01/10/2026
For a long time, I saw my job as helping women feel better within the world as it is.
Understand yourself.
Regulate your nervous system.
Set better boundaries.
Become more resilient.
Take responsibility for your patterns.
And I still believe in all of those things.
But I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with what happens when we stop there.
Because sometimes the woman who thinks she is “bad at coping” is responding to an impossible set of demands.
Sometimes the woman who thinks she has “poor boundaries” has spent her entire life being rewarded for being endlessly available.
Sometimes the woman who thinks she is “burnt out” is living within conditions that would exhaust almost anyone.
And sometimes what looks like an individual problem is partly a social, cultural, economic or political one.
That doesn’t mean personal responsibility disappears.
It just means context is also acknowledged.
I’m increasingly interested in holding both truths at once:
We have agency.
And we are shaped by the worlds we inhabit.
We can work on ourselves.
And we can question what we’re being asked to adapt to.
We can take responsibility for our lives.
And we can ask whether the structures surrounding those lives are working for us.
I think we need both lenses.
The personal and the political.
The inner world and the outer world.
Healing ourselves and imagining what might need to change around us.
That’s the conversation I want to have more openly here.
Because perhaps the goal isn’t simply to become better at coping with everything.
Sometimes the goal is to understand what was never ours to carry in the first place.
What does this bring up for you? What systemic issue have you been taught to see as personal?
Save this for later, or send it to someone you think needs to read it 🩷
