Choosing Yourself
Definition
She was taught to choose everyone else first. It was called love. It was called goodness. It was called being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. The choosing of everyone else's needs before her own was the evidence of her worth. The choosing of herself was dangerous territory: it looked like selfishness, like abandonment, like not being the woman she was supposed to be. Choosing yourself is not the abandonment of others. It is the recognition that you cannot give from a place of complete depletion, that the self who is always last is running on a debt that eventually comes due, that your life is also one of the lives that matters in the accounting.
Origins & Context
Tara Mohr in Playing Big identifies the pattern of self-abandonment in high-functioning women: the woman who is capable and accomplished but who consistently places her own development, her own needs, and her own truth last, in service of maintaining relationships and meeting external expectations. The choosing of herself requires a fundamental reorientation of the moral framework she was handed.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves names the woman's relationship to herself as the primary relationship: the one that, when it is healthy, makes all other relationships healthier. The woman who has left herself behind cannot fully love others. She can serve them. She can organize her life around them. These are not the same.
Brene Brown in The Gifts of Imperfection distinguishes between fitting in and belonging: fitting in requires the erasure of the self to match the group's expectations, while belonging requires bringing the self fully. The woman who chooses herself is making the transition from fitting in to belonging.
You were taught to choose everyone else first and to call that love. Choosing yourself is not the abandonment of love. It is the recognition that your life is also one of the lives that matters.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
Choosing yourself shows up as the decision made from your own knowing rather than from what will please or appease. The answer that does not begin with a calculation of what the other person needs.
It shows up as the recovery of rest. The ability to stop before the task is complete because the body needs to stop. The understanding that you do not have to earn rest.
It shows up as the grief of others who are not used to your choosing yourself. This grief is not evidence that you are doing something wrong. It is evidence that the dynamic is changing, and change produces loss for everyone, including the people who benefit from the change.
It shows up as the unfamiliarity of it. The disorientation of being the one whose needs are considered, when you have spent so long being the one who considered everyone else's.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother who could not choose herself is the most direct inheritance. The woman who watched her mother disappear into service, into obligation, into being everything to everyone and nothing to herself, learned that this is what women are. She may have vowed to be different. She may have replicated the pattern exactly. Often she did some version of both. The choosing of herself is, for many women, the breaking of a pattern that goes back through the women in the maternal line for many generations. The women who could not choose themselves because the cost was too high.
Through the paternal line: The father's model of the woman who chooses herself shapes whether the daughter believes it is permitted. The father who respected female self-determination, who admired women with lives and desires and choices of their own, gave his daughter a permission he may not have known he was giving. The father who required his wife and daughters to organize around him, who treated female self-interest as a problem, installed a prohibition that the daughter has to consciously dismantle.
Nikita's Note
The language of self-care has made choosing yourself sound optional, decorative, a reward for hard work. It is not.
Choosing yourself is structural. It means building a life that includes you. Not as an afterthought. Not as a reward. As a basic condition.
The women who taught you to choose everyone else were not wrong to love the way they loved. They did not know another way. You have more information than they had. You can build something different. That is not betrayal. That is the point.
From the work
You were taught to choose everyone else first and to call that love. Choosing yourself is not the abandonment of love. It is the recognition that your life is also one of the lives that matters.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.