Know who you are! Before the titles, I knew who I was
A life shaped by conviction, not circumstance—the power of knowing yourself early and refusing to betray that knowledge.
I do not tell my story as one of discovering that I was capable. I always believed that I was.
When I was seven years old, I went to the library and checked out a book on the biochemistry of microorganisms. Did I understand it? Not fully. But I tried. Even then, something in me was reaching. Something in me already knew that my mind was meant to stretch beyond what was immediately familiar.
That matters, because too many stories about women’s lives begin with doubt, as though our power only becomes visible after hardship has first convinced us that we have none. That was never my story. My life was not easy, but I was never confused about whether I had ability, intellect, or promise. I was told I was smart. I was told to believe in myself. And I did.
The challenge was never whether I could become someone. The challenge was building a life that could hold what I already knew about myself.
I became a teenage parent. Later, I found myself raising children while pursuing my doctorate, working as a research assistant and teaching assistant, and living in family student housing on campus. At one point, my children were 20, 10, 3, and 4 months old. My eldest daughter was in art school when I returned to the university. My youngest had been born prematurely at just 1 pound, 9 ounces. I was also moving through the collapse of my marriage and carrying the full responsibility of making a way forward for my family.
That period of my life was not the beginning of my belief in myself. It was the proving ground for it.
I did not wake up in those years and suddenly decide I had value. I already knew I had a mind. I already knew I could learn. I already knew I could build. What those years required of me was not self-discovery, but discipline. Not a lesson in worthiness, but a sustained commitment to honoring what I knew I was capable of becoming, even while life was demanding everything from me.
That distinction matters to me.
I am not interested in telling a “look how hard it was and look what I overcame” story. There is nothing wrong with survival narratives, and many women rightfully claim them. But I have always felt that my life was shaped less by hardship itself than by my refusal to let hardship define the outer edge of my future. I did not see myself as someone waiting to be rescued by confidence. I saw myself as someone with responsibility, ability, and work to do.
So, I did the work.
I left my job as a K–12 teacher and entered doctoral study. I supported my family through assistantships. I mothered, studied, worked, wrote, and persisted. I completed my dissertation in 1998 while accepting a position as an assistant professor. I formally filed the dissertation in 2000 as I prepared to pursue opportunities at a research university because, by then, I knew clearly that my deepest scholarly commitments would flourish most fully in a research-intensive environment. That was not a rejection of teaching. I valued teaching deeply and had already devoted myself to it. It was an affirmation of the kind of intellectual life I knew I was called to build.
What I have learned across that journey is that voice is not always born from pain. Sometimes it is born from conviction.
Sometimes a woman’s voice emerges not because she has finally been told she matters, but because she has known all along that she matters and refuses to live beneath that knowledge. Sometimes the struggle is not believing in yourself. Sometimes the struggle is protecting your sense of self from reduction, interruption, dismissal, and the thousand daily pressures that would make you smaller if you let them.
That was true for me.
Motherhood did not diminish my intellectual life. It sharpened it. Responsibility did not weaken my ambition. It clarified it. Early parenting, single parenting, graduate study, and professional aspiration were not separate chapters that took turns defining me. They were simultaneous realities, and I had to learn how to carry them without surrendering any essential part of myself.
I wanted something different for my children. I wanted them to see that intellect is not a luxury reserved for people with easy lives. I wanted them to understand that education is not merely credentialing. It is a way of widening what is possible. I wanted them to witness a woman who did not abandon her mind, even when life gave her every reason to postpone herself.
That is what I mean when I talk about voice.
Voice is not just an expression. It is authorship. It is the decision to live in alignment with what you know to be true about yourself. It is the refusal to shrink your aspirations because your circumstances are demanding. It is the discipline of continuing to think, build, and become while carrying real responsibilities.
Too often, women are encouraged to wait: wait until the children are older, wait until the money is steadier, wait until the divorce is behind you, wait until the grief lifts, wait until there is more time, quieter, more certainty.
But many women will never be handed ideal conditions.
I was not.
And yet, I never believed that difficult conditions meant I was meant for a smaller life.
That is the message I most want to share, especially with women who are carrying multiple realities at once. You do not need to wait for ease to honor your intellect. You do not need perfect conditions to begin building the life that corresponds to your gifts. You do not need a world that fully accommodates your ambition before you claim it.
There is a difference between having a hard life and having a diminished sense of yourself. The two are not the same.
My life included difficulty. It also included clarity. I knew early that I was curious. I knew early that I could learn. I knew early that my mind was alive. From that point forward, the task was not learning to believe in myself. It was learning how to keep faith with that belief while moving through the demands of real life.
Before the titles, I knew who I was.
Before the appointments, the publications, the leadership roles, and the public recognition, I knew I had a mind worth cultivating. I knew I was not meant to remain confined by circumstance. I knew that my children needed to see what it looks like when a woman trusts her capacity and builds accordingly.
That knowledge sustained me.
And that is what I hope other women hear in this story: not that life will become easy, not that obstacles are poetic, and not that hardship automatically transforms us, but rather that there is power in knowing yourself early and refusing to betray that knowledge later.
Sometimes the most important thing a woman can do is not to discover that she is capable.
It is to remember that she always was.
