Self-abandonment
Self-abandonment doesn’t look dramatic. It looks like a woman who's perfectly fine, perfectly capable, perfectly accommodating. A woman who cannot tell you the last time she made a decision based on her own desire instead of everyone else's convenience!
With years of experience you become fluent in everyone's needs but your own. You can read the room in seconds! You know who’s tired, who's stressed, who needs managing but if someone asks you what you need, you go blank. Not because you don't have needs. Because you stopped listening for them so long ago you lost the frequency!
The worst part is that it feels like a virtue. Selflessness. Being easy-going. Being low-maintenance. We hand out gold stars for self-abandonment and call the woman doing it, “amazing” and "such a rock."
Constant compromise doesn't make you more loving. It makes you absent from your own life while still turning up to it every day. That's the bit I'm done with. Not the giving, I’ll always give. But giving from a place of choice, not from the reflex of a woman who forgot she was allowed to want something too!
Women are trained to fit in to make other people feel more comfortable. They say yes when they mean no. They arrange their life around everyone else's calendar. They call it being a good mother, a good wife, a good woman!
Absorbing other people's needs, moods, and expectations becomes so big that there is no room for your needs. And the wild thing is, nobody made you do it. We volunteered! We bought into the world of care and service; we bought into the virtue of what 'good' looked like.
Nobody sits you down and asks you to give up your whole self in one go. It happens in millimetres.
It's the dinner you didn't want to go to, but went anyway. It's the opinion you swallowed because it wasn't worth the argument. It's the career move you didn't make, the trip you didn't take, the boundary you didn't set. You got eroded.
You tell yourself it's fine, it's just this once, it's not a big deal. And it isn't. Until you look up fifteen years later and realise the "just this once" became the architecture of your whole life. You built a marriage, a family, an identity around never being the inconvenient one. Around making sure everyone else's needs got met first, and calling whatever was left over "self-care."
The compromise wasn't a single decision. It was a thousand tiny abdications, each one so small you couldn't feel yourself disappearing. Nobody held a gun to your head. You picked the smaller version of yourself because it was easier than the friction of asking for the bigger one!
Say no to yourself enough times and eventually you stop asking the question. You stop checking in. You no longer wonder what would suit you because you already know the answer doesn't matter. You end up in the ‘why bother’ space.
No longer compromising doesn’t mean you have to suddenly become difficult. It means you slow down, take a breath, and speak your truth. You say short simple phrases like:
“That doesn’t work for me.”
“I’ll pass on that.”
“That’s outside of my current priorities.”
“I’d love to help but I don’t have the capacity right now.”
“I need to say no to this.”
Simple sentences are the start!
If you would love a few days designed to return to yourself, to rediscover your wants then come and get Repotted! We have a few places left: 13th-15th November.