Hi,
I've been thinking about a very particular kind of woman.
I seem to spend my life surrounded by her.
She's extraordinary.
Most people don't realise this because
she's become so incredibly good at making life work.
She'll find a way.
She'll reorganise.
She'll adapt.
She'll carry more than her share.
She'll solve problems nobody else has even noticed yet.
She'll hold families together.
Lead teams.
Run businesses.
Care for ageing parents.
Support friends.
Become the one everyone relies on.
People admire how capable she is.
I find myself wondering how much of her capacity has been spent creating workarounds.
Not because she isn't enough.
Because somewhere along the way she learnt that adapting was often easier than making a fuss.
So she adapted. And adapted. And adapted again...
Until one day she could no longer remember what life might have felt like
if she hadn't always had to work around everybody else's expectations.
I don't see weak women.
I don't see broken women.
I see women who have become astonishingly resourceful.
Women who have quietly found ways around controlling relationships.
Around impossible workplaces.
Around family expectations.
Around silence.
Around criticism.
Around never quite feeling enough.
Around being told they were too much.
Around never being asked what they wanted.
Sometimes I wonder how much brilliance has been spent surviving.
How much creativity has been spent adapting.
How much energy has been used simply trying to make life work.
And yet... Despite everything...
She has never stopped trying to become.
I see it in the woman who writes poetry in the evenings.
The woman who paints.
The woman who quietly dreams about opening her own business.
The woman who keeps thinking, "Surely there must be more than this?"
The woman who has spent years looking after everybody else while wondering when her own life might begin.
She's still there. She always was.
Sometimes she's just been growing around railings...
A little while ago in St Andrews I spotted the most magnificent cherry blossom tree.
She was astounding. She took my breath away.
Then I noticed something that stopped me dead in my tracks.
Around her trunk, four feet high, a thick ring of wrought iron railing had been cemented deeply into the ground.
It was so tight and so unnecessary that tears burned hotly in my eyes.
And yet, she had simply carried on growing.
All I could think was...
This is everything I refuse to collude with.
Not in trees and not in women.
She had never stopped becoming.
She had never stopped blossoming.
Despite everything.
She had found a thousand ways to become despite the fence.
The wrought iron had become embedded in her trunk. She had simply grown around it.
And, standing there, I couldn't stop thinking about women...
The extraordinary thing about human beings is that we keep adapting.
We adapt to families.
We adapt to schools.
We adapt to workplaces.
We adapt to marriages.
We adapt to systems.
Sadly, we are incredibly good at working around everything that constrains our becoming.
After a while, we don't even notice we are adapting. It simply becomes the way we live.
The way we speak.
The way we love.
The way we work.
The way we relate to ourselves.
Until one day we find ourselves wondering... "Is this really me?"
The greatest gift another human being can offer us is not another way to adapt...
but enough room to stop adapting.
Enough room to notice who we've always been beneath the workarounds.
Those relationships change lives.
Not because somebody fixes us. Not because somebody gives us all the answers.
But because, little by little, we stop spending our lives on workarounds
and begin using that same extraordinary intelligence, creativity and courage
to build a life that finally feels like our own.
I honestly don't think there is anything more beautiful than watching a woman gradually become more herself.
It is one of the greatest privileges of my life.
Kas ♥️
Experiential Becoming