Permission to Be

What happens when you stop performing and start remembering who you are

I worry sometimes I will never really trust anything.

I can feel it shake in my pelvis—the nerves that I am out here, always, all alone.

I feel like I will never trust the things around me to be true, or just another set of miles on the road.

I think I have been holding my pelvis since the minute I got married and became a wife and assumed this role.

I have been a wife for 19 years this September, and really, I feel like I am just getting my foot in the role now.

Back then I was just following an invisible social checklist on becoming an Adult in America.

I made calculated choices like my life was a reality TV game show—like Big Brother or Survivor.

I thought there was a method, a formula for success.

There isn’t though.

There is just judgment and how we deal with it all.

There are just hurt feelings we decide how to deal with.

There are only choices.

Still, we cannot deny that society asks us to follow the invisible standard that now includes even more fake aesthetic standards to meet the mark.

Of course, the mark for women is always so much higher than for men. You can find any local business influencer in your own state—fat, balding, and in an expensive suit—remarking on how many celebrities they know, but not actually doing anything. Like they’re the man. Meanwhile, we need long hair, long fake nails, huge fake lips, and no wrinkles to get anywhere.

I digress.

This is about getting you to lean out of that influencer life. That “don’t make it up just to get the like” kind of future—because the only judge out here is yourself.

All those people you’re involved with in these packs of women competing, these men showing off on golf courses, snorting drugs in the bathroom—they will fade away and leave you as soon as they see the next thing that gets them closer to the money they’re trying to make.

And this is what everyone is fighting for.
What it looks like to people that do not matter.

It’s hard to trust myself because I constantly do things to get me out of that place. That place everyone else is fighting to go. Fighting to be seen—and I have decided more and more that the more they see, the more they just weave a make-believe story to suit them.

I wonder if I can trust myself as I continue to do things that normal society tells me is against the rules—and then admire me for being brave enough to traverse a path that just feels like the way.
I wonder if I will ever feel the confidence everyone always says I exude.

I don’t trust the world because no one can think of me like I can.
And if I did meet the chart-capable version of myself, I know I wouldn’t like them anyway.

I know the way to sturdy has more to do with leaning into my own way,
but I want it put out there that I have been holding my pelvis the entire time I have been grown up going this way.

My deepest heart dream is to just be adored and worshipped by all,
and instead I often have to put up boundaries like a force of God on folks.

I have to tell them truths they didn’t want to look at, but can’t stop thinking about.

I have to ask the people I am around to be themselves, without racing to be like everyone else.

I have to keep leaving everyone I have ever loved behind me—lost to the rat race of the things achieved and unachievable.

I have to sit in this pelvis of mine and deal with these trust issues.

Maybe it will always feel hard,
but there is no way but through.

Keep facing your issues.
It is only going to heat up around here, my lovelies.