I’ve met the most amazing woman here in Charlotte … at the nail salon.
You know that rare thing where you meet someone and something in you just files her under my kind of person before you can understand why?
She’s that. Within a few weeks we’d racked up six dinners, which at our age is practically a courtship.
She’s also deeply connected in this city. And at dinner one night, she leaned in and said, “I have so many people I want to connect you with.”
Then came the warning: “But some of these women will be jealous of you.”
And I felt it. That old, familiar pattern reaching for the doorknob. The instinct to pre-shrink.
To get ahead of it. To make myself smaller and sweeter and more digestible so that no one, anywhere, could possibly have a bad feeling in my direction.
My first thought was almost comical in its innocence: But why? I’m kind. I’m the biggest cheerleader other women have.
As if being likable were a legal defense. As if I could present the jury with character witnesses.
And then I stopped. Because several years ago, I made a decision about this exact game: I don’t play it anymore. I’m not begging people to like me. I’m not performing niceness in exchange for approval, and I’m certainly not shrinking so a stranger can feel comfortable at brunch.
So I looked at my new friend and said, “Well, if they are, that’s not my problem.”
She laughed. We ordered more wine.
But I want to hand you the actual key, because this took me half a lifetime to find: to live a beautiful, self-possessed life, you must be willing for people to be wrong about you.
Willing. Not comfortable with it, not thrilled about it. Willing.
Because the alternative is a life spent running a full-time public relations campaign for an audience that was never going to issue the verdict you wanted anyway.
Some people will decide things about you in the first 90 seconds, and no performance will reverse it. Let them. Their opinion of you is happening in their head, which is, conveniently, not where you live.
Stop convincing. Just stand there in your own glorious beauty and let people be as wrong as they need to be.
The right ones find you anyway. Usually over dinner.
With love,
The right people don’t need convincing.
When I stop performing for the room and simply show up as myself, the ones who belong find me. They always do.
TKEES Square Toe Lily Suede Sandal
These TKEES Lily Suede Sandals have been on my feet all summer. The square toe, the minimal silhouette, the suede – they have that effortless European quality I can never resist.
Simple enough to wear with everything, interesting enough that they always get a comment. (Not that I’m looking for one.)
The Fear of Being Seen [From the Archives]
Most of us have spent years making ourselves more digestible, more palatable, more agreeable – and calling it kindness. This episode is about what it actually costs us to keep shrinking.
Worth pulling from the vault this week. It might just change how you walk into a room.
// TheEDIT
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