Stop holding it

The good girl stays stuck in the middle seat dying to pee. You don’t have to.

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She’s in the middle seat.

An hour into the flight, full bladder, deeply uncomfortable. The man at the aisle — genuinely kind, helped with her bag when she boarded — is asleep. Tray table down, drinks on it.

And she sits there. *Calculating.*

Weighing her physical need against the disruption of waking a stranger. Running the math on whether her body’s signal is legitimate enough to inconvenience someone who has, by falling asleep in the aisle seat with his tray table down, made himself the gatekeeper of her exit.

Meanwhile across the aisle — people getting up, tapping shoulders, stepping over, moving freely. No calculation. No apology. Just people with needs, meeting them.

She almost talks herself out of it.

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That woman is me.

I’m writing this from the plane. Sitting here getting increasingly uncomfortable, overriding a basic bodily need so a stranger could sleep.

Which — let’s be honest — is also just bad for you. The body doesn’t forget the signals you ignore. Every override gets logged. It keeps score.

I didn’t think *his comfort matters more than mine.* I didn’t think anything. My body said *I need to go* and my conditioning was already moving — already waiting, already shrinking, already polite.

It was automatic.

But primal need doesn’t negotiate.

The body doesn’t do social math. It doesn’t weigh your bladder against a stranger’s sleep. It doesn’t consult the rules of politeness before it signals. It just needs. Full stop. The conditioning is what tried to open a negotiation with something that was never up for discussion.

And for a split second — I caught it. Saw it running. Named it. Laughed at the audacity of it.

*Am I actually sitting here choosing his sleep over my own body?*

In that tiny gap between the automatic and the choice — I tapped his shoulder instead.

He stirred. Maybe a little annoyed. Then it was over.

Thirty seconds. It was nothing.

It’s always nothing. That’s the part the conditioning never tells you. The catastrophe you’re willing to cause yourself real pain to avoid barely registers for the other person. It never did. It was never really about them.

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*They called me inconsiderada. Egoísta. Caprichosa.*

Inconsiderate. Selfish. Capricious.

In Spanish those words land harder. Heavier. They have more body to them.

And then sometimes — the same people, sometimes the same breath — *eres candela.* You are fire. You are a lit match. Said with a laugh, a shake of the head, something close to delight.

I was both the problem and the spectacle. The same aliveness that lit up a room was the thing that needed to be managed. I learned early that my appetite — for space, for expression, for simply *having needs* — was at best charming when small and contained, and at worst, too much.

*Te damos un dedo y te tomas la mano.* We give you a finger and you take the whole hand.

I heard that one a lot. And somewhere along the way, I stopped taking the hand. I stopped asking for the finger. I learned to manage my wanting so carefully that I stopped knowing I was doing it.

I’ve done a lot of work on this. I’m so much better than I was. And still — under certain conditions, in certain moments — the automatic kicks in. The polite override. The good girl reflex. Not because the work isn’t real. Because the pattern is that deep.

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This is not rudeness. This is not inconsideration. This is the opposite — it is the erasure of the self in the name of consideration for everyone else. It is what happens when a girl is told, often enough and in enough ways, that her wanting is the problem.

This is not a personality flaw. It is something older and more structural than that.

We are conditioned — most women, across most cultures, from very young — to override the signals. To manage the wanting. To shrink the appetite to a size that won’t disturb anyone.

We are told to be smaller, quieter, less — and we comply, and then we wonder why we feel disconnected from ourselves. Why we feel like we’re moving through life behind glass. Why the aliveness we remember from childhood, that *candela*, has gone somewhere we can’t quite reach.

The body remembers every time you told it no.

Not the dramatic no’s — those are easier to trace. The small ones. The flight where you held it for another hour. The restaurant where they brought your steak wrong and you said *it’s fine* — and ate every bite of it anyway. The friend who cancelled again and you said *no worries, totally fine* — and meant it less each time. The meeting where you had the idea but waited to see if someone else would say it first.

Same program. Every time. Every arena.

And then — shortly after I tapped the shoulder and got out — the man at the window seat stepped over us both. “Sorry,” he said, reflexively, before he even moved. “Sorry, gotta get to the bathroom.”

Sorry for what? For having a body? For needing something?

I wanted to tell him: you have nothing to apologize for. But I recognized it instantly. The same program. Running in him too. We are all apologizing for our own existence, quietly, constantly, without even noticing we are doing it.

And we are teaching our children to do the same. She is watching you eat the wrong steak and say it’s fine. He is learning that needs come with apologies attached. They are downloading the program right now — in every moment you shrink, hold it, retreat. The pattern doesn’t stop with you. It travels.

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And here’s what nobody tells you about holding it.

When you don’t ask, you don’t just deprive yourself. You deprive everyone around you of the chance to actually show up for you. Because you’ve already decided for them. Already made yourself small so they don’t have to choose.

But they never got to choose. You chose for them.

You decided the waiter couldn’t handle the feedback. The friend couldn’t handle your disappointment. The man in the aisle seat couldn’t handle being woken. You thought you were being considerate — but you were quietly deciding that the people in your life aren’t adult enough to handle you. That they need to be protected from your needs.

You’ve been doing to them exactly what was done to you. Assuming they’ll do what you’ve been doing — override, absorb, shrink. You projected the pattern outward and called it kindness.

But when you stop — when you tap the shoulder, send the steak back, tell the friend the truth — something shifts. You free everyone in your orbit to show up as who they actually are. To find out what they’re capable of when someone stops pre-deciding their limits for them. You reignite each other’s resourcefulness. You find out what everyone is actually available for.

Which makes asking for what you want the least selfish thing you could do.

The good girl has it completely backwards.

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I spent some years not knowing I was at war with my own wanting. I thought I was being considerate. Thoughtful. Good.

And then something happened that made me stop. A health scare that felt, for a while, like it might be the end. The kind of thing that empties out all the noise and leaves you alone with the question: *what have I actually been living?*

I wasn’t dying. But I had to learn that. And that reprieve — the exhale of *not yet, not now* — doesn’t leave you the same. It hands you something. An obligation, almost.

To come back. All the way back. To stop holding it.

That’s when the real work began. Not the fixing or the optimising — the *noticing.* Learning to catch the automatic. To see the program mid-run. To find that gap between the conditioned response and the conscious choice — and learn to live there.

Because you can’t choose differently from something you can’t see.

Learning to disconnect guilt from wanting. To let appetite be appetite without immediately converting it into evidence of my too-much-ness.

To take the hand when the hand is offered — and to reach for it myself when it isn’t.

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This is what I want for every woman reading this.

Not the dark night of the soul first. Not the scare, the loss, the moment where the floor falls away and you realize how long you’ve been living outside yourself.

I want you to have the plane moment *now*. The small ridiculous moment where you catch the program mid-run, laugh at its audacity, and tap the shoulder anyway.

Because that gap — that tiny space between the automatic and the choice — is where everything changes. That’s where you get free.

Your wanting is not the problem. It never was.

Your wanting is the *candela*.

And everyone in your orbit needs you to stop holding it.

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*P.S. If you’re ready to stop holding it and free yourself — I’d love to hear from you. I work with women at the deepest levels helping them get their needs met, free of guilt, apology, and retreat. One on one and in group containers, through body, psyche and soul. What opens up on the other side is more than most women knew to want.