I was a newlywed, freshly transplanted into military life, and completely out of my depth. Everyone around me spoke in acronyms like it was their first language and mine was Google Translate. This new role was uncomfortable and terrifying, and I don't back down from a challenge, so naturally I attacked it like a hostile takeover. Committees. Volunteer slots. Casseroles. All of it, yes ma'am. Lunch on the table, dinner hot by six, a husband who came home to a woman who looked like she had this handled, which, narrator voice, she did not.
Meanwhile I was calling him from the grocery store to ask permission to buy groceries, because it wasn't "my" money anymore. Which is its own whole thing I could write a chapter about, and did. I told myself I was being a good wife. A good Christian. A good addition to a community that didn't know me yet. What I was doing was proving I still mattered, because the version of me that had a job and a stage and a reason to get up in the morning had just been taken away, and I didn't know how to exist without something to point to.
Two months in, I was already feeling the cracks. My husband, being the amazing man he is, knew I wasn't happy and wasn't about to let me avoid the hard conversation. He sat me down and asked me point-blank:
"If we weren't following the Army right now, what would YOU want to do? How can I support YOU?"
Cue awkward silence. Wasn't I doing what I was supposed to want to be doing? Wasn't this the divinely appointed, dutiful-wife thing? I didn't have an answer. Not because I didn't know what I wanted. Because I had quietly started to believe what I wanted didn't matter anymore. Every yes I'd said had been about proving something to someone else. The committee. The neighbors. The version of myself that needed to look capable. Not one of those yeses had come from knowing who I was underneath all that proving.
He wasn't asking what I could produce. He was asking who I was when nobody needed anything from me. Sitting across from him on our couch, when he should have honestly been studying and instead was just focused on me, I realized I didn't know. I did not love that realization.
That question didn't fix anything that night. I didn't quit my commitments and find myself by morning, that's not how any of this works, I wish it were. But it cracked something open. It was the first time I considered that maybe the goal wasn't to keep proving myself, but to figure out who I was when the proving stopped.
That's what identity does that performance never can. It doesn't ask what you can do. It asks who you are, and it waits for an answer that doesn't come from what you can accomplish. I could have kept doing all the same things, the committees, the lunches, the hot dinners, but if they'd been fueled by knowing who I was instead of what I needed to prove, the exhaustion and the mental load and the depression that followed would have told a completely different story. I genuinely believe that.
Get identity right and the rest has a foundation to stand on. Skip it and you're building on sand while calling the instability a character flaw. That's the whole premise of the second chapter. Honestly, it's the premise of most of the hard years that came after that couch conversation too.
If you've ever answered a question about your own life with an answer that was really about someone else's approval, this chapter (and honestly this whole book) was written with you sitting right there in the room.
That couch conversation is chapter two. The rest of the book is on its way. Or leave your email below and I'll let you know the moment you can hold it.