You Matter

Two words came through my hand last week. This is the story of how they arrived.

Last Wednesday I sat in on a group coaching call. I wasn’t the one being coached. I was in the audience, watching the coach work with a woman who had raised her hand.

The Fear With Many Names

The woman was afraid of reaching out too often to the people she serves. Afraid of bothering them. Afraid of being rejected. Afraid of being seen. And underneath all of it, as the coach kept gently digging, the oldest fear of all: afraid she wasn’t enough.

I know that stack of fears from the inside. I would guess you do too. We have spent our whole lives focused on the demands of the external world. Trying to be enough and do enough, but not too much, to fit in and succeed at whatever goals were set before us by family, career, and friends.

Many of us have raised families while we were swimming with the sharks in the world of competition and the relentless “more, more, more.” We often come to the third act of life exhausted. We checked all the boxes only to find ourselves still unfulfilled.

Our brains know the cost. Our bodies know it too. Exhaustion, frustration, dissatisfaction, sometimes bitterness and resentment.

The Child in the Hole

Then the coach offered a picture that has stayed in my mind.

If a child fell into a deep hole right in front of you, you would already be climbing down. There would be no thought about how you looked, whether you were bothering anyone, whether you were enough. Every fear about yourself would clear out of the way, because someone needed you.

Fear about ourselves can only live in the space where service isn’t. The moment we remember who needs us, the room fills with something else.

What Landed in Me

The coaching wasn’t directed at me. It landed anyway.

I’ve been serving people for years. But since my mother died, almost a year ago, my mind has found a refined purpose. I can now say it in my sleep: helping women in the second half of life come home to the aliveness they yearn for. But knowing lives in the head. That afternoon, while I listened to a coach hand another woman permission to care that much, something slid down into my chest and ignited my heart.

Now I don’t just know my mission. I feel it. I feel a sense of urgency now. Not urgency born from fear. Urgency born from passion.

And I found myself writing two words to the woman I write all of this for. I didn’t plan them. They came through my hand.

You matter.

You Matter

I mean you.

Our mothers showed us what good women do: they serve. And for those of us, like me, born in the ‘50s, they served in the home. Family came first. Husband, children, then you. Then women’s liberation came, and we were allowed, sometimes even forced, out into the world of work.

We got credentials and entered the pool where the sharks were swimming. The message was clear: to compete with the sharks you had to do more and be more, and fight for your place at the table. And we did. We had to play by the rules the sharks had set. And we did.

Sometimes the sharks chewed us up and spit us out. Sometimes we played the game and won big. But either way we come to this point in our life’s journey asking “Is this all there is?” For those of us who found a place in the middle, we live in an unrelenting grind. For those of us who clawed our way to the top, we live in an unrelenting grind. Hmmm.

Now we find ourselves in the third act of life. And now a new message is being handed down. It happened at exactly the hour you had accumulated the most to give. The culture calls it slowing down, stepping back, letting the young ones take it from here. And a woman who is exhausted and unfulfilled by the unrelenting grind, who, by the way, has accumulated a lifetime of hard-won wisdom, can start to believe it is time to slow down.

Wait. What?

Sit down? Be quiet? Take up knitting? Buy a rocking chair? Me?

Oh, I don’t know about you, but this “you’re used up, you’re done, get out of the way” cultural message makes me mad. We have invested so much of ourselves in this world: in our kids, in our careers, and just when we are truly at the top of our game the message is “you’re benched.”

So let me say it again. You matter.

If you’re exhausted, our first task is to reconnect you to your inner flame, the fire that vitalizes and re-energizes. The problem with the way most of us have played the game of life is that the needs and requirements of the external world have governed how we spend our energy. And we are drained.

But the uniqueness that you are was never the issue. Your uniqueness has been set aside to meet the requirements of the external world. This is the source of your exhaustion and frustration. Once you reconnect with this aspect of yourself, your own energy will refresh you.

What’s missing is you giving yourself permission to be you.

How Permission Travels

You can’t think your way into a permission you were denied. I tried for years, and I know how to think. Permission travels by witness. You watch it being handed to another woman, and something in you says, then I’m allowed too.

That’s what this letter is. Me, handing it to you, the way I watched it handed to someone else.

So try this with me. Put your hand over your heart and say the two words, out loud. I matter. Your body may argue. Mine did, the first time. Say the words again anyway. The arguing is a pattern, and patterns can be unlearned.

You may have noticed there was no letter from me last Thursday. My body asked for a quiet day, and I listened. That is part of this work too.

On Thursday I’ll bring you more of this in the video. For today, two words are enough.

And if one woman came to mind while you were reading, send this letter to her. Permission travels by witness. Be the witness for someone.

Tender hugs,