Pain Is Not Proof of Growth
Pain Was Never the Price of Becoming 💜
Hey my fabulous ladies, ✨
Happy second week of March. I hope each of you are doing your best to stay present, sane, and healthy during these times.
And you know what? It’s also okay to say, “I’m not doing well.”
Here in the Your Own Pathway Realignment Journal, part of being aligned is acknowledging when you’re not feeling it. Alignment is not pretending everything is fine.
Alignment is honesty. 🌿
This past Sunday we celebrated International Women’s Day, and I want to give a shoutout to all the incredible, fabulous, badass women I know. Each woman carries her own journey, her own path, and her own resilience.
But as I listened to women share their stories, I noticed something that kept appearing over and over again.
Pain.
Sacrifice.
Endurance.
And from those things—resilience.
Now sometimes pain is undeniably part of life. That’s reality.
Pain can come in many forms. Heartbreak—not just romantic heartbreak. Betrayal. Grief. The absence of protection from the very people who were supposed to protect us. Generational trauma that quietly travels through families.
These things exist.
But something else also stood out to me in many of the stories shared this past weekend.
Pain was not just acknowledged.
It was glorified.
Almost as if a woman’s story must be filled with suffering and sacrifice in order for it to be meaningful.
And that’s where I want to pause. 💫
Because last week in the Realignment Journal, I wrote about something simple but powerful:
That essay was about owning your presence.
About no longer shrinking.
No longer apologizing.
No longer over-explaining why you deserve to take up space.
But as we continue through Women’s History Month, I want to talk about another belief many of us grew up with.
The idea that pain is the price of becoming.
Many of us grew up hearing some version of the same phrase:
No pain, no gain.
It showed up everywhere.
In sports.
In fitness.
In work culture.
In relationships.
In the expectations placed on girls and women.
If it hurts, it must be working.
If you’re struggling, you must be growing.
And if something feels easier than expected?
Maybe you didn’t earn it.
For girls growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this message was everywhere. We watched a culture that glorified endurance.
Extreme thinness.
Diet culture.
Productivity as identity.
Relationships framed as something women were simply supposed to struggle through.
How many times have we heard people say:
“Marriage is hard.”
And sometimes it is.
But the question I’ve started asking is this:
Should everything meaningful require suffering?
Somewhere along the way, women’s pain became so normalized that ease started to feel suspicious.
If something wasn’t difficult enough…
exhausting enough…
painful enough…
we questioned whether it counted.
But pain was never meant to be the measurement of your growth.
Pain happens in life.
Heartbreak happens.
Grief happens.
Outgrowing people and places can hurt.
Those experiences are human.
But suffering was never meant to become the standard.
And yet, for generations, women have been praised most when they endure.
The woman who sacrifices everything.
The woman who carries everyone else.
The woman who pushes through exhaustion.
We call that resilience.
And resilience is powerful. 💛
But Darlings, resilience was never meant to become a lifestyle.
Sometimes the most powerful form of resilience is deciding that the hardship stops with you.
That the next generation does not inherit the same exhaustion, the same silence, the same normalization of suffering.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I move through my forties.
Something shifts when you start listening to your body differently.
For years I believed what many of us were taught—that growth meant pushing harder. Ignoring the signals. Proving your strength by enduring more.
But bodies eventually start asking to be heard.
And when you finally listen, you realize something simple:
You don’t win by fighting your body.
You win by listening to it.
Think about the messages many girls received about their bodies growing up.
Even something as ordinary as a tampon commercial carried a script.
Girls running on the beach.
Wearing white shorts.
Smiling and laughing as if nothing in their bodies had changed.
The message was subtle but clear:
Don’t slow down.
Don’t complain.
Don’t acknowledge discomfort.
Just smile.
Use the product.
Act like everything is fine.
For a long time, girls learned to perform that script.
Pretend the pain isn’t there.
Pretend the exhaustion isn’t real.
Pretend nothing in your body deserves attention.
But something has shifted in recent years.
More women are finally saying what should have been obvious all along:
Periods can hurt.
Bodies change.
Energy fluctuates.
Acknowledging pain is not weakness.
It’s honesty.
Sometimes you’re not operating at 100 percent.
Sometimes you’re at 50 percent.
Sometimes you’re at 10 percent.
And sometimes the most intelligent response is not to push harder.
Sometimes the most intelligent response is simply this:
Rest. 🌿
I saw another version of this message when I started building my business.
The leadership and productivity books recommended to me were almost always written by men—and very often by white men.
The advice was presented as a universal formula for success.
Wake up at 4 a.m.
Cold plunge.
Optimize every hour of your day.
If you were serious about success, you were a “morning person.”
And if you slept later?
Something must be wrong with your discipline; and there was a lot of shaming for not being disciplined.
There was almost a quiet superiority embedded in these messages. The earlier you woke up, the more driven and successful you were supposed to be.
So I tried it.
I tried the early mornings.
I tried structuring my days around these productivity blueprints.
And you know what?
I didn’t like it.
But more importantly, I realized something else.
Those routines weren’t designed with bodies like mine in mind.
Women’s bodies move through different rhythms.
Hormones shift.
Energy fluctuates.
And as I moved into my forties, my body made that very clear.
All the productivity hacks in the world don’t override biology.
Cold plunges.
Extreme morning routines.
Endless optimization.
You can force it for a while.
But eventually your body pushes back.
At some point it simply says:
Not today Babe. 🔥
And when that moment comes, you realize something important.
Success doesn’t have to look like someone else’s routine.
You don’t have to copy someone else’s blueprint to prove that you’re disciplined or capable.
Sometimes the real work is learning to build a rhythm that actually works for you.
If you’re younger and reading this, hear me when I say this:
You don’t have to wait until your forties to learn this lesson.
You don’t have to burn out first.
You don’t have to prove your resilience through suffering.
Pain will always be part of life in some form.
But pain was never meant to be the proof that you are growing.
Sometimes growth looks like pushing forward.
But sometimes growth looks much quieter.
Sometimes growth looks like finally deciding:
I’m going to listen to myself.
And sometimes the most powerful thing a woman can do…
is stop fighting herself.
And that, my fabulous ladies,
is real alignment. 👑
Until next time,
Empress darlings.
No crowns.
No performance.
Just alignment. 💕
