You Didn't Lose Yourself. (You Stopped Listening To Your Heart.)

Nadine was standing in a grocery store lineup when she started laughing.

She'd looked down into her cart. And there wasn't one thing in it that she would have bought if her husband had been with her. 

Not one. Every item was something she actually liked. Something she'd given up, item by item, year by year, without ever deciding to.

She'd been divorced a few months by then. Nineteen years of marriage behind her. And the thing that undid her in that lineup wasn't grief. It was recognition.

She had handed herself over so gradually that she never felt it leave.

Then there was the singing.

She caught herself doing it in the car one afternoon, and the sound shocked her a little. She had sung her whole life. Travelled with a seventy-five-voice choir as a teenager. 

And somewhere in those nineteen years, she had stopped, and she could not tell you when. There was no day she decided to go silent. She just did, one small accommodation at a time, until the quiet was so normal she forgot it had ever been song.

When Nadine told me this story, she said something that really resonated. “The biggest thing anyone has to do,” she said,” is get to a place where they actually care about themselves.”

Because for years she had been letting someone else decide things. And she didn't even think she was doing it.

That last part is the one I want you to think about…carefully.

She wasn't a woman who rolled over. She fought. She stood up for herself. She refused things. 

From the inside, it never looked like surrender. 

It looked like keeping the peace, being reasonable, choosing the microwave over the argument about the dishwasher. A thousand small reasonable choices, none of them big enough to notice, all of them pointing away from herself.

I know this from the inside.

This was my life before 50. Slowly, gradually, I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, stopped offering ideas, stopped accepting compliments, praise or gratitude for anything I’d done.

And like Nadine, I couldn't have told you the day it left. That's how this works. Not a robbery. A slow handing-over.

Have You Stopped Singing?

Let me bring this to your work, because it's the same pattern showing up in multiple ways.

You’re building something. A business, a body of work, a voice people are meant to recognize as yours. And every piece of it rests on a single foundation: the woman making the decisions. 

Who is she?

What does she actually think? 

What does she want, before anyone else weighs in?

If you don't know, you'll build the way Nadine shopped. 

You'll fill the cart with what gets approval. You'll post what performs for other people. You'll shape the offer the market seems to want. 

You'll soften the opinion that might cost you a client. None of it will be wrong, exactly. 

It'll be reasonable. It'll keep the peace. 

And one day you'll look at what you've built and feel that same strange awareness rising, because you can't find yourself anywhere in it.

Let me say that again: one day you'll look at what you've built and feel the same strange awareness rising... because you can't find yourself anywhere in it.

I've watched accomplished women do this with their businesses for years now. Build something impressive, and feel like a stranger in it.

Ask Yourself Two Simple Questions

There's a voice that runs the handover. I call him Fred. He’s your fear.

Fred is the part of you that learned, a long time ago, that being fully yourself was risky.

That having an opinion got you corrected.

That wanting too much, taking up too much room, being too much, cost you something. 

So now, every time you're about to choose from your own knowing, Fred reaches outward for you. He has you check before you speak. Consult before you decide. Ask someone else what they think before you ask yourself.

Fred isn't your enemy. Fear isn't meant to be the force against us. Fred's a protector working from very old information. 

He believes the safest version of you is the agreeable one, the one who fits. He's trying to keep you from being hurt the way you were hurt before. 

The trouble is, he's still protecting a woman who no longer exists, and the cost of his protection is that you slowly go missing from your own life.

You don't have to fight him. Nadine didn't. She thanked the part of her that had kept her safe, and then she started choosing for herself again.

That's the question underneath all of it. 

Who tells you who you are? And who do you want to be?

You answer it the way she did. Not with a grand declaration. With one small thing that's actually yours.

Your Tiny Brave Step

So, your Tiny Brave Step. 

Sometime this week, look at your own cart. Open your last two weeks of posts, your calendar, the decisions you made about your work. 

Find one thing in there that you chose because someone else would approve of it. Just notice it. You don't have to undo it. Noticing is the brave part, because Fred would rather you didn't look.

Then find one thing, one, that's entirely yours. And do a little more of that.

That's how you start singing again. Not all at once. One true note.

If you want help finding that note, the Tiny Brave Steps Generator will meet you where you are and hand you something small enough to actually do. 

And if you're ready to do this work alongside other women who are remembering who they are, that's what Creative Spaces is for.

You were never lost. You just stopped listening to your heart. It's time to take the wheel back.