Sometime earlier this year, I gave a friend very good advice based in the idea that the disruptive act of standing up for ourselves has to be the move in front of our kids sometimes. You know, in place of perpetually pretending we haven’t had enough of someone else’s bullshit while dying a slow death.

Reality can really matter more than keeping their little environment peaceful (read: fake) in certain instances, I stand by that. I’m a firm believer in acting in a way that I hope my daughter would in similar situations. She can’t be it if she can’t see it.

These are things I say, however, while I am also in therapy asking a separate human person how I can be so incapable of applying the same principles to myself.

It’s the accommodating, ladies. And it isn’t always the accommodating of dramatic or abusive situations.

Sometimes it’s the simple, daily effort of just staying invisible so the people around us won’t decide to offload an opinion we didn’t ask for.

Or worse, letting our existence trigger an opinion they never share; leaving us to ruminate over the brand of judgment they are probably passing in silence.

Sometimes it is appearing in places we don’t want to be, to send a message we don’t even believe in.

…or not appearing in places we do want to be, to perform a different version of shrinking.

We accommodate people we don’t even like.

We accommodate people who aren’t even thinking about us.

We even accommodate judgments people pass on other people in front of us, neither side of which is our responsibility to bother with whatsoever.

When I let my website expire a little over a year ago, the honest truth is that I wasn’t sure if there were things archived on it that might offend people I was meeting and getting close to as my kids get older. As my life evolves, and the things I do start to feel more like a reflection on them, it was increasingly feeling like too much of me was out there.

Even though I often read back on what I wrote and felt good about the stances I took, I still overthought them enough to decide the whole of it wasn’t worth the $120 per year it was costing me to host on the public internet.

Because one thing I can say for sure about this website and the three years of things that used to be on it is: it was the truest representation of me there was.

As an artist, it was the goal realized.

The only problem I on-and-off had with it was that it is a thousand percent “out there” and sometimes I didn’t want to be seen.

Anyone who wanted to know what I was all about could spend a couple hours on a Sunday reading up on that. They could feel comforted by what I had written, or decide these truths weren’t their cup of tea. They could unfriend me on Facebook over them, and I’m pretty sure a few of them did.

Was I cool with that?

Some days I really was.

But I also had “blanket days,” you know? Days I wished to shove it all under a blanket with my physical body and just hide. To just be a universally likable girl with zero positions below the surface that could bother someone else.

I still have those days. As I’m writing this it feels real and relevant, what I did by letting it expire. It was the “safe” and “smart” thing to do.

But it also brings me back to that advice I’m really good at giving to other people but not myself: What if being embarrassing in front of my kids every now and then is better for them than hiding under a blanket, questioning my relevance as human being with damn good ideas?

What if that is a thing they need to see me navigate sometimes?

I’ve watched my kids soar into adolescence these last two years—literally, at times. My son advanced to travel baseball and suddenly he was diving and lunging and forcing plays. He just keeps getting better, too. More dedicated, more confident.

My daughter started competitive cheer, and in one year went from doing floppy, kind-of kickovers to multiple handsprings. Flying out of basket tosses, balancing on top of extension pyramids.

We find money to pay for these things because we know what it’s doing for their self esteem to be growing their bodies and courage like this. It is worth every penny to me for many reasons, not the least of which is because they inspire me.

So I found myself telling their stories instead of mine these last couple years, having put a muzzle on whatever I was previously upto. This felt like the right thing to do, even though increasingly my son is asking me not to post pictures of him on social media. He likes his baseball feed, but nothing really else without his permission.

While I am making him and his team look super cool on social media, however, my immediate community of new friends is giving me very familiar advice: “You should be getting paid to do this.”

But this is a thing people say to you until you are out there. And while most of the ones who say it will continue to support and clap for you as you climb, in my experience, the haters just as surely appear at the same altitude every time.

At a certain level you will start to feel really selfish for showing up as your entire self. And that is hard for a regular woman, but especially for a mom.

What I don’t want for my kids is to shrink in the face of this feeling as I have, however. Part of that will depend on the people they choose to hang out with as they navigate life, but it will also rest in seeing the people they already look up to leading by example. In having a mom who fights through the “hard” for the things that fill her up.

In other words, if I want them to live into the experiences they want and deserve I have to show them what it looks like to do that. 

All of this, swirling around in me without a name, must have been what triggered the truly existential experience I had then, when I took my daughter to the Eras Tour movie this past October. (Asking you to stay with me as I get into the Taylor part.) 

Consider what those of us who “get it” see in this woman right now…

The last time I paid attention to Taylor Swift was probably when she was 19 years old. She was new, adorable, talented…and then, as we all do, she got a little annoying as she fumbled into her 20’s and tried a bunch of new things.

In the years of life that I definitely kept myself digestible by playing beer pong until 3am and riding the couch most Sundays, this girl was flying her art in the face of real life haters.

Meanwhile, songs she made in 2007 which no longer apply to me (and likely not even to a now 33-year-old Taylor) continue to speak to a brand new generation which my daughter now happens to belong to.

Not only does she still respect the art she made 5, 10, 15 years ago, she is spending a lot of time re-making it right now, only to find it is more profitable than ever.

Suddenly, I found myself a 40-year-old mom in a movie theater taking in the gravity of what this young lady has done with her life. All this time I’ve been in a roller-coaster relationship with my art, she was making and sharing hers even when the world was ripping it from one end to the other. This is what 20 consecutive years of being true to yourself no matter what looks like.

I am so proud of her.

I’m so glad my daughter has her.

I’m so glad we all have her.

Yesterday, my increasingly Swifty algorithm fed me a snippet of this video and I just had to go looking for the full version. Please give it six of your minutes, I promise it will tie this whole message together for you as it did for me…

A podcaster I follow recently talked about how we work so much of our “stuff” out in celebrity culture, and this is the surest example of that for me.

These two bring two separate decades of popular culture together to shine a light on something that is shockingly universal, overwhelmingly generational. The part where Mary starts crying and says, “I’m just so happy that I get to share this with all those little girls out there who feel like that…”

That’s the vibe.

We all doubt ourselves including Taylor-Damn-Swift and Mary-Freaking-J. Blige. If we can’t stop it, this has to be the next best thing.

Talking about it, fighting through it, showing our kids how to be great in spite of it.

The honest truth is, very few people have ever hated on what I do at the level these two can speak to. Like many of you though, I am very vulnerable to giving the few who don’t “get” me a very loud microphone they do not deserve.

So whether it needs to be said to ourselves or the handful who waste energy doubting us instead of working on themselves, I say we commit Mary’s lyric to mantra:

I’m going to be the best me. I’m sorry if it kills you. ➕