What if you just let yourself exist?
Listen. We are not taught anything about our brains. As we grow we learn to change or avoid pieces of ourselves to be likable. We try to shrink and reshape. Although we often fail at fitting in we succeed in withering our authentic selves. As the years pass we lose the ability to distinguish between our voice and the voices of the world. We become shadows of ourselves. Ghosts.
It is common, especially for women, to have grown into adulthood having skipped this part of development altogether.
We linger at the edges of our lives, never fully stepping into them, haunting ourselves while we wait for things to change. We will wait forever.
Without having built our foundation from within we end up struggling to remain steady in an unpredictable world. We are pulled and pushed and we reach for someone else to steady us. We depend on others to hold us up and they simply cannot.
We believe that life just happens.
We believe that life just happens to us and that our only option is to react. This belief disconnects us from the power that is innate within us. We practice the voice we think we are supposed to use, and muzzle our truth. We let ourselves wilt inside like forgotten house plants. As women, we are raised with expectations that put us in conflict with ourselves from our first breath. Our identities slip through our fingers and into a sea of billions. We keep searching for perfection that is purely fiction. We are a society obsessed with validation from others because we mistake it for self-actualization.
This is how most of us reach adulthood without letting ourselves happen. We don’t know how to be.