When Your Life Becomes Everyone Else’s: Reclaiming the Woman Within

When Your Life Becomes Everyone Else’s: Reclaiming the Woman Within

Somewhere along the way, many women stop asking themselves what they want.

Not because they don’t have desires.
But because they were taught not to.

From the time we were little girls, we were handed plastic babies and told, “Take care of her.”
We were praised for being helpful, quiet, nurturing.
We learned early: your value is what you give. Your worth lives outside of you.

So we grew into women who knew how to read a room better than we could read our own bodies.
We became intuitive to others’ needs — partners, children, coworkers — while growing deaf to our own.

And somewhere in that beautiful, heartbreaking devotion…

We forgot ourselves.

Pause here.
Take a breath.
Let that land.

Because if you’ve been the one who holds it all together…
The strong one. The reliable one. The giver.
You may not even realize how little space you’ve left for you.

And then one day, it shifts.
The children grow up. The marriage changes. The role you’ve anchored your identity to begins to dissolve.
And you’re left asking:

Who am I when no one needs me?

It’s a devastatingly holy question.
And one that invites you into the most powerful reclamation of your life.

Here’s the deeper truth:
When your identity is built on doing for others, you can’t fully connect with yourself or with them.
Because real intimacy requires wholeness, not performance.
Real love invites both people to be who they are, not who they were trained to be.

When you script your life around someone else’s needs, you unconsciously script theirs too.
No one gets to grow.
No one gets to be free.

This is the hidden cost of caretaking as identity.
Not the love itself, but the loss of self in the giving.

So today, I offer you a gentle but fierce invitation:

Reclaim your want.

If someone asks where you want to eat, tell them.
If someone asks what you want to watch, say it.
If someone asks how you want to spend your time, don’t defer. Declare.

Say it with power behind you.
Say it like your needs matter too.
Because they do.

And this isn’t selfish.
This is sacred.

This is the slow, powerful return to your own inner knowing.
Not because you’ve stopped loving others, but because you’ve remembered how to love yourself.

You are not your trauma.
You are not the role you’ve played.
You are a woman coming home to her soul.

Welcome back.