November 24, 2025 • 17 mins
Thoughts or comments? Send us a text!
What if the sudden urge to stop performing isn’t a phase, but a feature of a changing brain? We dive into the science and lived experience of “aging out of pretending,” exploring how midlife hormone shifts and synaptic pruning reshape the mental load of people pleasing. The result isn’t rudeness; it’s a recalibration of energy, attention, and honesty that can feel terrifying at first and liberating over time.
We connect the dots between social conditioning—especially the training to read the room—and the decision fatigue that mounts across careers, caregiving, and relationships. As estrogen and oxytocin pathways downshift, the circuitry that once fueled micro-adjustments gets costly, and your brain quietly trims it back. That pruning mirrors a garden: removing dead wood so the healthiest branches can bloom. Expect pushback from systems that rely on your old role; families, teams, and friend groups are built for stability and will nudge you to “go back.” Those nudges are data, not destiny.
Along the way, we offer practical language and body cues to hold your ground without heat. Swap apologies for clarity, practice small truths that don’t require a thesis, and let silence do some work. We talk about pruning relationships with compassion, recognizing when a one-way street stays one-way, and celebrating the ones that get deeper when you stop managing everyone’s reactions. You’re not becoming difficult—you’re becoming free, clear, and more you.
If this resonates, share it with someone who’s ready to take up their space. Subscribe for more grounded science, real talk, and tools you can use today, and leave a review to help fellow listeners find the show.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mary (00:00):
Good morning and welcome to a mini episode of No
Shrinking Violets.
I saw an article, a blog poston um Substack recently.
And I'm not sure if I ended upseeing this just because of my
algorithm, because of what Italk about here on this podcast.
(00:22):
But it was written by EllenScher, and I'm really hoping
that eventually I'm gonna findher and get her on here as a
guest.
But she wrote something calledAging Out Fucks, the
Neuroscience of Why You SuddenlyCan't Pretend Anymore.
And it really struck so manychords because not only have I
(00:45):
experienced this, but so, somany women that I've worked with
have also.
And it creates a lot ofcognitive dissonance.
So let me tell you a littlemore about what she talks about
in this blog post.
So she calls it the greatunfuckening, which is hilarious.
Um I typically do not swear onhere, but I gotta use her words
(01:08):
because I swear a lot in reallife, let's be honest.
But anyway, she refers to thisas the point in midlife when
your capacity to pretend,perform, and please others
starts shorting out like anelectrical system that's finally
had enough.
So what happens is you're tiredof apologizing or making
allowances for things thatinternally for most of your life
(01:32):
have felt a littleuncomfortable.
But y'all know how often I talkabout socialization and we've
been socialized to connect andnot create awkward situations
and to kind of stay in our laneand stay small.
So one of the things that is socool about what she writes is
(01:53):
that what is happening duringthis stage of life is first of
all not a surprise.
Our hormones are shifting.
We must hear that as women inmidlife or menopause,
postmenopause, we must hear orsee that a hundred times a week.
But yes, our hormones haveshifted.
(02:13):
And so what that means is whenone hormone, just one, shifts,
your entire system changes.
So it's like an orchestra.
Um, for instance, I had thyroidcancer.
So once my thyroid was removed,what that meant was I don't
have the thyroid hormone in mybody anymore.
(02:34):
And I have to take medicineevery single day.
So something that'smanufactured is not going to
work the same way.
And then when I hit menopause,or actually perimenopause, the
shifts started to happen becausemy progesterone dropped first.
And then your estrogen stopsbeing produced in the same way.
So you have almost none of thatbeing produced in the same way
(02:55):
it was.
So that creates shifts in yourentire system, which is why we
have trouble sleeping, becausethat has to do with hormones.
But okay, so that aside, thereis a physiological reason that
we stop caring as much or westop having the energy to manage
other people's reactions.
Your brain is literallyrestructuring itself.
(03:18):
So for such a long time, wehave been socialized to read the
room.
Now, I think first our brainsare different.
