmare — asbestos, break-ins, lease arrangements sketchy enough to be technically illegal. I fought my way out, got every dollar back, felt like I'd won something. Look at me, competently navigating disaster. And then my mom got the cancer call. Everything I'd been treating like it was urgent just collapsed inward.
In the time between doctors visits, scans, and picking this book back up, I realized I kept saying yes to the version of my life that feels handleable and no to the one that feels like it could actually be mine, because that version needs real confidence which I don't have.
Conviction works everywhere. You can fight through any room, any city, any circumstance. But confidence needs something conviction can't supply. It needs you to genuinely believe you deserve more than just getting through it. That wanting something big isn't the same as being irresponsible. That doing well isn't the same as living well. I lost the ability to tell the difference a while back.
There are things I have to do first. Get my mom through this, help my grandpa get divorced, say goodbye properly to friends and a city I've spent ten years in.
But I also know that I've been using timing as a hiding place, as an excuse. Yes, I've been competent, but I forgot to check whether I was actually happy or just very, very good at appearing functional.
Fighting through your life is not the same as being at home in it. Surviving well is not the same as living like you mean it and God, I have been so proud of how well I survive.
I'm scared to leave the US. I'm scared to leave the people who know me as the woman who networks at funerals, fights through rooms, wears black, keeps her head down, gets it done. I'm scared to find out who I am on the other side of having nothing left to fight through. But I'm more scared of being sixty and realizing I spent my whole life hiding instead of living. That I watched Cristina Yang dance it out in the kitchen a hundred times and never once stood up from the couch.
So I'm saying it here. I'm writing it here, so I can't quietly take it back later. I'm saying yes to the things that actually scare me.
Yes before I feel ready. Because Shonda showed me that ready is just a story fear tells itself to stay comfortable.
Fuck. Okay… time to get my shit together.