WEEK 34 - The Woman You Were Afraid To Become
The woman you've been performing is not the woman you are. And the one you've been hiding? She's the one worth knowing.
By Jennifer Dirksen · Sheer Photography, Youngstown OH · Est. read time: 6 min
What does it mean to be a good woman?
Think about it honestly. Not the version you'd say out loud in polite company. The version that lives in your body. The one you measure yourself against every single day without even realizing you're doing it.
Good women are agreeable. They're warm and accommodating and easy to be around. They don't ask for too much. They don't cause problems. They show up for everyone without making anyone feel guilty about the cost. They're supportive and selfless and they make the people around them feel comfortable.
Good women don't have too many needs. Don't take up too much space. Don't make things complicated.
Sound familiar?
Now let me ask you something else: how does she feel? That good woman you've been performing for years… does she feel alive? Does she feel like you? Or does she feel like a role you've gotten so good at playing that you've started to forget there was ever a version of you underneath it?
"The good woman is often the most exhausted woman in the room. Because she's been performing a character for so long she's forgotten she wrote herself out of the script."
The "good woman" performance.
Here's what I've noticed after working with women for over a decade:
The women who are the most exhausted aren't the ones with the hardest lives. They're the ones who have been the most relentlessly good. The ones who have been agreeable when they wanted to push back. Pleasant when they wanted to be honest. Accommodating when they wanted to draw a line.
The performance of goodness is one of the most draining things a woman can sustain. Because it requires constant monitoring. Constant self-editing. A continuous internal calculation of: how is this landing? am I being too much? am I making someone uncomfortable? do I still seem likable?
It's f*cking exhausting!!! And it's costing you something real.
Not just your energy. Your identity babe!!! The longer you perform the good woman, the further you get from the actual woman… the one with edges and opinions and desires that don't fit neatly into what everyone around you wants from you.
What the "good woman" gives up.
She gives up her honest reaction to things that bother her. She gives up the boundary she wanted to draw but didn't because she didn't want to seem difficult. She gives up the desire she felt but suppressed because it didn't seem appropriate. She gives up the opinion she had but softened because the room wasn't ready for it.
She gives up pieces of herself. Quietly. Consistently. In ways that feel like small compromises but add up to something much larger.
And eventually (if she's not careful) she gives up the ability to know what she actually thinks and feels and wants at all. Because she's been filtering herself for so long that the signal is barely there anymore.
That's not goodness. That's erasure. And it has been dressed up as virtue for so long that most women can't even see it.
The woman underneath the performance.
She's still there. She has been the whole time.
The version of you that has opinions she doesn't soften. Desires she doesn't apologize for. Boundaries she doesn't need to justify. Energy that takes up the full space she's in without monitoring whether that's okay with everyone.
She's the woman who says what she means the first time. Who wears the thing without wondering if it's too much. Who walks into a room and doesn't immediately start making herself easier to be around.
She might feel dangerous to you. She probably has felt dangerous for a long time. Because you've been told (directly or indirectly, in ways you can name and ways you can't) that she's too much. That she's difficult. That good women don't look like her.
But she's not too much. She's just unfamiliar. And there is a difference.
"The version of you that you've been afraid to become isn't dangerous. She's just the real one. And she has been waiting a very long time for you to stop being so polite about letting her out."
What happens when you stop performing.
I want to tell you what I see in my studio when a woman stops being the good woman for a few hours.
She walks in performing. Most of them do. Apologizing for themselves before I've even picked up a camera. Making jokes about their body. Trying to be easy, likable, low-maintenance… even here, even in a space that exists entirely for her.
And then something shifts.
It usually happens somewhere in the middle of the session. After the hair and makeup. After the first look. After she's seen one image on the back of the camera that didn't match the story she's been telling about herself. Something relaxes. The performance drops. And the real one shows up.
She's different. The way she holds herself changes. The way she looks into the lens changes. There's something in her face that wasn't there in the first frame… a knowing, a presence, a quality that I can only describe as her finally being in the room instead of managing her experience of it.
Those are always the best photos. Not the ones where she's trying hardest. The ones where she stopped trying entirely and just showed up.
That's the woman worth photographing. That's the woman worth being.
Stopping the performance doesn't make you difficult.
I want to be clear about this because I think it's the fear that keeps most women locked in the role:
Dropping the good woman performance doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you cold, selfish, unkind, or difficult to love.
It makes you real.
And real is magnetic in a way that performed goodness never gets to be. Because people can feel the difference (even when they can't name it) between a woman who is genuinely present and a woman who is managing her presence for your comfort.
The women who are actually memorable, actually magnetic, actually the kind of person people orbit… they're not the most agreeable ones in the room. They're the most real ones. The ones who say what they mean. Who take up space without apologizing for it. Who are fully, specifically, unapologetically themselves.
That's available to you!!! The moment you decide the performance is over.
October at Sheer.
This month we're going somewhere most content doesn't go.
We're talking about the woman you've been afraid to become. Not because she's dark or dangerous or something to be cautious about. But because she is the real you (the fully expressed, completely unfiltered, absolutely done performing version of you) and she deserves to exist outside of the space you've been keeping her in.
A boudoir session is where I've watched that woman show up more reliably than anywhere else I know. Because for a few hours, the good woman gets a day off. Nobody needs her to manage anything. Nobody needs her to be easy or agreeable or pleasant. The only thing being asked of her is to show up as herself.
And when she does?
The camera doesn't lie.
She was never the problem. The performance was. 🖤
The investment is smaller than another year of waiting.
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