I’m on the heels of a trip back to France. While I was there, I fought through my need for performance and perfection to find real joy.

This is what I wrote before I left…

Aug 17, 2025

It’s been two years since we’ve been to France to visit Micael’s family. There’s nothing about going there that necessitates me looking a certain way, but in that time I’ve been healing from years of stress and overwhelm, from insomnia, and I feel it in my body. I rarely feel like I look ‘good’ anymore. I’m just too tired to try.

We’ll be attending his brother’s wedding this time. A chance to dress up and have fun, but also the pressure of being compared to what I looked like before, when I was thinner, less stressed, carrying fewer fears in my body. I want to feel the power that comes with looking good in this culture. I want to impress people. I don’t want to be judged.

I can see how much I’m circling this, the desire to ‘look better’. That somehow that will mean I’ve achieved something. That I’m happy, I’m successful, I’m powerful. Then it struck me today. I’m equating control with power. In a culture that has so stripped women of real power, the ability to control how we present ourselves – our bodies, our homes, our lifestyles – becomes a pitiful second choice.

If I can control what I eat, how I look, how successful I seem to the outside world feels like a way to have power over our lived reality. A reality which measures us by such things. These are acts which say, I see what the metrics are and I will meet them, exceed them even. I know how to play. And I’m good at the game.

But control isn’t power. Power is the freedom to choose. And to use our own pleasure, our own desire as a reference point, not anyone else’s.

I’ve worked as a bartender at special events – weddings, auctions, elite functions – and I’ve noticed as I age that I hardly look at the men anymore. It is the women that are captivating. I see the women that are playing the game well. Toned bodies. Thin bodies. Beautiful clothing. Jewelry. Hair. They are winning. But somehow they aren’t really there, they aren’t taking up space in those successful bodies. They are referencing the eyes on them, always. But never asking what their own eyes want. Perhaps it feels too scary to see rather than be seen.

I also see the women that are holding space in themselves. It’s much more rare, but I see them. The ones that are too busy enjoying how it feels to be in their own bodies to wonder if anyone else is enjoying them as well. Their size, their clothes, how they present is irrelevant. There’s something ineffable about how they show up. It looks like fullness, and joy, and quiet trust. There’s a certainty in them, in how they are enjoying themselves.

To enjoy your own body. That is power.

I’ve worked so hard these last years to take up that kind of space in my body. To learn how to care first and sometimes only, what I think and want and need. Not in a selfish way. In a self nourishing way. To not be unconcerned with those around me, but to be most concerned with what is in me. How do I feel. What do I think. Where is my Center.

I’m learning to inhabit my body for my own pleasure now. I’m shedding what others have asked or demanded for me to belong, to be ok. But not by focusing on what I am shedding. Instead I keep turning inward and asking what would feel richer, fuller, more spacious. And I’m learning to trust what I hear myself say.

So in this moment, I’m hearing the call to release control so that something more loving can take its place. Something that doesn’t remember how many pounds I haven’t lost since my last pregnancy, or look at the wrinkles that weren’t there before the pandemic. Something that holds me gently as the tears start to fall while writing this. Instead I look at the soft lines of my body and I see beauty. I look at what I’ve held and who I’ve become and I feel so much tenderness. I close my eyes and I feel myself Here and for a brief moment I am unconcerned with any other eyes on me.

I am letting go of the need for control, or for power, and I am letting love take its place. And somehow that is the most powerful thing of all.

I think back over the ways I’ve inhabited my body over the years and I start to reclaim them, I start to reclaim me. I hold myself the way I would hold one of my own children and I fill that space with love. And I wish I’d gotten here sooner, but it’s ok because I’m here now. And somehow I can work backwards and make everything that brought me here belong too.

I still see what stress has done to me and I ask why it all happened. But maybe I don’t need easy answers. Answers that tell me it was all meant to be. I can shed that need for control too. Or rather than shed it, I can let love take up more space and I forget where the control used to be.

There’s no easy way to do this. Perhaps if your culture held you with love and listened from your earliest days this would feel natural. Do these places exist? I like to imagine that they do. That there are tribes that hold children in such a sacred way. In my imagination, these children’s cells are not programmed before birth by the traumas of their parents to be rigid, to be afraid, to hold themselves from the honesty of their own needs. These children are tender and receptive. They trust. They know without hesitation that they will be heard. They take up space unapologetically. If you know this place, tell me. I want to hear your stories. But if it doesn’t exist then I was brought here to create it. Because this is what we were made for.

I soften and I love. And somehow that is everything.

Letting Go of Performance

The Language of Me

A Radical Recalibration