Who Is Actually In The Room

I want to ask you something before we go any further.

Who was the first woman’s voice you ever heard?

Not the first voice. The first woman’s voice. The one that showed you, before you had words for any of it, what a woman was supposed to look like. How she was supposed to move through the world. How much space she was allowed to take up. How much of herself she was permitted to show.

Sit with that for a moment.

Maybe it was your mother. Maybe it was a grandmother, an aunt, an older sister, a woman at church who seemed to have all the answers. Whoever she was, she handed you something before you were old enough to question it. A definition. A template. A set of unspoken rules about what it meant to be a woman in the particular world you were born into.

She did not hand it to you with a warning label. She handed it to you the way women have always handed things to each other. Because it was all she had. Because nobody had handed her anything different.

Now let us keep going.

Think about where you grew up. Every place has opinions about women. About how much noise we are allowed to make, how much room we are allowed to occupy, how much of ourselves we are expected to manage quietly and gracefully and without inconveniencing anyone.

Think about faith. Culture. Ethnicity. The particular set of nouns that describe where you come from. Each one of those nouns sent a representative to your committee. You did not choose a single one of them. They simply showed up, took a seat, and started issuing opinions about your life.

And if you have reached your forties, you know there is one more voice that arrives right on schedule. The one that starts auditing everything. Have you done enough. Have you become who you were supposed to become. Is it too late. What exactly are you still waiting for.

That voice does not come from one place. It comes from all of them at once, condensed and urgent, showing up just when you thought you had things figured out.

I will share mine.

I am a Southern, Italian, Catholic woman of a certain age. My mother was a converted Catholic from Mississippi, prim and proper, a woman who carried her own long line of Southern women who knew that grace was armor and softness was survival. My Italian grandmother was her complete opposite, loud where my mother was quiet, expansive where my mother was contained, declaring where my mother suggested.

Two women. Two entirely different definitions of what I was supposed to be. Both delivered before I was old enough to form a single question about any of it.

Then the Church. Then the South. Then the particular kind of woman all of it agreed I should become.

I did not just get one voice. I got a choir.

And I spent a very long time thinking that choir was me.

Here is what I want us to sit with this week.

None of these voices are villains. The women who handed them to us loved us. The cultures and faiths and places that shaped us were themselves shaped by generations of people who never stopped to examine what they were passing down, because nobody told them to.

That is how it works. We receive what we receive. We carry what we carry. And somewhere along the way, if we are paying attention, we start to notice that some of what we are carrying was never ours.

Not because it was given in malice. But because it was given without a label.

So here is the question I want to leave us with this week.

When we hear the loudest voice, the one with the most opinions about who we are and what we should be and how much of ourselves is acceptable, whose voice does it actually sound like?

Not ours. Not at first. Maybe not for a long time.

But underneath all of it, underneath every voice that arrived before we had language for any of this, there is something quieter.

We are going to find it.

Inward. Onward. Go.

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