High-agency people are annoying; that's the point

Oct 26, 2025

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Over time, it’s become clear that what I’m building is bigger than one writer’s inner monologue, and I want to build it with more intention. I’ve been connecting with other writers whose work I love—many of whom haven’t yet built a large audience but absolutely deserve one—and I want BAD GIRL MEDIA to become a home for voices like theirs, without losing the tone and clarity that made this space what it is today.

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Happy reading. x

High-agency people are annoying; that’s the point.

People have been calling me “intense” since I was a little girl.

Teachers said I asked too many questions. Friends said I was “a lot.” Boyfriends said I needed to relax. Bosses said I should be more of a team player, which usually meant I should stop pointing out when things weren’t working.

For a long time, it hurt my feelings because I thought something was wrong with me. I tried to soften myself, to be more easygoing, to go with the flow. But the truth is, I’m not a go-with-the-flow kind of person. I like to know the plan. I like to understand why we’re doing something. I like things to actually happen instead of just being discussed endlessly. It took me until my late-20s, but I finally stopped apologizing for that.

Most people are remarkably comfortable with chaos masquerading as planning. They’ll agree to things that aren’t real plans. They’ll sit in meetings that accomplish nothing. They’ll follow processes that stopped making sense years ago. And when you refuse to do that, when you actually want to know what’s happening and make a decision and move forward, suddenly you’re the problem.

High-agency people are annoying because we refuse to pretend. We don’t nod along to plans that aren’t actually plans. We don’t defer to processes that don’t work. We don’t wait for permission that’s never coming. And when you do that, when you move instead of waiting, when you ask instead of assuming, when you act instead of discussing endlessly, you disrupt the most fundamental human comfort: the script.

The world runs on scripts—and high-agency people break them.

That’s why they’re annoying, but it’s also why they’re necessary. Because value creation requires friction, and if you’re not making anyone uncomfortable, you’re probably not doing anything important.

What is high agency, really?

High agency is the ability to act on your own convictions without needing permission, consensus, or external validation to move forward.

It’s the friend who cancels the chaotic group trip because no one’s actually leading, and books her own solo weekend instead. It’s the coworker who stops attending the weekly meeting that accomplishes nothing and sends a note saying she’ll rejoin when there’s an actual agenda (yes, I was that coworker). It’s the person who says “I’ll just handle this myself” and then actually does it, rather than waiting for someone else to step up.

High-agency people operate from internal authority rather than external scripting. They don’t need you to agree with them before they act. They don’t need the group to validate their decision. They assess the situation, make a call, and move forward. And they’re willing to be disliked in the short term if it means getting to a better outcome in the long term.

Which sounds great in theory, but in practice, it makes people deeply uncomfortable. Because most people have outsourced their decision-making to social consensus, institutional permission, or the general vibe of the group. So, when someone just decides and acts independently, it exposes how much everyone else has been waiting around for someone to tell them it’s okay.

The world runs on scripts.

Scripts are the invisible infrastructure of social life. They’re the inherited beliefs most people never interrogate, the bureaucratic processes everyone follows because “that’s how it’s always been done,” the cultural norms that dictate how you’re supposed to behave in a meeting, a relationship, a family structure, etc.

Scripts exist for good reasons. They reduce friction and allow coordination without constant negotiation. They make life predictable, which makes it manageable. When everyone follows the same basic social protocols, we can function together without having to renegotiate reality every time we interact.
But scripts also calcify over time. They stop being useful and become self-perpetuating. The meeting that no longer serves a purpose still happens every Monday because it’s on the calendar. The belief that you need a certain credential to be taken seriously persists even when the evidence says otherwise. The relationship dynamic where one person always defers and the other always decides continues because disrupting it feels harder than maintaining it.

High-agency people disrupt it anyway. They notice when the script is broken and everyone’s pretending it’s not. They ask why we’re doing something this way, and they’re genuinely interested in the answer, not just performing curiosity. They refuse to participate in the performance of productivity, the theater of consensus, the endless deferral of responsibility disguised as collaboration.

