The Girl at the Pool

I was driving this morning and my mind started to wander the way it only does when I’m alone in the car. I found myself thinking about the younger version of me. The girl who was trying so hard to keep everyone happy, to live up to expectations, to be good and modest and self-aware and careful. And I got more emotional than I expected.

I think most of us, especially women, carry a handful of stories from our teenage years or our early twenties, or maybe even younger, that still surface decades later. They are often small moments. A comment someone made, a look, a correction. Something that lasted only a few seconds but somehow lodged itself so deeply that it became part of the inner narrative we carry about ourselves, coloring the way we think and move and present ourselves long after the moment itself is gone.

I want to tell you three of mine. And then I want to tell you what I would say to her now.

✦

The first story happened at a pool in high school. I was with friends and my boyfriend at the time, wearing a bikini, feeling relaxed and good. At some point he threw his towel into my lap. When I looked up, he told me that my bikini bottom had shifted and a little bit of hair was showing at the edge, and that I needed to be more careful because people might see.

I felt grateful to him. I thought he was protecting my modesty, looking out for me. I also felt embarrassed in a particular kind of hot humiliation after having your body pointed out in public as something requiring management. I thought: I need to get myself together. I need to be more aware of how I am sitting, what I am wearing, how I look at all times so that this never happens again.

The second story happened at a different pool, a few years later. Same boyfriend, who was working there as a lifeguard. I was visiting him and we were sitting at an umbrella table with several people I did not know. It was a hot day and I was wearing shorts and trying my best to relax in the heat. Partway through the afternoon he leaned over and told me I needed to sit differently, close my legs, because the guys at the table were looking under it and he did not like that.

I adjusted immediately. I sat in a less comfortable position for the rest of the afternoon, and I felt grateful to him for that too. He was protecting me, I thought. Looking out for me.

The third story happened when I was twenty-three, at my first job out of college. It was a stressful and difficult time and I had gained some weight, the first time in my life I had any kind of a belly, and my clothes were not quite fitting the way they used to. I was at a customer's house, sitting at her kitchen table going through her project. When I stood up I did not realize for a moment that my shirt had ridden up slightly. I noticed immediately and pulled it down, but she had seen it, and afterward she called one of the leaders at the company to say that I was a mess, that my belly had been hanging out of my shirt, that it was unprofessional and something needed to be said.

He came to me, told me what she had said, and then just looked at me.

There was no malice in it. I know that. But what I felt in that moment was that I was being asked to defend myself. That I had done something wrong. And I felt alone, unprotected, and that the appropriate response was to feel apologetic for the body I was living in.

So I did. I apologized to him. I felt ashamed. I felt like I had let everyone down by not having better control of myself.

✦

I have been carrying those three moments for a long time. They surface without warning, the way some memories do, because they are still trying to tell you something.

What I noticed in the car this morning is that for the first time, when those memories surfaced, I did not feel the shame. I felt anger. Not at the younger version of myself, but on her behalf.

Because here is what I know now that she did not know then.

At the pool in high school, a gentle heads-up would have been enough. What happened instead was a public correction that communicated: your body requires management, and you are responsible for monitoring it at all times. That is not protection. That is control dressed up as care.

At the lifeguard pool, the boys looking under the table were the problem, not how I was sitting. A person who loved me and wanted to protect me would have turned to them. Instead he turned to me, and I rearranged myself to make it easier for everyone, including the people whose behavior was actually out of line.

And at twenty-three, a leader who was older and more experienced than I was should have recognized what was actually happening in that phone call, which was a grown woman commenting unkindly on a young girl's body. The appropriate response was to end that conversation and not bring it to me at all. I was not unprofessional, I was twenty-three years old, going through something hard, in a remodeling company. What I needed in that moment was someone to stand between me and that kind of scrutiny, not someone to deliver it to me and wait for me to explain myself.

I did not have the framework for any of that then. I did not have a model for it. The women I watched navigate the world expected themselves, and me, to be in control at all times. Put together, modest, hyper-aware of how they were being perceived, and perpetually adjusting to make everyone else more comfortable. That was the template I had, so I used it.

✦

Here is what I want to talk about, because I think it is more common than we admit.

