I'm Haley Ryan, an Identity and Authenticity Educator, and my work explores what happens when women spend so long being who everyone else needs or wants them to be that they lose sight of who they are underneath it all.

I'm particularly interested in the gap between knowing and doing. You can understand your patterns, know where you come from and be completely aware that you're allowed to make your own choices, but that doesn't nevessarily mean you know what you want. And even when you do, actually choosing it can become much more complicated once other people are involved.

I don't think the answer is someone else telling you what the "right" choice is. I'm much more interested in how you get to the point where you can figure that out for yourself.

I had a friend I was extremely close to, and when she was going through a difficult time I went above and beyond to support her, even though I was dealing with my own stuff and didn’t really have the mental or emotional bandwidth.

Later, I started seeing girls’ nights out and weekends away on social media that I hadn’t been invited to. My immediate assumption was that I must have done something wrong.

And I knew that response. I’d been doing some version of it for as long as I could remember. I could give more than I really had to give, then feel left behind when I was no longer useful and become preoccupied with figuring out what I’d done wrong and how I could fix it.

I’ve thought a lot about that since, because what interests me now isn’t really the friendship itself. It’s how automatically I looked to somebody else’s response to tell me something about myself.

That pattern didn’t begin or end with one friendship, and I don’t assume every woman I work with has experienced it in the same way. But it’s one of the reasons these questions are personal to me rather than something I only find interesting in theory.

So what does it actually look like to stop abandoning yourself?

I use self-abandonment to describe the ways we gradually learn to leave ourselves out of our own lives. Sometimes that’s obvious, but often it looks perfectly reasonable from the outside. You’re responsible. You do what needs doing. You take your roles seriously. You consider other people. None of those things are inherently a problem.

The problem is when you’ve done it for so long that other people’s needs, expectations and reactions have become easier to hear than your own.

And then someone tells you to “choose yourself”, which sounds straightforward until you realise you’re not entirely sure what you’d be choosing.

That’s why I’m less interested in telling women what they should do and more interested in what helps you figure that out for yourself. Other people are still allowed to have opinions about your choices, and those opinions might still matter to you. They just don’t always have to make the decision.

Where do you want to go next?

There isn’t one correct route through this work, so start with the thing that feels most relevant to you.

The Permission Project

If you already understand a lot about yourself but want somewhere to practise actually doing things differently, The Permission Project is my monthly membership for turning that understanding into ordinary, real-life choices.