When Non-Compliance Is Treated as a Personal Issue

Some behaviors are learned long before they are named. 
Caution. Scanning. Softening. Constant adjustment to mood and threat. 

Ways to stay safe. 

Years later, these same behaviors are handed back to us by systems that claim neutrality, stripped of context and turned into labels: people-pleasing if they’re deemed excessive, emotional intelligence if they’re deemed useful. Either way, the story stays the same. The system that produced these behaviours disappears, and the burden lands on the person.

As kids, our favorite winter pastime during electricity cutoffs, my cousins and I, besides playing with melting candle wax, was telling horror stories. Dracula was scary in early 90s, but we had our own monsters, Omna Al Ghoula, Em R’aidy (both kidnappers of little children), and the infamous jinn with goat hooves for feet, ready to possess or harm us if we failed at being good and pure of heart.

As I grew a little older, horror stories at school and among friends became about women who dared to say no. Horror persisted, but stories became less imaginative and more like cautionary tales. None of them were fiction, and none were ever compassionate.

Tales of women who brought shame to their families and condemned them to eternities of torture. Women who didn’t conform became the monsters, the “things” we were supposed to fear, hate and outcast. Fear stopped being about jinn lurking in the dark, waiting for me to show my foot from under the covers. It became about reputation and honor. Mine. My family’s, immediate and extended, current, past and future. 

A woman has nothing but her honor

Then these tales became real too fast.

Classmates. friends I shared desks, sandwiches, and bonjus with, were pulled out of school, beaten, punished and reprimanded by fathers, brothers, uncles and male cousins, because they fell in love with a boy. And yet school continued as usual. Not a single word from any faculty member. Except for the stories we shared quietly in the halls, moving secretly among us girls, the cruelty was never registered. Never named. 

The friends we lost were never spoken of publicly. Any proximity to them was enough to implicate us in something we were the center of, yet never allowed to participate in, because it was always “bigger than our comprehension”. 

As young adults, our coming-of-age weren’t ceremonial, but more of the same. Don’t aggravate. Don’t escalate. Cover up. Keep Distance. Pay for two seats in public transport so you’re not molested. Don’t ride in empty cabs and don’t sit in the front seat.

The list went on and on. I laugh as I write this, more than twenty years later, it’s still too ingrained that I didn’t even realize it was still there!

You’d think we’d age out of cautionary tales. We didn’t. They expanded and compounded, moving beyond how to protect honor into how to stay safe and successful. How to navigate systems that publicly insist on moral binary and zero tolerance, while quietly allowing those with money and titles, usually men, to do anything.

We witnessed these systems assassinate those who named what power tried to suppress. Journalists. Thinkers. Scholars. Torn apart in loud explosions, one after the other. We watched the same systems distort the stories of women who were raped, killed, disappeared, jailed. Always the same quasi-accusation explanations: wrong place, wrong time. Didn’t take precautions. Failed the moral binary.

Moral binary ruled the façade. Money and titles ruled reality.

Power imbalance became clear, safety became conditional and punitive measures were exceedingly severe.

Noncompliance didn’t mean I’d be just an outcast, or lose the social construct of “honor”. It meant losing my job. My residency. My reputation. My livelihood. The choice was simple: conform, or face jail and deportation.

And cautionary tales don’t stop.

Every time I moved countries, helpful people gave me two things. A map for where to shop for the best and cheapest groceries, and a list of warnings people like us shouldn’t do. How we’re monitored, singled out, generally disliked, selectively excoticized, Occasionally fetishized.

By now, if you didn’t notice yet, horror stopped needing monsters or tales. Fear occupied the imagination and took hold in anticipation, vigilance, and regulation. 

Masking became the condition of passage. The way through the day.

Perform normalcy. Not once, but constantly. Louder here, quieter there. Softer now. Invisible later. Adjust, adjust again. Adjust before anything happens so nothing happens.

Real threats. Internalized threats. Imminent threats. All mixed together.

It became labor. Continuous and rarely visible. Moving through the day scanning for danger while making sure nothing about you registers as dangerous. Existing without escalating. Speaking without provoking. Being present without being read as a problem.

Over time, this produces a particular exhaustion. A mind performing cost management, constantly and consistently. At every step, in every decision: what is permitted, what is risky, what must be adjusted, withdrawn, or preemptively neutralized, without pause or guarantee. 

And when this exhaustion is consulted, the same behaviors that produced it are lifted out of context and labeled: people-pleasing, or emotional intelligence. One frames the behavior as a personal failure, authorizing correction and self-work. The other frames it as personal capacity, authorizing reliance, extraction, and overuse. 

A dual framing by design, a deliberate structural contradiction. One that is displaced onto the individual to navigate, while the system that produced it remains untouched.