Getting Back on Your Own Damn List
Joanne Cox · 6 min read
There is a particular kind of standing still that happens after years of giving everything you have to everyone else. You are not in crisis exactly, nothing dramatic has happened, you are simply standing in the middle of the road like a deer in headlights, blinking, wondering how the hell you ended up here. How every decision you made, one reasonable choice after another, somehow added up to a life where you are not even on your own list of favourite people.
You give advice to everyone. You show up for everyone. You do everything for everyone else, and then one day you are sick, or exhausted, or simply running on empty, and there is no one there for you the way you have always been there for them. That is the moment the questioning starts. How did I get here?
And the honest answer is never one bad decision. It is years, plural, of dedication to every other motherfucker on this planet before yourself.
I want to be upfront about something here. This is not a blog for the faint hearted, because we are tired, genuinely tired, of picking up the pieces for everyone else while there is not a single living soul doing the same for us, and half of them get offended the moment we finally say no thank you.
We are genuinely tired of picking up the pieces for everyone else while no one is doing the same for us.
There is a particular kind of standing still that happens after years of giving everything you have to everyone else. You are not in crisis exactly, nothing dramatic has happened, you are simply standing in the middle of the road like a deer in headlights, blinking, wondering how the hell you ended up here. How every decision you made, one reasonable choice after another, somehow added up to a life where you are not even on your own list of favourite people.
You give advice to everyone. You show up for everyone. You do everything for everyone else, and then one day you are sick, or exhausted, or simply running on empty, and there is no one there for you the way you have always been there for them. That is the moment the questioning starts. How did I get here?
And the honest answer is never one bad decision. It is years, plural, of dedication to every other motherfucker on this planet before yourself.
I want to be upfront about something here. This is not a blog for the faint hearted, because we are tired, genuinely tired, of picking up the pieces for everyone else while there is not a single living soul doing the same for us, and half of them get offended the moment we finally say no thank you.
So the first thing I ask of you is to pause. Just stop for a minute and take a breath, and ask yourself honestly, where the hell did I go?
Because you are not reinventing anyone here, and you are not rediscovering some new version of yourself either. You are finding the girl who used to have real vividness for life, the one who punched the air and jumped out of bed because she was brilliant at maths, or obsessed with ancient history, loved being on the track team, played football, swam, danced, painted watercolours, was a financial whiz, whatever it was for you.
She is not gone forever. She has simply been buried under years of one other motherfucker after another coming before you.
This is what the six sessions in Choose Yourself are built to walk you through, getting you firmly back onto your own list of favourite people. No one is asking you to love your kids, your sister, your parents, your partner, or your closest friends any less.
What I am asking is that you start counting yourself among the people you show up for. Stop just answering to everyone else and start actually looking after yourself, because if you are not in your own corner, nobody else’s presence there is going to fill that gap.
The arc runs like this. Pause asks you to stop long enough to hear yourself again. Remember brings back everything that used to light you up, all those things buried under obligation and exhaustion.
Permission gives you the go ahead, the one you have been waiting for someone else to give you, to actually step back into one or two of those things without needing anyone’s approval first. Once you do that, expansion starts to happen almost on its own, and you begin rediscovering versions of yourself you genuinely liked, the kind that make you smile quietly on the inside again.
From there, momentum builds, and this part is well understood, what you put out into the world tends to come back to you multiplied. Once you are generating real joy again instead of running on fumes, the world has a way of reflecting that straight back at you.
And the final piece is becoming, which is really just falling back in love with the person you already are underneath everything, and finally, properly, putting yourself back on your own favourites list.
Nobody is calling you selfish for doing this, whatever anyone tells you. Learning to say no thank you, learning to protect your own energy with real boundaries, learning to look at your life with actual clarity instead of just surviving it, none of that makes you a worse partner, mother, sister, or friend.
It makes you a woman who is finally present in her own life again, rather than a ghost running errands for everyone else’s.
