The pressure you’ve been under has formed who you are today. Nothing lasts forever, and you have more choices than you realize. You have strengths you’ve mistaken for weaknesses; strengths you’ve kept buried.
Those strengths are your power, and it’s time for you to embrace them.
When you do what’s best for your higher self, things will work out, I promise.
Part of you already knows this, and that part is your higher self: this is who you are without your ego and other external influences bossing you around. It can be unbearable in the beginning, so get a good therapist and give me a call.
Here’s how I know this works:
When I turned 40, I started realizing I had forgotten who I was, and I had to find ways to honor her. Here’s what I did:
- I looked ahead on the path I was on and decided I deserved a better one. It was my choice to make.
- I ended my marriage because I knew it would eventually destroy me and everyone else.
- I invited a group of women to gather monthly to deconstruct and reconstruct together.
- I started therapy, and I waited for the right therapist because I knew she was the one.
I began asking myself: What do I need? What do I want?
And let me tell you, that was really hard to answer.
Here’s a story: Before I made all these decisions, I had a few hours to myself on a weekend, without my kids, and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. Did I want to read a book? See a movie? Go for a walk? I had a panic attack in my car, in a parking lot, because I had no idea.
I didn’t know what I liked or wanted in this small decision, and I realized I had been doing this for the big ones, too. I didn’t even know how to begin to think about what I wanted, because for years, I had stopped listening to my mind and body, and I forgot how to do it.
When you have lived a life for other people, doing what you think you should do to fit in, or appease your family, or smooth things over, even if it feels safe, it’s not.
This kind of living eats away at your power and disconnects you from yourself. It moves your source of truth from inside to outside.
Do you know why that is? For all of my feminism up until then, I hadn’t done the work to be able to see that my choices were already made for me. I wasn’t driving my own life path, and when I tried to take the wheel, I felt guilty AF.
That’s what it looks like to hand your power over to an external system. And in this and many other cultures and countries, that system is patriarchy. Patriarchy demands compliant women who will sacrifice and caretake endlessly, which ultimately benefits only men.
What does that sacrifice actually look like?
Abandoning your vision: Changing the direction of your idea because a man gave you “advice”.
Losing time: Absorbing every caretaking role in your household and spending all your time, even your professional time, in the service of others.
Dissolving your identity: It looks like accepting mediocrity from people around you because you’re convinced yourself it’s better like this than alone.
You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be loved.
What happens when you reconnect with yourself and choose her?
When I started choosing myself four decades into my life, I lost a lot of people. Divorce was one of the hardest, most expensive, most humbling experiences of my life.
And my life began to improve.
So did my business.
So did my kids’ lives.
I started asking for help, which felt radical. I had learned throughout my life, especially in married life, that asking for help was an exercise in futility, so I stopped doing it. I had convinced myself (yes, I am an eldest daughter AND granddaughter) that I had to do everything myself and that asking for help was not only pitiful, but no one valued me enough to do it anyway.
Business mythology tells us the same lie: we worship the self-made, bootstrapping man. But it’s a myth. Every one of those men had people, resources, and systems propping them up and falling over themselves with their mediocrity.
I refuse to accept that story anymore.
I refuse patriarchy.
I refuse judgment.
I refuse mediocrity.
I refuse complacency.
I refuse injustice.
I refuse conditional love.
I refuse fear as motivation.
I embrace love.
I embrace justice.
I embrace change.
I embrace joy.
I embrace myself, exactly as I am, because I am a goddess and I am worth it.
You are, too. Ask for help.
Big love and credit to The House of Morrigan, who inspired this essay.