The system
didn't break me.
It revealed me.
I spent over a decade inside the machine doing what women are taught to do. Work harder. Stay grateful. Shrink strategically. Survive professionally.
It worked — until it didn't.
I believed them.
Every time.
Indeed. LinkedIn. Handshake. Each one said they wanted a disruptor. A different thinker. Someone who would challenge the status quo.
They didn't. They meant: obey and perform as required for our bottom line. Period.
I was never broken. The system was extracting me. I needed to build something that actually fit how I work.
I didn't leave because I won. I left because I finally stopped trying to win a game that was never designed for me.
Over a decade at the intersection of tech, talent, and dude-bro culture. Senior roles. Big logos. Real impact that got credited to someone else.
ADHD diagnosis at 39. Every job. Every manager. Every "you're a lot" suddenly reframed — not as failure, but as twenty years of running the wrong system.
Left Silicon Valley. Bought a farm. Started building something that made sense for how I actually work — not how the machine needed me to perform.
Once you stop contorting yourself to survive, the real work begins.
You were just in systems that couldn't hold it. That's a system problem. Not a you problem.
Women reclaiming it terrifies the right people. That's how you know you're doing it correctly.
It's code for: give until you disappear so nobody else has to grow. You are not a sacrifice. You are a resource — for yourself first.
They were survival algorithms in a broken ecosystem. They made sense when you built them. Now you get to choose something different.
It feels that way because you were taught models built on pressure, performance, and extraction. Build from alignment and consent instead.
You're allergic to systems that demand self-abandonment as the price of success. There is a different way to build. That's exactly why we're here.
Neurospicy women weren't made for the machine.
Getting diagnosed with ADHD at 39 didn't break my life open. It reframed everything that had already happened.
Suddenly the pattern made sense. They thought they wanted someone bold and different. They did — until they realized they couldn't control me. Then it was: too emotional. Too intense. Work on your communication style. Be more strategic. Polish your delivery.
What they actually meant was:
I was connecting dots they weren't ready to see. Moving faster than the structure could hold. Feeling everything in a room and naming it out loud. That's not a liability. That's a neurospicy brain doing exactly what it's built to do.
The diagnosis didn't tell me something was wrong with me. It told me I'd been running the wrong operating system my entire career. So I built one that actually works — and then I built a system for other women to create their own. That's what Build Your P.O.S.S.E. is. Not a personality overhaul. A personal operating system built around how you actually work.
Turns out I wasn't the only one trying to rewrite my own rules. The podcast We Are Tired AF exists because this experience isn't personal — it's systemic. Three neurodivergent women. Three different industries — tech, academia, nonprofit. One identical pattern: gaslit, dismissed, told to shrink. We came together to name it out loud.
Ready to build something that actually fits?
Interested in working together, booking Courtney to speak, or having her as a guest on your podcast or show? Let's talk.