Write your Permission Slip to Grow
When did you first learn to shrink yourself to make others comfortable?
Maybe it’s when you walk into a room full of people and decide to speak quietly. Or when you hold yourself back from opportunities because you fear someone’s reaction. Or when you don’t speak out and own your story because you’re more concerned about protecting them than yourself.
At some point you decided it was easier to be small.
And that’s okay. For so many of us there has been a point where someone said we weren’t good enough. It could be ex-partners who chose complacency instead of change, friends who didn’t honor boundaries, parents who didn’t work to break cycles that caused you pain, or even just people who barely know you and choose to lash out when you speak up. There was a time where you learned their beliefs about you and eventually you adopted them as your own. Their voices faded and instead your inner critic took their words and picked up where they left off.
It’s so common to continue abusing yourself with someone else’s narrative about you. Because there was a time when they chose to hurt you over and over again and you thought it was your fault. You thought you deserved less because they refused to give you more. You wove your value into whether they chose to pay the price of discomfort of choosing you instead of the cheap and easy choices they claimed made them miserable.
Your worth, capabilities, and healing are not tied to whether another person made responsible decisions or chose to care for you instead of destroy you.
When people with toxic tendencies finally leave your life you are gifted with so many opportunities. You can choose to keep yourself small and limit yourself. Or you can choose accountability. You get the chance to survey your choices, became aware of your own limiting beliefs and behaviors, and you can choose to give yourself permission to grow. If you choose to instead wait for someone to choose change or to choose treating you well (like you deserve) then you’re choosing to betray yourself daily.
There is no person worth that amount of pain.
So give yourself permission to stop choosing their pain. And to stop repeating toxic behaviors of someone who chose puddles when you’re capable of navigating oceans. Write yourself a permission slip to grow today in all the places you feel that urge to shrink yourself. Give yourself permission to live fearlessly and free of the weight of someone else’s false opinions about you and your capabilities.
This is your permission slip to bloom.
