Those words from my mentor still echo in my mind with crystalline clarity: “You’re a grown woman now – you’ve got to stop blaming everybody around you and take responsibility.” Like a mirror held up to my soul, they reflected back the uncomfortable truth I had been avoiding for years. I had mastered the art of pleasing others, then graduated to the easier path of blame, all while avoiding the harder road of genuine accountability. The prospect of standing alone, of severing those familial ties that both nourished and suffocated me, loomed like an impossible mountain I couldn’t bring myself to climb. It wasn’t until my mother’s passing – that seismic shift in my universe – that I was forced to survey the wreckage of a life lived for others. The irony was piercing: I had always known who I was and what I wanted, but that knowledge lay dormant beneath layers of familial obligation and fear. The courage required to stand alone, to voice that simple yet devastating word “no,” carried with it the price of solitude – a price I wasn’t ready to pay for so many years.

Like many, I remained tethered to the familiar pain of blame, marinating in patterns that pulled and tugged at my soul, my energy, my very essence. It was a dance of unhappiness, a choreography of compliance that left me a stranger to myself. Yet, in life’s mysterious alchemy, even our darkest moments carry seeds of transformation. Sometimes it takes a seismic shock – even the profound loss of a parent – to shake us awake from the slumber of people-pleasing. Perhaps there’s a bitter mercy in having change thrust upon us when we lack the courage to choose it ourselves. For in that forced awakening, we finally see how living to the rhythm of others’ tunes doesn’t just dim our light – it extinguishes it entirely, leaving us hollow echoes of who we might have been.