Hi Friend
Last week I asked you this:
If you came home tomorrow and saw your life as an outsider, what would you finally give yourself permission to let go of?
I actually did come home and see my life as an outsider. Six weeks away will do that to you.
I want to tell you what I found.
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What I left on the shelf
I have always been pretty minimal. Clothes go easily. Furniture, dishes, the things that have no story attached to them, none of it has ever had much of a hold on me. I thought I was good at letting go.
The nicknacks that hold a memory of my mother I kept without apology, there are just a few. Those are not clutter. Those are her.
And then I stood in front of my books.
I am not a fiction reader. I am a lover of education, of non fiction, of learning. If I could spend the rest of my life taking courses I think I would do it happily. My books are not just books. They are who I have been planning to become. Every single one of them is a door I left open just in case.
I picked up my aromatherapy textbooks. My reflexology manuals. My health coaching references. Years of study. Certifications earned. Clients served. Real knowledge, hard won.
And I felt it in my body before I thought it in my mind.
She is not who I am anymore.
I have spent years doing one to one work with clients. It has been the financial backbone of my life. And I have been holding onto those books the way you hold onto a safety net you are terrified to admit you no longer need. Not because the work still calls me. Because it felt safer than fully betting on who I am becoming.
So I let them go. All of them. I kept only the books that belong to the woman I am now and the one I am growing into. Everything else went.
And something in me exhaled that had been holding its breath for a very long time.
Clutter is rarely about the things. It is about the versions of ourselves we are not yet ready to say goodbye to. Every object we keep past its season is a small act of loyalty to a self that has already moved on. And that loyalty, however loving it feels, takes up space. Physical space. Energetic space. The space where the next version of you is trying to take root.
You cannot become who you are meant to be while you are still housing who you used to be.
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Grief taught me to let go of what I couldn't keep anyway. Standing in front of those bookshelves taught me the same thing in a completely different way. But it also showed me something else. Something I want to talk about this week.
What we put down. And never picked back up.
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The girl who turned her volume down
When I was ten years old I was in every speaking competition I could find. I did one girl skits, in the drama club, singing competions all of it. I performed.I loved to perform. I loved being in front of a room the way some people love breathing. It was not something I did. It was something I was.
And somewhere along the way I turned the volume down.
Not all at once. Gradually. The way you adjust to a dimmer switch so slowly you don't notice the room getting darker until one day you realise you've been sitting in the shadows for years.
Two things did it. I made myself smaller so the people around me wouldn't feel outshone. And I carried a body I had decided the world could not accept. I have been fat for most of my life. And I made that mean something it didn't have to mean. I made it a reason to hold back. To wait. To not quite claim the space that was mine. Not the stage. Not the room. Not the full volume of who I actually was. That was my story. I wrote it. And I kept living it.
My body has not changed much. But that story has. And when the story changed, everything else started to shift with it.
I saw it clearly for the first time at a gestalt weekend years ago. Someone held up a mirror and I recognised myself in it. The woman who made herself smaller so nobody around her would feel outshone. The woman who calmed her big personality for the world. For the people she loved. For the rooms she walked into that weren't quite ready for all of her.
I saw it. And then I kept doing it anyway.
Because seeing something and being ready to live differently from it are two completely different things. And I wasn't ready. Not yet.
It took a business closing. A silent retreat. Six weeks away with nothing but a suitcase and my own thoughts. A shelf full of books that belonged to someone I was finally willing to say goodbye to. It took all of that before the ten year old who wanted every stage she could find started to believe she might actually get one.
This newsletter is her. This brand is her. The woman standing in front of a camera on Instagram talking directly to you is her.
She waited a long time. But she didn't give up.
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What did you put down
I have been in a lot of rooms with women. Workshops, conversations, the quiet exchanges that happen when you hold space long enough for someone to finally say the true thing.
And what I keep witnessing is this.
There is a woman in her 60s doing community theatre for the first time in her life. She wanted to do it at 25 but life had other ideas.
There is a woman who loved to dance as a girl. Really loved it, the kind of love that lives in your body. She married a man who didn't dance. For decades she sat at the table at weddings while the music played. She is line dancing now. Every week. Without apology.
There is a woman lifting weights at 68 because her family thought it wasn't ladylike and she spent 40 years believing them.
These are not small things. These are the things that make a life feel like yours.
Around the age of 10 something specific is happening developmentally. Children at that age are old enough to have genuine passions and preferences but not yet fully shaped by the performance of acceptability. The approval seeking, the self editing, the learning to be palatable, that comes later. What a girl loves at 10 is often the most uncurated version of who she actually is. Before the world got to her. Before she learned to make herself fit.
Psychologists who study identity development in women talk about a pattern they see consistently. Girls begin silencing themselves in early adolescence, turning down the volume on their authentic preferences, their ambitions, their voices, in response to social pressure. By the time they reach adulthood many women have been performing an edited version of themselves for so long they have lost touch with the original.
But here is what I am witnessing in the women I talk to. The perimenopausal women sitting in that angst and questioning. The menopausal women going deeper into it. And especially the post menopausal women on the other side.
Something shifts.
The caring about what other people think starts to loosen its grip. The anger that comes in perimenopause, and it does come, that restless what is this all about energy, it is not a malfunction. It is a signal. It is the self that got put down a long time ago starting to knock from the inside again.
And the women I am talking to who are in their 60s and 70s, the ones picking things back up, they are not doing it recklessly or dramatically. They are doing it quietly and completely. They are decided in a way that younger women often aren't yet. They have stopped asking permission. They have stopped waiting for someone to tell them it's okay.
They are just doing it. Finally.
What did you put down that still belongs to you?
Not the career you didn't pursue. Not the life you didn't live. I am not talking about regret. I am talking about something smaller and more specific than that. A thing you loved. A way you were. A version of yourself that got quieted not because she was wrong but because the world around her wasn't quite ready.
She is still there. I promise you she is still there.
And it is not too late.
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Your question for next week
Here is your question to carry this week:
What did the ten year old version of you love before she learned to make herself acceptable?Before she learned to behave. And is any part of that still waiting to be picked back up?
Sit with it. Reply if something moves in you. I read everything. Next week I will answer it myself.
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If this is landing somewhere real for you and you want to start clearing space for her, the free guide is waiting at www.karenamy.com/free-guide
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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
In love, light and laughter — Karen