Releasing forty years of inherited smallness
I was scrolling through Netflix’s newly added movies and came across this 1995 movie with a powerhouse ensemble of women, titled ‘Waiting to Exhale’. Four women, each at the precipice of life, navigating their respective struggles with self.
It turned out to be the stereotypical, good-vibes holiday watch, but for 1995? It was probably trying to to say something. Anyway… this piece was inspired by the premise of having held ones breath for so long, that you’re just... waiting to exhale.
As the year draws to a close, I find myself returning to that all to familiar pressure in the chest, the sense that something has been carried for far too long.
This is not anticipation of a new beginning, nor the usual adrenaline of reinvention. It’s a more subtle experience, a recognition if you must, that before anything new can be inhaled, something old must first be released.
It’s an acknowledge of accumulation—in my case, forty years coming—not just of time, but of opinions, expectations, judgements, and identities that I never consciously chose. The invisible build-up of what society, family, partners, and institutions placed upon that I have my spent the better half of my life internalising.
For me, this isn’t just the threshold of another year, it’s the threshold of life, living and purpose itself. At this point, I am less interested in resolution, instead I am seeking release. We can talk about ‘becoming’ till the cows come home, but right now, in the wee hours before my fortieth, it feels more like an unburdening of the person I was told I needed to be.
This is release.
How we are taught to shrink
From an early age, my body and temperament existed under public scrutiny. First, I was too thin “a sick chicken,” as it was unkindly phrased. A walking plank. A body without assets. Later, I was too round. A figure that now occupied too much space. “Sorry to say, but it’s just too much weight” an acquaintance’s mum once said.
When it was not about my body, it was anything and everything else.
My hair was too unruly.
My emotions too sensitive.
My intellect too average.
My creativity too mediocre.
And when I developed opinions, fire and the guile to fire back, I crossed an invisible line. I became “too much.”
Too difficult.
Too angry.
Too feisty.
I was informed—often casually, sometimes cruelly—that I did not possess the qualities men looked for in a woman. That my sharpness would make me unlovable. That marriage would be unlikely. That I should consider myself fortunate if anyone was willing to “put up” with me.
These were not singular events, but a pattern that I have come to realise that many women recognise (and unfortunately continue to perpetuate themselves).
Repeated diminishment, when internalised, often mutates into resentment or self-contempt. The psyche, when unable to push outward, will turn inward.
“So what?”, you might be thinking, we’ve all experienced some version of this, we’ve all read Freud and Jung or some versions of their work. Where exactly am I going with this that’s revolutionary?
No where. No where, new at least. But a lifelong curriculum in self-monitoring, in learning that worth is conditional tied to palatability, is something that warrants repeated reminders for release. Even if it serves only as a self reminder.
The first lessons in strength
Any one who can relate to the paragraph before, will know that this is how we first teach our selves strength. Through the hardness of needing to defend one’s self, a sharp exterior is forged by a reactive state, fuelled by pain and anger.
While that kind of strength is not inherently wrong (it’s innate, a survival instinct), it almost always comes at a cost. Yes, it’s born of necessity, it shields and protects against hostile environments, but it also suppresses vulnerability.
Vulnerability is what allows us to feel, to experience intimacy with others, but more importantly with oneself. Continued suppression of vulnerability obscures discernment, which over time, can lead to feelings of entrapment.
I am not ashamed to admit that only recently I began to understand that strength doesn’t need to be loud, obvious or sharp. That there exists a quieter, softer version rooted in assuredness or clarity.
It doesn’t obviously reject harm, but it doesn’t tolerate it either. It recognises the hurt, pain, fear and insecurity behind the actions of others, but it does not excuse their behaviour. Instead, it permits us the release, a passover of such, that protects us form the burden of internalising it.
The body becomes the ledger
These patterns followed me through every aspect of my life, in friendships, at work and in romantic relationships. And just as our external world mirrors our internal feelings, so does our physical body reflect our metaphysical turmoil.
We speak about the body as though it were separate from the self, an object to be managed, disciplined, corrected; weight gain is framed as indulgence, fatigue as weakness, illness as inconvenience. But the body is really keeping score of all all our energetic expenses.
Long before the mind is ready to name distress, the body has already begun recording it. Every unmet need, every swallowed word, every boundary crossed in silence leaves an imprint. Not as punishment, but as protection.
I was once told that I always put on weight when I was partnered. “You must be happy,” someone observed. That couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, weight was never a simple matter of appetite or metabolism. It was a response. A form of containment, a protective shield or sometimes as a repellent.
When I felt free, when life felt expansive, expressive, unthreatening, my body followed suit. I inevitably moved more and sought outward connection. Pleasure was kinetic, relational, alive. But when I felt constrained, emotionally unsafe, unseen, or internally conflicted, the body adapted in other way. It slowed. It gathered as if to say: something here requires holding. It stored, layering symbolic distance between self and the source of discomfort.
Psychologists have long noted that the body often takes on the labour the psyche cannot yet bear. Wilhelm Reich wrote of character armour and muscular armour, the physical and psychological defences we develop to protect against trauma and emotional overwhelm. Modern trauma research echoes this: when expression is unsafe, sensation becomes storage.
What we call “coping mechanisms” are often preservation strategies. The body does not store pain to punish us. It stores it to keep us alive.
