Before Someone Defines You, Define Yourself

Dear reader, I want to talk to you about something that sounds simple but isn’t easy.  It sounds like freedom. It sounds like advice your favourite auntie would give you over cocktails and caviar. But following it, is one of the harder things a woman can do. I want to talk about learning to live for yourself, before the world assigns you a role and mistakes it for your identity.

There is a version of empowerment that is easy to perform but hard to fully embody. Travel, they say. Build your brand. Bloom before you settle down. These are the right things to say, but the premise is built on the wrong foundation. Advice to women seems to be weighed down by the looming pressure of the body clock and must-achieve milestones, but says nothing about the character you’re required to build. And so most young women do it all, check as many boxes as they can, and still arrive at thirty wondering why they feel so hollow.

We first arrive into our twenties already shaped; not into ourselves but into the roles we’ve been fed by the community around us. Daughter first: carrying the weight of our parent’s beliefs and expectations before we learn to carry ourselves. Built into that weight is the idea that in order to be worthy, you have to be chosen. As a wife. As a mother. You have to become the anchor to a family, without getting the chance to figure out who you even are.

You search high and low for the one who is meant to complete you because you haven’t learned that you came into this world already whole.

Now, none of this is an argument against marriage or motherhood. There is a deep and real value to building a family, in raising people who will carry something good into the next generation. But if partnership is your primary identity before you have developed your own, you will spend the rest of your life negotiating with a version of yourself that was never fully formed.

I also want to pause here and say something with care: many young women are carrying wounds they never asked for. A father who left. A mother who was hard in ways that left marks. The quiet betrayals that arrive early in life and take up permanent residence. Those wounds are real. They are not weakness, and they are not your fault. But here is what I have learned: developing yourself is not a betrayal of your pain. It is actually the most loving thing you can do with it. It is how you stop handing it to every new person who walks into your life, hoping they will fix what was broken before they arrived.

The work of becoming yourself is the answer to all of it. And it starts here.

I. EDUCATION

When women engage seriously with difficult fields and develop genuine competency, something shifts internally. It is not just knowledge. It is trust. I felt this for the first time in my Honours programme, in a craft of writing class. We were doing weekly exercises, working through different forms, and then we got to poetry. Something broke open. I realised that I could put myself inside the writing, not just observe from outside it. A free write became a personal essay. And suddenly I had authority, not because someone had given it to me, but because I had found a way to infuse myself into the work. That is what real education does. It does not just fill you with information. It gives you a new relationship with your own intelligence.

You let curiosity lead, you follow it into the unfamiliar, and you come out the other side with a confidence that no one can grant you and no one can take away. This is the woman who is not afraid to debate, not afraid to be wrong in public, not afraid to speak her conviction even when the room goes quiet. She has earned her own authority.

II. GOALS

I grew up in a household that did not apologise for ambition. My mother has a PhD. She is goal-oriented in the way that shapes the women around her, and I absorbed that early. I entered college already giving myself permission to want big things. That part was never the struggle.

The struggle came later. Life has a way of making you cautious. Not through one dramatic blow, but through the accumulation of small disappointments, of opportunities that did not land the way you hoped, of risks that did not pay off the way you planned. And slowly, without even noticing, you stop jumping off the cliff the way you did when you were young and unafraid. You become risk-averse.

You leave things on the table and call it wisdom.

I wrote about this in Entry 20 of my devotional, The Faithful Maker. It is about saying yes to big things. Not as a first act of courage, but as a return to it. Because the older I got, the more I could see the opportunities I had walked past without realising it. You don’t know what you’ve left on the table until you’re far enough away to look back. That entry was a turning point for me. A decision to pick things up again. To stop letting the weight of experience become an excuse for playing small.

This is what goals do for a woman. They keep her in motion. They give her something to orient toward that belongs entirely to her, not to a relationship, not to someone else’s vision of who she should be. The woman who is lit up by her own ambition does not shrink to fit. She is not threatened by her own shine. And she does not wait to be chosen before she begins.

III. SELF-CONTAINMENT

This is the quietest route, and often the most overlooked. It asks women to go inward, to sit with themselves in solitude, in honest self-reflection, in the kind of stillness that makes space for truth.

The second half of my twenties, I got out of the game. I left America, came back to South Africa, opened my own business, and spent years learning how to listen to myself. Shadow work. Emotional honesty. The courage to tell the truth about how I felt, even when the consequences were uncomfortable. I was not in and out of relationships. I was in and out of myself, and that made all the difference. The business I built was built on that containment. The clarity I carry now was paid for in solitude.

I am in a relationship today, and I am grateful for it. But I know, without any doubt, that I could only choose well because I had first chosen myself. Self-containment is not loneliness. It is preparation. It is the practice of tending to your own inner fire before the world demands your warmth. This woman minds her business and minds her peace. She is not easily disturbed, because she has done the inner work that makes a life feel solid from the inside out.

Three routes, one destination. A woman who knows herself.

You did not arrive empty. You arrived whole, and unnamed, and full of potential that was never yours to give away. Character development is the work of returning to that. Of defining who you are, and having the courage to live in it. That is not a concept. It is a practice.

Start now, before someone else starts it for you.