The Pain You Never Blamed on Confidence
So much of the ache we carry quietly traces back to one thing we never learned to name.
There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't come from doing too much. It comes from shrinking too much — and most of us never call it that.
You call it being easygoing. Being the strong one. Being "not that kind of woman" who makes a big deal out of things. You call it loving someone through their worst moments, or working twice as hard because that's just who you are, or staying quiet in the meeting because your point probably wasn't that important anyway. You give it a hundred different names. Confidence is rarely one of them.
But so much of the ache we carry — the low-grade exhaustion, the relationships that quietly hollow us out, the achievements that never quite land as enough — traces back to a single root most of us never learned to name: we were never taught to believe we were allowed to take up space.
There's a poem by Lily Myers, "Shrinking Women," that went viral years ago for putting words to exactly this. She describes watching the women in her family learn, generation after generation, to make themselves smaller — smaller bodies, smaller opinions, smaller needs — so there'd be more room for everyone else. It struck a nerve with millions of women because so many of us recognized the shape of it in our own lives, even if we'd never once used the word "confidence" to describe what was missing.
Here's what that shrinking actually looks like once it grows up with you.
It looks like apologizing before you speak — "sorry, this might be a dumb question" — as though your voice needs a permission slip to exist in the room. Psychologists who study self-esteem in women point out that this isn't politeness. It's a quiet, constant negotiation for the right to be heard, and it's exhausting in a way that never shows up on paper.
It looks like staying in relationships you know, somewhere underneath, aren't good for you — not because you don't see it, but because a part of you is grateful to have been chosen at all. Researchers who study self-esteem and relationships call this "settling," and the cruelest part is that it usually comes with full awareness. You're not confused about your unhappiness. You've just decided you're not confident enough to ask for more.
It looks like testing people you love — picking fights, pulling away, waiting to see if they'll leave — because somewhere you've decided you're not fully believable as someone worth staying for. It's not manipulation. It's grief for a security you never got to feel safe trusting.
And it looks like the opposite, too: overachieving. The perfectly organized life, the promotion you fought for, the home that always looks like it's ready for guests. On the outside it reads as confidence. Underneath, it's often the opposite — a woman trying to earn, through sheer output, the sense of worth she was never given permission to just have.
“None of this announces itself as a confidence problem. It shows up as burnout. As “why do I keep ending up here.” As a body that’s tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix.”
I think this is why so many women read a list of "signs of low self-esteem" and feel almost betrayed by how familiar it sounds. Not because they thought they were confident — most of us have made peace with never having felt especially confident — but because we assumed the cost of that was small. A little self-doubt, we told ourselves. Not a big deal. We didn't realize it was quietly writing the terms of our relationships, our careers, our sense of what we were allowed to ask for.
The good news, if there is one, is that naming it changes something. Pain that has a source is pain you can actually work with. If the exhaustion, the settling, the over-functioning, the apologizing-for-existing all trace back to the same root, then you're not fixing ten different problems. You're tending to one.
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If this resonated, this is exactly what I work on with clients. I'm opening a few free 20-minute calls this month — no pressure, just a conversation about where you're at. [Book a time here].
You were never too sensitive, too much, too demanding.
You were just never handed the belief that you were allowed to take up the space you already deserved.
❤️
With you in it,
Joanne