In this way, weight becomes less about consumption and more about conservation. The body creates mass not as indulgence, but as buffer. A physical boundary where emotional ones were not allowed.
This is why the cultural insistence on disciplining the body misses the point entirely. You cannot shame a ledger into erasing its entries. You cannot punish the body into forgetting what it has been asked to carry.
What looks like self-sabotage is often self-preservation.
In relationships where I stayed too long, long after my intuition had begun whispering its objections, my body spoke louder. It bore the truth my mouth did not yet have permission to articulate. The weight was not happiness. It was endurance.
Our bodies keep score because someone has to.
And healing, I have learned, is not about forcing the body back into compliance. It is about changing the conditions that made it necessary to adapt in the first place. Safety precedes release. Trust precedes transformation.
When the psyche no longer needs the body to hold what it cannot express, the ledger begins to close its accounts.
Borrowed validation
My sense of worth never really belonged to me, it was always on lease. From partners to supervisors, anyone positioned to confer approval, to seek validation perhaps as a substitute for what was absent elsewhere.
I learned early on to equate worth with approval. To prove myself relentlessly because affirmation was not something one simply had; it was something one earned through performance, compliance, and emotional labour.
This is not an unusual story. In environments where validation is inconsistent or conditional, the psyche adapts by externalising self-worth. One becomes adept at reading rooms, anticipating expectations, and adjusting behaviour accordingly. Competence becomes currency and effort becomes proof of existence.
In professional settings, this often masquerades as ambition.
I worked hard (some might say to a fault) not merely out of commitment to craft, but out of a deeper compulsion to justify my presence. To be useful, to be indispensable and when approval arrived, it functioned less as encouragement and more as oxygen.
There were supervisors who recognised this hunger and met it with guidance, fairness, and trust. And there were others who recognised it as leverage to exploit their own agenda.
The danger of borrowed validation is not that it comes from outside, but that it gives the power to define worth to those who have little incentive to protect it. When approval becomes the metric, boundaries become negotiable. One’s internal barometer is quietly replaced by external benchmarks.
As an independent consultant, I assumed that having autonomy would finally dissolve this pattern. Instead, it revealed how deeply embedded it was.
The hierarchy had disappeared, but the reflex remained. I continued to undervalue myself, to over-deliver and to stretch beyond reasonable limits. The exploitation did not end, it simply became self-administered.
This is the quiet legacy of conditional worth. Even in freedom, one continues to perform captivity.
What I am realising now, as turn the corner to forty, is that validation borrowed too long becomes a liability. It keeps one small through internalised permission-seeking, through the subtle, corrosive belief that one must always earn the right to exist at full size.
The questions that have surfaced this year are familiar but revealing:
Am I being difficult?
Am I asking for too much?
Should I be grateful for what I’m offered?
At least I’m still included… right?
These are not questions of strategy. They are remnants of a power dynamic that no longer applies.
The shift begins when these questions are interrupted by discernment. Discomfort is not always a sign of ingratitude or excess. Often, it is simply the nervous system registering misalignment.
Self-worth that is not borrowed behaves differently. It does not need to announce itself. It does not need to explain itself. It does not need to prove itself. It is less negotiable.
And perhaps most unsettling of all, it no longer asks for permission.
The final release
Sometimes, I wish I could forget the last forty years entirely. To wipe the slate clean. To begin again without the residue of judgement, misinterpretation, and internalised smallness that has shaped how I move through this world.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes not from the events themselves, but from their afterlife; the way words spoken decades ago continue to echo long after the speakers have moved on. The way early assessments become invisible scaffolding around identity. Not loud enough to notice, but firm enough to constrain.
For a long time, I believed that forgetting was the prerequisite for freedom. That healing required erasure. A kind of psychological amnesty where nothing painful had ever occurred. But forgetting, I of course know, is neither possible nor better. The enemy is not in the memory but in the meaning we attach to it.
What weighs us down is not what happened, but the interpretations we carry in its wake. The conclusions we were forced to draw in moments when we lacked power, language, or context. The narratives we told ourselves to make sense of environments that could not or would not hold us.
To release is not to deny history. It is to loosen the grip of these inherited conclusions. To recognise that much of what shaped us was never a verdict on our worth, but a reflection of someone else’s limitation, fear, or unexamined pain.
This distinction matters.
Forgetting alludes to an erasure of the past. Releasing instead, seeks to renegotiate our relationship with it.
There is a quiet authority that comes from saying: This happened, but it no longer gets to decide who I am. Not in an act of defiance, but in collected clarity.
It is purely administrative. A closing of open books, returning borrowed ones to their rightful owners and refusing to continue living as the custodian of other people’s unresolved issues.
I am not seeking blank pages or a rewrite, just space.
Space to pause and respond rather than react.
Space to contemplate and choose rather than comply.
Space to inhabit my own life without need for constant self-correction.
As this year, and my fourth decade closes, I am giving mysel permission;
Permission to be soft without being weak.
To be strong without being hardened.
To take up space without erasure of self.
I am exhaling the weight of who I was told to be and inhaling the grounded authority of being myself.
Nietzsche would call this a movement toward self-authorship; the refusal to let one’s life remain a footnote to other people’s fears and limitations.
No comments:
Post a Comment