The Work Has Moved Upstream
What 17 years of studying identity, language, and capacity taught me about looking beyond the individual.
For a long time, my work centered on the relationship between language, identity, and the ways high-capacity Black women come to understand themselves.
I was interested in the words used to describe them. The identities they learned to occupy. The expectations they learned to meet. The distance between what they were capable of doing and what it cost them to keep doing it.
I wanted to understand how a woman could become so capable that her capacity started to define how other people understood her. How competence could become an expectation. How adaptation could become evidence that she was fine. How being able to manage something could quietly turn into an assumption that she should have to manage it.
These questions came from studying my own experience. But the more I studied my own experience, the harder it became to believe that the problem existed only inside the individual.
That realization changed the direction of my work.
The Individual Was Never the Whole Story
When a woman repeatedly manages what should have been difficult to manage alone, what does the environment learn?
When she anticipates needs before anyone has to articulate them, resolves tension before it becomes visible, or absorbs the consequences of poor planning, what becomes easier for everyone around her?
And when she continues to deliver, what does her performance allow other people to stop examining?
These questions lead somewhere different from the familiar conversation about resilience, boundaries, burnout, and self-care.
They ask us to examine the relationship between a person’s capacity and the environment that encounters it.
Consider a woman who consistently makes an understaffed team function. Her colleagues begin to depend on her judgment, flexibility, and willingness to resolve problems. Deadlines continue to be met. Work continues to move. Leadership sees a capable employee and a functioning team.
But what if the team’s apparent stability depends on the amount of difficulty she absorbs?
What if her flexibility is compensating for organizational rigidity? What if her emotional labor is preventing conflict from becoming visible? What if her ability to make unreasonable demands look manageable is the very thing keeping those demands from being questioned?
Her capability is real. So is the work she performs.
But the conclusion that the environment is functioning well does not necessarily follow.
A person’s ability to compensate for a problem is not evidence that the problem has been resolved.
And when that person is consistently capable, the distinction can become difficult to see.
Capability Is Not Capacity
One of the distinctions shaping this next phase of my work is simple: capability is not capacity.
Capability concerns what someone can do. Capacity concerns what can be carried, sustained, and supported under particular conditions.
The two are related, but they are not interchangeable.
A woman may have the knowledge, skill, judgment, and experience to perform at a high level. That does not mean she has unlimited room to absorb additional responsibility. It does not mean the conditions surrounding her are sustainable. And it does not mean that because she can meet a demand, the demand is reasonable.
Yet environments often treat demonstrated capability as permission to expect more.
The person who solves the problem becomes the person expected to solve the next one. The person who remains composed becomes the person presumed unaffected. The person who adapts becomes the evidence that adaptation is all that is needed.
Over time, capability can become a justification for increasing the demands placed on someone without examining the conditions under which those demands are being met.
This is particularly important when we examine high-capacity Black women, whose competence, composure, and ability to navigate difficult environments can be interpreted through expectations that extend beyond their individual roles.
Their capacity does not exist in a vacuum. Neither do the assumptions made about it.
The question, then, is not simply whether a woman can continue.
It is what her continued ability makes possible for the environment around her.
When Adaptation Hides the Conditions
Environments do not need to explicitly announce their assumptions for those assumptions to shape what happens.
Sometimes an assumption becomes visible through what is repeatedly expected. Sometimes it appears in what goes unacknowledged. Sometimes it is revealed by the absence of a question.
Who notices the additional work?
Who recognizes the emotional labor?
Who questions why the same person is repeatedly relied upon?
Who examines the conditions that make her intervention necessary?
And who benefits when she continues to adapt?
Get Shae Thomas’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
These questions extend beyond the workplace. The same dynamic can appear in families, relationships, communities, and institutions. Wherever people interact, expectations develop. Language gives those expectations meaning. Repeated behavior can make them appear natural.
A person adapts to an environment. The environment becomes accustomed to the adaptation. Eventually, the adaptation can become part of what the environment expects.
What began as a response to particular conditions becomes treated as an inherent quality of the person.
She is naturally responsible. Naturally composed. Naturally dependable. Naturally the one who can handle it.
But what if the qualities being attributed to her are only part of the story?
What if we are seeing her capability without seeing what that capability is being used to absorb, compensate for, or keep from view?
This is the illusion I want to examine.
Not whether high-capacity Black women are capable. Their capability is not the question.
The question is what their capability allows others to assume.
Why the Work Is Moving Upstream
My work is now moving under the name SwivelledIllusions™.
The change represents a shift in where I am directing my attention. Rather than concentrating exclusively on how individuals experience, interpret, or navigate their identities, I am examining the environments in which those identities are formed, reinforced, recognized, and expected to function.
I am interested in the assumptions beneath what organizations believe they are seeing.
When a leader sees a high-performing employee, what are they actually observing? Are they seeing sustainable capacity, or are they seeing the results of someone compensating for conditions that remain unexamined?
When a team consistently delivers, what does that performance reveal about the system? What might it conceal?
When an organization identifies a person as resilient, dependable, or exceptionally capable, what responsibilities become attached to that description? What expectations become easier to justify?
These are not simply questions about individual well-being. They are questions about interpretation, leadership, organizational assumptions, and the conditions under which human capacity is used.
This is where the research begins to meet organizational education.
The workplace is a significant setting for this work because organizations make decisions about responsibilities, workloads, recognition, resources, and performance. They have the authority to examine and change many of the conditions that shape people’s working lives.
But the larger inquiry is not limited to work.
Identities are not made in isolation. The language available to us, the expectations placed upon us, and the responses we receive from our environments all contribute to how we come to understand ourselves and one another.
To understand the individual more fully, we must also be willing to examine what surrounds her.
The Question I Am Carrying Forward
I am not abandoning the study of high-capacity Black women. I am not replacing their experiences with an abstract conversation about systems.
Their experiences remain central to the inquiry.
What is changing is the direction of the examination.
Instead of stopping at what a woman experiences, I want to investigate the conditions that help produce that experience. Instead of treating her ability to adapt as the final explanation, I want to ask what her adaptation reveals. Instead of assuming that successful performance tells us everything we need to know, I want to examine what that performance may be concealing.
The aim is not to presume that every environment is dysfunctional or that every act of competence signals harm. It is to question conclusions that are too easily drawn from visible performance alone.
A person can be capable and still be carrying too much. An organization can meet its targets while relying on unsustainable human effort. A system can appear stable because the people within it are continually compensating for what it has failed to address.
Those possibilities deserve serious examination.
For me, this is what it means to move upstream: to look beyond the visible outcome and investigate the assumptions, expectations, and conditions that help produce it.
SwivelledIllusions™ is the home for that inquiry.
The work will continue through research, language exploration, audio-led education, and the development of ideas that help leaders and organizations question what they believe they are seeing when they evaluate human capability and performance.
The name has changed. The scope has expanded. The questions have moved.
And the question I keep returning to is this:
What happens when an environment mistakes someone’s capability for evidence that its demands are reasonable?
Because sometimes what looks like a person’s extraordinary ability to manage is also evidence of what the environment has learned it can leave for her to manage.
We cannot fully understand the person without examining the conditions.
And we cannot responsibly evaluate the conditions without questioning the assumptions we have made about the person.
That is where this work is going.
That is why the work has moved upstream.
