caring, and brilliant women don’t get out there and make things happen is because of this very core fear. It is very, very easy—and completely congruent with how we are socialized—to think that if we have this discomfort and fear that it means we are doing something wrong, bad, or just not right. What it actually means is that we are pushing beyond the safe boundaries that women have historically stayed within and have been defined by.
Again, to come back to one of my main points, if we are holding a larger, historical perspective, we can see that such responses—in our very own bodies and psyches—are forces from history that are trying to keep the status quo in place. If we care about that changing, then we will be big hearted with ourselves, take a deep breath, and keep going forward.
What do you mean by
being big-hearted with ourselves?
For those of us who are
committed to stepping up and out, we can often respond to these fears and vulnerabilities by trying to push through or tough it out. Like: “I’m not going to let this stop me!” But that just tries to stuff these deep concerns in a dark corner of ourselves. Usually, it doesn’t work.
These psychological responses then become physical—some strange illness or exhaustion or something. But if we realize that these fears and this sense of vulnerability are not our enemy, but are trying to protect us, we can listen to them differently.
If we think of these fears coming
from our younger selves and the generations of women in our
own families and throughout
history who were all terrified to
speak up and draw attention to themselves, we can
respond to ourselves with
love and care for taking
on a task that is so significant
rather than being impatient or
just trying to over-ride our
responses. We see our being a pioneer as transformative to all of the girls and women who came before us and who still live within our psyches because they never had the chances that we do now.