You don't need to start over. You need to remember.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from believing that who you are is not quite enough.

I know it well. I spent a long time hiding the parts of myself that felt too much, too weird, too awkward. The version of me that talked too fast and laughed too loud and cared too deeply about things other people found unremarkable. I learned early, the way most of us do, that there were parts of myself better kept quiet. And so I kept them quiet.

Over the last decade I've done a lot of work to unbury those parts. To look at the quirks and the intensity and the specific, particular Ruth-ness of who I am, and to decide that not only is it okay — it is actually the whole point. I have done that work. I believe it.

And yet, recently, I noticed something. In certain rooms, in certain moments, I was making myself smaller. A self-deprecating joke before someone could notice I was taking up space. An apology tucked into an opinion. That familiar, quiet shrinking.

It didn't mean I had failed. It didn't mean the work hadn't taken hold. It meant I was human, and that patterns run deep, and that uncovering who we are is not a single event. It is an ongoing practice.

Here is what I want you to hear, because I think you need it as much as I did: there is nothing wrong with you. There never was. The version of you that feels grounded and certain and fully herself — she is not gone. She is not something you need to build from scratch. She got buried. Under life, under expectations, under years of absorbing, directly and indirectly, who you were supposed to be instead.

The work is not to start over. The work is to remember.

Why we get buried

Our nervous systems are incredibly good at adapting. When we receive the message — through a critical parent, a dismissive partner, a workplace that rewarded performance over personhood, a culture that had very specific ideas about how women should take up space — that certain parts of us are not welcome, we learn to manage those parts. We tuck them away. We develop strategies: perfectionism, people pleasing, overachieving, shrinking, numbing.

These are not character flaws. They are intelligent adaptations. Your nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do — it kept you safe in an environment where being fully yourself felt risky.

The problem is that those adaptations have a way of outlasting their usefulness. The environment changes. You grow. You do the work. And still the pattern shows up, because it is wired in, because it became automatic, because the nervous system does not update its operating system simply because you have decided intellectually that you are allowed to take up space now.

This is why so many women come to me feeling like something is fundamentally wrong with them. Like they should be further along. Like everyone else has figured something out that keeps slipping through their fingers. Like the answer is to tear it all down and start fresh.

It is not.

The proof is already in you

I have been sitting with this idea for a few weeks, turning it over in my own life and in the conversations I have with clients. And then I went to edit this week's episode of Inspired Questions — my conversation with Zulma Williams, a licensed clinical social worker who calls herself the swearing therapist, and who is one of the most grounding, no nonsense, genuinely funny people I have had on the show — and I found the idea sitting right there in the recording.

Zulma said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She said: you have a 100% track record of overcoming your challenges. How do I know? Because you're here.

Read that again.

Every hard thing you have ever faced — you are on the other side of it. Every time you thought you couldn't, you did. Every season that felt impossible, you moved through. The evidence of your resilience is not somewhere in your future, waiting to be earned. It is already written into your history. It is the fact of you still being here.

We don't give ourselves credit for this. We are so focused on what still feels hard, on the gap between where we are and where we think we should be, that we completely overlook the extraordinary amount we have already survived and navigated and grown through.

Zulma's episode drops this Thursday on Inspired Questions. I want you to hear her tell her own story — because it is remarkable — and I want you to hear this particular idea in her voice. Subscribe so it lands in your feed the moment it's out. SUBSCRIBE

What uncovering actually looks like

Remembering who you are is not a dramatic event. It does not require a breakdown or a retreat or a complete reinvention. It happens in small moments, often quiet ones.

It looks like noticing when you make yourself smaller, and getting curious about it instead of critical. Not why am I like this, but oh, there's that pattern again. What is it protecting?

It looks like practising, in low stakes moments, letting yourself take up the space you actually need. Saying the thing without the apology in front of it. Letting yourself be seen being enthusiastic, or certain, or unashamedly yourself, without immediately softening it.

It looks like building a relationship with your nervous system — learning what regulation feels like in your body, so that when you notice yourself contracting, you have something to come back to. Breath. Movement. Stillness. Whatever works for you.

And it looks like being honest with yourself about the stories you are still carrying. The ones that say you are too much, or not enough, or that the real you needs to stay quiet in this particular room. Those stories are not the truth. They are adaptations. And adaptations, unlike character, can change.

You are not a project to be fixed

I am building something new in my work right now, rooted in exactly this idea. I am not ready to share all of it yet, but I want you to know it is coming, and it is for the woman who is tired of feeling like she needs to start over. The one who suspects, somewhere underneath everything, that she has always had what she needs. She just needs help finding her way back to it.

If that is you — stay close. More soon.

And in the meantime: what is one part of yourself you stopped showing because it felt like too much? I would genuinely love to know. Leave a comment or reply to this week's email.