Opinion Stop treating approval like oxygen, watch her grow
A woman doesn’t truly discover herself when life finally gives her permission. She discovers herself the moment she stops waiting for it.
Becoming yourself isn’t a grand transformation but a quiet reunion with the person you were before the world edited you. There comes a moment in every woman’s life when she realises she has been living as the idea of a person, rather than the person herself. It doesn’t arrive with a dramatic thunderbolt or an epiphany worthy of a diary entry. It arrives quietly, like noticing a perfume you don’t remember choosing still lingering on your skin. You weren’t wearing it for yourself but because someone once told you it suited you.
Women are handed roles as if they are birthrights: she’s the sensible one, the calm one, the girl who doesn’t make trouble. And because girls are raised to treat approval like oxygen, we inhale these descriptions until they feel like identity. Psychology calls this introjection, the absorption of expectations so deeply that they become indistinguishable from the self. But to the women living it, it feels like decorum, upbringing, culture and like we’re doing the right thing.
Somewhere along the way, we become fluent in being the version of ourselves that pleases the room. The nervous system learns that safety comes from being agreeable. The mind learns that love often follows compliance. The body learns to tense whenever an honest feeling wants to surface. By adulthood, many women become emotional contortionists to fit everyone else’s comfort, even if it leaves them breathless.
Then something shifts. Maybe she moves out or falls in love with someone who sees her beneath the performance or leaves a relationship that demanded too much silence or she simply reached an age where pretending feels heavier than the truth. Whatever the trigger, her inner world becomes louder than the expectations around her. Suddenly, she realises she has no idea what she actually likes, wants or believes. This isn’t an identity crisis but an identity reveal.
As she starts noticing her own patterns with honest eyes, she sees the pauses before saying no, the softened tone to avoid conflict, the rehearsed opinions that are swallowed when the moment arrives and the guilt that rises whenever she chooses herself — a guilt inherited from generations of women rewarded for shrinking. When she questions these patterns, her nervous system trembles because she’s been trained otherwise.
And yet she continues. She answers questions without scanning for approval. She hears and recognises her own laughter. She admits the desires she had convinced herself were silly. She explores the anger stored in her mind’s attic, packed beneath layers labelled “good girl expectations”. Slowly, she begins to reacquaint herself with a version of womanhood that isn’t curated by others.
This psychological transformation is fascinating. The nervous system rewrites old scripts, the inner child learns to feel safe with self-expression and a lifetime of emotional labour is replaced by emotional honesty. Beneath it all lies grief — over the years she spent performing, the passions she postponed and the voice she muted.
Grief in such journeys is not tragic but the making of space. She is surprised to discover that her real self is not too much, just fuller than the version the world preferred. She realises she doesn’t want a life that looks good from the outside but one that feels good from the inside. She begins to value peace over politeness, truth over tolerance and presence over performance.
Somewhere along this unfolding, she reaches an almost cinematic moment. She meets herself. A self that feels both new and deeply familiar. Maybe that is the secret of womanhood that nobody teaches us. Becoming yourself isn’t a grand transformation but a quiet reunion with the person you were before the world edited you. And perhaps the most beautiful part is this. A woman doesn’t truly discover herself when life finally gives her permission. She discovers herself the moment she stops waiting for it.
The writer is a Delhi-based child and systemic psychologist Editor (Planning, Projects) Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
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