When I was 8 years old, I won a jar of gumballs because I successfully guessed how many were in the jar. But the winning guess wasn’t really mine. I had based it on a comment that my Dad had made. Had I followed my intuition, I would have guessed a much lower number.

The day that I took the jar of gumballs home, I was rewarded for not following my instinct. I took that lesson to heart. Eventually, I found myself aged 26 and unable to answer a question with any response but “I don’t know”.

I discovered that my indecision was, at it's root, a self-esteem problem. I found its solution in learning to stand behind my decisions, even if it means that I don’t go home with the jar of gumballs.

For generations, women’s physical security and prosperity relied on marrying well. Their beauty was their most powerful asset in that pursuit. This put women in direct competition with one another for men’s attention and affection. Despite significant social change, competition among women persists. This is because we continue to be told that power among women is in short supply and that it is available only to the most beautiful among us. This scarcity makes our beauty and our worth relative. It is this myth that keeps us in competition.

We seek after beauty because of what it promises us. But many of us haven’t found that promised power in our pursuits. We come out of conformity dissatisfied because this system can’t actually offer us true power. It is not designed to give power. It is designed only to take. To make women smaller, to isolate us, and extract money from us.

We can refuse to compete for the crumbs of power that it promises. We can claim the power and measure of worth that are ours inherently. We can draw the lines differently and make sure that they don’t fall between us.

You may have noticed that it has been more than a month since the release of the last Cuttings the Strings piece.

The plan that I had shared with you was to release the final piece in our Beyond Beauty series, On Isolation, in December.

That didn’t happen. And as you may have deduced, this is also not that promised post.

In this piece, I offer an update on what you can expect from Cutting the Strings in the coming months and a reflection on why, even when I knew I wasn’t going to meet that deadline, I didn’t communicate with you. Even though I wanted to.

I fell into a trap set for all women: believing that fulfilment was only a perfect body away.

My pursuit of thinness was about being perceived to have the many positive attributes that we ascribe to thin women in our society. But the feat of conforming my body to earn the social value associated with thinness was so exacting that it left me with no other identity.

This is not a bi-product, but a sign of our standard of beauty working effectively in a patriarchal society. Making thinness just beyond reach but making that standard the key to unlocking social power and personal fulfilment keeps women spending their time, money, and energy on attaining it.

Thinness is not just about making women’s bodies small. It is about making women themselves small and compliant.

I used to want the identity that I believed was only available beyond the fat. Now I want to claim the self-determined identity that I believe is only accessible to us beyond thinness.

I, like every woman that I know, have had women in my life comment on the size of my body. I consider these comments to be calls to conformity.

I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit replaying their words in my mind, often crafting responses that I wish I had provided in the moment.

Until recently, I understood each of these comments to be judgements: statements about my worth. Each one a reminder that it fluctuates with my weight.

I now view them differently. I can compassionately see that women have the complicated task of teaching young women and girls how to exist in a society where women’s value is determined based on their appearance and their care for others.

Women’s social value being derived from these sources has tremendous implications on our relationship to our own needs. Restriction is essential to accessing the limited power available. And so, elders are put in the precarious position of showing their love by enforcing a harmful standard.

I absorbed more lessons than I can count about the social consequences of not conforming to the Western standard of beauty. But I was never taught that conformity - not meeting my needs - would destroy my relationship with myself.

I have slowly learned to build a relationship with myself that centres around and prioritises meeting my needs. I have built a sense of self independent of my social value. I stopped building my life around the size of my body.

As a result, my body has changed, and more people make critical or cautionary comments about the size of my body.

I’ve learned that the feelings that my changing body brings up for other people are not my responsibility.

What is my responsibility? Meeting my needs.

My husband and I have very different cooking styles. He dutifully does his “mise en place” - preparing all of his ingredients before he starts to cook. My approach is more of a juggling act. I prep some components of a dish wihile others cook. 

We started cooking together regularly in the year after I finished law school. As a student, my focus was on efficiency. I was told that this was told this was the secret to success. I believed that if I was successful, I would be worthy and loveable.

I didn’t relegate my struggle for efficiency to my work and studies. Rather, it drove my every action. This meant that I rarely did one thing at a time. I subconsciously filled my life with noise to drown out the critical voice in my head. 

Upon reflection, my chaotic appraoch to cooking was part of that noise. I prepped ingredients while others cooked because I couldn’t bear the thought of simply watching onions cook for 8 minutes. 

My husband’s leisurely approach invited all of the things that I was running from: silence, mindfulness, peace. 

I was earning my worth and trying to avoid the constant stream of voices telling me that I never could. He was just making dinner. 

He’d grasped something that I hadn’t yet: that success didn’t require abandoning peace.

I started learning to play the fiddle a year ago.

As soon as I started telling people about it, I noticed that I also started cracking self-depricating jokes about my abilities.

When I played in public for the first time, I noticed an urge to stop playing the moment that I made a mistake.

I did both of these things in an effort to save face - to acknowledge my inadequacy before someone else named it.

But I’m learning that I don't need to listen to that protective voice.

I can, instead, listen to the many voices encouraging me to keep going.

As a child, I learned that I could quell tension by needing less. I learned to go to the bathroom when it wouldn’t disrupt the schedule, to wait until others were hungry to eat, and to deny my needs if meeting them might make me late. 

I tried to be easy. 

This pattern left me always looking around, not looking inwards. After decades of living this way, I was craving connection that I only knew how to achieve by giving people what I thought they wanted from me. By learning to identify my feelings and what need that feeling was trying to communicate, I slowly learned how to look inward. I learned that the connection that I was missing was the connection to myself. 

I learned to honour my needs over being easy.

I love to sing. I have also avoided singing for a lot of my life.

I saw singing as another way to prove my worth. I believed that I would only be given opportunities to sing if my voice was exceptional and my performance flawless, and believed that I only had one chance to demonstrate my abilities. This made every note that came out of my mouth feel monumental. 

I convinced myself that I needed to remain silent until I was exceptional, lest I fail and be cut off from doing this thing that I loved. I got caught in a pattern of not doing something that I loved because I didn’t want to be precluded from doing something that I loved. 

I kept repeating this pattern until I identified the source of my fears, re-shaped my definition of success, and stopped treating every moment as a single opportunity.

I have spent many years longing to be truly known. I have also spent those same years believing that I couldn’t be both known and loved. Believing that at some stage, I would reveal something that would make people walk away. Since I couldn’t predict exactly what part of myself might repel each person in my life, I resolved to hide as much of myself as I could, believing that it was the only way to maintain relationships. At a certain point, I found myself longing for a level of connection that I couldn’t pursue while still holding onto this belief. In this week’s piece, I will explore how I have been able to build relationships where I am both known and loved by strengthening my relationship with myself and cutting the strings with the foundational belief that told me otherwise.

The past few weeks have felt both incredibly full and incredibly empty because I reverted to living largely in my head. Not present. Not intentional. I had been inundating myself with noise to protect myself from the big fears and feelings occupying my mind. I found my spirit pushing against it, sensed my body crying out for peace, and my voice begging for space.

So, I made a pie. As I mixed ingredients, I felt my thoughts shift, and with each knead of the pastry, sensed that I was returning to myself. Hope arose, the fog lifted, and I felt free to create, think, and find my voice. This pie was made with self-love, and I can feel the difference.