The Committee Approved the Cheese

(buy the damn cheese)

Most people who know me would probably describe me as fearless. The girl who left home at fifteen. The woman who built things from nothing. The one who moved across the world the way other people move furniture. From the outside, I’ve never looked like someone who waits for permission.

That’s true, mostly.

But underneath the feisty, slightly reckless, spontaneous, leaper-off-cliffs woman, there is still a part of me quietly waiting for permission. The word alone almost makes me choke on my own spit, but there it is. Not permission to do things—I have never struggled with that. Permission to simply be me.

I don’t use the word validation because validation is about performance. Someone watching and approving.

This is different.

This is about existing. About taking up space not as an achievement but as a given. About being the full, unedited, slightly too much version of myself not for an audience but because she’s here, she’s been waiting, and she is frankly tired of the anteroom.

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Permission is sneaky. It never introduces itself as permission. It disguises itself as “after I lose ten pounds,” or “after the kids leave home,” or “after I know a little more,” or “after this project,” or “once things settle down.” Life never settles down. The waiting became the condition. We became so thoroughly trained in the art of waiting that we stopped noticing we were doing it. The smaller, safer, more palatable version of ourselves became the one we introduced to the world while we were getting the other version “ready.”

There is no other one. There never was. What there is, what there has always been underneath the waiting, is fear.

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Fear is incredibly well branded. It shows up wearing practicality. Timing. Reasonableness. Professionalism. Not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable. It tells you that maybe next year you’ll finally write the thing. Start the business. Wear the outfit. Move to the city. Leave the relationship. Say what you actually think.

Last week I stood in the grocery store for five full minutes holding a wedge of absurdly expensive French cheese I had noticed the week before, so you could say I had been stalking it. I really wanted to try it. I picked it up. Put it back. Picked it up again. Apparently some ancient committee in my head had decided forty dollars’ worth of cheese required unanimous approval. I bought the cheese. It was excellent. Fear will do that. It’ll turn the smallest act of permission into a moral dilemma. Excellent marketing. I bought it for years. The committee was never really discussing cheese.

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I was taught to believe that certain expressions of myself were inconvenient, or embarrassing, or didn’t fit the shape of what was wanted. It came from the accumulated weight of lived experiences that were never in my control. Nobody ever said it out loud. They didn’t have to. I learned that the safest version of me was the edited one.

That’s the part that got trained. Not the part that left home at fifteen — she was never asking anyone. The part underneath her, the quieter one, that learned much earlier than that to make herself acceptable before she made herself known.

The edit costs something. It’s not neutral. Every small act of self-management chips something off. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a little, consistently, over years, until one day you’re standing in your own life wondering why it fits like someone else’s.

Fuck that.

The full version of who I am doesn’t look anything like what I was told it should look like. It is weirder, louder, more specific, more contradictory, more surprising. It takes up more space. It makes some people uncomfortable. It says things the edited version would have swallowed.

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Here’s the math that finally did it: I’m sixty-ish. The actuarial tables and I have reached an understanding. Whatever time is left, am I really going to spend it being palatable? Introducing the contained version at parties while the actual one — the one who laughs from the diaphragm, says the thing everyone’s thinking, starts a business at an age when she’s supposed to be simplifying, writes essays like this and hits publish before the fear wakes up — waits in storage for a readiness that was never coming?

The world does not need another edited version of a person. It has plenty of those. What it needs, and what it is genuinely starving for, is the complete, unmanaged, fully expressed version of us exploding into life with everything we’ve got.

Buy the expensive cheese. Take the long way. Say the thing you’ve been rehearsing in the shower for six months. Order dinner and dessert and eat them in the wrong order. Cancel the plan you said yes to out of guilt and spend the evening doing absolutely nothing. Tell someone they matter. Block the person who doesn’t. Go to the movie alone. Wear the thing. Say the thing. Do the thing you’ve been dressing up as “not the right time” for approximately your entire adult life.

The right time was always now.

You just kept postponing it until it looked more like permission.

Fuck that.

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