There’s a moment, and if you’re a woman reading this, I’d bet money you know exactly the one I’m talking about, when you wake up one day and realize you don’t even recognize your own life anymore. Not because it exploded overnight. Not because of one catastrophic decision.
Not because you “lost yourself.”
Here’s the reality and honestly it hurts worse initially to admit this. It’s harder to say than I lost myself. But the reality is, you abandoned yourself. In tiny little pieces. Over and over and over again until you were no longer recognizable even to yourself!
It happens one “it’s fine” at a time. One swallowed boundary. One forced smile. One overextended yes. One more chance. One more accommodation. One more moment where you convinced yourself that being low maintenance, agreeable, selfless, easygoing, supportive, strong, nurturing, adaptable, forgiving, patient, and understanding somehow made you a “good woman.”
And let me tell you something as a woman who has been the nurse, the executive, the wife, the mother, the fixer, the leader, the peacemaker, and the woman sitting in her car trying not to cry before walking into a meeting…That shit catches up to you! Some day. Some how. But eventually the reckoning comes.
We live in a society that has conditioned women to believe that choosing ourselves is selfish while simultaneously expecting us to hold together literally everything and everyone around us. We are praised for self-sacrifice from the time we are little girls. Be nice. Be agreeable. Don’t be difficult. Don’t make people uncomfortable. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t be intimidating. Don’t be emotional. Don’t be “a lot.” God forbid a woman takes up space without apologizing for it first.
And somewhere along the way, many of us became so focused on being chosen by everyone else that we stopped choosing ourselves altogether. We put ourselves dead last and then wear the burnout like a badge of honor. Exhausted? Overwhelmed? Running on caffeine, cortisol, and unresolved resentment? “Just part of being a woman.”
I call bullshit. No. It’s not. And our bodies are screaming that truth at us. Research continues to show strong connections between chronic stress, emotional suppression, trauma, and autoimmune disease. All conditions that disproportionately impact women! Coincidence?? I think NOT! Somewhere between 24 and 50 million Americans are living with autoimmune disease, and roughly 80% of them are women. Research has increasingly explored the relationship between chronic stress, self-silencing, people-pleasing behaviors, and immune dysregulation.
The body keeps score while women keep pretending they’re “fine.” Read that again!!
We are seeing growing conversations in both medicine and psychology around the physiological toll of constantly abandoning ourselves to maintain peace, approval, or survival. Chronic activation of stress responses has been linked to inflammation, immune dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, burnout, anxiety, and autoimmune flare-ups.
And honestly? Women don’t need another wellness influencer telling them to drink more water and manifest better things to come. We need permission to stop disappearing. So my goal?? The disruptor? Serve as a bright shining permission slip for women everywhere to put themselves at the top of their priority lists!
I think about this often when I reflect on the woman I used to be. The version of me I now call “Allie OG.” The over-functioner. The woman who could carry impossible loads while smiling through it. The one who kept proving herself over and over in rooms full of people who benefited from her exhaustion. The one who confused loyalty with self-abandonment. Personally AND professionally.
I spent years shrinking myself inside environments that demanded excellence while punishing authenticity. I learned how to survive toxic systems by becoming hyper-capable. Helpful. Dependable. Unshakeable. I did this in a very toxic work environment but I learned it in a very dysfunctional family one first.
Until one day, my body, my mind, and my spirit collectively said “Absolutely the hell not anymore” and honestly the older I’ve gotten, the bigger the hell no has too. And here’s the thing nobody tells women about finally choosing themselves….At first, it doesn’t feel empowering. it feels terrifying.
Because when your identity has been built around being everything for everyone else, boundaries feel like betrayal. Rest feels lazy. Saying no feels mean. Walking away feels selfish. Prioritizing yourself feels uncomfortable because you’ve spent years being rewarded for your own depletion. That’s why so many women stay stuck. Not because they’re weak. But because they’ve been conditioned to believe self-sacrifice is virtue.
I see this constantly in leadership coaching conversations with women executives and professionals. Brilliant women. Accomplished women. Women leading teams, companies, households, and entire human beings while quietly eroding underneath the surface. Women who know how to negotiate million-dollar budgets but still struggle to ask for what they personally need without guilt. Women who can advocate for everyone in the room except themselves.
That’s part of why the conversations inside The Unfiltered Leader matter so much to me. Not because it’s about becoming louder, harder, or more aggressive. But because it’s about coming back home to yourself.
Really looking at and redefining Your values. Your integrity.
Your voice. Your boundaries. Your standards. Your leadership style. Your humanity. It’s about asking: Who am I when I stop performing? Who am I when I stop over-explaining? Who am I when I stop shrinking to fit rooms I’ve already outgrown?
Because leadership is not martyrdom. And womanhood is not meant to be a slow, painful disappearing act.
I think about this often when I remember the summer I spent rebuilding my life in tiny little moments. The Montana trip. The dream catchers hanging in the trees. The realization that my “deep end” moment wasn’t actually chaos—it was clarity. I wasn’t blowing up my life for sport. I was finally becoming honest about the fact that I could no longer survive inside a life that required me to abandon myself daily to maintain it. That realization changes you. And not everybody likes the version of you that emerges afterward.
The moment a woman stops over-functioning, over-giving, over-explaining, and over-accommodating, the people who benefited from that version of her often become deeply uncomfortable. Because boundaries expose entitlement.
Truth disrupts dysfunction. And women who finally remember who they are become very difficult to control.
That’s why so many women are exhausted right now. Not because we are weak. But because we’ve been carrying generations of conditioning that taught us our worth lives in our usefulness.
And I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but your worth is not measured by how much of yourself you are willing to sacrifice to keep everyone else comfortable. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to say no. You are allowed to disappoint people. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to outgrow people, jobs, roles, and expectations. You are allowed to become someone your old life no longer accommodates. That isn’t selfish. That’s survival.
And maybe the real healing starts the moment women stop asking permission to put themselves at the top of their own damn priority list.