Our brains are different.
We are built to connect, we'rebuilt to nurture a little bit
more than men.
And I don't like to make such astrong divide there.
There's obviously a lot ofsocialization that happens.
(03:40):
I think if you watch typicalparenting, and this is not
blaming parents because thisgoes back a long time.
But if you watch parenting, wetreat little girls differently
than we treat little boys.
And again, I'm doing, you know,two separate genders.
If you take into account genderfluidity, that's a whole other
thing.
(04:01):
But we're really socialized toread the room.
We look at social cues, wecalculate the risk in actually
saying the thing that firstmight occur to us.
We kind of um censor ourselvesbecause we don't want a reaction
that's uncomfortable.
(04:22):
So we tend to suppress anauthentic response.
And we fall into this kind ofthis world of feeling like we're
responsible for everyone else'sreactions.
And I see this with women 80%more than I do with men.
So for instance, we know thatif we say or do a certain thing,
(04:44):
it could make someone angry,upset, disappointed, fill in the
blank.
But we feel like we have aresponsibility for that
response.
So we will temper what we sayand do to try to monitor or mold
or control the response ofanother person.
So we take on thisresponsibility for the emotional
(05:08):
response of everyone around us.
And when we do that, it takes atoll.
So what happens as thesehormones shift?
We don't have as much capacityto do this.
And I think the other thingthat I'm going to talk about
more in a minute is we also havebuilt up a lifetime of little
(05:30):
losses or big losses or littletraumas or big traumas or just
life events that wear us down.
It's like, you know, you take aset of tires and you keep
driving on all these differentroads, you hit a couple
potholes, it's going to affectthe balance of your car, right?
But you keep going, you keep,you keep steering in a way that
(05:50):
corrects for the ability to wantto drift off the side of the
road.
So the cool thing that happensat this time of year, as our
hormones are shifting, our bodyis changing too.
And in our brain, somethingthat happens, it's called
synaptic pruning.
What is so, so cool about thisis this happens in newborns.
(06:14):
So when you're born, your brainhas way too many neurons.
So as a baby is raised andlearns from its environment, the
brain allows some of thoseconnections to simply die off.
And I find that endlesslyfascinating.
I mean, we could talk aboutthat for an hour in another
(06:35):
episode, but synaptic pruningbasically is like, I'll give you
my garden analogy.
If you allow certain kinds ofshrubs or bushes or even trees
to grow as grow like they wantto, a lot of times they start to
get woody, they don't produceas well.
If they are a flowering shrub,they're not going to get as many
(06:58):
flowers.
So we prune them.
We take out the branches thatare not healthy.
We want to optimize the thingsthat are healthy and are
producing the flowers.
That's what your brain does.
Your brain does that whenyou're a baby, which is why
parenting, eye contact, talking,cuddling, all of those things
are so important to raising ahealthy kid.
(07:20):
So this is what our brain doeswhen we hit this point going
into midlife.
So some of these neuralpathways that are the ones that
in the frontal lobe that we tendto placate or don't say the
thing that first occurs becausewe're worried about sort of
(07:41):
controlling the emotionalclimate of the interaction,
those things start to die off.
And, you know, Ellen Schertalks about this as Marie
condoing itself, which is socool.
So anyway, so Luann Brisendineis a neuropsychiatric, a
neuropsychiatrist, and she wroteThe Female Brain.
(08:03):
And she's talking about sort ofwhat I am, that we are
particularly wired as women forsocial harmony, caregiving.
It's driven by estrogen andoxytocin.
Well, of course, what happensin midlife, the estrogen levels
shift and drop.
So we're not able to do that asmuch.
(08:24):
And plus, I think we just stopcaring.
And I'm starting to see a lotof social media accounts now
with women in their 50s, 60s,and their whole shtick is how
they've stopped caring.
Again, that could be myalgorithm, but it cracks me up.
So the things that we typicallywould have done, you know,
making sure that other peopleare comfortable, laughing at
(08:47):
jokes that we don't think arefunny, um, or being very careful
with how we say somethingbecause we're reading the micro
expressions.
