Who Are You When No One Needs You?
I was a daughter. Then a finance professional. Then a girlfriend. Then a colleague. Then a person who was fine.
Always something for someone else. Always a role with requirements attached.
The day the roles started falling away, one by one, I expected to find myself underneath. What I found instead was a question I had never thought to ask.
Who am I when there is no one to perform for?
I did not know. That was terrifying. It was also, I understand now, the most important moment of my life. Not the losing. The not knowing. Because not knowing meant there was something to find.
I called it identity unboxing. The slow, uncomfortable, occasionally hilarious process of figuring out who you actually are when you strip away everything you were told to be.
It turns out I like silence more than I thought. I do not actually enjoy most of the things I spent years saying I enjoyed. I am funnier than I gave myself credit for. I am more sensitive than I allowed myself to admit.
I am someone who talks to her cats and means it. Someone who walks at sunrise because it feels like the world belongs to her for a moment before anyone else wakes up. Someone who left a career that looked successful from the outside and felt like slow suffocation from the inside.
The question is uncomfortable. Sit with it anyway.
Who are you when no one needs you?
That answer is the beginning of everything.
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.