Why a Woman Never Stops Becoming

There is a Lauryn Hill song I keep coming back to. Somewhere in the middle, almost in passing, she warns against turning yourself into stone when what you really are is something precious.

I keep thinking about what that hardening costs. Making yourself smaller, more manageable, easier to overlook, because somewhere along the way you learned that taking up room was risky. That wanting more was ungrateful. That the version of you with ambition and standards was too much for the room.

From the outside, it looks responsible. Low-maintenance. No trouble. The kind of woman nobody needs to adjust for.

From the inside, it is a slow way of disappearing.

So what keeps a woman from disappearing? I don’t think it’s drive, exactly.

Some of it is freedom. Not the abstract kind, but the plain, unglamorous kind: not needing anyone’s permission to live the way you want, being able to make a decision about your own life without negotiating it through someone else’s comfort.

I have watched brilliant, generous women become smaller versions of themselves, not because they weren’t enough, but because they never built the kind of independence that makes smallness optional. They stayed where it cost them too much, because leaving required resources they didn’t have. They said yes to things that diminished them, because no had consequences they couldn’t absorb.

Money is part of this, but not all of it. It’s the slow work of building a life sturdy enough that your choices are actually yours, and not decided by what you can’t afford to lose. Only when you can leave does staying become a choice.

Some of it is memory. I know what it is like when circumstances make your decisions for you, when there is no leverage and no exit and nowhere to stand.

There is a Destiny’s Child song about women who buy their own jewelry. I ended up going the other way. I sold mine, along with my savings, to pay for two years of learning. It was the only way I could see to understand what had happened, and to make sure it never happened that way again.

And some of it is what happens to a woman who keeps taking herself seriously. Keep learning, keep building, keep showing up when it would be easier not to, and something changes in how you carry yourself. You stop waiting for someone else to confirm your worth, because you’ve collected enough evidence of your own. You make decisions from steadiness instead of anxiety.

It isn’t arrogance. It is what accumulates.

It changes love, too. A woman who has built something of her own chooses differently. She can stay because she wants to, not because she has nowhere else to go.

So on the days the effort feels like too much, and the result looks too far away to justify it, I don’t think the answer is a bigger reason. You aren’t doing this to impress anyone, or to prove anything. You are doing it because becoming yourself takes room, and room is rarely given.

Many of us end up building it ourselves.

Hardening was never the only option, even when it felt like the safest one.

This is KC — from Love & Life. 💜