We're looking to be um veryaware of, okay, was that a
little micro frown?
Do I need to soften this evenmore?
So I think we underestimate howexhausting it is, and this is
(09:10):
called decision fatigue, how umexhausting it is to continually
monitor that and adjust ourbehavior based on everything
around us.
So I think the reason, and thisgoes along with Ellen Scher
makes this point too in her blogpost.
I think the reason that womenexperience this, and I talk
(09:33):
about this so much on thispodcast, is we have been told
things like, what do I say allthe time, stay small.
And so we don't take up ourspace.
We have made ourselves into theversion of ourselves that the
world likes because we're notpushing boundaries.
We are staying within the guiderails that the world has put on
(09:57):
us.
And when we stop doing that, itis very uncomfortable for the
world around us.
So once that starts to happen,and you know, this is another
theme that you've probably heardme talk about, it is scary as
hell for women to finally standup straight.
And I'm talking about thisliterally and figuratively, to
(10:20):
stand up straight, put theirshoulders back and down, stand
in what, you know, yogis callmountain pose, take up your
freaking space.
And it is terrifying because wehave been rewarded.
If we look at behavioralpsychology, we've been
consistently rewarded for thetimes when we do stay small,
(10:42):
when we smile, when we kind ofswallow the comment that we
really want to make, or we checkourselves and don't say the
thing that we really want tosay, we get rewarded for that.
When you step past the world'sguardrails and you expand them
into where you want them to be,you start to say and do things
(11:04):
that other people don't like.
The system doesn't like change.
So systems theory says that weall sort of run in the way that
we've been programmed to run,but our doing that also programs
the system around us.
This is true in families, thisis true in organizations.
So you start to, as the cog inthe whole process, you start
(11:28):
turning differently, faster,slower, whatever it is.
The rest of the system has toadjust to that.
And it will do everything inits power to get you to keep
doing what you have historicallydone.
So you'll get comments like,you're too much.
Oh, you're obviously goingthrough something.
You're being difficult.
(11:49):
Why have you changed?
So we start to have this ideaof women in menopause, women in
midlife, women moving throughmenopause are now difficult and
or were abrasive.
You know, that kind oflanguage.
What is really cool, and I'vesaid this, I said this a lot to
(12:11):
my college students actually,because they were they're at a
stage where they're starting tohave deeper relationships and
they're worried about being whothey really are.
What if somebody doesn't likeme?
And what I've always said is ifyou, I used to say to them, if
you fly your freak flag, likeyou be you, the people that
(12:33):
stay, they know exactly who youare.
That authentic love and care isthe most powerful force.
If you try to be what you thinksomebody wants you to be, and I
would say this to even womennow going on first dates,
they're back in the dating game.
Don't try to figure out whatsomebody wants you to wear, say,
(12:54):
be, do, look, all of thosethings.
Order the big damn appetizer atthe first date and eat it like
you would eat it in front ofyour family.
Because if somebody likes youthe way that you are, that is
authenticity.
So you don't have to fake itwith these most important
relationships.
My God, we have to fake itenough in life with at work and
(13:18):
all of those other things to getwhere we want to get.
But when we start to have thesehormonal shifts, we basically
lose a little bit of our filter,or it's much more effort to
allow that filter to do the workthat it had been conditioned to
do since we were, I don't know,eight.
Um, then we start to beourselves.
(13:40):
But that feels reallydangerous.
But what I'm gonna tell you iswhat you gain from that is, you
know, I talked about pruning.
One of the things you gain fromthat is the people and
relationships in your life getpruned out if they're not
serving you.
The dead wood, the branches inyour world that aren't blooming,
that aren't bringing somethinginto the world that makes it
(14:03):
better, that makes your lifebetter, they get pruned out.
And it's scary because theother thing we're socialized to
do is maintain relationships.
It doesn't matter what kind ofposition we have to twist
ourselves into to keep themgoing, maintain the
relationship.
