I Sat On The Floor With A Box Belonging To The Woman I Used To Be

Two years ago, I decided it was time to organize the mess of storage boxes in my basement. Covered in dust and deeply hidden, I found an old keepsake box. I opened it cautiously and discovered it was a collection of old journals, sentimental knick-knacks, and one of my earliest resumes from a version of me applying for a job I don’t even remember wanting.

Intrigued by what I could see at first glance, I sat down on the floor with it. After all, that’s what you do with a box like that. You don’t stand over it. You sit with it. You take everything out of it, soaking up every little detail in the pursuit of recollecting the exact memory associated with why you kept it in the first place.

The journals were the hardest find. It wasn’t because of what happened in the years I wrote them; stories of trauma, joys, and other momentous events. I noticed the handwriting. The girl who wrote this hurried with every stroke of her hand, like she was worried about getting the words perfect so she wouldn’t forget. This girl had opinions and dreams. She had a five-year plan that had nothing to do with a mortgage or a school pickup schedule. She wanted things that had nothing to do with anyone else’s approval, and reading these entries reminded me how different I was back then.

I’ve made my peace with my past, mostly. Looking at photos of me reminded me of how much has changed since I was twenty-three years old. The face in the old photos tucked between the pages looked familiar, but certainly didn’t reflect the woman this young girl grew up to become.

Somewhere between then and now, I made decisions I don’t remember agreeing to. A whole life’s worth of them, actually. And I couldn’t recall the moments where I signed off on any of them.

I didn’t know that’s what inheriting an identity actually felt like. I reflected on the individual moments that were small enough that I never noticed the exact moment I stopped choosing the life I wanted and started complying with the roles expected of me.

As girls become women, nobody sits us down and hands us a job description for each upcoming role. It’s quieter than that. It’s a hundred small yeses, most of them sensible in the moment, that eventually add up to a whole identity we adopt.

Women are expected to become good daughters, supportive wives, and exceptional mothers. The world knows we can handle pretty much everything. You probably know the roles first-hand. You’ve probably been in a few of them so long you’ve stopped thinking of them as roles at all. They just describe who you are now, and the life you live. Yet, nobody obvious handed you a contract with rules and roles for any of it that you had to follow. You just kept showing up, day after day, until the role became load-bearing, until the rest of your life was built on top of it, and pulling it out now would mean the whole thing might come down and crash.

The identity you’re living in right now is made of two different parts: the parts you built, and the parts you adopted and absorbed.

Most of us have never separated the two. You can be excellent at carrying something you never agreed to carry. Competence doesn’t prove consent. It’s just evidence that you got really good at doing what needed to be done. I was very good, for a very long time, at being the version of myself that other people needed me to be. In fact, I got so good at playing my parts that I eventually forgot to check in with myself to ensure that I didn’t become invisible to the wants and goals that the younger version of me had wanted to experience.

Most of the baggage that women carry at this point in their lives isn’t wrong, and it isn’t worthless just because you didn’t choose all of it on purpose. Some of the results are uniquely yours, built with intention, and chosen with your eyes open. Our lived experiences are worth every bit of what it’s cost us. And yet, some of those experiences were handed to you by people who meant well and never thought to ask if you wanted to be a part of it at all. You became what everyone else needed you to be because that’s what you did back then, and nobody ever came back to check if you were okay, or if you wanted something different.

Just so you know… I didn’t put the box back in my basement storage.

I let it sit on my desk for a long time. Every time I looked at it, I was triggered to remember who I was and who I wanted to be. I spent a lot of time contemplating what I wanted for myself in my next phase of life, in my next chapters.

What I got as a result was simpler than I expected. I got a choice.

I got to decide what happened next. It wasn’t because I now regretted the past twenty years of my life, because I didn’t regret my life, or the things that helped me feel accomplished. However, it did help me to stop defaulting into whatever version of me shows up because it’s familiar and what I know is expected of me by other people.

I know this much, though. The next decision I make is mine.

I’m done ignoring my own needs and dreams so that other people can get what they want. In this next phase of my life, I will choose to prioritize the things that are important to me. It’s not that I’m turning selfish all of a sudden. I just want to ensure that what I want is part of the equation from now on.

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Hi, I’m Sarah! There was a day I looked at my life and felt invisible in it…so I rebuilt it. Now I help other women do the same, whether that’s launching a business, writing a book, or building a platform.