I Don’t Want to Be Easier to Love Anymore
A woman's journey to stop shrinking herself and start living authentically.
I Don’t Want to Be Easier to Love Anymore
I have spent a ridiculous amount of my life trying to figure out how to be the right amount of woman.
Not too emotional.
Not too loud.
Not too needy.
Not too independent.
Not too opinionated.
Not too ambitious.
Not too much.
Just enough.
Enough to be loved. Enough to be respected. Enough to be taken seriously. Enough to be good at my job, a good mother, a good partner, a good everything.
But never so much that I made anyone uncomfortable.
And, God, that is exhausting.
I am 36 years old, and I think I am finally realizing that I do not actually want to spend the rest of my life being easier for other people to handle.
Because I am not easy.
I love hard.
I worry hard.
I cry hard.
I get excited about things other people probably would not think twice about. I can overthink something to death and then, in the very next breath, decide I am doing it anyway.
I ask a lot of questions.
I want to know why.
And “because that is how it has always been done” might actually be one of my least favorite answers in the English language.
I notice things.
I notice when someone feels left out.
I notice when somebody is being underestimated.
I notice when words and actions do not match.
I notice when something feels unfair, even when everyone else seems perfectly comfortable pretending it is normal.
Sometimes I wish I noticed less.
Life would probably be easier.
But I would not be me.
And I have spent enough years trying to edit myself.
My life has not gone according to some beautiful little plan.
I have loved people.
I have lost people.
I have stayed too long.
I have started over.
I have built things I thought would last forever and then had to figure out who I was when they didn’t.
I was married young. I became a mother. I built a career. I have had seasons where I knew exactly where my life was going and seasons where I swear I was just holding everything together with caffeine, stubbornness, and whatever tiny amount of sanity I had left.
I have been the person everyone could count on.
And for a long time, I was proud of that.
I could handle it.
Whatever “it” was.
Give it to me.
I’ll figure it out.
And I usually did.
That trait has served me well. It has carried me through motherhood, work, heartbreak, change, and every strange little reinvention of myself.
But being the woman who can handle everything comes with a catch.
Eventually, everyone believes you can.
Including you.
So you keep carrying things.
People.
Problems.
Expectations.
Disappointments.
Responsibilities that probably were never yours in the first place.
And then one day you look around and think:
Wait.
Who the hell is taking care of me?
That has been one of the hardest things for me to learn.
Strength is not the same thing as carrying everything alone.
Independence is not the same thing as never needing anybody.
And loving someone does not mean endlessly understanding behavior that hurts you.
That last one took me a while.
Because I can understand almost anything if you give me enough information.
I will think about where somebody came from, what happened to them, what they were afraid of, why they reacted the way they did.
I will find the humanity in someone even while I am furious with them.
That is one of my favorite things about myself.
It has also gotten me hurt.
I had to learn that understanding someone does not require abandoning myself for them.
I can love someone and still expect consistency.
I can forgive someone and still remember.
I can have empathy and boundaries at the same time.
I can say, “I understand why you did that,” and still say, “You cannot do that to me.”
Maybe that sounds obvious.
It was not always obvious to me.
Neither was the idea that I was allowed to want things simply because they made me happy.
Not because they were productive.
Not because someone needed me to do them.
Not because they made sense on paper.
Just because they made my life feel like mine.
I love sitting outside with coffee with way too much cream in it.
I love growing things, even though half the time I am outside staring at a plant asking, “What the hell is wrong with you now?”
I love feeding people.
I love a loud house.
I love weird books and dark stories and anything that makes me wonder what in the actual hell I just read.
I love beautiful things. Strange things. Magical things.
I love learning.
I love asking questions.
I love finding out there is an entire world behind something I knew absolutely nothing about yesterday.
And I love people.
That is probably the thread running through everything I do.
It is why recruiting fits me.
My job is technically about finding people for jobs.
But that has never been the interesting part to me.
