Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals(8)

I was devastated.

I could not handle that people were so upset with me. Never mind that they were absolute strangers. Never mind that it was in the comments of a Facebook post. I was gutted. Remember little girl me? Remember Shark Teeth? Well, she still desperately wanted to belong, and she hated the idea that anyone might be upset with her.

It honestly seems stupid in retrospect, because I’m so far removed from that insecure young woman (thank you, therapy!). But it made me second-guess everything I did and said publicly. There were a handful of topics I knew would make people angry, so I stopped mentioning them altogether. Working, entrepreneurialism, my team, having a nanny, having a housekeeper, business trips—it all quickly became taboo. I focused on what people loved. Pinterest-worthy photos on how to get organized, parenting advice, exercise tips, and cupcake recipes ruled the day. I worked my butt off for years to grow and scale my company, but if you asked me at the time what I did for a living, I would demurely tell you that I had “a little blog.”

That “little blog” was read by millions of people every month and had a six-figure revenue stream, but I understood that the business behind the blog was upsetting to certain people, so I never mentioned it. And it wasn’t like I just kept certain aspects of my life quiet. The very nature of keeping it a secret started to reinforce the idea that what I was doing—and who I was—was something to be ashamed of. This fed my mommy guilt. This fed my insecurities about the right way to be a wife. When anyone said anything negative about my choices, either online or in person at a family function, I didn’t question it. I came to believe that they were right, that I was doing all this wrong, that a good woman or wife or mother would live totally for her family.

Only I couldn’t give it up. I loved my business, and I loved trying to solve the puzzle of entrepreneurship. It made me happy. It lit my heart on fire. It made me feel alive. But, simultaneously, I didn’t want anyone to be inconvenienced by the thing that gave me joy.

How many of you do that? How many of you reading this are living half lives or, worse, are a shadow of who you were truly meant to be because someone in your life doesn’t fully appreciate or understand you?

I didn’t want to give up on my dream of a successful business, but I also didn’t want anyone to disapprove of me. I lived this double life for nearly five years and suffered from constant anxiety attacks. It took a ton of personal work and some big realizations for me to get to the root of why I felt the need to live this way, but the gist of it is this: I cared more about being loved by others than I cared about loving myself.

So while I continued growing my business, I stopped mentioning it publicly. And when members of our family questioned why I would work rather than stay at home with our children—constantly and with increasing frustration—I learned not to mention it privately either.

Brené Brown says, “Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. . . . Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.”1 I didn’t understand it at the time, but I felt extremely ashamed of being a working mom. And I felt ashamed for years. Years of beating myself up, years of trying to please everyone else, years of trying to be exceptional at producing family dinners and toddler birthday party designs in order to prove that my children weren’t missing out on anything. So many years I wasted knotted up inside about other people’s expectations for my life. So many years being distracted from my core mission to motivate and help other women, because I was so worried about everyone else’s perception.

So many years I spent apologizing for who I was.

Oh, not verbally apologizing. My apologies were so much more hurtful because I didn’t say I’m sorry with my words. I apologized with the way I lived my life. Every time I felt ashamed for taking a business trip. Every time I swallowed the lie of mommy guilt. Every time I dressed a certain way or spoke a certain way in order to be better received was an apology for who I really was, a lie of omission. And every single time I lied about who I was, I reinforced the belief in my own mind that there was something wrong with me. I honestly believed I was the only woman who felt this way.

Then, in 2015, I went to a conference that would change my life forever. I talked about it in detail in my last book, and I swear I won’t be that author who just repeats all her old stories in the sequel, but the gist of that experience was, we were doing some work on limiting beliefs and the lies that hold us back. I began to dig into my childhood and what I might have learned or accepted back then that was still affecting me today.

Spoiler alert: most of the things you learned in childhood are still affecting you today. I was no exception.

I grew up in a home with a traditional structure. Dad worked, and Mom took care of the house . . . even when she also worked. Somehow I still found my way into being a proud feminist—which means, in its totality, that I believe men and women should be treated equally. I went into marriage believing my husband and I would equally share the load, but it was so easy to slip back into the structure I’d grown up with that told me what a woman should be like and how she should act and what her value was.

Let me step to the side for a moment and unpack the idea of living into what a “woman is supposed to be.” If I only get to give you one thought to chew on in this book, it would be this: Most of us have been raised with a massive disparity between the way women should be and the way men should be. This isn’t a question of masculine versus feminine. I’m typing this out right now while wearing full makeup—with contouring! This is a question of who little boys are raised to be versus who little girls are raised to be. Like I mentioned earlier, most women, regardless of where they grew up or what their cultural background is, have been taught essentially that to be a good woman is to be good for other people. The problem with this is that it means you’re letting other people determine your worth. Is it any wonder that half the women I know suffer from anxiety and depression, drowning underneath the wave of what other people think? We’ve been taught that we don’t have any value without the good opinions of others.