But relationships stop workingafter a while sometimes.
(14:24):
Kids that maybe people that wewere friends with as kids, that
might not still work.
That friendship might haveturned into quite a one-way
street and it's going the wrongway.
So you're gaining authenticity.
You're being you.
You don't have to perform.
And I think the other thing isthe energy that it takes to
(14:45):
manage that, you don't have todo that anymore.
You just be you.
And this is not an excuse, letme be clear, to be rude.
You're just being authentic.
You're allowed to say, I hearyou, I don't agree with that.
You're allowed to say that.
You're allowed to wear thingsthat other people think maybe
(15:06):
you shouldn't wear.
You can wear makeup, not wearmakeup, let your hair go gray,
color your hair.
You get to decide it's yourlife, it's your body.
You're gaining clarity.
So when you stop trying to runeverybody's comments and
opinions through a filter thatis not your own, that is
society's or what you've beenhanded, when you stop doing
(15:29):
that, then you really see thingsmuch more clearly.
It's much less stressful.
So while initially the fear isgoing to want to stop you, that
is your amygdala.
Your amygdala is saying, thisis dangerous.
The couple times you haveactually stated an opinion,
something bad happened.
(15:50):
Somebody at work didn't likeit.
You stopped getting calls fromthe guy you were dating.
Well, guess what?
That's okay because what yougain from all of this is real
relationships.
So if you had relationshipswhere you were serving their
purpose, you were peoplepleasing, you don't have to do
(16:11):
that anymore.
And I can tell you where I amnow, it's pretty amazing.
And I'm not saying it's like asmooth path where there's no
stumbles or hurdles.
Sure, life always has hurdles,but when you can put aside that
um tendency or socialization offeeling responsible for every
(16:36):
freaking thing that happens, youhave more time to actually live
your life.
And the relationships thatdon't survive, well, they're
either they're either gonnaevolve into more authenticness
or you're gonna figure out, ohmy gosh, these are the people
who always saw me, who I alwaysfelt like I could let see me.
(16:57):
And that is one of the mostpowerful things.
So remember, if you're goingthrough this phase, it doesn't
matter what age you are.
If you start to do this beforeyour brain starts this shift,
more power to you because thatis awesome.
And remember, the system isgonna want you to stay the same.
(17:20):
So that pushback means you'redoing something right.
You're not becoming difficult,you're becoming free, you're
taking up your space.
Have a great week.
It's Thanksgiving week.
I hope that you have time withyour favorite people, the people
you love.
And I hope that when you thinkabout your life, you find you
(17:40):
have amazing blessings.
And until next time, go outinto the world and be the
amazing, resilient, vibrantviolet that you are.
Good morning and welcome to a mini episode of No
Shrinking Violets.
I saw an article, a blog poston um Substack recently.
And I'm not sure if I ended upseeing this just because of my
algorithm, because of what Italk about here on this podcast.
(00:22):
But it was written by EllenScher, and I'm really hoping
that eventually I'm gonna findher and get her on here as a
guest.
But she wrote something calledAging Out Fucks, the
Neuroscience of Why You SuddenlyCan't Pretend Anymore.
And it really struck so manychords because not only have I
(00:45):
experienced this, but so, somany women that I've worked with
have also.
And it creates a lot ofcognitive dissonance.
So let me tell you a littlemore about what she talks about
in this blog post.
So she calls it the greatunfuckening, which is hilarious.
Um I typically do not swear onhere, but I gotta use her words
(01:08):
because I swear a lot in reallife, let's be honest.
But anyway, she refers to thisas the point in midlife when
your capacity to pretend,perform, and please others
starts shorting out like anelectrical system that's finally
had enough.
So what happens is you're tiredof apologizing or making
allowances for things thatinternally for most of your life
(01:32):
have felt a littleuncomfortable.
But y'all know how often I talkabout socialization and we've
been socialized to connect andnot create awkward situations
and to kind of stay in our laneand stay small.
