I Was Worried I'd Come Off Unlikeable
But I think more of us should embrace being unlikable.
I sent the first draft of my latest book, I Don’t See Colour: Everything My Body Learned to Hide, to my best friend.
Eager for her response, I texted her “well..?!??!!”
“It’s brilliant”, she texted back.
“Oh, good, because I was worried I would come off as unlikeable”
Unlikeable.
I used the word almost absentmindedly, but since I did, I haven’t been able to shake it.
What’s the point of being unlikable unless it means something?
I’m reading Yesteryear at the moment (have you read it? Because I need to talk about it). Natalie is such an unlikeable woman.
I’m finding it equal parts comforting and disturbing. Not because she’s unlikeable - personally, I relish an unlikeable woman; Fleabag is my all-time favourite story- but it’s because her inside thoughts do not match her outside persona.
Natalie is nice.
“Be nice, Natalie”, her mother tells her. She trains in politeness, and she practices her smile. She pretends; she manipulates, constantly putting on a show for everyone else. Green light means go on her carefully crafted persona.
While Natalie’s inner monologue is sharp, witty - sometimes callous - but always shrewd and intelligent, on the outside, she never expresses any of it.
It’s infuriating.
And deeply relatable.
When your outsides don’t match your insides.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to keep this up. To see the world a certain way - to know, hear and feel what others cannot, and to stay silent. Complicit. To bite your tongue until you taste the metallic tang of blood and smile through gritted teeth while you tap and breathe and use every single nervous system regulation technique you have been taught to keep the peace and be nice.
Be nice. Be likeable.
But liked by whom?
While you are expending all your energy being nice and protecting the peace, you are simultaneously keeping the systems of Empire intact and destroying yourself from the inside out1.
In the last week, I have become a target for Angry White Men on Facebook, and it has reminded me exactly why women choose to keep their acute observations to themselves (like I needed that reminder). It was a cold slap in the face, a wake-up call that hatred for women and people of colour is still very much alive and well. And it is getting bolder, louder, with access to microphones and the internet.
It cannot be left alone to fester and grow.
For Good.
What makes it so hard to sympathise with Natalie is the fact that there is no depth to her inner world; she’s not trying to dismantle the conditions; there is no higher purpose or cause; she’s vicious for viciousness’ sake. Her actions are purely for herself alone.
If we are to be unlikable, it needs to mean something.
I’m talking about Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Skyler White in Breaking Bad. These women cared nothing for what society thought of them because they were protecting the vulnerable and prioritising something other than themselves - not a feeding of the ego but an audacity not to conform - an air of being ungovernable.
While reading Yesteryear (I’m about 3/4 of the way through), I can’t help but want Natalie to snap at her dimwitted husband. To let that sharp tongue loose, and allow her carefully chosen words and her eloquently crafted sentences to spill from her lips - a display of her truth.
When I look at my clients, I want the same for them too.
I am a fierce advocate for the unlikable woman.
This is why most of them come to me, for their insides match their outsides. So that the flames of their holy rage will not destroy them from the inside out - consuming them. So that they have the audacity to say what they already think, that their unlikability can mean something.
It’s not innate; it must be learned.
Empire has taken so much from us: language, imagination, a connection to our felt sense and inner worlds, safe spaces for us to speak without expecting punishment - no wonder we find it so hard and yet so irresistible to give voice to our truth.
But I have been working in this space long enough to identify what it takes.
As a writer, a storyteller and an all-around articulate person, living in Portugal and desperately trying to learn the language here has taught me a great deal about how we express ourselves.
I have so few words in Portuguese, so first I must identify exactly how I am feeling, connect with my rich interior world and understanding of what is deeper than my surface-level reactions and wants - what is really going on and what do I really need?
Next, I must ask myself, “How do I convey this want? How do I get my needs met?” This step is so interesting because I have learned many times that this can be done with energy - a look, a gesture - and not words.
And very last come words: vocabulary. Which, strangely, is what everyone is worried about. In my Portuguese classes, in my Instagram DM’s, in my practitioner space, everyone is worried that they do not have the intellect, the education or the perfect words to say what they want to say.
And I will say to you what I say to them.
Making your interior audible is about energy first and words second.
You must feel audacious before you can be audacious.
Writing my book has been such an exercise in giving my felt sense words. It has been liberating to put on the page what has only lived inside my body for so long.
An absolute gift and joy, an act of grace and audacity.
And I want as many people as possible to experience this too, Fan the Flames of your Audacity. On Tuesday, 28th July 2026, I am hosting a 2-hour workshop to help you do exactly this - connect with your rich interior world and feel its energy, find the fire of your inner audacity and fan those flames. It’s €15 (I wanted to make it pay-what-you-can, but I can’t seem to figure out that setting), and you will get the recording, plus the slideshow and any notes.
Written by me, Leandra, no AI.
Research backs this up: through a phenomenon called the Prejudiced Norm Theory, we know that not calling out sexist, racist or harmful comments creates an environment where prejudice is normalised. And there is a growing amount of evidence that suggests that suppressed anger contributes to autoimmune diseases in women: Women of Colour are even more so affected by this.