#Unsettled

As the mother of a teenage daughter, I spend a lot of time in the car. If you have teens, you know the passenger seat of a car is where the real truth comes out. The radio is low, the eyes are on the road, and suddenly the conversational filter drops.

On a recent road trip, the topic turned to “the tea”—who was dating whom, who just broke up, and who was changing themselves for a guy. My daughter was venting about the sheer amount of effort some of her peers were putting into getting attention: the heavy daily makeup, the questionable fashion choices crafted purely for the opposite sex, the quiet shapeshifting.

Then she dropped a piece of teenage wisdom that made my chest bloom with pride.

She told me she refuses to get dolled up just to hang out with a guy. “I will never downgrade my worth for someone else. If I get a boyfriend,” she said, “I don’t want to false-advertise. If he only likes me with a face full of makeup, he doesn’t actually like me. What you see is what you get.” (Mind you, between her dance competition weekends, her skin needs a break anyway, but her logic was airtight.)

Sitting there listening to her, I felt two things simultaneously: relief that she possesses that kind of core security, and complete awe that she already figured out at fifteen what so many of us took decades to learn.

Why do we downgrade our worth? Why do we settle? We’ve all seen it happen—and if we’re being honest, most of us have done it.

A woman meets someone new, and slowly, subtly, her edges begin to dissolve. Her interests align with his interests. Her wardrobe shifts to his taste. Her volume turns down.

My sister went through a string of relationships where she completely lost herself trying to morph into whatever ideal the person she was with wanted. It wasn’t until much later in life that the lightbulb finally went off. As a side note: she was pretty awesome all along and didn’t need to perform to be worthy of love. Sadly, there are so many people who never reach that realization.

And it isn’t just a teenage phase or a twentysomething rite of passage. I see it in women my age and older. I have a friend—smart, articulate, with a fantastic personality—who lives like a nun and won’t put herself out there after her divorce because of a deep-seated, internal anxiety about not being “enough.”

We spend so much of our lives auditioning. We shrink, we contour, we edit, we quiet down, and we downgrade our value just to make sure someone else picks us.

Look, I get the struggle with confidence. Growing up as a curvier girl in the dance world, I had my fair share of body insecurities. In a room full of mirrors and pink tights, you learn early to pick yourself apart. What woman hasn’t?

Maybe I just got lucky and stumbled into being comfortable in my own skin a little earlier than most. Or maybe I just got tired of carrying the weight of trying to fit a mold that wasn’t made for me. (And for the record, I still pick myself apart.)

“Just be yourself” sounds like a tired greeting-card cliché until you realize what the alternative actually costs you, which is living in a constant state of low-grade performance fatigue. If someone only likes the edited, curated, downgraded version of you, they don’t actually like you—they like the mirror you’re holding up to their ego.

If they don’t appreciate the real, unfiltered, full-volume version of who you are, they simply don’t belong in your orbit. It’s not a tragedy when someone opts out of your life because you refused to shrink; it’s a blessing working in your favor.

Don’t ever downgrade your worth to appease someone else’s discomfort. Stop dimming your light so someone else can feel brighter.

There is no reason to put on a mask to play a supporting role in someone else’s play. You are the star of your own show—it’s time you started acting like it.