Part 2 - The Gift: It Made Me Softer in the Right Places.

Part 2 of 4 in the series "What the Work Did to Me"

The most common form of despair is not being who you are." Søren Kierkegaard

There was a woman I used to dismiss.

Not out loud. Never out loud.

But in my head - in the quiet, private part of me that made quick judgments before I could catch them - I used to hear her talk and think: she's too much. Too loud. Too angry. Why can't she just say it calmly?

She was fighting for something real. I just didn't have the eyes for it yet. I think about her a lot now.

One of the things nobody warns you about when you enter this kind of work is what it does to your empathy.

Not just toward other women, or toward the people you're trying to serve. Toward everyone. Toward yourself.

It stretches something inside you. Quietly. Like a muscle you didn't know was tight until someone showed you how to release it.

And once it releases - once you start seeing people as products of everything that shaped them - something shifts in how you move through the world.

I started noticing things differently in ordinary conversations.

A colleague who talked over everyone in meetings - and I used to be frustrated by him - I started seeing the room differently.

Who he talked over. Who he didn't. Which voices were interrupted and which ones weren't.

And then I started wondering what he had been taught, all his life, about whose words mattered.

That's not excusing the behavior. It's understanding the architecture behind it.

There's a difference. And the work taught me that difference.

I became a better listener.

Not the polite kind of listening where you wait for your turn to speak.

The real kind, where you're genuinely trying to understand what someone is carrying underneath what they're saying.

I started hearing things I used to walk past.

A joke that landed wrong but everyone laughed at anyway.

A woman in a meeting who said something good and watched it get ignored, then watched a man say almost the same thing five minutes later and get a nod of approval.

Before the work, I would have filed those moments under that's just how it is. Now I couldn't file them anywhere. I just had to sit with them.

Sitting with things, I've learned, is its own kind of education.

It taught me to stop rushing toward resolution. To stop needing everything to have a neat answer. Some things are just complicated, and the most honest thing you can do is admit that instead of wrapping it in a bow so it feels safer.

That's what the work did. It made me more comfortable with complexity.

Before, I needed things to be simple. Good people and bad people. Right choices and wrong ones. Now I understand that most of the time, it's layers all the way down, and pretending otherwise is just a way of protecting yourself from the full truth.

It changed how I love people, too.

I started loving with more intention. More attention. I started asking better questions, not to fill silence, but because I genuinely wanted to know.

What shaped you?

What do you carry?

What were you told about yourself before you were old enough to question it?

I stopped taking people at face value. Not because I became suspicious, but because I became curious.

There's a version of me, before this work, who moved through relationships faster. Shallower. Who took what was on the surface and called it knowing someone. The work slowed me down. Made me want to go deeper.

There was a moment - I think it was a training session, or maybe a workshop - when someone listed out what we teach girls to be.

Be quiet.

Don't take up too much space.

Smile.

Be agreeable.

Don't make people uncomfortable.

I sat there running through my own childhood like a film reel.

I recognized all of it. Every single instruction. I had followed most of them without anyone explicitly telling me to. That's how deep it goes, you don't always get the rules handed to you. You absorb them from the air.

Recognizing that didn't make me angry in that moment. It made me sad. And then - slowly - it made me free.

Because once you see a cage, you can stop mistaking it for a home.

Tracing the shape of what had been built around me - quietly, without anyone announcing it - was one of the most liberating things this work gave me. Not dramatic liberation. Not a declaration or a transformation scene. Just a slow, steady loosening.

I started choosing things more deliberately. How I spent my energy. Who I gave my softness to. When I spoke up, and when I walked away.

The work gave me a kind of clarity I didn't know I was missing.

Not certainty, those are different things.

Certainty is rigid. Clarity moves. It adjusts.

It says: I don't have all the answers, but I know what I'm looking at.

That's what I found. A clearer way of looking.

At the world, at people, at myself. At the woman I had been building, one quiet decision at a time.

And with that clarity came something I can only describe as purpose. Not the loud kind. Not the kind you announce. The kind that sits in your chest, steady, and tells you: this matters. Keep going.

But I would be lying if I told you it was all softness and clarity and beautiful revelation.

Because the same lens that gives you sight also makes some things impossible to look away from. And carrying that - the weight of always seeing - is its own kind of burden.

That's what I'll share in the next part. The part that doesn't make it into the inspirational quotes.

Rugo,

A Piece Of My Mind!.