And that makes them extremely annoying to everyone who’s still operating on autopilot.

High-agency people force others to confront their own passivity, and most people really don’t want to do that.

When someone just does the thing without asking permission, without building consensus, without waiting for the right moment, it reflects back a very uncomfortable question: if they didn’t need permission, why did you? If they didn’t wait for someone else to lead, why are you still waiting? If they assessed the situation and made a decision in ten minutes, why have you been discussing it for three weeks?

It’s much easier to call them bossy, controlling, or “too much” than to admit you’ve been sitting in a passive script that doesn’t serve you. The high-agency person becomes the problem because their clarity makes everyone else’s fog visible.

They also violate the social contract of comfort, which is one of the most deeply held unspoken agreements in any group. Politeness is a script. So is learned helplessness. So is the endless loop of “let’s circle back” and “I’d love to, but I don’t have the bandwidth” and “we should really get more input before we decide.”
High-agency people won’t play along with any of it. They won’t pretend confusion when the path forward is obvious. They won’t nod sympathetically at excuses that are just fear dressed up as prudence. They won’t defer to seniority, tradition, or consensus when those things are just covers for inertia. They break the invisible rule that says we’re all supposed to pretend things are more complicated than they are so no one has to take responsibility.

And perhaps most threatening of all, they actually move. In any group dynamic, the person who moves first resets the entire structure. They become the new center of gravity, and the script has to rewrite itself around them—and that sometimes creates resentment. Because once they move and the script has been rewritten, everyone else either has to follow, actively resist, or be left behind. That’s disruptive. That creates friction. And that friction is exactly why they create value.

Annoyance is a feature, not a bug.

Here’s the part almost no one wants to hear: value creation requires friction, which means if you’re not annoying someone, you’re probably not doing anything important.

Comfort is the enemy of progress. Polite agreement is often just complicity with a nicer face. Consensus-building can be genuinely useful, but it’s just as often conflict avoidance dressed up as collaboration, a way to diffuse responsibility so thoroughly that no one ever has to make a real decision.

The high-agency person is annoying because they refuse to let the group stay comfortable in dysfunction. They won’t let you coast on vague plans. They won’t let you pretend the strategy is solid when it’s mostly hope and vibes. They won’t let you hide behind “that’s just how things are” when “how things are” is clearly not working.

They ask the question no one wants asked. They name the dynamic everyone’s ignoring. They take the risk everyone else is avoiding. And yes, that’s uncomfortable. But discomfort is the only thing that actually moves the needle, because comfort is just another word for stagnation.

Every reformer, founder, whistleblower, inventor, activist, and leader was annoying at first. They disrupted the script. They refused to accept the default. They pissed people off by refusing to be complicit in broken systems. If they hadn’t been willing to be annoying, if they’d prioritized being liked over being effective, nothing would have changed.

The gender layer: when scripts are doubly enforced.

It’s hard to talk about this for me, because it feels like complaining—and I loathe complainers—but the reality is: high-agency women get penalized twice, because the scripts we’re breaking aren’t just social norms but gender expectations.

A man who makes decisions without asking is decisive and confident. A woman who does the same is controlling and doesn’t know how to collaborate. A man who refuses to defer is a natural leader. A woman who refuses to defer is difficult and needs to work on her people skills. A man who moves without building consensus is visionary. A woman who does it is not a team player.

This isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve watched men do exactly what I do and get called bold while I got called intense. I’ve been told to soften my communication style, to ask more questions before stating my position, to make sure everyone feels heard before moving forward. And I did try that for a while, because I wanted to be taken seriously and I thought maybe they were right.
But what I learned is that “being taken seriously” often just means “being palatable to people who are threatened by directness.” And I got tired of performing deference to make other people comfortable. I got tired of asking permission to do things I already knew how to do.

I got tired of the tax on my time and energy that came from having to manage everyone else’s feelings about my competence.

That’s a big part of why I finally started my own business back in 2015. When you run your own thing, no one’s in charge of you. You don’t have to negotiate your own authority. You don’t have to soften your edges to make other people feel okay. You can just see what needs to happen and do it.

