Before the World Had Opinions

Close your eyes for a moment.

Find her - the version of you before the world had opinions about who you should be. Before you learned to make yourself smaller in certain rooms, and louder in others. Before you started editing yourself in real time based on who was watching.

Mine is about ten years old. Running barefoot through a field of wildflowers in a lavender dress, hair loose and flying in the wind. Smiling so big due to pure life joy. She doesn't know anyone is watching. She isn't performing a single thing. She's just completely herself.

Most of us knew how to do that once. And most of us can trace, if we're honest, the quiet moment when we started to forget.

It doesn't happen right away. There's no single event you can point to and say that's when I lost myself. It's slower than that.

• The culture you grow up in.

• The people closest to you.

• The thousand small moments where you learned, consciously or not, that certain parts of you made others uncomfortable. That being fully yourself was perhaps a little too much.

And so you adjust. You soften an edge here, amplify something there. You become very good at reading rooms and becoming what the room needs. It feels like social skill. It feels like maturity. It doesn't feel like loss at all.

Until one day it does.

I know this because I lived it - the slow erosion, and then the overcorrection. When I felt the pull back toward myself I grabbed it too hard. I went too far the other way: too loud, too much, performing my personality instead of living it. And underneath all of that I was running myself like a drill sergeant. Hard and relentless in a way I would never treat someone I loved. The puzzle pieces of who I truly am were all there. I just kept forcing the wrong ones into place.

It took the Universe pausing my life completely to help me see it. The kind you can't negotiate with or push through or stay busy enough to avoid. Just stillness. And in that stillness, finally, clarity.

Clarity about the path I'd been on. The version of myself I'd been performing. How far I'd drifted from the girl in the field. It was a harsh teacher, but I've learned that sometimes we don't slow down until something makes us. Sometimes the most loving thing life can do is take away our ability to keep running.

The pieces were always there. We just sometimes need enough life experience, enough wrong turns, and enough full stops before the right ones finally fall into place.

Maybe you're in the middle of your own stop right now. Or maybe you're on the other side of one, still catching your breath, trying to find the thread that leads back to her.

She's still there. She never left. She's been in the field this whole time, barefoot, carefree and waiting with all the patience in the world for you to find your way back. 🌻

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✨ Think of your own version of her - the you before the world had opinions. How old is she? What is she doing? I'd love to know. Leave it in the comments.

✨ And if you're somewhere in the middle of finding your way back to yourself, The Quiet Shift Guide is a gentle place to start. Free, and made for exactly this season.