Episode 146 - Five Questions I’m Asking This Year
Is your social media feed overflowing with New Year’s resolutions and tips to optimize your life? This mindset can feel overwhelming, so instead of pushing for the “perfect” 2026, I’m offering something else in this episode: five questions I return to again and again to recalibrate my relationship with myself. These questions aren’t about productivity or self-improvement. They’re an invitation to unlearn good girl conditioning, step out of self-abandonment, and choose a way of living that actually feels like yours. Here’s what I cover:
How women’s socialization continues to shape our choices and behaviors
What passivity actually looks like when your desires and preferences go unspoken
Why overworking isn’t just physical labor, but emotional, relational, and mental labor too
How self-abandonment is at the core of people pleasing and putting yourself last
Why joy, fun, and play can be nourishment instead of something you earn after work
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Transcript
00:58
Happy New Year, friends. I'm still not quite sure what time is going as fast as it is going, but here we are, January 5th. That's the day I'm recording this. And I hope you had in all of your holidaying and celebrating some rest and some connection and some joy.
01:17
If your social media feed is anything like mine is right now, it is full of New Year's resolution-y stuff, right? How to craft the perfect 2026 with all the amazing things you're going to change and become and do and stop and start.
01:36
And I just, I have never identified less with this kind of like optimization mindset that we seem to be in. And I think largely it's because I'm a 52-year-old woman who's in perimenopause, like so many of you.
01:58
I'm also struggling every day with the heaviness of living in the political chaos and the slide into fascism that is life in the United States right now. It is a lot. And I've never felt more, first of all, certain that we are doing something wrong with our relentless march toward optimizing every single part of our lives.
02:30
And I've just never felt less drawn to the big goals kind of genre of life. Because in the past, I would have absolutely jumped on the goal setting bandwagon, outlined my 17-point plan for major changes I was going to implement that I was totally overwhelmed by the 1st of February and totally abandoned.
02:56
So I know the drill and I know that goal setting is kind of woven into so many parts of our lives. And I just, I don't want it this year. I'm tired. I'm like tired on a new level of weariness that comes from, I think, living with all the pressures.
03:21
And I mentioned the aforementioned, you know, political upheaval and chaos. And so I want to share something with you that I do for myself a lot. I have five questions that I return to over and over again as a way of just calibrating in big ways and small ways how I feel about myself and my life and the connection that I feel toward myself or the lack of it.
03:50
And I really hope to offer you these five simple questions that have nothing to do with productivity or self-optimization. They're just questions meant to free you, to free up some part of you, to free up old ways of thinking, to unlearn ways that we've been taught that we should be in the world, and to identify ways in which or places where our socialization is still popping up.
04:23
Because women are overly socialized to be agreeable instead of honest. We are socialized to be useful instead of fulfilled or satisfied. We are programmed to be endlessly resilient instead of supported and self-sacrificing instead of honoring ourselves.
04:46
And so these questions, fairly simple. I'm going to offer them to you in several different ways. It's more of like a corrective exercise than a big goal setting exercise. You'll see what I mean. For each of the questions, I'm just going to ask it.
05:02
I'm going to give you a little bit of context, why it matters, what usually gets in the way of us answering it and then bringing that answer into our daily lives in a really useful way. And then you can take what is valuable to you, leave the rest.
05:19
I'm really a fan of just taking one little thing that lands or that resonates or that feels useful and just leaving everything else. You do not have to answer all these questions. That is not the point.
05:31
It's to take one or two things and bring it into your daily life in whatever way feels really meaningful to you. So question number one, where do I fall into passivity? And there's a couple other ways that you could ask this of yourself as well.
05:50
Number one, where do I stay quiet in order to keep things like running smoothly? Where do I have an opinion that I'm not sharing? Or where am I waiting for someone else to decide for me? Because for me, passivity is kind of what I have relabeled or I used to relabel or mislabel, that's better said, as easygoing or low maintenance or nice.
06:20
But relationally, passivity is where resentment grows. Women don't name preferences, limits, or desires. We were taught that those are how we are too much or too big or too dramatic. And when we aren't able to name what we want, relationships become unbalanced and intimacy and honesty can't be there because we're not saying what we actually want.
06:49
Passivity is, it's like the absence of desire. It's the absence of preference. It's the absence of this is what I want. And we need to see the places where we are being passive to keep the peace. Often that's what we were taught to do in the homes we grew up in.
07:11
Because passivity as an adult means you are not showing up in the full way that you deserve in your own life. We spend so much time being compliant and performing what we think other people want that we slide into these passive roles where we just go along to get along.
07:35
And that's something that I want to see in my own life because it's where I can take a step into sharing something that I want, sharing something that matters to me, having a boundary or some other kind of limitation that would make my life better.
07:50
So if any of that resonates or matters or your curiosity gets piqued, that's a great question to ask yourself. Where am I falling into passivity? Question number two, where am I overworking? This question matters a lot because overworking isn't just about the physical labor that we do.
