A personal reflection
Throughout my life, I have encountered women of remarkable strength warm, generous souls who gave endlessly of themselves. Yet, for all they offered the world, they rarely paused to offer the same tenderness to themselves. I suspect many of them never truly understood that being kind to oneself is not selfishness, it is the very foundation of every kindness they extended to others.
Surrounded so consistently by this emotionally generous energy, it was almost inevitable that I absorbed it as my own. I have come to believe that a human being is much like clay ,infinitely shapeable, responsive to every hand that touches it. And so, shaped by those around me, I became an emotional sponge: a person who instinctively absorbed the feelings of everyone nearby and quietly convinced herself that she was responsible for each one.
When I finally turned inward and began examining the roots of this pattern, I traced it all the way back to my earliest years. I was raised and nurtured by my mother a woman of extraordinary warmth, whose very spirit I had, without realising it, quietly made my own. Her way of being seeped into me. And then came my closest friends, each of them a portrait of selfless giving. Every woman in my orbit, it seemed, had been taught by word or by example to give: emotionally, physically, and mentally, without limit and without question.
We live in an era where equality is spoken of on every platform and in every corner of public life. Yet, even now, so many women find it quietly impossible to place themselves on the same footing as other to say, simply and without guilt, “I matter too.”
This is written for all those women the ones I have loved and the ones I never got the chance to know, the ones whose names I carry and the ones I have only ever glimpsed in passing.
You are worthy — not because of what you give, not because of how much you endure, but simply because you exist. And your life, in all its fullness, is worth every ounce of the love you so freely pour into the world.
