The paid post maps all three lanes (Building, Maintenance, and Bridge) with concrete actions for the pivot you are actually in.
Sometimes the help comes from the least likely places.
Sometimes it was already yours.
open.substack.com/pub/strickly...
And they underestimate the Bridge. Because the honest answer about what this transition is really the crossing for is rarely comfortable.
They are not pivoting to another job.
They are pivoting to themselves.
They leave behind the skills, the relationships, the hard-won knowledge that belongs to them, regardless of who signed their last paycheck.
The route you take to get where you are going is not incidental.
Most high-achieving women treat every transition as a Building problem.
What do I need to construct in the new chapter?
But they skip the Maintenance lane entirely.
I was one of the fifteen.
When Shirl, one of my fifteen, built her storytelling series, she came back to her people. I sat down with her and told the real story.
Being the Strong One in Rooms Not Built for Me. Now streaming.
shadesofstrong.com/cynthia-stri...
Luvvie Ajayi Jones runs The Book Academy.
I was in Cohort 3.
Over a thousand submissions to a Penguin Random House imprint. A hundred selected. Fifteen of those hundred came from Cohort 3.
This week on Substack, I wrote about the audit your circle has been waiting for.
Not the placement.
The accuracy of it.
The mentor table is open.
I am a Black gay woman who has spent thirty years in corporate spaces learning the difference between the people who were with me and the people who were performing it.
That education was expensive.
I am trying to make it less expensive for the women coming up behind me.
The people still standing next to you are standing there on purpose.
The ones who went quiet were always going to go quiet.
The institution did not create them.
It just finally stopped requiring them to pretend.
What is different right now is that the performance has dropped.
And what is left is exactly what was always there underneath it.
We have been here before.
The room is shifting.
The rules are changing.
The people who said they were with us getting quiet in a very specific way.
We absorb it because naming it costs more than carrying it.
We have been carrying it our whole careers.
The betrayal did not come from the institution this week.
It came from inside the circle.
That is the one that costs you something to look at directly.
We've been building this way our whole lives. Quietly. Without credit. Without a policy protecting us. It's not a disadvantage. It's the infrastructure that the people dismantling DEI never had access to and never understood. Keep building. Keep finding each other.
open.substack.com/pub/strickly...
We are not waiting for the systems to work.
We are building what works without them.
That is not a backup plan. That is the plan.
Find your people.
Not the ones who are convenient.
The ones who have shown you who they are when something was on the line for them, too.
That is the circle worth building.
That is the one that holds when everything else is loud and unstable.
Black women, queer people, immigrants, everyone the current moment is targeting is already doing this.
Quietly.
Consistently.
Without waiting for permission or policy.
I am not talking about networking.
I am talking about the specific people who know your name
before you have credentials to offer them.
Who show up when the room gets hostile.
Who tell you the truth without using it as a weapon.
When the systems that were never fully designed to protect you start failing loudly and publicly, community stops being a nice idea.
It becomes infrastructure.
They dismantled DEI and made it harder for people who were already fighting for a seat to get into every room.
No advocates in the pipeline.
No programs softening the entry.
No institutional cover for those who were tolerated only when the policy required it.
Thursday's free post names the anger. Friday's paid post builds the architecture. Both live at stricklycyn.substack.com. Come to both tables today.
Women's History Month is not a celebration when you are still living inside the fight. It is a record. Add your name to it.
The chaos is not new. Black women have always been asked to perform excellence inside burning buildings. The question has never been whether the building is on fire.
The question is what we build while it is.
I spent thirty years building inside systems running a different set of rules underneath the surface. I picked up Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler this week. She wrote in the 1990s about 2032 and described this morning with more clarity than anyone currently in power wants to acknowledge.
That is the history being made this month. In your office. In your body. In your anger.
Where you sat in a meeting last Tuesday and watched your idea come back to you with someone else's name on it.
Where Henrietta Lacks built the foundation of modern medicine without consent and without credit. Where Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat nine months before Rosa Parks and got labeled a troublemaker for it.
Women's History Month. Not the version with the inspirational quotes and the corporate email blasts.
The real version. Where Black women and LGBTQ+ professionals are making history in real time while the institutions around them actively revise who belongs.
For the people building during collapse: you are in the process, not behind it.
The mentor table is always open.
open.substack.com/pub/strickly...
This book is for everyone who knows that specific exhaustion.
That is iteration.
Not starting over.
Removing everything that was protecting the wrong thing.
The Pivot Test is Thursday's free Substack post.
Three questions before you change any Direction Marker.