So one of the things that is socool about what she writes is
(01:53):
that what is happening duringthis stage of life is first of
all not a surprise.
Our hormones are shifting.
We must hear that as women inmidlife or menopause,
postmenopause, we must hear orsee that a hundred times a week.
But yes, our hormones haveshifted.
(02:13):
And so what that means is whenone hormone, just one, shifts,
your entire system changes.
So it's like an orchestra.
Um, for instance, I had thyroidcancer.
So once my thyroid was removed,what that meant was I don't
have the thyroid hormone in mybody anymore.
(02:34):
And I have to take medicineevery single day.
So something that'smanufactured is not going to
work the same way.
And then when I hit menopause,or actually perimenopause, the
shifts started to happen becausemy progesterone dropped first.
And then your estrogen stopsbeing produced in the same way.
So you have almost none of thatbeing produced in the same way
(02:55):
it was.
So that creates shifts in yourentire system, which is why we
have trouble sleeping, becausethat has to do with hormones.
But okay, so that aside, thereis a physiological reason that
we stop caring as much or westop having the energy to manage
other people's reactions.
Your brain is literallyrestructuring itself.
(03:18):
So for such a long time, wehave been socialized to read the
room.
Now, I think first our brainsare different.
Our brains are different.
We are built to connect, we'rebuilt to nurture a little bit
more than men.
And I don't like to make such astrong divide there.
There's obviously a lot ofsocialization that happens.
(03:40):
I think if you watch typicalparenting, and this is not
blaming parents because thisgoes back a long time.
But if you watch parenting, wetreat little girls differently
than we treat little boys.
And again, I'm doing, you know,two separate genders.
If you take into account genderfluidity, that's a whole other
thing.
(04:01):
But we're really socialized toread the room.
We look at social cues, wecalculate the risk in actually
saying the thing that firstmight occur to us.
We kind of um censor ourselvesbecause we don't want a reaction
that's uncomfortable.
(04:22):
So we tend to suppress anauthentic response.
And we fall into this kind ofthis world of feeling like we're
responsible for everyone else'sreactions.
And I see this with women 80%more than I do with men.
So for instance, we know thatif we say or do a certain thing,
(04:44):
it could make someone angry,upset, disappointed, fill in the
blank.
But we feel like we have aresponsibility for that
response.
So we will temper what we sayand do to try to monitor or mold
or control the response ofanother person.
So we take on thisresponsibility for the emotional
(05:08):
response of everyone around us.
And when we do that, it takes atoll.
So what happens as thesehormones shift?
We don't have as much capacityto do this.
And I think the other thingthat I'm going to talk about
more in a minute is we also havebuilt up a lifetime of little
(05:30):
losses or big losses or littletraumas or big traumas or just
life events that wear us down.
It's like, you know, you take aset of tires and you keep
driving on all these differentroads, you hit a couple
potholes, it's going to affectthe balance of your car, right?
But you keep going, you keep,you keep steering in a way that
(05:50):
corrects for the ability to wantto drift off the side of the
road.
So the cool thing that happensat this time of year, as our
hormones are shifting, our bodyis changing too.
And in our brain, somethingthat happens, it's called
synaptic pruning.
What is so, so cool about thisis this happens in newborns.
(06:14):
So when you're born, your brainhas way too many neurons.
So as a baby is raised andlearns from its environment, the
brain allows some of thoseconnections to simply die off.
And I find that endlesslyfascinating.
I mean, we could talk aboutthat for an hour in another
(06:35):
episode, but synaptic pruningbasically is like, I'll give you
my garden analogy.
If you allow certain kinds ofshrubs or bushes or even trees
to grow as grow like they wantto, a lot of times they start to
get woody, they don't produceas well.
If they are a flowering shrub,they're not going to get as many
(06:58):
flowers.
So we prune them.
We take out the branches thatare not healthy.
We want to optimize the thingsthat are healthy and are
producing the flowers.
That's what your brain does.
