The Woman at the Helm

There is a particular type of exhaustion that has no name, but every woman knows it. It’s a particular type of tiredness that doesn’t come from lack of sleep or being over-worked (though, most of us are!). It really comes from a place of pouring out your life energy in directions or toward people you didn’t choose.

Someone needed you there or expected you here. The schedule, the role, the holding of a version of yourself that is more palatable to others. You built your life around all of it, without feeling the slow erosion of what you actually desired.

And then, one day, something shifts. A birth. An anniversary. A death. Something that shakes up the ordinary just enough for you to catch a glimpse of your life, but you don’t recognize yourself in it. The experience is bewildering. When, exactly, did your life become about everyone but you?

Sovereignty is the word I keep returning to. Not power in the sense of dominance and not independence in the sense of needing nothing. Sovereignty in the oldest sense of the word: the authority to govern oneself. To be the one who decides where your energy flows, what your time is worth, and whose voices get access to the innermost rooms of your heart.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t taught this. We’re taught generosity. We’re taught how to accommodate. Read the room. Smooth the edges. Manage the mood. We’re taught to have empathy and move toward one another, which is beautiful, but the story is incomplete. Our interior world in this story remains largely uncharted wilderness.

Our becoming, our unfolding, and our questions about who we are and who we’re growing into are not luxuries to be attended to when things settle down. Spoiler alert: they never settle down! Sovereignty is not something you earn when things settle down, it’s something you practice on your worst and best days.

Nature, it turns out, already knows this. In elephant herds, it is the eldest female who leads. Not despite her age, but because of it. She carries the memory of the herd: where the water was in the last drought, which path is safe, which threat is real. The younger elephants orient around her not out of obligation but out of knowing. Her accumulated wisdom is the herd's greatest survival asset. She is not diminished by time. She is distilled by it.

Orca whales live a similar truth. Female orcas are among the only non-human species known to experience menopause, and they live for decades beyond it. Researchers have found that post-reproductive females lead their pods to food sources with an accuracy that younger whales simply don't possess. Their value to the group does not end when their biological role does. It deepens. The oldest grandmother whale is the one who remembers. The one the pod follows when everything else is uncertain.

We have somehow convinced ourselves that this is not also true of women. That our worth is tied to a particular season of life, a particular role, a particular kind of usefulness. But the matriarch doesn't lead because she is the most accommodating. She leads because she knows herself, she knows her world, and she has stopped apologizing for either.

If you are somewhere in that reckoning right now, I want you to know that the asking itself is the beginning. You don't have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to stop outsourcing the question.

You are the author. You are the subject. You are the one at the helm.

It was always supposed to be you.