I was raised a good girl. Chances are, you were too.
Good girls don’t talk back, follow the rules, and are…well…good.
We all walk away from our kid lives with a wound or too. And most of us can process our history well enough to at least understand it.
But having it never effect us again? That’s another thing altogether.
There is just some conditioning shit that’s hard to get past.
I listened to a podcast the other day that was talking about the term unapologetic as it applied to being oneself, suggesting that it was a negative in the business world. I get it, coming off as an arrogant asshat is annoying and off-putting, especially when so much of business is cultivating relationships.
That example is not just about business, though.
That’s actually the rub for us former good girls. We would rather water ourselves down and play small, than risk being seen as an ass-hat, annoying or off-putting. Someone else is always calling the shots.
Leaving us right back to being those good girls, doing what’s expected of us instead of what we feel and know in ourselves is right for us.
At some point we have to be able to say “This is what I want and I’m not sorry for wanting what I want.”
Start there. You can always figure the other stuff out later.
Unapologetically.