Your brain does that whenyou're a baby, which is why
parenting, eye contact, talking,cuddling, all of those things
are so important to raising ahealthy kid.
(07:20):
So this is what our brain doeswhen we hit this point going
into midlife.
So some of these neuralpathways that are the ones that
in the frontal lobe that we tendto placate or don't say the
thing that first occurs becausewe're worried about sort of
(07:41):
controlling the emotionalclimate of the interaction,
those things start to die off.
And, you know, Ellen Schertalks about this as Marie
condoing itself, which is socool.
So anyway, so Luann Brisendineis a neuropsychiatric, a
neuropsychiatrist, and she wroteThe Female Brain.
(08:03):
And she's talking about sort ofwhat I am, that we are
particularly wired as women forsocial harmony, caregiving.
It's driven by estrogen andoxytocin.
Well, of course, what happensin midlife, the estrogen levels
shift and drop.
So we're not able to do that asmuch.
(08:24):
And plus, I think we just stopcaring.
And I'm starting to see a lotof social media accounts now
with women in their 50s, 60s,and their whole shtick is how
they've stopped caring.
Again, that could be myalgorithm, but it cracks me up.
So the things that we typicallywould have done, you know,
making sure that other peopleare comfortable, laughing at
(08:47):
jokes that we don't think arefunny, um, or being very careful
with how we say somethingbecause we're reading the micro
expressions.
We're looking to be um veryaware of, okay, was that a
little micro frown?
Do I need to soften this evenmore?
So I think we underestimate howexhausting it is, and this is
(09:10):
called decision fatigue, how umexhausting it is to continually
monitor that and adjust ourbehavior based on everything
around us.
So I think the reason, and thisgoes along with Ellen Scher
makes this point too in her blogpost.
I think the reason that womenexperience this, and I talk
(09:33):
about this so much on thispodcast, is we have been told
things like, what do I say allthe time, stay small.
And so we don't take up ourspace.
We have made ourselves into theversion of ourselves that the
world likes because we're notpushing boundaries.
We are staying within the guiderails that the world has put on
(09:57):
us.
And when we stop doing that, itis very uncomfortable for the
world around us.
So once that starts to happen,and you know, this is another
theme that you've probably heardme talk about, it is scary as
hell for women to finally standup straight.
And I'm talking about thisliterally and figuratively, to
(10:20):
stand up straight, put theirshoulders back and down, stand
in what, you know, yogis callmountain pose, take up your
freaking space.
And it is terrifying because wehave been rewarded.
If we look at behavioralpsychology, we've been
consistently rewarded for thetimes when we do stay small,
(10:42):
when we smile, when we kind ofswallow the comment that we
really want to make, or we checkourselves and don't say the
thing that we really want tosay, we get rewarded for that.
When you step past the world'sguardrails and you expand them
into where you want them to be,you start to say and do things
(11:04):
that other people don't like.
The system doesn't like change.
So systems theory says that weall sort of run in the way that
we've been programmed to run,but our doing that also programs
the system around us.
This is true in families, thisis true in organizations.
So you start to, as the cog inthe whole process, you start
(11:28):
turning differently, faster,slower, whatever it is.
The rest of the system has toadjust to that.
And it will do everything inits power to get you to keep
doing what you have historicallydone.
So you'll get comments like,you're too much.
Oh, you're obviously goingthrough something.
You're being difficult.
(11:49):
Why have you changed?
So we start to have this ideaof women in menopause, women in
midlife, women moving throughmenopause are now difficult and
or were abrasive.
You know, that kind oflanguage.
What is really cool, and I'vesaid this, I said this a lot to
(12:11):
my college students actually,because they were they're at a
stage where they're starting tohave deeper relationships and
they're worried about being whothey really are.
What if somebody doesn't likeme?
And what I've always said is ifyou, I used to say to them, if
you fly your freak flag, likeyou be you, the people that
(12:33):
stay, they know exactly who youare.
That authentic love and care isthe most powerful force.
