Author: Tasha

After writing this week’s essays, I found myself stark raving mad. 

I was mad about a date I went on last weekend, during which a man scolded me for not giving him more access after knowing me for only a week. 
I was mad that TSA workers were forced to work without pay. 
I was mad about the ways I have overgiven, with men, at work, with friends, and received nothing back. 

I’m not sure if it’s the book writing or my perimenopause, but my body is rumbling with rage.

A friend recently asked if she should focus on her book or other projects. I told her: If you decide to write your memoir, prepare for an awakening. Writing this essay collection has held a spotlight up to all the ways I’ve allowed others to mistreat me, all the ways I was unloving and unkind to myself. 

I’ve dug into memories and reexamined everything society and culture taught about what it means to be a woman—then and now. Not much has changed in the way women are treated. We’re still held up to a harsher light.

What I’ve gathered this week is that writing a memoir isn’t just about stringing together memories; it’s about releasing everything you’ve swallowed to be acceptable to everyone else but yourself. It’s about learning to demand more from others and your life going forward.

Writing has forced me to tighten my boundaries and close emotional doors.  I grew up thinking anger was unladylike. Now I understand that rage can be a catalyst for transformation. 

This morning, I wrote about a moment from childhood—the moment I made an unconscious vow: I will never become a wife. 

It was a memory I hadn’t thought about in years, yet it still stirred something within me. 

I still have nightmares where doors slam. I catch a glimpse of my eleven-year-old self crying. I reach to console her, and she snatches her hands back.

As I wrote, my heart raced. I exhaled deeply, trying to contain the tears. My body remembered what my mind refused to admit. The pain is still there. Trauma is a squatter.

It made me wonder how much of our past remains buried within us, shaping the way we show up in our everyday lives. 
How many illnesses form?
How many relationships fracture before they fully begin?
How many patterns hum quietly in the background, on repeat?

Maybe we don’t need another self-help book or more prescriptions. 
Maybe what we need is awareness of the pain our bodies have been carrying—and the courage to release it.

Words create space for healing.

At 40, I discovered that everything I had learned about womanhood was a lie.

In girlhood, I carried these truths like a lunchbox:

Good women don’t rage.
Good women must sacrifice.
Good women must get married to feel complete.

I started writing my first essay collection because I had seen these same lies capture the women around me. I saw it in their hunched shoulders, swollen eyes, and plastered smiles.

A gentle warning: run and save yourself.

I slowly began the process of unlearning, unraveling truths like a mad scientist trying to crack a code.

The more I wrote, the more I interrupted moments of performance.

I’m starting the Womanhood Diaries, a series of short reflections from the middle of that process, a roadmap back to yourself.

I invite women on a similar journey to join me or begin their own process of unlearning.

A version of this essay was previously published on Medium

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

My mom echoes these words, hoping its markings will make a permanent indentation on my feminist psyche. But as a woman who has crossed the 40-year-old dash line, I’ve been privy to the shame game for a while now.

The whole “getting the milk for free” philosophy has been used to shame women for centuries. Whether you agree or disagree with this perspective isn’t the point. It’s the implication that we, as women, should base our choices on a need to belong or be possessed rather than on our true desires.

Sex is just one of the many ways society uses to shame women. There’s also mom guilt, the stigma attached to being a single woman of a certain age, being too ambitious, or not being busy enough. The list goes on and on.

Some people use shame as a defense mechanism, while others use it to maintain order in their narrow-minded world. And then there is the most harmful use of shame: when we use it against ourselves.

So, what is shame, and how do we recognize it when it shows up?

Author and shame expert Brené Brown defines shame as the intensely painful feeling of believing we are flawed and, therefore, unworthy of acceptance. This can lead to destructive patterns such as addiction, eating disorders, and toxic relationships.

Simply put, it’s that voice in your head that says you don’t measure up.

The thing about shame is that it rarely announces itself. Unlike its more publicized counterparts, anger and depression, shame dons a more subtle disguise, often showing up as perfectionism and its partner in crime, procrastination.

Due to persistent cultural conditioning, we, as women, tend to set unrealistic standards for ourselves based on others’ expectations. Suddenly, others’ ideas become our ideas, and when those ideas don’t coincide with the core of who we are, we feel bad about ourselves.

What results is a series of stop-and-go efforts toward achieving our goals because, deep down, we’re afraid of how others will perceive our work. Or, we exert so much effort into being perfect that we never get the opportunity to see if one of our seemingly crazy ideas will pan out.

In the book “Untamed,” New York Times Bestselling author Glennon Doyle writes: “I was wild until I was tamed by shame. Until I started hiding and numbing my feelings for fear of being too much. Until I started deferring to others’ advice instead of trusting my own intuition.”

How to break free of shame

The surest way to get untangled from shame is to expose it and call it out for what it is: you trying to please someone else rather than yourself. Often, what stops us from creating our dream life is doing things the way they’ve always been done instead of the way we deem fit.

When I started powerlifting, family members and friends warned me about getting too big. In their minds, increasing the poundage meant I would magically transform into Hulk Hogan. However, for the first time in my life, looks were not my concern. The power I felt from squatting and deadlifting heavy weights created a mental shift unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. My big thighs had a purpose for once, and I began to accept my body like never before.

What if, instead of lamenting how big our thighs or stomachs are, we decided to put on our most form-fitting dress and strut down the street?

What if instead of talking about how we suck at writing, we wrote copious amounts of words anywhere and everywhere we had an audience?

What if, instead of talking about how we’re not good at selling ourselves, we threw traditional marketing measures out the window and promoted ourselves in a way that felt most authentic to us?

Once we confront our shame, it frees us up for other pursuits. When we spend countless hours obsessing over our bodies, our relationship status, or our bank accounts (or lack thereof), we prevent ourselves from showing up as our true selves. We can use that same energy toward achieving our professional and personal goals.

My challenge to you:

Think for a second. What do you fear most? Maybe it’s talking on camera, making sales calls, speaking up at work, or publishing a less-than-perfect blog post. I’m here to grant you the permission you’ve been seeking to do the thing that scares you — and do it every day for the next month. You’ll start to notice after a couple of weeks that the one thing you thought you couldn’t do has now become a habit.