“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
-Anaïs Nin
That’s where many of us women find ourselves. We’ve been conditioned to grasp, to tighten in the face of difficulty. Grasping for someone to make it better, for someone to take the weight from us.
When we face a challenge, our first instinct is to look for a way out: food, conversation, a relationship, a distraction.
We reach out for something, anything, to soothe the discomfort instead of sitting with it, letting it pass through us, allowing it to shape us into someone who can carry the fullness of our lives without needing an external savior.
It is subtle, but it is deep. It pulls us into ideas about love and need.
This is where I see the real crisis of our time. We have women who believe they are empowered but lack the autonomy to truly hold themselves. They are in opposition to old models of femininity, but opposition is not power.
True empowerment is autonomy.
And autonomy is not independence in the way it’s often framed. Autonomy is the capacity to carry out the imperatives of life.
It is not about being apart from others, but about being able to help others, to lift them out of suffering without losing yourself in the process.