If you try to be what you thinksomebody wants you to be, and I
would say this to even womennow going on first dates,
they're back in the dating game.
Don't try to figure out whatsomebody wants you to wear, say,
(12:54):
be, do, look, all of thosethings.
Order the big damn appetizer atthe first date and eat it like
you would eat it in front ofyour family.
Because if somebody likes youthe way that you are, that is
authenticity.
So you don't have to fake itwith these most important
relationships.
My God, we have to fake itenough in life with at work and
(13:18):
all of those other things to getwhere we want to get.
But when we start to have thesehormonal shifts, we basically
lose a little bit of our filter,or it's much more effort to
allow that filter to do the workthat it had been conditioned to
do since we were, I don't know,eight.
Um, then we start to beourselves.
(13:40):
But that feels reallydangerous.
But what I'm gonna tell you iswhat you gain from that is, you
know, I talked about pruning.
One of the things you gain fromthat is the people and
relationships in your life getpruned out if they're not
serving you.
The dead wood, the branches inyour world that aren't blooming,
that aren't bringing somethinginto the world that makes it
(14:03):
better, that makes your lifebetter, they get pruned out.
And it's scary because theother thing we're socialized to
do is maintain relationships.
It doesn't matter what kind ofposition we have to twist
ourselves into to keep themgoing, maintain the
relationship.
But relationships stop workingafter a while sometimes.
(14:24):
Kids that maybe people that wewere friends with as kids, that
might not still work.
That friendship might haveturned into quite a one-way
street and it's going the wrongway.
So you're gaining authenticity.
You're being you.
You don't have to perform.
And I think the other thing isthe energy that it takes to
(14:45):
manage that, you don't have todo that anymore.
You just be you.
And this is not an excuse, letme be clear, to be rude.
You're just being authentic.
You're allowed to say, I hearyou, I don't agree with that.
You're allowed to say that.
You're allowed to wear thingsthat other people think maybe
(15:06):
you shouldn't wear.
You can wear makeup, not wearmakeup, let your hair go gray,
color your hair.
You get to decide it's yourlife, it's your body.
You're gaining clarity.
So when you stop trying to runeverybody's comments and
opinions through a filter thatis not your own, that is
society's or what you've beenhanded, when you stop doing
(15:29):
that, then you really see thingsmuch more clearly.
It's much less stressful.
So while initially the fear isgoing to want to stop you, that
is your amygdala.
Your amygdala is saying, thisis dangerous.
The couple times you haveactually stated an opinion,
something bad happened.
(15:50):
Somebody at work didn't likeit.
You stopped getting calls fromthe guy you were dating.
Well, guess what?
That's okay because what yougain from all of this is real
relationships.
So if you had relationshipswhere you were serving their
purpose, you were peoplepleasing, you don't have to do
(16:11):
that anymore.
And I can tell you where I amnow, it's pretty amazing.
And I'm not saying it's like asmooth path where there's no
stumbles or hurdles.
Sure, life always has hurdles,but when you can put aside that
um tendency or socialization offeeling responsible for every
(16:36):
freaking thing that happens, youhave more time to actually live
your life.
And the relationships thatdon't survive, well, they're
either they're either gonnaevolve into more authenticness
or you're gonna figure out, ohmy gosh, these are the people
who always saw me, who I alwaysfelt like I could let see me.
(16:57):
And that is one of the mostpowerful things.
So remember, if you're goingthrough this phase, it doesn't
matter what age you are.
If you start to do this beforeyour brain starts this shift,
more power to you because thatis awesome.
And remember, the system isgonna want you to stay the same.
(17:20):
So that pushback means you'redoing something right.
You're not becoming difficult,you're becoming free, you're
taking up your space.
Have a great week.
It's Thanksgiving week.
I hope that you have time withyour favorite people, the people
you love.
And I hope that when you thinkabout your life, you find you
(17:40):
have amazing blessings.
And until next time, go outinto the world and be the
amazing, resilient, vibrantviolet that you are.
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