The good daughter.

For most of my life I played the role of “good daughter.” The compliant one, the loyal one, the silent one. This was the path to less friction and more freedom to excel and explore. I witnessed early on that there was no such thing as winning an argument with my headstrong mom, so there was no point in trying – any effort to declare a different point-of-view would have simply stirred up a maelstrom of emotions and there would never be a neat, logical resolution. So I learned to not have an opinion, to not feel my feelings, and to shrink myself to fit inside my mom’s limited world view. I love my mother dearly. She is one of the most heroic figures in my life. But the “good daughter” role I played for too many years was keeping me stuck. I felt my life starting to slip away and knew the only way to call it back was to make an abrupt, dramatic, irrevocable change. So I moved across the country to New York. It marked the first step in dismantling my “good daughter” persona. My mother has a very powerful and penetrating frequency and I knew I needed physical distance to clearly feel my own frequency without the distortion of guilt. She and I have soul contracts from past lives where I have played a similar, self-limiting role that kept me small and stuck, while she was always domineering. This is the life where I am breaking all of those contracts once and for all and rewriting a new role for myself, in relationship with my mother, that will bring an elegant and life-affirming end to my part in keeping myself small for someone else out of some fucked-up sense of familial duty or loyalty.