The interesting part is the person.
What happened to them?
What are they good at?
What are they scared to try?
What are they capable of that nobody has given them a chance to prove yet?
Sometimes the person with the perfect résumé is not the right person at all.
Sometimes somebody just needs one person to look at them and say, “I think you can do this.”
I know what that feels like.
I also know what it feels like to walk into something without knowing everything and think, Well, shit. I guess I’m going to learn.
That has basically been my career strategy.
I have learned industries I knew nothing about.
I have taken jobs that scared me.
I have managed people.
I have recruited people.
I have questioned processes.
I have made mistakes.
I have gotten better.
I have discovered that confidence is rarely something that magically arrives before you take the leap.
Usually, you jump first, and your confidence catches up later.
And I wish more women knew that.
Actually, there are a lot of things I wish women knew sooner.
I wish we knew that being emotional does not make us irrational.
Being kind does not make us weak.
Being ambitious does not make us selfish.
Being independent does not mean we have to do everything ourselves.
Having boundaries does not make us mean.
Changing our minds does not make us failures.
Starting over does not erase everything we built before.
And wanting more does not mean we are ungrateful for what we already have.
That one matters to me.
Because I am incredibly grateful for my life.
And I still want more from it.
Both things are true.
I want to grow in my career.
I want to be successful.
I want financial security and opportunities and work that challenges me.
I also want slow mornings.
I want my kids to remember laughter in our house.
I want love that feels safe and exciting at the same time.
I want dirt under my fingernails from my garden.
I want dinner around a crowded table.
I want books stacked everywhere.
I want to laugh so hard I cry.
Hell, sometimes I just want to cry.
I want a life I am actually awake for.
Because I have already done survival.
I am very, very good at survival.
I can make something out of almost nothing.
I can fall apart at night and still get up the next morning.
I can rebuild.
I know that about myself now.
But I do not want the rest of my life to be a demonstration of how much I can survive.
I want to live it.
Messily.
Loudly.
Softly.
Fully.
I want my children to grow up knowing their mother as more than the woman who kept everything running.
I want them to know I had dreams.
That I changed.
That I screwed things up.
That I tried again.
That I loved people fiercely.
That I stood up for myself eventually, even when it took me longer than I wish it had.
That I was never fearless.
I just kept doing things while I was scared.
And especially for my daughter, I want her to know that she never has to shrink herself into something easier to digest.
She can take up space.
She can ask the question.
She can change her mind.
She can leave.
She can begin again.
She can love someone without disappearing inside them.
She can build a beautiful life and still decide she wants something different.
She can be soft and powerful at exactly the same time.
I spent years thinking success would eventually look like some perfect finished picture.
The right career.
The right house.
The right relationship.
Enough money.
Happy kids.
A version of myself who finally had all her shit together.
I am beginning to suspect that woman does not exist.
And thank God.
Because I actually like this one better.
The one still figuring it out.
The one who gets too excited.
The one who asks too many questions.
The one who loves people even after swearing she is done with people.
The one who cries.
The one who gets pissed off.
The one who starts over.
The one who keeps believing there is something beautiful ahead of her even after life has given her plenty of reasons to be cynical.
The one who is still becoming.
I used to think becoming a strong woman meant learning how to need less, feel less, and endure more.
Now I think strength looks completely different.
It is knowing when something hurts.
It is admitting when you want more.
It is saying what you actually mean.
It is letting yourself be loved without believing you have to earn it by being useful.
It is building a career without sacrificing the woman underneath it.
It is knowing you can survive alone while still choosing connection.
It is realizing that you are allowed to build a life that feels good, not just one that looks successful.
So no, I do not want to become easier anymore.
I do not want to be less emotional.
Less curious.
Less stubborn.
Less loving.
Less complicated.
Less me.
I have spent enough of my life wondering how much of myself I was allowed to bring into the room.
Now?
I’m bringing the whole damn woman.
