You are more than one thing

Photo by Sanket Gupta on Unsplash

The advice…

You are more than just one thing. Don’t confine yourself to a box that doesn’t truly exist.

Where it’s coming from…

If there’s one thing the Woman Unclouded journey has taught me, it’s that a woman - a person, really - is never just one thing.

We’re conditioned to think in boxes. From early on, we’re taught to slot ourselves, and others, into categories: the ‘academic’, the ‘creative’, the ‘scattered’. We carry this into adulthood, labelling ourselves with roles like ‘wife’, ‘mother’, ‘single’, ‘businesswoman’. Even careers come with labels: ‘accountant’, ‘teacher’, ‘nurse’. Not to mention the stage in life: ‘young’, ‘mid-life’, ‘old’.

And each little word comes with a set of expectations.

But I’ve met so many women who’ve dared to blur, or even erase, those lines - tossing out titles and mixing them into the beautifully messy thing we call life.

Strong businesswomen with a creative spark. Busy mothers with bold dreams. Older women with the fire of youthful confidence. In a recent piece, Marie Briguglio said: “I do not like to be placed in any single box, like “economist”. It is possible (better and more fun) to be more than one thing in life! It is the unique mix of things that makes us who we are!”

What I’ve realised is that, often, it takes time for people to realise that they are the only ones holding themselves back. That they can, in fact, give themselves permission to be all of who they are.

The boxes? They were never real.