We Were All Duped

And the moment you see it, everything changes..

Let me tell you a story.

Not a tidy one. Not the kind with a neat little bow at the end. The kind that starts in the dark and finds its way to the light — not because someone handed you a flashlight, but because you finally decided to strike your own match.

It starts on an ordinary morning.

I woke up slow. Foggy. That low, quiet disconnection that had become so familiar I’d stopped questioning it. Just shuffled to the bathroom, shuffled back, sat on the edge of the bed and stared at nothing in particular.

And then came that voice. The one most of us have running in the background like an old radio we forgot to turn off.

What is wrong with you.

Not a question. A verdict.

And because I had spent most of my life in a world that rewards sharp starts and early risers and women who have it together before the coffee finishes brewing — I accepted that verdict without a trial. Without a single piece of evidence. Without so much as asking whether it was even true.

I just… agreed.

---

Here’s what I didn’t know yet.

That voice? The one handing down verdicts before I’d even had breakfast?

It wasn’t mine.

It had been borrowed. Absorbed. Built up over decades from a thousand different sources — expectations I never consciously agreed to, standards I never actually set for myself, roles I stepped into because someone needed filling and I was standing there.

Daughter. Wife. Mother. Caregiver. The one who holds it together. The one who shows up. The one who keeps moving no matter what.

And I had done all of it. Every single bit of it.

But here’s the AHA that cracked something open in me.

Somewhere in all that showing up for everyone else — I had quietly, without ceremony, without even noticing — stopped showing up for myself.

Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just… gradually. The way a river changes course. Slowly enough that you don’t see it happening until one day you look up and realize you have no idea where you are.

---

Now I want to talk about something that might sting a little.

Because I think a lot of us — women in this season of life — are carrying something we haven’t fully named yet.

A feeling that somewhere along the way, we got duped.

Not by any one person necessarily. Not by one dramatic betrayal. But by a system. A set of unspoken rules. A culture that handed us a script and told us this was what a good woman looked like — selfless, available, endlessly giving — and we followed it. Because we were good women. Because we loved our families. Because that’s what you did.

And now?

Now the kids are grown. The demands have eased. The noise has quieted.

And we’re standing in the middle of our own lives wondering why it doesn’t feel like ours.

That feeling has a name.

It’s grief. And it’s also anger. And underneath both of those — if you’re willing to go there — is something much more interesting.

It’s power.

That is the second AHA.

Because the moment you stop calling that feeling “bitterness” and start calling it information — everything shifts. That ache you carry for the dreams you set aside, the life you put on hold, the woman you were becoming before everyone needed a piece of you — that is not evidence that it’s too late.

That is your soul pointing at exactly what she wants you to go back and get.

---

But here’s where most of us get stuck.

We pick up the anger and we carry it right into the next chapter with us.

And honey — I understand that. I have lived that.

But anger is a heavy suitcase. And you cannot reclaim your life and drag that weight at the same time. It will exhaust you before you get anywhere worth going.

So what do you do with it?

You acknowledge it. Fully. Without flinching. You look that feeling dead in the eye and you say — yes. Some of this wasn’t fair. Some of what I gave, I gave at a cost I didn’t fully understand at the time. Some of the dreams I set aside stayed set aside for too long.

You say it. You feel it. You let it be true.

And then — and this is where the personal power lives — you make a decision.

Not to forget. Not to pretend it didn’t happen. Not to perform forgiveness before you actually feel it.

But to stop letting the past be the loudest voice in the room.

Because here’s what I know about women who have lived the way we have lived — who have survived what we have survived, rebuilt what we have rebuilt, loved the way we have loved:

We are not fragile.

We are not finished.

We are, if anything, the most dangerously equipped women on the planet to build something extraordinary — because we have already proven, a thousand times over, that we can do hard things.

---

So back to that foggy morning.

I sat on the edge of my bed and instead of accepting the verdict — I did something different.

I got quiet. I breathed. I listened.

And what came back wasn’t a to-do list. Wasn’t a plan. Wasn’t a productivity strategy.

It was a feeling.

Something warm and unhurried that said — you have more in you than you’re letting through. Stop measuring yourself by a rhythm that doesn’t belong to this season. Stop apologizing for who you’ve become. She is not less than who you were. She is more.

So I let the morning be what it was.

Coffee without urgency. No pressure. No verdict.

And right around eleven o’clock — something shifted.

My mind cleared. Ideas moved. Energy arrived — not forced, not performed, but real. I took a nap that afternoon without guilt. Came back from it fully present. Recorded a video in one take.

Not because I pushed harder.

Because I finally stopped pushing against myself.

---

Later that day I was in my studio, covering an old canvas with a fresh coat of gesso.

If you’ve never painted — gesso is a primer. A white base coat. And when you apply it you’re not erasing what’s underneath. Every layer that canvas has ever held is still there. You’re just preparing the surface so something new can come forward.

And standing there with my brush I had a thought that made me laugh out loud.

That’s it. That’s exactly it.

We don’t get to erase what’s been lived. We don’t need to. Every experience — the sacrifice, the grief, the years of giving, even the anger — those are layers. They’re in the canvas. They’re part of what gives it depth.

But they don’t have to be what’s leading anymore.

You get to decide what comes forward now.

---

Here’s what I want you to walk away with today.

You have a personal power sitting inside you that you have not yet fully tapped.

Not because you’re incapable. Not because it’s too late.

Because you’ve been so busy being everything to everyone else that you haven’t had the space to feel what’s actually there.

That power doesn’t come from anger. It doesn’t come from regret. It doesn’t come from pushing harder or tightening up or trying to outrun the years.

It comes from telling yourself the truth.

About where you feel duped. About what you gave that cost you. About what you set aside that you want back. About who you were becoming before the world interrupted you.

Tell yourself that truth — without the anger, without the performance of having it all together, without apologizing for any of it.

And then ask yourself the only question that matters now:

What does the woman I’ve actually become — the one who survived all of that, who built all of that, who is still here and still standing — what does she want?

Because she has earned the right to want things.

She has earned the right to dream.

She has earned the right to walk into this season of life not with resignation — but with unbridled, unapologetic, arms-wide-open joy.

Not despite everything she’s been through.

Because of it.

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That’s what rewiring looks like.

Not going backward. Not pretending the hard years didn’t happen.

Deciding — on your own terms, in your own time — that what comes next belongs entirely to you.

You don’t retire.

You reclaim.

And there’s one more piece of this.

When you’ve spent decades listening to everybody else, trusting yourself again doesn’t necessarily happen because somebody tells you, “Just follow your heart.”

Sometimes you don’t know which voice is your heart.

You’ve heard the rules for so long that they can sound remarkably similar to your own voice.

That is why I wrote Building Believable Trust.

Not to teach you how to become somebody new, but to help you recognize the woman who has been underneath all that conditioning all along. To begin hearing yourself again. To notice what feels true to you. And little by little, to build enough evidence that when your own voice says, I want this, you believe her.

Because reclaiming your life requires something more than knowing you were duped.

You have to trust the woman who gets to decide what happens next.

Building Believable Trust is available on Gumroad for $50.

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