What's left when you stop having to earn your worth?
Why freedom from striving isn’t the finish line: it’s just the beginning.
Like so many women, I spent years obsessively tracking calories, chasing achievements, and pushing my body beyond reason. Quitting all that gave me peace and liberation. But what I didn't expect in that newfound freedom was that I'd have to learn to find a new kind of motivation.
At the start of summer, I told friends and followers I was stepping back from this newsletter to focus on my book writing. I thought the space would help me make real progress. I did make some progress, just not as much as I’d hoped.
Part of the reason was the crushing overwhelm and brain fog I’ve been swimming in for the last year, as I’ve come to realize I’m in the thick of perimenopause.
But there was something else going on, something I only recently put my finger on.
I no longer do anything out of lack of self-worth. And lack of self-worth used to be the thing that drove me.
In the past three years of quitting diets and all the BS that goes with constantly attempting to shrink yourself, I’ve reclaimed myself. I stopped tying my worth to work, being a boss, athletic achievements, weight loss, or physical appearance. And when I look back, I see how much of my life was built on the constant belief that I had to earn my right to exist.
I know I’m not alone in this.
As women, we’re taught that to get ahead, we should be endlessly striving—smaller, fitter, more productive. Always moving. Never stopping to rest or reset. Diet culture and hustle culture are two heads of the same beast.
And here’s the kicker: we’re also taught that no matter what we do, it still won’t be enough.
But when you opt out of that race, everything looks different.
My worth, it turns out, was never something I needed to hustle for. It was always innately within me.
That realization has been liberating. It’s been life-changing. It’s also been confusing AF. Because when you’ve spent decades striving, pushing yourself—harder, faster, thinner, better—and then you stop, what’s left to drive you?
I’ve had to find out.
Making peace with movement
The first place I had to make peace with was exercise.
When I first quit dieting and moved to intuitive eating, I had to recalibrate my relationship with movement. I’d been an obsessive over-exerciser most of my life but especially in my 40s. Exercise was transactional: something I did to “earn” my food and keep my weight in check. Even though I truly loved working out, it was grossly overprioritized in my list of things that mattered, higher than food, sex, sleep, even my kids. Work carried more weight only because it paid the bills and let me prove myself in a different way.
Having a broad, muscular frame, I found solace in strength. Unlike being thin, it was something that came natural to me. If I couldn’t be skinny, I thought, at least let me be strong. I was naturally muscular, so I leaned into it. When I entered my 40s, I found Olympic weightlifting and began competing. I loved the mind-body connection, the physics and precision required of the lifts, and the way a sequence of tiny movements, executed perfectly, could send a barbell flying from the floor to overhead. It made me feel powerful and present.
But I also used weightlifting as a way to control my body. I deliberately competed in weight classes below my natural weight, so I’d be forced to lose. Except for my very earliest meets, I ended up cutting weight for every meet, severely dehydrating myself in the days and sometimes weeks beforehand just to hit my number.
Most of us think hunger is bad, but dehydration is worse. It’s an endless thirst. It starts like a desert in your mouth, and the longer it goes on, the more it takes over. I had to cut water weight three, sometimes four times a year. Once, I had a meet where I was a tenth of a kilo over at weigh-in and spent the next half hour spitting into the gym toilet, visualizing lemons to help summon the saliva, because there was nothing left to piss.
If you’ve ever driven yourself past reason, you know how easily pain can masquerade as worth.
Those were good times. Luckily, they’re behind me now.
This summer, I started lifting again, with a renewed focus on mobility and strength. It was time. I always knew the value of lifting, but hitting perimenopause and staring down the back half of my life made it doubly clear: I want to preserve as much bone density and strength as I can. Working on the basic movements again made me realize just how much I missed lifting heavy. So I’m back, working with my original Olympic lifting coach, but this time I’m doing it for the right reasons. It’s been enormously freeing to just focus on the movements without the pressure of worrying over the size of my body.
I had to go through a similar reset with my other big passion, mountain biking. It took time, but I found new reasons to move outside the pursuit of thinness: cardiovascular health, mental clarity, and the joy of being outdoors and socializing with like-minded people. Movement isn’t about penance anymore. It’s about celebration. This body makes me feel alive. It’s a gift to be able to move it.
The hardest reset: writing
But writing? Writing has been harder.
Unlike lifting or biking, writing demands sustained concentration, something that’s been in short supply for me here in the early days of perimenopause. The kind of writing I’m doing also requires emotional depth. I’m no longer cranking out fluff(ier) pieces about fall nail color trends or packing for theme park vacations as I did in the first half of my career. Not to minimize those topics, because we need them too. But now, I’m writing from my own life, about things that matter deeply to me. And while I don’t have the same fire under me, the one that silently screams you have to do this … or else you’re nothing, I’m still battling perfectionism.
Maybe that’s why every time I hit publish, it feels like strapping my heart to my sleeve and inviting people to judge it.
For so long, I wrote with a clear external goal: clicks, bylines, validation. To be clear, the numbers still matter, but they matter less. My motivation is coming from a different place. And, to be honest, I’m still figuring out what that is.
The deeper work of transformation
The truth is, transformation doesn’t stop when you quit striving. That’s when the deeper work begins.
And I’m not the only one wrestling with this.
The at wrote last week about starting over in a new place but still being the same person with the same struggles and recognizing how we must meet ourselves where we are in this new moment.
She touched on something we rarely talk about: the work of transformation, and how it isn’t always as tidy as we hope it to be.
“Big change has a way of pulling the unconscious into the light. The insecurities, the resistance, the old wounds we carry 🌿 they all rise to the surface in the midst of transition.
Here in this new place, aspects of yourself will feel magnified, impossible to ignore, as you’re being asked to look at them more clearly than ever.
That can look like procrastination, rigidity, perfectionism and overwhelm.”
The piece called to me. Though I’m mentally and emotionally worlds away from who I used to be, there is still healing to be done.
I shared with her my belief that transformation often requires rebuilding after the old, worn-out negative beliefs are gone.
She agreed and called it the full process of transformation. The shedding and rebuilding, she said, that’s where the magic happens.
So I’m leaning into the rebuilding right now, giving myself lots of grace, especially with the writing.
Because when you stop trying to earn your worth, what’s left isn’t emptiness—it’s space. Space to rediscover what truly matters. Space to rebuild from a place of love instead of lack.
For right now, I’m letting that be enough.
💬 I’d love to hear from you.
Does this resonate with your own experiences of transformation? If you’ve gone through your own shedding and rebuilding, what did it look like for you?
P.S. If this resonated, feel free to share it with someone else who’s shedding old beliefs and rebuilding anew. We’re not meant to do this work alone.