Stop Trying to Be Digestible

The Health Cost of Making Yourself Easy for Everyone Else to Swallow

I was in middle school when I decided my handwriting wasn't good enough.

Some of the other girls had this effortlessly loopy, rounded script — the kind that put little hearts over their i's without it looking like they tried hard. Mine was angular. Cramped. Deeply unimpressive. So I did what any reasonable, self-respecting eleven-year-old would do: I started practicing someone else's handwriting.

I thought I was being strategic. Aspirational, even.

The girl whose handwriting I was copying did not see it that way.

She called me out, in the way only middle school girls can, which is to say with zero diplomatic cushioning and the kind of accuracy that still lands thirty-two years later. I was mortified. And also, if I am being completely honest with you, confused, because I genuinely did not understand why my handwriting needed to be mine.

That is how deep the training runs.

We Are Wired to Fit In (And It's Costing Us More Than We Know)

From the time we are old enough to sit in a classroom, the message is consistent: observe what the group is doing, adjust accordingly, and do not make it weird. Fitting in is not just socially rewarded, it is practically a survival skill. The kids who fit in have friends. The adults who fit in get hired, get invited, get included.

So we learn to adapt. We soften our opinions. We round off our edges. We pick up other people's handwriting, metaphorically and sometimes literally, and practice it until it feels almost natural.

The problem is that "almost natural" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Here is what I have come to understand, both through my own experience and through the work I do with women inside my coaching practice: chronic conformity is not just an identity issue. It is a nervous system issue. It is a gut issue. It is a body issue.

When you spend years, or decades, managing how you present yourself in order to stay palatable to the people around you, your body is working overtime. The hyper-vigilance required to constantly monitor yourself, adjust yourself, and pre-empt how you might be received is exhausting. It is the kind of exhaustion that lives in your shoulders. In your digestion. In the fact that you wake up tired even after eight hours, because your nervous system never actually got the memo that you were safe.

Fitting in, at that level, is a full-time job with no benefits and a terrible dress code.

The Version of You That Keeps Getting Watered Down

I spent a significant portion of my life in performance mode. It was the constant, low-grade awareness of what was expected of me, and the reflexive impulse to meet that expectation before anyone even had to ask.

I was a good athlete, so I performed toughness. I was in a professional environment, so I performed composure. I was in relationships where my needs felt like inconveniences, so I performed not needing things.

The problem with being a good performer is that you get very good at it. So good that the performance starts to feel like the real thing. And then one day you look around and realize you genuinely do not know what you actually want, because you have spent so long curating what you were supposed to want.

This is not a crisis moment with a soundtrack. It is the feeling of being vaguely disconnected from your own life, like you are watching it from slightly outside yourself, wondering when it is going to start feeling like yours.

Your body, by the way, has been trying to tell you about this for years. It keeps the score even when you are not keeping track.

What Happened When I Stopped Trying to Fit In

I did not wake up one morning and decide to stop conforming. That is not how it works, and honestly, if my body had not forced the issue, I am not sure I ever would have gotten there on my own.

I got sick. The kind of sick that pulls you out of your own life and sets you down somewhere quieter, where the noise of everyone else's expectations cannot quite reach you, and you are left alone with the question of what you actually want your life to feel like.

That kind of sick has a way of clarifying things fast.

When your body stops cooperating with the performance, you have two options. You can white-knuckle your way back to the version of yourself that was running on empty and call it recovery. Or you can use the interruption for what it actually is, which is an invitation to stop living in a way that was making you sick in the first place.

I chose the second one. It wasn’t gracefully. And I didn’t do it all at once. But I chose it.

And the more I stopped performing a version of myself for other people's comfort, the more my body started to relax. And I mean that physiologically. The tension I had been carrying, which I had normalized to the point of not even registering it as tension, began to release. My digestion improved. My sleep improved. The low hum of anxiety that I had just assumed was my personality turned out to be a symptom of living out of alignment with myself.

Fitting out is not the risk. Fitting in at the cost of yourself is.

In my forties, I understand something I could not have articulated in middle school: standing out is not something that happens to you. It is something you come back to. It is the version of you that was always there, underneath all the adapting and adjusting and handwriting practice. That version never needed to be invented. She just needed to be recovered.

What Fitting Out Actually Looks Like

I want to be clear that fitting out does not mean being contrarian for sport. It does not mean announcing to your coworkers that you have rejected societal norms while sending strongly worded emails about the office policies.

It means knowing what you actually think, and not apologizing for it. It means wanting what you actually want, even when it does not fit the template. It means building a life that is organized around your values instead of organized around your performance reviews.

For the women I work with, this often shows up in the body first, before they can even articulate what is off. They come in saying their gut is a mess, they’re eating for convenience, their energy is shot, and they cannot figure out why they feel so depleted when they think they are doing everything “right”. And when we start working together, what we often find underneath the physical symptoms is years of self-abandonment in small, socially acceptable doses.

The path back is not a detox. It is not a supplement protocol. It is the slow, deliberate work of remembering who you are and deciding to live from that place. The body tends to follow.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you stripped away what your job expects of you, what your family narrative says you should be, and what you have decided is realistic, who is left?

That is not a trick question. It is probably the most important health question you will ever ask yourself.

The woman who has an answer to that question, even a partial, messy, still-figuring-it-out answer, is the woman whose body finally has permission to stop bracing.

And it turns out that women has pretty great handwriting.