Two news items caught my attention this week. The death of Alex Trebek and the election of our first female vice president. Being a long-term Jeopardy fan, I was sorry to hear Trebek’s battle with cancer ended in death. Then I heard that he worked at his game show up until two weeks before his death. Who does that? Answer: My Dad!

Last night on the NBC Evening News, in the story about Kamala Harris’s election, they interviewed young girls and their mother’s about female empowerment. At the end, one of the mothers said, “When I look at my daughter I see a CEO or the president!” I followed her exclamation with, “but no pressure…”

But seriously, how wonderful and extremely DELAYED to finally have a woman as our vice president, especially an Indian and Black woman. Looking back over the mixed bag of white men we have survived in the Oval Office, I believe a woman certainly cannot do worse. My greatest concern is that the young girls of our country don’t feel bad or inadequate if they cannot reach their parent’s highest goals set for them.

I come from a family where there was extreme pressure to become something “semi-great” preferably in my Dad’s area of interest. That kind of self-imposed pressure, coming originally from parents, to become the best in the world at something, can be devastating if the child never reaches that parent-imposed goal, and even sometimes when they do. The confusion within the child when her natural proclivities do not match the dominant parent’s demands, can lead to a debilitating crisis in self-confidence and self-authority. In other words, it can be destructive for their entire life.

Is there an authentic need to find our true self?

“The human mind can imagine both how to break self-esteem and how to nurture it – and imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.” – Gloria Steinem in “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem

The distraction of feeling constantly inadequate, stands in the way of a person ever learning to love and respect their own natural intuitions and talents. How do we identify our natural interests? “The more regularly you create, the more you will notice an image often repeated in varying ways. This is your true self made visible.” (Gloria Steinem, The Revolution From Within)

In 2004, one of the best books I read to encourage this awakening within myself was “Revolution From Within” by Gloria Steinem. There I found my strong desire to finally find and be my true self is quite common among women in their forties and fifties. Most of us did not find any real encouragement to change until then. We were too busy living our lives…

Midlife Crisis Queen!

Unfortunately, it took me until my late-40s to begin this long journey. It was only after I had been forced to give up on living an average and basically inauthentic life, that I began to explore what was authentic within me. What was crying out for personal expression? Eventually I began a writing career, something I had always dreamt of, but felt inadequate to pursue. I also started a blog in 2007 naming it “Midlife Crisis Queen.” In my mind this title was humorous, but it caught on more than I ever expected. (I removed this blog from the Internet in 2014.)

Finding true self is the liberation of finally giving yourself permission to be all that you are inside. It is also the only path to finding positive love relationships with others. There is so much more in Gloria’s book about how our connection with nature reinforces our connection to true self and how patriarchal religions suppress power in women.

To young women I say read this book and see if it speaks to you. Don’t spend most of your life searching for wholeness and rightness outside of Self.

All that you are seeking is within…

“I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that. Think of the joy of self-discovery: solving a problem, making a bookcase, inventing a dance step… all by reaching within for a vision and making it real.”