In my personal essay, When Fulfilling Your Mission Means Breaking the Rules, I explored the struggle to pursue our own visions and ambitions while navigating the expectations placed upon us as women. A few weeks ago, I took a closer look at one of the themes raised in that essay: why setting boundaries can feel so painful. Now, I’m examining another: what happens when caring for others begins to cost us our own lives?
When Caring Becomes Self-Erasure
Caring for others can be a wonderful expression of love, generosity, and compassion. But it can also become a path to self-erasure. I’ve observed two ways this can happen:
1) We erase ourselves one choice at a time.
2) We resist erasure but lose parts of ourselves in the struggle.
Sometimes, we erase ourselves one choice at a time.
Some women find deep fulfillment in caring for others. Being the person their children, parents, siblings, partners, or friends can depend on gives them a sense of purpose, connection, and worth.
For example, a woman may genuinely want to marry and raise children while also envisioning a fulfilling career, friendships, creative pursuits, and interests of her own. Another may willingly become the person her family turns to for help, whether that means offering emotional support, providing financial assistance, or caring for aging parents.
These are roles they may value and choose. But the demands can grow beyond anything they anticipated. A personal project gets postponed. An activity they love falls away. A dream they had gets deferred. Their own needs and wishes become the easiest ones to put aside. Each choice makes sense in the moment, but each can become another swipe of the eraser. Then, one day, she looks at the page and finds that so much of the person she once was has been rubbed away. Her interests, ambitions, and dreams may still be there, but only as faint traces of what she once imagined for herself.
She chose to care for others. She didn’t necessarily choose to lose herself in the process.
For others of us, the struggle is different. We’re resisting erasure.
We may have our own ambitions and a clear vision for our lives, one that does not revolve around caretaking, yet grow up in families or communities where that role has already been assigned to us. The expectations are so deeply embedded that they seem as natural as the air we breathe. We didn’t have the same power to question them when we were young that we have as adults.
We resist. We negotiate. We try to compromise, hoping to meet some of those expectations while still making room for our own lives.
But the people holding the erasers keep reaching for us. And every compromise that costs us a piece of our time, energy, freedom, or identity is another swipe of the eraser. Even as we fight to keep ourselves on the page, parts of us are being rubbed away.
We may still recognize the person we’re trying to become. But as long as we remain in this struggle, we’re spending our lives defending her instead of living as her. When you are fighting, you are not free!
At some point, we have to recognize our own participation in the struggle. That doesn’t mean we freely chose the role or that the pressure wasn’t real. It means we can decide whether to keep negotiating with people who insist on erasing parts of us, or not.
We can put down the argument and walk away from the erasers.
In the Heroine’s Quest, that realization can be part of your Call to Adventure. We begin to understand that we cannot keep one foot in the Ordinary World and cross the threshold to pursue the vision calling us forward.
Whether we’ve gradually set ourselves aside or spent years defending the woman we know we are, the question becomes: What would it take to make room for our own lives now?
Have you experienced either of these paths? What helped you recognize what you were losing, and what have you learned about reclaiming it?
Sharing that wisdom is one way we Return with the Elixir, bringing something from our own journey that may help another woman on hers.
I wrote candidly about my own experience with an assigned role in, When Fulfilling Your Mission Means Breaking the Rules: Gender Role Expectations as Threshold Guardians.
