The Woman You Were Before You Got So Responsible

She had a favorite song she played too loud. She had opinions about things that didn't matter. She took up space in rooms without calculating the cost first.

She wasn't fearless — she just hadn't yet learned to be afraid of herself.

You know her. You were her. And somewhere between then and now, in the long accumulation of being needed and being good and being careful, she got quieter. Not gone. Just waiting, with the particular patience of something that knows it's still alive.

July is when I feel her most.

What Gets Dimmed

We don't lose ourselves all at once. It happens gradually, and mostly it happens in moments that look like maturity from the outside.

You stop singing in the car because your teenager is embarrassed. You stop wearing the color you love because someone once said it was "a lot." You stop telling the whole story because you've learned to read the room. You stop asking for what you actually want because wanting too specifically feels dangerous — it gives the world something to withhold.

Each of these moments is so small. And yet, cumulatively, they teach you to make yourself smaller. To lead with the version of you that is easiest for everyone else to receive.

What gets dimmed isn't your competence or your care or your capability. Those often grow. What gets dimmed is your wildness. Your excess. The parts of you that exist for no productive reason whatsoever — the delight, the silliness, the hunger, the inconvenient joy.

And then one day someone asks what you want, and there's a pause, and in the pause you realize: you've been so busy being needed that you've barely asked yourself.

What Summer Knows

The thing about July is that it doesn't negotiate. The blackberries don't check whether it's a good time to ripen. The heat doesn't apologize for being too much. The light doesn't ask permission to last until nine o'clock.

Summer is extravagant in a way that doesn't care if it's appropriate. It is simply, fully, entirely itself — abundant to the point of excess, alive to the point of wildness — and nothing in it is sorry about that.

I think this is why summer has always felt like a homecoming to women who have spent the rest of the year being reasonable. The season gives you permission by example. You cannot stand in July and argue that full expression is wrong. The evidence is everywhere.

The invitation isn't to be irresponsible. It isn't to abandon the life you've built or the people who need you. It's something smaller and more specific than that:

Let one part of yourself that has been quiet be loud again. Just one. Just for this season.

The Inquiry

I want to leave you with a question — not a journaling prompt, not something you need to think carefully about. Something more like a listening.

What part of you has been waiting?

Not what you should want more of. Not what would make you a better, more balanced person. What is actually, honestly, specifically asking for air? The thing that flickers in you when you drive past a lake and think for half a second about stopping. The creative project you've explained away for three years. The friendship that feels like play instead of obligation. The music you listened to before you got so respectable.

She's not asking for your whole schedule. She's not asking you to blow up your life.

She's asking for an afternoon. A yes. A little room.

Give it to her. See what she does with it.

You were never too much. You were just too little allowed to be.