Nobody Told Us

Nobody asked me if I wanted to spend the first forty years of my adult life proving I was worth the space I took up.

They just assumed I’d be fine with it. And honestly? I was. Because I didn’t know there was another option.

That’s the thing about conditioning. It doesn’t knock. It just moves in, unpacks its bags, and starts rearranging your furniture.

I was sitting in a women’s circle last week — and before you ask, no, I was not the one holding the talking stick and running the show. I was a regular human being sitting in a chair. It was glorious.

The facilitator had written something about energy moving like the tide. How it rises and recedes. In rhythm. In natural harmony. No apology required.

Man, my whole body exhaled.

Because somewhere between “be a good girl” and “lean in, queen” nobody told us that rest was part of the deal. Nobody told us the tide is supposed to go out. We just kept paddling.

We were little girls once. And we got praised for being helpful. For being quiet. For not asking for too much. For making things easier for everyone around us. And we learned quickly that our value lived somewhere in our usefulness.

Then we grew up and the world handed us a second shift. Work all day, come home and work some more, call it love, don’t complain. And some of us did it for decades without blinking because that’s just what you did.

About that time, the wellness industry showed up and said you need to optimize yourself. And girlboss culture said the only thing standing between you and success is your mindset. And nobody — not one single person — said maybe the whole setup is the problem.

My saving grace came in the form of my girlfriend’s mother who was a preachers wife, bore 5 children in rapid succession, and went to college in midlife to earn her degrees and carve out a late in life career.

I’ll never forget what she told this young struggling working mom. “You can have everything in life you want. You just can’t have it all at once.”

I’ve been thinking about that woman lately. Because here we are — some of us retired, some of us in our second act, some of us doing both on alternating Tuesdays — and we are still, STILL trying to justify our existence through.

I gave myself until May to answer a very serious question.

Am I a Ho or a Bo? No, not that. A hobby owner or a business owner.

I needed to know. I needed a label. I needed to pick a lane because apparently driving in two lanes at once is frowned upon. Fifty years of conditioning told me that a thing without a category is a thing without value.

And you know what I figured out? The answer is yes. Yes, AND.

Some days I put on my business brain and I make the calls and I look at the numbers and I am absolutely a business owner. Some days I follow my muse into the 3am dark and write things that don’t have a business case yet and I am absolutely doing something that lights me up. And some days the tide is out and I wait and I trust it’s coming back.

All three of those are real. All three of those count.

The ho-or-bo question was never really about clarity. It was the same old voice asking me to justify myself. Just wearing a cute little entrepreneurship outfit.

The stuff we’re carrying, the need to be busy, the guilt about rest, the feeling that we have to earn our own time — we did not choose that. It was handed to us before we were old enough to read the fine print. By a system that needed us productive and compliant and not asking too many questions.

And retirement doesn’t fix it. That’s the part nobody puts in the brochure.

You can leave the job and still wake up at 6am feeling like you’re already behind. You can be completely free on paper and still feel like you need to account for your afternoon. Because the conditioning is internal now. It’s in the walls.

Naming it doesn’t make it disappear. But it does change things.

Because once you know that voice isn’t yours, you can hear it and go “oh, that’s just the old recording, not my actual wisdom.” You give yourself some grace and get a little room. A little air. A little space to ask what you actually want.

And that question, friend, is worth the whole second act.

The tide goes out. The tide comes in. Nobody shames the ocean for the in-between.

All boats rise.

Not just the ones that are moving.

Jayne Reid, this week’s podcast guest, knows all about trying to prove her existence. Throughout her life and career, she kept showing up anyway — and that relentless showing up is exactly what that little voice inside so many of us learned to call our worth. This episode drops Sunday, June 7—watch it HERE.