08:11
It's about the emotional labor. It's about the relational labor. It's about the mental labor that we do oftentimes to earn love, to avoid conflict, to prove that we are worthy or worthwhile, and to prevent other people from being disappointed in us.
08:29
It is self-abandonment that is dressed up as responsibility. And for a lot of my super ambitious women out there, that ambition, if you kind of peel back that layer of ambition underneath is trying to earn love, belonging, the good opinion of other people.
08:52
And so overworking or seeing where you are overworking is just a moment to pause and say, am I getting out of this overworking situation something that is valuable for me? Or am I putting in more than is my share?
09:12
Am I taking care of things that are not my responsibility? Women are so expected to do invisible labor, emotional tracking, planning, remembering. And we are so praised for our endurance and the way that we keep showing up over and over and over again in these really highly resilient, productive, and totally unsustainable ways.
09:34
And so if this question, where am I overworking, creates some curiosity for you, here's some other ways that you might ask it. Where am I doing more than my share? What am I carrying that isn't actually mine?
09:53
Where am I exhausted but still really pushing hard? Question number three. Where am I abandoning myself? This question really matters because self-abandonment is the core of people pleasing. It is saying I matter less than anything going on outside of me that somebody else wants or needs or wants me to do for them.
10:22
So this happens when we consistently override our own intuition. We override our boundaries or don't have any. We don't feel our own emotions and we don't pay attention to the signals from our body about what we like, what we want, what we don't want.
10:43
And for the good girls out there, right, this is lesson number one that we learned. We learned that what we think, what we feel, what we want to have happen is secondary to what everybody else wants.
10:57
And so unlearning that, unlearning that disconnection takes some energy and some focus. There are some other ways that you might ask this to help you see, where am I self-abandoning? You might ask yourself, where am I saying yes when my body says no?
11:23
Where am I ignoring my own discomfort? Is there something that I'm tolerating in my life that I don't want to tolerate anymore? Because each of those questions gets at the heart of how we are trained to attune to everyone else outwardly and not to attune to ourselves inwardly.
11:45
So this is how we unlearn behavior. Question number four, where can I honor myself and my needs better? This is one of my favorite questions because it's like a reclamation question. This is the question I go to when I don't feel like myself, when I feel like I'm doing too many things for other people or where I'm not connected enough to myself.
12:14
Because for me, when I'm not honoring myself, that's when I feel burnout and resentment and withdrawal. And I feel like my emotions are kind of out of control. Women's needs are often framed as burdensome.
12:29
Many women are praised for not needing, right? You're such an easygoing person. You're so easy to get along with. And what that does is it creates this false binary in our mind where I can't take care of myself if I'm taking care of other people.
12:46
Like it's either or either they get care or I get care. And that can feel selfish. So really looking at the answer to this question helps us see that it's not a binary. It helps us step into our full and whole personhood, deserving of the same kind of support and love that we so freely give other people.
13:09
You can also ask, what do I need more of right now? Or what would support actually look like for me? If I trusted my needs, what would change? Those are some other ways to ask that so you can get at some good answers for yourself.
13:27
Last one, this is a big focus for me this year. And it's the first time that I've kind of brought this question into the list that I regularly ask myself. And it is this. Question number five, where do I need more joy, fun, or play?
13:44
This question matters because joy isn't frivolous. Play isn't immature. And fun is so necessary to balance out and to give ourselves the nervous system care that the times we are living in demand right now.
14:04
Joy helps restore our creativity, our desire, our aliveness, our imagination, all of the things that really make life worth living. And they are especially important right now in the climate that we're in.
14:22
Not just politically, but medically, right? Perimenopause and having to support other people and wanting to still build relationships of trust and joy with others means we need to give ourselves joy and play and fun.
14:39
It's not a reward. It's nourishment. So many of us learned that the most important thing you can do with your time is work. And if there's any time left over, then maybe you can have a little bit of joy or fun or play.
14:52
But what I want to do and what I am doing this year for myself is really centering joy, fun, and play. So if you are curious about how you might bring a little bit more of that into your life, here's some other ways you could ask.
15:08
What lights me up that I've been postponing? When was the last time I felt playful? What was I doing? What was it like to get some input there? And what feels like relief? Because sometimes relief can lead to fun or play or joy.
15:27
For me, what really feels joyful is listening to music and dancing, spending time with people one-on-one where I can have a really nourishing conversation. For you, the answers might be different, but they are so important.
15:44
As I end here, I just want to reiterate, you don't need to answer all of these questions. They are offered to you in the spirit of just what sparks some curiosity? What sparks some, maybe some annoyance or some guilt or some other type of emotion that makes you want to spend a little more time with these questions?
16:06
Let your brain have these questions as something to just mull over. And then whatever comes up, great. And then if something useful comes up, you can decide what to do with that. And if there isn't anything useful in that question, let it go and take what really feels like a fit.
16:23
Because again, if we are learning to trust our bodies and trust our intuition, the place to start is with these questions. Have a great week. I'll see you soon.
