Your one true purpose in life is to reclaim your Dignity.
You lost it when you were a little girl.
We all did.
It’s a rite of passage.
Like losing your teeth.
But unlike losing your teeth, your Dignity doesn’t automatically come back. You have to proactively take it back.
Who knows where you lost it? Maybe it was a comment made by your parents that you were too loud or too bossy or just plain ol’ “too much.” Maybe it was something your third grade teacher said. Maybe it was a boyfriend who thought he had the right to an opinion about your body. Maybe it was a magazine cover that showed a photo of its interpretation of The Ideal Woman, which made you compare yourself to “perfection.”
And you, who once thought she was the center of the Universe, started to doubt yourself.
You no longer believed you were worthy of all the love in the world just because you were a human being.
You no longer believed you mattered, no matter how much you accomplished (or didn’t).
You no longer believed you were enough, just the way you are.
For most girls it happens somewhere between 5 and 10 years of age. I was 9 when I distinctly remember deciding that “girls aren’t supposed to eat,” because that’s the message I got from my mom and magazines. My girlfriend and I tried to not eat for an entire day and by 2 o’clock we were in tears wondering how we would ever go through life without food.
I know it sounds crazy to read that as an adult, but when we’re children, our brains are unable to process the information that comes at us, especially from the adult world.
Your Not-So-Fully-Functioning Child Brain
The human brain’s prefrontal cortex (the part that is able to use reason and judgment and formulate complex thought patterns) is not fully formed until somewhere in our mid twenties. That means we have many years of deciding who we think we are, and we almost always get it all wrong.
We think we’re not smart enough.
We think we’re not pretty enough.
Or thin enough.
Or rich enough.
Or desirable enough.
In short, we come to believe, as if it were a fact of life, that we are not enough as human beings and are therefore not worthy of someone’s attention and praise, or we believe we need to keep trying and trying to garner someone’s approval.
And it never comes.
Or it comes and goes.
And the little girl in us keeps waiting and waiting.
Until we…
Woman UP
The little girl in us has no business running an adult life, and yet she often finds herself in the CEO chair. Her emotional immaturity wreaks havoc on our lives because the woman in us has not stepped UP and into her role as The Boss and Leader, which can only happen when we say, Enough! I’m in charge of all things “me” from now on.
This is how we reclaim our Dignity.
Can you see why that has to be the most important thing you ever do in your life?
Can you see how that changes everything?
It changes how you show up in the world, as a card-carrying Adult Woman who not only takes care of the frightened little girl in her, but she also lets everyone know that no one else gets to have an opinion about what she does, how she behaves, what she says (or doesn’t say), unless that opinion is invited.
This is how we dignify ourselves.
This is our One True Purpose in life, and once we do this? Everything else falls into place.
Everything!
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