Stoke your fire

Little girls come into the world full of fire. They laugh with their whole bodies, speak their minds without hesitation, talk loud and carry themselves with a confidence that says, I belong here as much as you.

And then the world starts to chip away at us bit by bit.

“You’re too loud.”

“You’re too much.”

“You’re not enough.”

“Be smaller. Be nicer. Be less.”

So we learn to fold ourselves into shapes that make other people comfortable and us uncomfortable. We trade pieces of our wild, radiant selves for the illusion of fitting in. Somewhere along the way, that confident little girl gets quieter, and we learn to forget she ever existed. It's almost like the fire went out.

But here’s the secret: she never really leaves and that fire still burns.

At 64, I’m peeling back the layers of expectation and “shoulds” now I can see her clearly. I've stoked the fire. Burn baby burn.

I welcome back the girl who knew her worth without a second thought. The girl who didn’t apologize for taking up space, for being smart and for having a different opinion and voicing it.

I've learned something else...that aging isn’t fading away. It’s reclaiming. It's coming home to yourself and being comfortable in your own skin even as it sags and folds. It's letting go of the filtered vision we have all been sold about "beauty" which is code for being young. It's about acceptance and grace for who and how we are. And maybe it's about shedding tears and grieving over the years we hated ourselves because of what we had been told we should have been. It's about letting go of who they told us to be and stepping honestly into being who we were always meant to be.

The world likes to make women feel invisible as we get older, to tuck us into the background as if our time has passed. Aging is not the end of us, it's about becoming ourselves unapologetically. The older I get, the less I care about the rules that were never meant for me. My “give a Fuck" factor has plummeted, and with it, my willingness to be invisible.

Maybe that’s what makes aging women so powerful and maybe a little intimidating. We are no longer bending to societal norms. We are confidently standing in who we are, unedited and unapologetic. Perhaps the world doesn’t know what to do with women who refuse to disappear. Not our problem, I guess "they" will have to adjust. 😉

So world, if this makes you uncomfortable, good, it means you are growing.

The truth is I am not done. I am not fading. I am reclaiming the woman I was born to be, and she is vibrant, fun, curious, and unafraid to be herself. She is fire.

Many of us spend a lifetime relearning what we were born knowing m; that we are unique, that we belong exactly as we are, and that we don’t have to twist ourselves to fit in.

My hope is that, the matriarchs, the grandmothers, the great-aunts, and all aging women become living proof of that truth. That we show the younger generation that being yourself fully and unapologetically is not just right, it’s beautiful.

And I don’t mean “beautiful” in the way the world measures it. I mean the kind of beauty that radiates when someone is authentically themselves, no filters, no pretending, no shrinking. The kind of beauty that makes you stop and think, that’s what freedom looks like. The freedom to be yourself.

To the younger generation of girls and women please don’t wait until you’re sixty, seventy or eighty to remember who you are. Don’t hand over your voice to a world that will always try to tell you what you should be. Stay true to who you are. And if you forget for a while as many of us did, know that you can always come back to yourself. You were born whole with a fire inside you. Hold onto that truth and live it boldly. We’ll be here, cheering you on, reclaiming ourselves right alongside you.

I intend on leaving this world with the fire I was born with. 😉

Here's to keeping your own flame burning bright.

Love,

Kath