How Being a "Good Girl" and Following the Rules Taught Me to Abandon Myself

For most of my life, I have been the "good girl."

I ticked the boxes.

I listened to everybody I was supposed to listen to.

I followed the rules.

And I used to think that made me disciplined, or responsible, or grown up but what I didn't see for a long, long time is that it also made me really good at something else: abandoning myself.

That's what following the rules actually cost me. Because every time I chose the rule over what my intuition, my heart or my body was telling me, I was practicing a very specific skill. I was practicing leaving myself to keep everyone else comfortable.

Somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that other people knew better than I did. That they were smarter, more experienced, more successful, more qualified to have an opinion about my own life than I was. And once you believe that, you stop consulting yourself. Why would you? You've already decided your own knowledge, wisdom and intuition, isn't reliable enough to trust.

This was never really about rules, they were just the protective shield. Underneath it was a pattern of self-abandonment I'd been running for years. Even through all these years of self-discovery and healing, I didn't even recognize it as a choice. It just felt like being good and doing the right thing.

But no more, I'm done with abandoning myself.

The more I deepen the connection with myself, the more I trust myself, the more I believe in myself, the more confident I become and the harder it is to keep abandoning that self for something outside of me.

I want to be honest about the nuance here, because self-trust isn't the same as knowing everything. There are people who know more than I do, who are experts in things I'm not, and I still want their advice. I still want to learn from them. The difference is I'm no longer handing over my power to do that. I always tell the women I work with "take what resonates and leave the rest." I can take in what someone else knows and still come back to myself to decide what's true for me. That's not rebellion. That's just no longer abandoning myself in the name of being teachable.

Maybe it's turning fifty or maybe it's the midlife awakening I feel like I'm living through right now. Either way, I keep noticing the same thing whenever I follow a rule that doesn't fit me: there's a version of performing sitting right underneath it. Some quiet loyalty to the shoulds, or not wanting to ruffle feathers or disappoint anyone, this is still running the show. And every time I catch it, I recognize it now for what it actually is. Not discipline but abandonment, dressed up as doing the right thing.

Here's a small, almost silly example. Since running my own business, I have heard again and again that you need to be posting on social media every single day or you'll lose momentum, lose the algorithm, lose relevance. I've followed that rule. I've tried it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

I can't follow that anymore as it just isn't right for me. Some days I may post three times in one day (like I did last week), and then you may not hear from me for a few days and I'm letting that be okay, because pushing past what I actually have capacity for right now or what I feel inspired to do would be one more small self-abandonment, in service of a rule I didn't even choose.

That's the pattern I'm most interested in breaking, not because rules are inherently bad, but because so many of the ones I was following were never really mine. I inherited them, absorbed them, performed them, and called it being the "good girl."

If any of you are seeing yourselves in this I invite you, the next time you're about to override yourself to follow a rule, a should, an expectation that isn't yours, pause long enough to ask whose voice you're actually listening to in that moment. Yours, or the one you learned to trust more than your own.

Coming home to yourself starts with noticing every small moment you've been taught to leave.

Mel x