Personal Responsibility Isn't a Punishment, it's Your Fucking Liberation

Somewhere along the way, we turned personal responsibility into a punishment.

We made it mean: this is your fault. You did this to yourself. You should have known better, tried harder, wanted it more.

You mustn’t want it hard enough, Susan!

I want to hand it back to you today as something else entirely, something that will make you feel so much better about yourself, because I don’t believe responsibility was ever supposed to feel like that.

For a lot of women, especially women who’ve spent years trying to get healthier, fitter, more themselves, those striving to be “be their best,” responsibility has become a stick we beat ourselves with. “I need to take more responsibility for my health” quietly translates to “I’m the reason this hasn’t worked, and if I just felt bad enough about that, I’d finally do something about it.”

That’s not responsibility. That’s self-flagellation wearing responsibility’s as a disguise. I think it’s one of the most common, least examined reasons women stay stuck in behaviour that they know is not getting them anywhere, not because they lack accountability, but because the version of accountability they’ve been conditioned to is soaked in shame, and shame doesn’t build anything. It just makes you feel like shit.

Operating from responsibility without the flagellation is what I want to explain and where I want to take this today and then I want to go somewhere connected to that: who’s actually allowed to say no in your life, to a conversation, a workload, an expectation, a scroll, and what happens to your health, your body, your sense of self when the answer is almost nobody, including you.

Let’s actually sit with what responsibility means, stripped of the guilt.

Responsibility, at its root, just means: this is mine to respond to. Not mine to blame myself for. Mine to respond to.

That’s an enormous fucking difference. Blame looks backward, obsessed with how you got here, whose fault it is, what you should have done differently. Responsibility looks forward. It says: regardless of how I got here, this life, this body, this week, it’s mine to work with. I get to decide what happens next.

And here’s the reframe worth landing: that’s not a burden. That’s power.

Think about the alternative. If this life isn’t yours to be responsible for, then it belongs to someone else. To circumstance, to whoever’s asking the most of you, to whatever system you happened to land in. If you’re not in charge of it, someone or something else is. When you say “this is mine to respond to,” you’re saying, in the same breath: and therefore I get a say. I get to be the one steering the ship, not just the one absorbing the shit.

That’s not a small thing for a woman who’s spent years being the one everyone else’s needs flow toward. Being handed responsibility, real, un-shamed, forward-facing responsibility, for your own life, your own health, your own body, is one of the few times you get to be fully, unapologetically in charge of something that’s entirely, legitimately yours.

So try this: next time you catch yourself in the shame spiral, thinking I should have, I always, why can’t I just — stop, and ask instead: what am I actually responsible for responding to right now, and what would it look like to respond to it from a place of choice, not punishment?

That’s the whole shift. Not lower standards. Not letting yourself off the hook. Just taking the hook out of your own back.

This shame-based version of responsibility didn’t come from nowhere. It was taught and it was taught in a very particular way - if you’re a woman, AFAB or any kind of minority.

Most of us were raised, culturally, socially, sometimes explicitly, to believe that asking for too much is the offence. Not the actual overload. Not the actual unreasonable demand. The asking. Wanting more time, more rest, more support, more say in your own week gets quietly coded as high-maintenance, selfish, “she’s a lot.”

So the safest, most rewarded position becomes: absorb it. Don’t ask. Adjust yourself to fit whatever’s already been decided, and call that flexibility, call it being easygoing, chillAF, not like the other girls, call it being a good mum, a good employee, a good partner.

A good girl.

That’s not a you: inherent. That’s conditioning and it runs so deep that most of us don’t experience it as a rule being enforced, we experience it as our own personality.

“I’m just not someone who likes to make a fuss.”

“I don’t want to be difficult.”

“It’s easier if I just do it myself.”

Those sentences feel like identity.

They are actually inherited instructions.

We talk a lot about boundaries in this space, set your boundaries, hold your boundaries. Boundaries are a useful and necessary construct. However, I want to offer a different, maybe more honest question underneath it, because “boundaries” can start to feel like one more task on the list. One more thing you’re failing to do properly.

The question I actually want you asking is simpler, and it goes further back than the boundary itself:

What are you giving consent to, across every environment you move through and did you actually agree to it, or did it just happen to you?

A huge amount of what’s draining you isn’t a boundary you failed to set. It’s a consent you never actually gave, it was simply assumed, taken, or never questioned in the first place.

There are two places consent operates.

The conversation you keep having because saying no to it feels ruder than simply enduring it. The workload that quietly expanded because you never said the sentence “that’s not mine to carry.” The expectation someone placed on you, at work, in your family, in your friendships, that you never actually agreed to, but you’ve been fulfilling it so consistently that everyone, including you, assumes you said yes.

These are consents you’re giving, moment to moment, out loud or in silence, and most of them were never actually decided. They were defaulted into.

This is the layer most people never consider at all. The social, cultural, and political landscape you exist inside, the messages about what a woman’s body is for, what she owes the people around her, how much space she’s allowed to take up. Those aren’t things you consented to in any meaningful sense. You were born into them and your online environment operates the same way: every scroll, every algorithm-fed image, every comment section you half-read is another moment of consent being extracted from you passively, without you ever being asked directly.

This matters, in the context of wanting a healthier, fitter life, because your capacity to actually get your own needs met, your workouts, your food, your rest, your sense of self, is being quietly taxed by all of this consent you never consciously gave. You cannot out-discipline a life where you are constantly, invisibly agreeing to carry more than you have capacity for.

Here’s how these two ideas talk to each other.

Responsibility, done right, is you deciding what’s yours to respond to, from personal power, not shame.

Consent, examined honestly, is you noticing what you’ve been agreeing to without ever really agreeing, consciously and unconsciously, and understanding that you get to revoke consent at any point, to whatever the fk was never yours to carry in the first place.

Put those together and you get something genuinely different from the standard “just be more disciplined” health advice.

You get: this is my life, I’m responsible for it, and that means I also get to decide what I’m actually consenting to inside it— including, finally, consenting to prioritise your own training, your own food, your own rest, instead of defaulting everyone else’s needs ahead of your own by habit.

That’s not selfish. That’s the beginning of actually being in charge of your own life.

That’s personal responsibility.

That’s how you play the long game.

If this is landing — if you’re ready to stop absorbing everyone else’s defaults and actually sit down and decide, deliberately, what your training, your food, and your life are going to look like, I’m running a one-day, in-person workshop in Melbourne on Sunday, August 9. It’s the What The Fuck Workshop where we demystify exactly what the fuck you should be doing in your health and fitness to meet your goals. A 5 hour evidenced based, neuroaffirming and community supported session. No fads. No bullshit. No information overload. You and me and 15 other gorgeous women, eating lunch and getting the answers you need to start moving forwards.

P.S There’s an $1800 BONUS gift for every attendee so check it out here and grab your spot before they sell out.