I know there are people right now who are thinking, But you don’t know what they did. You don’t know what I went through. You’re right, I don’t. But I do know that if your past is still affecting your life today in a negative way, holding on to it is not helping you.
Does it make you feel better about yourself? Does it make you kinder to people when you live in that state of misery, in the state of, “I’m too fat. I’m too thin. I’m too young. I’m too old. I’m too . . .”? How is it making you feel?
It’s making you feel like crap. Nobody is living in a place of not enough and happy about it. Nobody is inspired and making great choices and enthusiastic and excited for every day while they are living in a state of not enough.
The amazing thing is that this is all perception. It’s all what you believe to be true. And you get to decide what you believe. If we were girlfriends in real life I would shake your shoulders and remind you that you get to decide.
I am living proof that your past does not determine your future.
I am a living, breathing example.
I am your friend, Rachel, and I am telling you that I walked through trauma and I walked through pain and I have been bullied and I have felt ugly and unworthy and not enough in a hundred different ways. And I have decided to reclaim my life. I have reclaimed it and fought back against the lies and the limiting beliefs over and over and over again. I have built on that strength by looking at what is true, not what is opinion. And you can too.
EXCUSE 5:
I CAN’T PURSUE MY DREAM AND STILL BE A GOOD MOM/DAUGHTER/EMPLOYEE
You can remove the word mom from this excuse and replace it with anything of your choosing: wife, sister, Christian, friend, fill-in-the-blank.
I hate this excuse.
Like, it actually pisses me off. Not because you might believe it, but because I did too. Do you know how many years I wasted trying to live my life to please everyone else? Do you know how long I beat myself up because I liked to work when all the other moms I knew wanted to stay at home? Most of us will grapple with this, and the vast majority of those who do won’t pursue anything that might come at the expense of anyone else’s happiness.
You want to join a gym, but that would require your husband to watch the baby so you can go work out and he doesn’t like to watch the baby? Oh, shoot, well, I guess you can’t go. Or, you want to move to a new city, but your family is super close and your mom will freak out if you’re not nearby? Okay, I guess you’ll just live forever right where you are. Or, you want to use your retirement traveling the world like you always dreamed of, but your daughter was counting on having you nearby to help her with the kids? All right, you better let that vision for your life go.
After all, their happiness matters more than yours does, right? They matter more than you do. The only way to be a good mother, daughter, sister, friend, or whatever is to show up for the other parties exactly how they want you to, when they want you to, right?
Ladies, you get one chance at this—literally only one chance at this life—and you have no idea when your chance might be over. You cannot waste it living only for everyone else.
I don’t mean that you should be wholly selfish. I don’t mean that you should assume life is only about you and what makes you happy. Part of being in a family or a relationship or a community means showing up for others. The problem is that most women I know don’t struggle to show up for others; they struggle to show up for themselves.
I was talking with my dad the other day about the idea for this book. I told him that I wanted to write about pursuing and achieving goals. I told him how many women send me notes asking me how to find the courage to do that. He told me to tell you to be selfish.
“You know what they told me on the first day of class for my PhD?”
My dad always, always starts any story with a question, knowing full well his audience doesn’t know the answer. I used to hate it as a child because I assumed he just liked to prove his superior intellect. As an adult, though, I can look back and see that he was teaching us, from a very early age, to work through a problem before waiting for someone to tell us the answer. Now, of course, I do the exact same thing to my kids and cringe to imagine what my eight-year-old self would think of it. In any event, I didn’t have an answer for him that day.
“No, Daddy, what did they tell you?”
“They told us to be selfish. They told us that getting a PhD later in life was something you did for yourself and nobody else. They told us that it wouldn’t be long before our spouse or our kids or our boss got frustrated by our classes or our homework or how long it takes to write a thesis. They told us if we weren’t selfish with this one thing—our dream of having a doctorate—we’d let someone else talk us out of it.”
I’m going to assume that you spend a good deal of your life thinking about others and caring about others and being a great family member and employee and friend. But I’m going to tell you, at least as far as your goal is concerned, that you’re allowed to focus on it even if it means that you’ll miss some time with the people you care about. I’m also going to encourage you to ask yourself (just like in the previous chapter) if something is true or if something is an opinion.
There are two extremely well-known opinions that play deeply into the narrative about what you can and can’t be simultaneously. The first is work-life balance. The idea that work and life can ever be perfectly in balance is an opinion.
It’s the million-dollar question for every working mom, right, ladies? How do you balance your job and your family? It’s a valid question and worth discussing if for no other reason than that it’s reassuring to hear other working moms struggle with this too. My thoughts on this topic are really quite strong, and I don’t mind telling you exactly what I’ve said on numerous business panels over the last decade.
Work-life balance is a myth.
More than that, it’s a hurtful myth, because I don’t think anyone actually achieves it and yet we feel positive that other women somehow have. Someone somewhere mentioned it as a possibility—their opinion, mind you—and the media seemed to latch on. So when we feel off balance and are struggling to keep all our balls in the air, we assume it’s just because we haven’t figured out work-life balance. It becomes one more thing we’re failing at as moms, beyond forgetting it was “weird and wacky hair day” at school and buying the wrong kind of yogurt. Ugh! I detest anything that makes women feel wrong or less than, so allow me to debunk this ridiculous idea.