But the fact that this is still necessary, that women still have to opt out of traditional structures to exercise full agency without constant friction, tells you everything about how deeply the scripts run. Breaking them as a woman isn’t just annoying to individuals. It’s destabilizing to the system, because if women stop deferring and start directing, the entire social order has to renegotiate itself.

High agency is not the same as narcissism.

This is important to clarify because narcissists are also high-agency in the sense that they break scripts and refuse to defer to consensus. So what’s the actual difference? It comes down to one thing: high-agency people update when they’re wrong. Narcissists don’t.

The defining feature of high agency isn’t confidence or decisiveness. It’s responsiveness to reality. High-agency people act decisively, but they’re also constantly course-correcting based on new information. They’re not attached to being right. They’re attached to getting to the right answer, which means they’ll change direction the moment the data shows they should.

Narcissists are attached to their own narrative above all else. They’ll break scripts, but only in service of their ego. They’ll reject consensus, but not because they’re seeking truth or better outcomes. They need to be the center, to be right, to be validated. When reality contradicts them, they’ll dismiss the reality before they’ll update the narrative.

High-agency people are also transparent in a way narcissists aren’t. If they have an agenda, you’ll know what it is. If they change their mind, they’ll tell you why. If they were wrong about something, they’ll admit it directly rather than reframing the situation so they were secretly right all along.

The other key difference is that high agency respects competence and expertise. High-agency people don’t bulldoze over people who actually know more than they do. They don’t mistake confidence for correctness. They break scripts that are genuinely broken, but they also recognize when a script exists for a good reason, when it’s encoding hard-won collective knowledge or protecting against known failure modes.

Narcissists assume they know better than everyone by default. High-agency people assume they might know better and then test that assumption rigorously against reality and the expertise of others. That distinction matters enormously.

The cost of never being annoying.

When no one in the room is willing to disrupt the script, the bad plan goes forward. The dysfunctional meeting continues indefinitely. The incompetent leader stays in charge because no one wants to create conflict by naming the problem. The unjust policy persists because challenging it would be uncomfortable. The relationship stays stuck in the same pattern because changing it would require someone to say “this isn’t working” out loud.

Comfort curdles into stagnation. Politeness becomes complicity. Niceness becomes a cage that prevents anyone from telling the truth or taking meaningful action.

Organizations that punish high-agency behavior end up with cultures of performative busyness where nothing actually gets done. Relationships where no one is willing to be direct end up hollow and resentful. Social movements that prioritize feelings over change accomplish nothing except making their members feel virtuous for having the right opinions.

High-agency people are annoying because they won’t let things stay broken. They won’t let you hide behind process, tradition, or the need for more discussion. They won’t let the group settle into comfortable dysfunction. They create friction, and friction is the only thing that generates heat, light, and forward motion.

At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to live by your own authority or keep waiting for permission that’s never coming.

High-agency people have made that decision. They’ve accepted that they’ll be called too much, too intense, too difficult. They’ve accepted that they’ll disrupt other people’s comfort. They’ve accepted that they’ll be resented for moving first, for seeing clearly, for refusing to pretend.
But they’ve also accepted that the alternative is worse. Flattening yourself to be palatable means letting other people’s fear dictate your choices. Waiting for consensus that never arrives means nothing ever changes. Living inside someone else’s script means you never actually find out what you’re capable of.

So here’s the question worth asking: when you encounter the “annoying” person in the room, the one who’s asking the hard question, challenging the default, refusing to go along with comfortable dysfunction, are they actually the problem? Or are they just the only one awake while everyone else is sleepwalking through scripts that stopped serving them years ago?

Maybe the annoying person is annoying because they’re holding up a mirror. And maybe what you’re seeing in that mirror isn’t them being too much. Maybe it’s you not being enough.

Go ask for what you want. Go set the boundaries that will make your life better. Preserve your precious bandwidth for the things that truly matter. Go be annoying.

—S

PS: If you enjoyed this essay, I recommend “Embrace your cringe and let it set you free” or “Thinking for yourself is so punk rock” next. x