Look At What You Just Did

We made it to the end of April.

Not the end of the journey. Not the end of the committee, which is still very much in session and still has opinions about your sock selection and at least seven other things before 8am. But the end of this particular walk together. And before we step into May I want to take one moment to look at what actually happened here.

Because something did happen. Even if it was quiet. Even if it was small. Even if the committee barely noticed.

Four weeks ago we sat down together and named something most of us had never named before. The committee. The voices that showed up before we had one of our own. The choir of southern women and Italian grandmothers and churches and cultures and ages that took up residence in our heads and never once asked permission to stay.

We did not shame them. We did not blame them. We just looked at them clearly, maybe for the first time, and said, there you are. I can see you now.

Many people never stop. They go their whole lives managing the committee without ever asking who put them in charge.

We stopped. We asked.

And then we listened for something underneath all of it.

The whisper. The quiet pull. The thing that was there the whole time, patient and unhurried, waiting for us to get still enough to hear it.

Maybe you heard it clearly this month. Maybe it came on a Tuesday, soft and unexpected, and you almost scrolled past it but you did not. Maybe it came in a decision you made without consulting anyone, a feeling you trusted before your head had time to argue, a moment of stillness in a moving life that you finally, for once, did not fill with noise.

Or maybe it was fainter than that. A flicker. A suspicion. The faintest sense that something is there, even if you cannot quite make it out yet.

Both of those count. All of it counts. The noticing is enough.

Here is what quiet confidence actually feels like, because it is not what we imagined.

Quiet confidence does not feel like certainty, nor like having all the answers or even knowing exactly who we are and what we want and how to silence the committee for good. The committee, bless their hearts, is not going anywhere.

Quiet confidence feels like this. Knowing the voice is there. Trusting it a little more than we did last month. Catching ourselves mid-committee and thinking, wait, whose voice is that anyway, and actually pausing long enough to wonder.

That pause. That small, quiet pause between the noise and the next thought. That is where it was hiding all along.

The voice was not waiting patiently somewhere peaceful. It was tucked underneath everything, surviving, waiting for one quiet moment to slip through.

We did not arrive anywhere. We began. And beginning, after a very long time of not knowing there was anything to begin, is everything.

So here is what I want us to carry into May.

Not a resolution. Not a plan. Not a five step program for silencing the committee and emerging fully formed into the rest of our lives.

Just this. The next time the committee convenes, and it will, probably before you finish your tea, notice it. Name one voice. Just one. Ask yourself whose voice that is and whether that voice actually knows you.

That is the whole practice. Notice. Name. Question. Repeat.

The voice underneath gets a little clearer every time we do.

We began this month standing at the sock drawer in a full committee crisis over a pair of orange socks.

I hope you wore them.

And if the committee had something to say about it, I hope you let it talk. And then I hope you crossed your legs anyway.

Inward. Onward. Go.

The Returning Project is a space where women reclaim who they truly are, beyond who they were told to be. New posts every Sunday.

Take the free quiz and when you are ready then to go deeper with the download our workbook.

‍ ‍