What is the purpose of your life?
Why are you here?
If you had asked me these questions three years ago I would have probably answered that I was here to be a good mother and wife. To help others and contribute to the world. To make myself into a better person and overcome my faults and weaknesses.
But I certainly wouldn’t have told you that I was here for joy, for excitement, for expression. I wouldn’t have told you that I was here just to delight in each new day and the experience of being a human with all of my good and my bad, my light and my dark.
When did we as women get sold the idea that we need to work for our joy? That our greatest gift to the world is sacrificing our own wants and pleasure to take care of and serve others?
I can’t remember there being a moment when I took this on, it just always seemed to be the reality. And I didn’t have the awareness back then to recognize the pain and sadness in the fake smiles of the women I grew up surrounded by.
When women try to fit themselves into too small of boxes, all kinds of things happen.
- There are women who become so filled with resentment at not accomplishing their own dreams that they pour all of that energy into controlling their children and living through them.
- There are women who slowly fade into addictions to substances like food, alcohol, and medications to numb the feelings and tolerate the intolerable.
- There are women who hustle and checklist their lives away trying to earn that love, trying to earn the right to feel good and like they are enough.
When you grow up believing that you do not have an inherent right to be who you are, feel how you feel, and act accordingly, parts of you have to be shutdown, ignored, or numbed to survive.
And then you go through life feeling like you’re half alive and half zombie. Always trapped between making others happy or choosing happiness for yourself.
But I want to dispel that lie. The lie that somehow you will hurt the ones you love by choosing happiness for yourself first.
The reality is that you’re not doing anyone a favor by people pleasing and lying to yourself and others to try and be what you think you’re supposed to be, because eventually, you won’t be able to sustain it.
Trust me, I know.
I hustled hard for my self worth for the first 29 years of my life and definitely throughout 10 years of my marriage, and then one day I hit a wall and realized I was so empty of joy and connection in my life that I was done.
I had created a life that was there to fuel and take care of others lives.
And the crazy thing was, no one else knew that I wasn’t happy.
When I did eventually move forward with divorce, my husband at the time told me that he just hadn’t understood how bad things were, and I knew that was because I had done such a good job at what I thought I was supposed to do – pretend that I was happy.
But pretending is no longer our lot in life as women. The world is shifting and women are waking up to the beauty of trusting themselves.
Of believing that they are worthy of a full life lived on their terms and filled with all that they desire – whether that’s a career, marriage or no marriage, bearing children or no children, partnership, adoption, travel, stillness, play, pleasure, excitement, passion, relief, and peace.
And it all begins by letting go of the belief that your wants are selfish and you’re greatest calling is to take care of others.
I want you to know that as you honor what you love and feel called to in your life, you will become more round and full.
You will fill up with yourself and the excess will spill over onto everyone and everything in your life. Then your children will grow up with a mother that loves them not because she has to, but because she is so in love with herself and her life that it happens naturally.
This is the gift given to the world when women love and honor themselves first.