I spent eighteen years thinking I’d escaped, only to realize I never left,
I had just redecorated the cell.
August 2024. I’m sitting in my apartment…my own apartment, the one I moved into after finally leaving my marriage…staring at my phone. Waiting for a certain someone to text back.
It had been a week. Maybe more. I’d lost count, which meant I was counting.
The lack of attention was doing something to me…and it wasn’t just the natural disappointment. It hit deeper…it was something that felt like dissolution. Like, if he didn’t text back, what did this mean about me? Was I not worth a text back?
I was 40 years old at the time. I’d left the evangelical church that raised me, had recently divorced the husband I married at 22, and to top it all off, I had even become an executive chef in New York City…rising from zero experience to head chef in less than two years.
I had moved out, moved on, and started dating for the first time since I was 15.
And even still, after all I had been through…I was STILL measuring my worth by whether someone I barely knew would text me back.
I grew up in the Southern Baptist world in Blythewood, South Carolina, learning biblical womanhood like math: fixed rules, clear equations, one right answer. Your body existed to serve your husband while not causing him or any other male in your orbit “to stumble”. Your desires were suspect until proven righteous. You needed to submit, but also be a partner. You should be confident (in Christ), but not prideful. Sure, you may suffer, but suffer well.
I married my first husband right out of college because that’s what you did. I played the role I’d been trained for: wife, helper, keeper of his home, and his righteousness. I journaled constantly, auditing my own heart for sin, asking God if my desires were selfish, trying to figure out how to want things without wanting them too much.
Two weeks after my wedding, I wrote:
“Tonight I was selfish. I reverted to the old Jessica. Tonight I was wrong.”
I don’t even remember what I’d done. Any assertion of self was a moral failure.
But it was that moment, I had fully squeezed into my people-pleasing outfit and zipped it on…chokingly tight.
Fast forward to 2020, and I was quite literally falling apart, along with the rest of the world. The pandemic stripped away the busyness, the productivity, the constant motion that had kept me from having to sit with myself. We’d just moved to New York City that May, and suddenly I was stuck in a new city with a five-year-old and a marriage that had been quietly dying for years.
I wrote: “For my whole life, I have identified myself by what I did. If all that’s stripped away, who am I?”So, I continued teaching myself to cook (because that was the whole point of moving here in the first place!) and tried to plan for what was to come.
That fall, I started as a line cook with zero experience and climbed fast—sous chef in six months, executive chef in a year. And, I became good. Really good. The kind of good that gets written about..that gets noticed.
For the next two years, my life entered the prescribed burn phase…sure, I lit the match when I finally sat my ex down and suggested we separate and move on as co-parents instead of spouses. I fanned those embers, but I had no idea what the flames would take with them, or if…or how I would reemerge on the other side.
I thought: This is it. This is freedom. This is who I am.
But…despite it all…I was still performing. The audience had changed from my family to God to my husband to chefs and critics and customers…but the question twisting my insides stayed the same:
Am I good enough yet? Do I deserve to be here?
When I finally made the hard decision to leave the restaurant…to leave the 80-hour weeks and to leave the biggest rush I’d ever had in my life, my constant proof of competence…I felt like I was disappearing. I recognized one of my biggest fears, the one that had ruled my life since childhood: I was afraid of being forgettable.
By then, I had also started dating. Making up for lost time, I told myself. I’d gotten married so young that I never had the chance to explore, to figure out what I actually wanted.
In one year, my “count” went from one to more than ten. I told myself that each person taught me something about myself, that each experience was meaningful.
I thought this was liberation.
But when the attention slowed down, I unraveled quickly. When texts went unanswered, I questioned everything.
I realized I had merely swapped “biblical womanhood” for “sexually liberated single woman” and called it freedom.
Different costume. Same cage.
Here’s what took me eighteen years to understand: The cage wasn’t the church. It wasn’t the marriage. It wasn’t the restaurant.
The cage was the belief that I needed external validation to be real, to exist, to matter.
At 22, I needed my husband to want me so I could be a good wife. At 39, I needed my chef to respect me so I could be promoted. At 40, I needed strangers to text me back so I could be desirable.
That August night, alone in my apartment, staring at my silent phone, I finally saw it. I’d spent two decades trying to solve the problem by changing the variables. But what I really needed was a totally NEW equation.
I opened my journal and did something I’d never done before. I made a list…not of what I did, not of who approved of me, but of who I actually was:
I am joyful.
I am positive.
I am silly.
I am loving.
I love people.
I love hosting.
I am irreverent.
I love to laugh.
I love challenges and finding solutions.
I am creative.
I like rules and boundaries (and breaking them).
I like my friendships.
I like attention.
I love cooking, and more so, eating.
I like feeling needed.
I like art.
I like poetry and music.
I like dancing.
I like coffee.
I like games.
I like TV shows that make me feel something.
It was the first list in eighteen years of journaling that didn’t define me by productivity or approval.
And…it scared the hell out of me.
I’m not writing this from the other side. I haven’t completed this journey, actually…honestly, I’m writing it from the middle.
It’s been 17 months since that August night.
…17 months of learning to exist without needing validation.
…17 months of building a business that serves my life instead of consuming it.
…17 months and now in an exciting new marriage, a true partnership with Yas that actually feels equal…no hierarchy, no performance, just two people figuring it out together.
…17 months of asking questions I’d never had the balls to ask: What do I want? What do I actually like? Who am I when nobody’s watching?
And the wild thing is…I’m still here. I didn’t disappear when I stopped performing.
Freedom isn’t leaving the church or a marriage that doesn’t fit or the restaurant or the life you thought you wanted. Freedom is learning that you’re real without proof…without achievement…without submission or someone’s desire.
You just are, and that’s enough.
I wonder what cage you’re carrying that you don’t even know is there.
Maybe it’s an achievement…
Maybe it’s beauty…
Maybe it’s being needed…
Maybe it’s being good…
Maybe it’s freedom being masked as just another performance…
Maybe you left the thing that was hurting you & you’re still suffocating and you don’t know why…
Maybe you changed all the variables, but the equation stayed the same…
I can’t tell you what your cage looks like. I can only tell you that I carried mine for eighteen years before I realized it was there. And putting it down is the hardest, most important work I’ve ever done.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about freedom:
It doesn’t feel like relief at first…it actually feels like freefall.
When you stop performing, you think you’ll disappear.
When you stop achieving, you think you’ll become nothing.
When you stop chasing validation, you think you’ll fade away.
But you don’t.
You’re just finally…actually…just here.
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