The Life You Are Actually in Charge Of

There is a version of freedom that nobody taught me about. It is not the quit-your-job, move-to-another-country, and live without responsibilities kind that I see people talking about online all the time. It is more subtle than that, but also more radical. It is the freedom that lives inside the small decisions you make every single day about how you spend your time, what you say yes to, and whether the voice guiding those choices actually belongs to you.

It has taken a long time for me to learn this, and it hasn’t always been a straight road.

The first version of me who tried to claim any kind of self-authority was not brave or sovereign or even particularly honest. She was avoidant. She was a woman in her early twenties, new to the workforce, drowning in other people’s emotions and her own inexperience, who had not yet learned that you were allowed to simply say: I need to reschedule. So instead she made things up.

When I worked for a remodeling company in my twenties, my days were filled with customer meetings in people’s homes. Renovation projects are emotionally loaded in ways that are hard to explain if you have not been inside one. You are in people’s houses. Their homes. They are excited and then frustrated and then angry (because nothing ever goes according to plan.) I was young and absorbing all of it, and sometimes when I knew a meeting was going to be difficult, when something had gone wrong that I did not yet know how to fix, I would call before I was supposed to arrive and invent an excuse. I’m not feeling well or there’s an emergency, or whatever story I could come up with. And then I would show up two days later and the customer would say, are you feeling better? And I would have to remember what I had told them and build on top of it, and the whole thing would grow heavier and more exhausting than the original conversation would have been.

There is another story from that era that I will tell on myself because I think it is important to be honest about how far avoidance can actually take you. I was working at a bank and a customer had a discrepancy in her account. She was missing ninety cents in interest owed to her by the bank, and I did not know how to resolve it. Rather than admitting that, I avoided her. She came in every day asking for an update. One afternoon I was in the break room eating lunch when a colleague came to tell me she had arrived. I asked them to tell her I was unavailable and that I would call her later. She said she would wait. And so she sat in the waiting room and I sat in the break room for an hour, hiding.

I tell these stories with love for the woman I was then, because I understand what she was doing. She was trying to protect herself. She just did not yet have the tools to do it honestly. She could feel that something was violating her nervous system. She just did not know she was allowed to say so.

There are other failures that were of an opposite nature, but were equally instructive. There was a morning during that same job at the remodeling company when I received genuinely devastating news before an eight-thirty customer meeting. I called to ask if we could reschedule and explained that I had a personal emergency, but they pushed back. They had taken the day off and they were expecting me, and I let them guilt me into coming. I sat across from them at their dining room table, running a meeting I could not focus on, with tears running involuntarily down my face. There is no version of that story where I made the right call by going. What I did was tell my body, clearly and directly: you do not matter as much as their schedule.

That is the message we send ourselves every time we override our own truth to manage someone else’s comfort.

Guilt is the underlying issue behind all of these stories and it is important to clearly call that out. I have come to understand that there are different types of guilt that show up for different reasons. The first is moral guilt, which arises when you have violated your own values or hurt someone else. That guilt is earned. It is information and we should listen to it. The second kind is performative guilt, which is the feeling that floods your nervous system when you are about to inconvenience someone by honoring yourself. That guilt is not a moral signal. It is conditioning built from decades of people-pleasing and caretaking compressed into a physical sensation that feels like conscience, but it is not. It is the voice that says they will be disappointed or they will make a judgement about you, and that maybe the right thing to do would be to just go. It feels like morality in your body, but it is just a script you have been reading from your whole life that you did not write.

Performative guilt is what keeps you in meetings you should not be in, or available to others when you are completely depleted. It keeps you saying yes when every cell in your body is asking you to say no. The way to get through this kind of guilt is not to silence it, but to build something stronger alongside it, which is the muscle that knows your needs are as valid as anyone else’s.

In addition to guilt, there is also a layer of reactivity. Most of us who have spent years in caretaking or high-performance roles have been conditioned to respond to perceived needs before they are even stated. Someone sighs and you are already thinking of how to help them. There is an uncomfortable energy in the room and you rush to smooth it out. This feels like kindness, but it is actually a survival strategy running on automation, and it pulls you out of your own life dozens of times a day without you noticing. The practice I have found most useful here is a pause, a tiny space between noticing someone else’s need and deciding what, if anything, you are going to do about it. In that space, before the automatic response takes over, you get to check in with yourself. One word that helps me create that space is noted. When someone’s opinion or expectation starts seeping into my decision-making before I have had a chance to consult myself, I say it internally: noted. It is not dismissive. It simply means I have registered what you have said and I am now going to decide what I actually think. That pause, however brief, is where self-authority begins.

The clearest example of full sovereignty I ever witnessed was not my own. It was a director I worked with early in my career, a small woman who wore pink suits and carried herself with a level of confidence and certainty that I had never seen up close before. In one of her first meetings with her senior leaders, a man began describing his technical work and said, almost offhandedly, I’ll spare you the details. She held up her hand and, without raising her voice, she listed her advanced degrees in the relevant technical fields, her years of experience, and said: I am very much interested in all of the details. Please see me after this meeting. The room went silent. I remember thinking: I want to be that. Not necessarily because of the drama of it, which was minimal, but I wanted to have the groundedness underneath it. She was not performing authority. She simply had it, because she knew exactly who she was and what she would and would not be accepting.

That is the goal. It is not a permanent state, it is a practice.

What it looks like in daily life is less cinematic than that conference room moment. It looks like rescheduling the dentist appointment without inventing a reason. It looks like not responding to a text message until you are actually ready to be present for the conversation. It looks like going back to your hotel room when your body needs sleep, even when the founders of the company are suggesting you stay. It looks like recognizing that most of the things on your calendar that feel non-negotiable are not actually non-negotiable. Of all the balls you have in the air right now, the ones that are made of glass are fewer than you think. The rest of them can be dropped- they will simply bounce and you can pick them up later.

There is one rule that holds all of this together and it is non-negotiable: you cannot build sovereignty on top of a lie. Even small ones. Even socially acceptable ones. When you say I am not feeling well instead of I need to reschedule, you are telling yourself that your needs are not enough on their own, and your truth requires justification. That you can only choose yourself if someone else approves the reason. That is the cage. That is the internalized hierarchy you are trying to dismantle, reconstructed from the inside every time you reach for a cover story instead of the truth. Sovereignty is not freedom from consequences. Sometimes people will be disappointed and sometimes there is a cost. But you are choosing it with clear eyes rather than shrinking from it in the dark.

What it sounds like is simple to the point of feeling almost rude the first few times. I need to reschedule. I will not be there tonight. Can we move this? No extra drama or elaborate explanation, and NO apology for having a life that requires tending.

Truth is the muscle we are building here. Sovereignty is what you achieve when it gets strong.

I want you to think about where you have been overriding yourself. Where the expectations of others, or the schedule, or the guilt, have been making decisions that belonged to you. Think about whether there is one small truth you could practice this week or one moment where you choose yourself without inventing a justification for it.

You are not in a cage. You have more choice, more agency, more freedom than the life you have been living inside might suggest. And you get to claim all of it without lying.

If this resonated and you are ready to look at what you have been performing instead of choosing, The Unbinding is where I would point you.