MY PHILOSOPHY
I spent most of my life at war with myself. Between me I'd always been inside, and the me that religion, society, achievement told me I was supposed to be. Every bit of turmoil in my life sits at this intersection: real me, trying to stuff myself into a box that was never built to fit.
I coped by performing. Intensely. Competitively. Seriously. I made myself into someone I wasn't, just to win. To survive. And underneath it, the real me shriveled up like a little sick alien living inside my own life, infecting the host.
So I said fuck the rules. I'm writing my own.
I'm beautiful and whimsical and creative and edgy and rebellious and feral, all at once.
Soft and hard. Beautiful and ugly. Clean and messy.
All at the same time. I will not be stuffed into a box anymore. I will not sacrifice myself to win. I will shuck off every identity that was never mine to begin with in order to be fully me. It’s my journey and mission.
Everything I do is grounded in my lived experience, and the ongoing work of moving from the identity I built to succeed in this world, to the fully free version of me who’s been underneath it the whole time.
These are the principles I live and work by.
01 - I stopped waiting for someone else to hand me the answer.
For years I let other people hand me the recipe for what to believe, how to find meaning, what my life was supposed to add up to. It never felt like mine. Not until I crashed the fucking plane of my own life and realized the only thing I actually wanted was to live on my own terms, freely enough that other women could see it was possible for them too. That's when it started working, not when someone handed me the answer, but when I trusted myself enough to write my own.
02 - I was never a perfectionist.
Even though I spent SO much of my life talking about being a perfectionist, I realized that “perfection” was never core to who I am. It was a set of handcuffs, keeping me safe and small and scared of being embarrassed, scared of stepping out of line. But, there's no way to a bigger life if you're stuck on perfection, stuck on what people will think when you mess up. You have to be willing to fuck up. Get messy. Get embarrassed. It's the only way forward towards real ownership.
03 - I am the exact right thing to be
My uniqueness, who I've always been underneath, is the exact right thing to be. Not a problem to manage. Not something to sand down to fit. I spent years highlighting the qualities I needed to be taken seriously and turning down the ones that had no real place. Now I know that when I stop performing and let the real me run the show, I get to do what I want. I get to have WAY more fun. And I don't apologize for it.
This is a lifetime pursuit. I'm still learning these principles every day. Old beliefs still rear their ugly heads, and I still have to catch them and choose myself again.
But I'm steadfast in my pursuit of full ownership of my life — and of showing other women what's possible when they chuck the false identity they've been living in and reclaim the powerful, whimsical, beautiful version who’s been underneath all along.