Smart Girls Screw Up Too

Chapter 2 Aligned decision makingRediscovering your inner Smart Girl

I’d love to say that was where it ended for me — that I uncovered my needs, met them, healed my Source Wound and lived happily ever after. In a castle. With a unicorn. But life’s trajectory is never quite that smooth and things were shaky for a while before they truly improved for good.

It was a few months after ‘it’s over’. My mother’s arms were wrapped around me and she was telling me it would all be okay, and even though she was right I didn’t believe her back then.

I knew I hadn’t always been the sad girl. I used to have hope. I’d had so much hope I’d give it away to strangers I met at bus stops. And the truth was I’d lost it long before ‘it’s over’ happened.

But when?

In hindsight, I don’t think there was just one moment. It’s like being the proverbial frog put into a pot of water. It’s only lukewarm when we make our first sacrifice of the soul and jump in. But the temperature keeps going up — slowly, but surely — and the hotter it gets, the harder it is to jump out because we’re always striving for the next thing: a promotion, a better partner or a bigger house.

So, when had it started? Was it when I was a child?

What was I like as a little girl?

That was the question I asked my mother. I remember the feeling of her chest expanding beneath my head before she answered, and suddenly I was frightened to ...