I did not experience those moments as shame at the time. I experienced them as gratitude. As appropriate. As evidence that I had good people around me who cared about how I was presenting myself to the world. The shame was there, underneath, but it was packaged as something that felt like protection.

That is how shame conditioning works. It does not announce itself as shame. Instead, it positions itself as responsibility and self-awareness, and being a good, considerate, careful person who is attuned to the people around her. It tells you that monitoring yourself is a form of respect, for others and for yourself. And because that framing feels virtuous rather than diminishing, you carry it without questioning it for years.

The downstream effects are enormous. When you are responsible for how everyone else feels about your body, your presence, and your behavior, you gradually lose access to your own feelings about those things. Your attention is always outward, always scanning, always adjusting. And the quiet voice that knows what you actually think and feel and want gets harder and harder to hear.

A few years ago I was in therapy and my therapist asked me to do a reparenting exercise. He asked me to imagine sitting with a younger version of myself in a difficult moment and to tell her what I would say. I went blank. I couldn’t do it because I was still identifying with her. I was still looking at her through the same lens of judgment she had been taught to use on herself. I could not comfort her because I had not yet stopped agreeing with the people who had shamed her.

To sit in the car this morning and know immediately what I would say to her felt like something had finally clicked into place.

✦

Here is what I would tell her.

You are beautiful. You are worthy of every room you are in and every person you are talking to. You bring enormous value to every situation you walk into, and you should not have been treated the way you were in those moments. None of it should have happened the way it did.

I would tell her what should have happened instead, so she could understand what she was actually allowed to expect going forward. Because she had never been shown, so she did not know.

I would tell her to hold a high bar for the behavior of the people around her, and that if people are not meeting that bar, she is allowed to say so. She is allowed to remove herself. Her expectations are not unreasonable and her feelings are not too much. She is not the problem.

I would tell her that she deserves to be surrounded only by people who are openly interested in her success and her wellbeing, people who know her value and act accordingly. And that anyone who does not meet that standard does not get to stay close.

I would tell her she is not responsible for managing other people's reactions to her existence.

✦

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.

I have done a lot of this work. I have real inner authority now, I know my value, and I can hold my ground in difficult rooms. I know that my voice and my feelings matter and I act accordingly most of the time.

And yet, I still hear her sometimes. That younger voice is still trying to protect me by asking: How are you sitting right now? Did you say the wrong thing? Is everyone okay with you?

I know what she is doing. She is trying to keep me safe, trying to prevent disconnection or abandonment, trying to make sure no one misinterprets me. She learned that job a long time ago and she is still showing up for it faithfully.

What I have learned to do is acknowledge her and then gently tell her it is not needed right now. I don’t silence her and I don’t shame her for being there. I just let her know that I have this, and that she can rest.

That is what self authority actually feels like from the inside. It is not clean or linear or simple. It is not the absence of that old voice, it is the presence of a newer, steadier one that has enough authority to speak over it. A cacophony of voices accumulated from a lifetime of experiences, and learning which one to follow.

The internal narrative is the last thing to change. You can know better intellectually long before the voice in your head catches up, and that is okay. It is just how it works, and the work is not to eliminate the old voice but to stop letting it make the decisions.

✦

I do not know what the younger version of you is carrying from the past. I do not know what moments she has been trying to tell you about, the ones that surface without warning because they are still waiting to be understood differently. I am sure many of you have carried far heavier things than what I shared today.

But I know she is in there somewhere, and I know she has been waiting for someone to take her side.

That person has to be you. It has always had to be you, and I think you are more ready than you know.

You are beautiful and you are worthy of every room you are in. You should not have been treated the way you were, and it is okay to hold standards for the people around you and hold them accountable when they fall short. It is okay to remove yourself from situations or relationships that are not serving you. Your voice matters. Your feelings matter. And you deserve to be surrounded only by people who know your value and act like it.

✦

This is why I do this work. Everything I build at A Life in Color, the conversations about inner authority, the framework around generational humanity, all of it comes back to the question of what we are carrying that was never ours to carry, and what it looks like to finally put it down. That is the work. And it starts exactly here, with being able to look at that younger version of yourself with compassion instead of judgment, and to take her side.

If this resonated and you are ready to look at what you have been carrying that was never yours to carry, The Unbinding is where I would point you.