The Permission Slip You’ve Been Waiting For: It’s Okay to Focus on You
The Permission Slip You’ve Been Waiting For: It’s Okay to Focus on You
There’s a particular weight to living your whole adult life carrying everyone else. And then there’s the weight that comes after — when the obligations have lifted, the caregiving ends, and you realize you have no idea who you are underneath it all.
This is for the woman sitting alone, finally free, but feeling more lost than ever.
The Thing No One Tells You About Freedom
We spend years — decades even — believing that one day we’ll have permission to focus on ourselves. That magical someday when we’ve done enough, given enough, been enough for everyone else.
But here’s what actually happens. The obligations end. The people move on or pass away. The caregiving stops. And you’re left standing in an empty room, finally free to do whatever you want.
Except you have no idea what that is.
Because no one is coming to save you. No one is coming to tell you what to do next. And terrifyingly, no one is there to stop you either.
I know this because I lived it. I still live it some days. That empty room doesn’t always feel like freedom. Sometimes it just feels like silence where everyone else used to be.
A woman reached out to me not long ago and said something that broke my heart open. She told me she couldn’t remember the last time she did something just for herself — that everything had always been attached to someone else’s life. Now she lived alone, with no real friends and little family left nearby. She said the weight she spent her whole adult life carrying had just been replaced by a different weight — the weight of not knowing herself at all.
I didn’t have to think hard about how to respond. I just wrote back: I know exactly what you mean.
When Being “Selfish” Was Never the Real Problem
Most of us grew up watching our parents work themselves to the bone just to keep things afloat. We never saw what a healthy, balanced life looked like modeled in front of us. We learned duties, not dreams. We learned function, not fulfillment. We were never taught how to thrive because the people raising us were too busy surviving.
And here’s the truth that still aches when I sit with it: when women don’t take care of themselves, everyone suffers. Not just us. We can’t teach others what we never learned. We can’t model something we never practiced. We can’t dream dreams we never allowed ourselves to have.
I didn’t know I was missing any of this until the caregiving stopped and I looked up and realized I had no idea what I actually wanted. Not a vague idea. No idea at all.
The Real Fear Isn’t Guilt — It’s Success
Here’s something I’ve come to understand about myself and about the women I hear from regularly. The guilt eventually fades. But it gets replaced by something even more paralyzing — the fear of what happens when you actually focus on yourself.
Fear of failing when there’s no one else to blame. Fear of succeeding when you’ve never quite believed you deserved it.
Someone told me once about an Avon business she started years ago. It took off. People loved what she was doing, and the momentum was real. And it terrified her — not the work, but the success. She found ways to let it fall apart because thriving felt more dangerous than struggling. Because struggling was familiar. Thriving felt like something that happened to other people.
I understood her completely. When you’re finally doing something for yourself — truly for yourself — the stakes feel impossibly high. If you fail, there’s no obligation that got in the way. No caregiving emergency, no one else’s need that derailed you. Just you, the choice, and the outcome. That kind of accountability is frightening when you’ve spent decades making everything about everyone else.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: we’ve already been living with the consequences of choices we made moment by moment, without a plan, for decades. We survived that. We can survive this too.
What I Know About Permission
I used to think I was waiting for permission. Permission to rest. Permission to want something. Permission to take up space in my own life.
What I’ve slowly come to understand is that the permission was never coming from outside. It was never going to arrive in my inbox or be handed to me by someone who finally decided I’d done enough. I was going to have to give it to myself.
And that is so much harder than it sounds.
What I needed wasn’t really permission at all. It was acceptance. Acceptance that I am worth whatever I want to do. Worth the joy I choose. Worth the daily routines that feel like self-love rather than self-indulgence. Worth the risk of trying and failing. Worth the quieter, more terrifying risk of trying and succeeding.
I still have to remind myself of this. Some mornings I sit down with my coffee and feel the old pull — the sense that I should be doing something for someone, that my own wants are somehow less urgent than an obligation that no longer exists. And I have to consciously choose differently.
One morning I put up my Christmas lights in October. Not because it was time. Not because anyone was coming over. Just because the glow of them makes me feel something warm and good, and I decided that feeling was reason enough. It sounds small. It was small. But it was completely, entirely mine. And that felt like a beginning.
What Changes When You Accept Your Worth
When I started — slowly, imperfectly — accepting that my own life deserved my attention, things began to shift in ways I didn’t expect.
I started creating small daily routines that felt like kindness toward myself rather than items to check off a list. I started doing things when they brought me joy rather than waiting for the calendar to say it was appropriate. I started trying things knowing that failure was just information and not evidence that I’d been right all along to put myself last.
And yes, I’m still figuring this out. I have days where I drift. Days where the old patterns resurface and I find myself organizing my time around everything except myself. But the difference now is that I notice. And noticing is how it changes.
You’re not starting from scratch. Neither am I. We’re starting from experience — from fifty or sixty years of knowing exactly what doesn’t work, exactly what we don’t want, exactly how heavy it feels to live for everyone else. That knowledge is not nothing. It’s actually everything.
Now we get to discover what we do want. One small choice at a time. One morning of Christmas lights in October at a time. One moment of this is what I want, and I’m going to do it anyway at a time.
You don’t need permission. You need to accept that you’re worth anything you want to do.
And then you begin. Not all at once. Not perfectly. Just one decision today that is entirely yours.
What’s one thing you’re going to do this week — just for you — that asks nothing of anyone else? Drop it in the comments. Your answer might be exactly what someone else needed to hear today.