The Smaller Version

Why we walk past the moments we worked the hardest for.

I stood at the podium. I received my honorary doctorate. I gave the commencement speech. I sat back down.

By the time I got to the car that evening, I was already thinking about what I needed to do next.

I downplayed it. I did the same thing with the TEDx speech two months earlier. I have done it with every milestone of my career, if I am being honest. Every product launch. Every retailer that picked us up. Every chapter I closed and the next one I opened before I even knew I had left the first.

I have been collecting moments like that my whole adult life and refusing to stand inside any of them.

I don’t think I am alone in this. The women I talk to all do it. We finish the thing and we move. We get the title, land the moment, hit the milestone, and we are already three steps ahead in our heads before our bodies have caught up to what just happened. We treat the win like a turnstile we have to walk through to get to the next thing on the other side.

We say “no big deal.” We say “I’m just lucky.” We send a thank you note to the people who got us there and then we go answer email.

I am not entirely sure why we do this. I have my guesses. Some of them are about how we were raised. Some of them are about the way other women police women who take up space. Some of them are about the specific exhaustion of having spent decades being praised for momentum, not the moment. We learned that the thing we are rewarded for is the next thing. So we go to the next thing. We never stay.

I have built a whole career on momentum. Momentum has been good to me. But every moment I refused to stand inside is a moment I do not actually have. I cannot reach back for it. It is gone. I was already gone before it happened.

Here is the part I am still working out.

Are we afraid the moment will disappear if we look at it directly. Will the spell break? Will that accolade or award be taken back? Or are we unable to see we deserve and earned “it”?

Sadly, I also think we are afraid of how it looks. We do not want to seem like we are promoting ourselves. We do not want to seem self-centered. So instead of letting ourselves celebrate the fact that we worked hard to get here, we shrink. We wave the moment off. We walk past it.

And here is the part that does not make sense to me. I know the opposite is true. I know the moments we let ourselves feel are the ones that fuel the next chapter. I know the moments we walk past are the ones that quietly drain us. I have said this out loud to other women. I believe it.

And I still did the thing this essay is about. I waited to share it. My closest people knew. Friends at work knew. The rest did not, until it was over, done and my daughter posted about it. I didn’t, I shrank anyway, until I got called out on it (thank you, Jamie)

That is what I am still working out. Why we keep choosing the smaller version. Why knowing better is not enough.

I do not have a clean ending for this. I am writing it because I am sitting with the question, not because I have answered it.

XO, Indie