The Day I Stopped Waiting for Permission

Pour yourself a cup of coffee, Bestie. Let's talk for a few minutes.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the question I asked at the end of one of our last Coffee Conversations: What genuinely brings me peace?

It sounds like such a simple question, but I can tell you from experience that answering it honestly can be surprisingly difficult. For much of our lives, we're taught to consider everyone and everything around us when making decisions. What does my family need? What makes financial sense? What is responsible? What will people think? What am I supposed to do?

Those aren't bad questions. In fact, many of them are the questions responsible adults need to ask. The problem comes when we become so accustomed to asking them that we forget there is another person whose opinion belongs in the conversation.

Our own.

I don't remember one dramatic morning when I woke up and announced that I was going to start choosing myself. There wasn't a movie-worthy moment when I threw open the curtains, changed my life, and suddenly knew exactly where I was headed. My experience was much messier and much more ordinary than that.

What I do remember is beginning to recognize how often I was waiting for permission.

Permission to change my mind. Permission to want something different from what I'd wanted ten years earlier. Permission to say no without providing a five-paragraph explanation. Permission to spend time doing something simply because I enjoyed it. Permission to distance myself from relationships that no longer felt healthy. Permission to pursue something that made absolutely no sense to anyone but me. And perhaps most importantly, permission to stop feeling guilty about any of it.

I think women become especially good at seeking invisible approval. No one necessarily tells us we need permission, yet somewhere along the way we become experts at anticipating how our choices will affect everyone else. We can spend hours worrying about whether someone will be disappointed, offended, inconvenienced, or confused by a decision that is ultimately ours to make.

There's generosity in considering other people, of course. I never want to become someone who moves through life without caring how my choices affect the people I love. But I've learned there is a difference between considering other people and allowing them to determine the direction of your life.

That distinction took me a long time to understand, and eventually it required me to make a choice that was anything but small. I had to remove someone from my life whom I had once believed would always be in it. It meant acknowledging that a relationship I had spent years trying to make work was abusive and accepting that choosing peace sometimes comes with an extraordinarily painful price. I won't tell that story today. It's complicated, deeply personal, and deserving of far more than a paragraph tucked inside another story. But I will tell it when the time is right, because I know there are women who may recognize pieces of their own lives in mine. That's a Coffee Conversation for another day.

For now, what matters is what that experience eventually taught me: choosing yourself doesn't mean you stop loving other people. It doesn't mean abandoning responsibilities, becoming selfish, or blowing up your life because you're having a bad Tuesday. Sometimes choosing yourself is much quieter than that. It might mean protecting an hour of your morning, changing the way you spend your weekends, reconnecting with someone you miss, saying no to something you've always dreaded, or finally admitting that something you've been doing for years simply doesn't make you happy anymore.

For me, some choices were small and others were much bigger. Some made perfect sense to the people around me, while others probably had them wondering what on earth I was doing. There were decisions I made confidently and others I second-guessed a hundred times before I finally trusted myself enough to move forward.

What surprised me was that peace didn't arrive when everyone understood my choices. Peace arrived when I understood them.

That realization changed something in me. I stopped believing that a good decision required unanimous approval. I stopped assuming that someone else's discomfort automatically meant I was doing something wrong. Most importantly, I began paying attention to the difference between the choices that looked right from the outside and the choices that actually felt right inside my own life.

I certainly haven't perfected this. There are still times when I question myself, overthink things, or care far too much about what someone else might think. But I'm much quicker now to come back to the questions that matter: Is this life consistent with who I am? Does this decision move me closer to or farther away from peace? Am I doing this because I truly want to, or because I've convinced myself I'm supposed to?

Maybe that's part of what a Second First Life really is.

It doesn't necessarily mean starting over. It doesn't require leaving your job, ending a relationship, moving across the country, buying a boat, or reinventing yourself into someone completely different. Sometimes it's simply the moment you realize that you still have a voice in how the rest of your life unfolds—and that you don't need anyone else's permission to use it.

This week, pay attention to one decision you've been postponing because you're waiting—consciously or unconsciously—for someone else's approval. It doesn't have to be a major life decision. In fact, I'd rather you start small. Ask yourself:

If no one else had an opinion about this, what would I choose?

You don't necessarily have to act on the answer. Just notice it. There's something incredibly powerful about learning to hear your own voice again.

Until next time,

Kat