Be Kind, Not Nice:

A Field Guide for Recovering Good Girls

Somewhere in the late 1980s, probably in a school corridor that smelled faintly of tuna sandwiches and disinfectant, I was told to "be nice." I had just said something accurate but impolite. A habit I’ve struggled to kick, despite my best attempts at social camouflage. “Be nice” wasn’t a suggestion. It was a correction. A chastening. A leash.

Like many women, I’ve spent decades trying to be good. Not just morally good, but aesthetically palatable, socially agreeable, emotionally self-erasing. Nice.

But niceness, as I’ve come to understand, is a trap. It’s not the same as kindness. Kindness is a form of grace. Niceness is performance art with the volume turned all the way down.

“Be kind. But not nice.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She voiced what most women are never explicitly told - that niceness is a performance we’re taught to give, especially for those who expect us to stay small and smooth and manageable. Kindness is radical. Niceness is repressed aggression dressed in politeness.

If this sounds dramatic, allow me a moment of literary backup.

As Marilyn French writes in The Women’s Room, “Being a woman is being born into a collective lie.” That lie, I believe, is the one that says our worth lies in our ability to soothe, to smile, to smooth things over. To apologise in advance for the space we take up. To be nice, even when we are furious. Especially when we are furious.

The late 1980s and early 90s were a kind of liberation for me. I was at a radically left-leaning university in the north, trying - madly - to do a double honours degree in three years. That meant taking some of my lectures and seminars in the evenings alongside part-time students, many of them mature students, many of them sponsored by their unions.

It was a passionate, opinionated atmosphere. No one was trying to be nice. They were trying to be right, or at least interesting. You could disagree without being shamed. You could speak without softening.

I liked the person I was then. And for a long time, I stayed that person in private. With people I trust, sometimes I still am.

But in public? I became ‘nice’. I worked in marketing and publishing for one of the most recognisable companies in the world. Creative. Independent. Supposedly maverick. They thought I was bold. I felt diluted. I edited myself constantly.

I write under a pseudonym now, and my social media is hidden behind the same name. Not because I’m ashamed, but because my children were once tormented for having a mother with opinions.

Maybe it’s the freedom of menopause, that sweet indifference to the male gaze. Maybe it’s because my children are older now and know how to disregard small minds. Maybe it’s because I remember, more vividly than ever, the wonder of opinionated women. Maybe it’s because I’ve sacrificed and swallowed and stood still long enough.

I no longer strive to be nice. I know I am kind. And more than anything, I want to be free.

Hélène Cixous, in her call for écriture féminine, might describe this as a failure of language - or more precisely, a failure of the language we’ve been allowed. She urged women to write the body, to write their truths, to find words not borrowed from patriarchal grammar.

But it’s difficult to write honestly when you’ve spent your life learning to self-edit.

I have spent years trying to write likeable things. Not honest things. Not sharp things. Not uncomfortable things. But “nice” things - sweet and tidy and admired for their tone, not their truth.

The trouble is, truth isn’t always nice. It’s not always charming. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s unkind in the name of clarity. Sometimes it arrives in the voice of Dorothy Parker, who once quipped:

“She speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.”

That, my friends, is not nice. It also might not be wrong.

My relationship with niceness is complicated. I was raised on it, groomed for it, praised for it like a dog who sits on command. I know how to write the thank-you note. I know how to pad an opinion with enough softness it no longer feels like a fact. I know how to smile when someone is being appallingly condescending.

But here is the quiet violence of nice: it turns real women into polite ghosts.

Elaine Showalter once explored what she called the “female malady” - a cultural diagnosis of hysteria, depression, madness. But I think there’s a contemporary version of it: the Nice Woman Breakdown.

It happens quietly, often with a smile. It’s when you’ve said “it’s fine” so many times your body stops believing you. When you’ve swallowed every criticism, absorbed every emotional spill in the room, and finally, one day, you just... leak.

Because niceness, when compulsive, becomes self-harm. You chip away at your edges until you can no longer hold your shape.

And when you finally stop? When you dare to say no, to speak plainly, to let the sharpness come through? People are aghast. What happened to her? Why is she so aggressive?

The passive aggression of Nice People is rarely questioned. It is weaponised as morality. But if a woman says what she thinks without a flourish of apology? Suddenly, she’s a problem. Niceness becomes the velvet glove of patriarchy. It strokes you while it smothers you.

Luce Irigaray described women as “the sex which is not one” - fragmented, splintered under the weight of male discourse. I believe something similar happens with kindness. Women are permitted to be kind only so long as it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Real kindness - the kind that says “you’re hurting me,” or “this dynamic is unfair,” or “I won’t let you speak to me like that” - is too often dismissed as cruelty.

Let me be clear. This isn’t a manifesto for being mean. I have no desire to become the internet’s latest hot take in a blazer. I’m not advocating smugness, or cruelty, or the abandonment of compassion. But I am advocating for the kind of honesty that risks being disliked.

I am, reluctantly and with many missteps, trying to unlearn the need to be seen as nice. I am chaotic. I am occasionally wrong. I can be sharp, but I am not unkind.

Because kindness is not the same as acquiescence. Kindness is active. It is curious. It has edges, and standards, and sometimes even consequences. Niceness, by contrast, is about comfort - other people’s comfort, at the expense of your own truth.

Here’s what I want instead. I want to be more Dorothy Parker. More Toni Morrison. More Audre Lorde, who reminded us:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

I want to build a language, or at least a small lexicon, where women can speak without shrinking. Where the word “kind” doesn’t mean “silent,” and “truthful” doesn’t mean “difficult.”

Here’s to the un-nice woman. The one who says what she means and listens when others do the same. The one who doesn’t apologise for existing at full volume. The one who rewrites her sentences without deleting herself.

It’s not easy. It’s not always pretty. But it’s the truest thing I’ve got.

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With unnecessary commas and questionable grace,
Sabina xx