Choosing Me: The Journey Home to My True Self

By Jeanie P Duncan

What would happen if you chose yourself?

So often, women are taught to put others first. We are conditioned to focus on the needs of others rather than prioritizing ourselves - and we become good at it. Choosing others becomes so central to our way of being that we can build big, busy lives without ever stoppi

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885046763

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Choosing Me

Choosing Me

The Journey Home to My True Self

Jeanie P Duncan

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Jeanie P Duncan

All rights reserved.

Choosing Me

The Journey Home to My True Self

ISBN

979-8-88504-559-9 Paperback

979-8-88504-885-9 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-676-3 Ebook

Contents

Foreword–Freedom

Chapter 1: Fulfillment

Chapter 2: Running

Chapter 3: Choosing Myself

Chapter 4: Listening to My Heart

Chapter 5: Knowing Yourself

Chapter 6: Coming Home

Chapter 7: Leaping

Chapter 8: New Beginnings, Old Patterns

Chapter 9: Breaking Free

Chapter 10: Wayfinding

Chapter 11: My Light

Chapter 12: Alive

Practices to Support the Journey

Coaching Interlude: Reflection Questions for Your Journey

Gratitudes

To Lyn and Luke: You are the greatest joys of my life. Thank you for being the lights along my path, revealing more to me about love, life, and being my true self than all the books, sages, and teachings this world can hold. You have my whole heart.

Foreword–Freedom

This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called liberation.

–Pema Chodron

Your true self is a treasure of all divine virtues.

–Ma Jaya

Six years ago, at forty-seven, I felt free for the first-time in my life. Everything changed.

And yet, nothing changed, as what I’ve realized is that I returned home to my true self. I was there all along, I just had to peel all the layers to get back to me. 

This journey to my true self has had me explore, unpack, and look at so many things in my life: my family of origin, what was modeled, and what I adopted as truths for the world and for me. My beliefs about what it meant to have a good life—a loving husband, Chuck, of twenty-seven years; a wonderful son, Luke; a thriving career. And all the ways I placed these things in between me and knowing and living my true self as a gay woman.

In this book, I’ll walk you through my own journey toward delayering values, beliefs, and an identity that didn’t feel entirely like my own, and ultimately toward the freedom of claiming my sexual identity and marrying Lyn, the love and light of my life.

While this book is the story of how I came to know and live my truth, I hope my process for what’s worked and the lessons I’ve learned also support you in your journey.

Part of the path that led me to writing this book is my experience coaching executive women through change and transition and helping them leverage the personal transformation that comes from it. I’ve also been inspired by the stories of more than fifty women I interviewed for this project. I stand in awe of these amazing, wholehearted, and brave women. Witnessing their power, vulnerability, resilience, and resourcefulness has been and continues to be a sacred experience for me. I learn from them every day.

Through it all, I’ve captured key themes that emerged, connecting these diverse women at midcareer and mid-life. Consistently, they describe experiences of being pulled, torn, empty, stuck, and even suffocated in their lives. Some reflect on unrealized dreams that they long to explore. For others, their life feels lacking…a lack of support, of being seen, of feeling understood, of having time for themselves, and being able to seize what they most want. Many reach a point of wondering, Is this all there is?

Often, these women divulge that they are living a life that looks great from the outside, while on the inside, it’s anything but. They’re exhausted, burned out, and depleted. They may not see an exit strategy in order to start doing what will bring them greater fulfillment, and if they do, they’re terrified to make the changes to get there—often, they question if they actually deserve to.

Whether it’s in their careers, their relationships, or within themselves, they want to feel seen. They want to feel confident, independent, powerful, and in the driver’s seat of their life. Instead, they wonder if they should just stay the course and wait it out.

Is this you? Can you see yourself in these stories?

These experiences—shared by so many women I’ve coached and interviewed—certainly reflect some of my own experiences.

I find that we share a common ground: desire

Desire to be fulfilled

Desire to love and be loved

Desire to be seen, heard, and understood

Desire to align with what’s most important to us

Desire to know and live our purpose

Desire to be our most real and true selves

What I want you to know more than anything is that you deserve these things and can have them. It’s all available to you, and it begins within: by loving yourself and choosing yourself.

Here’s the thing. I thought I knew myself. I mean, my business is leadership development, after all. I consult with organizations, and I coach and facilitate their leaders all day long, every day, to know who they are and be their most authentic self. In helping them do that, I thought I was modeling my most authentic self. Truth be told, I think I was my most authentic self to a good extent—the extent to which I knew my truth at that time.

What I’ve come to realize in this wild journey of life is that we’re only ever living a percentage of our true self—that which we’re able to comprehend at any given moment in time. We’re always growing. We’re always becoming. I’m learning to lighten up on the doses of self-judgment. In fact, writing this book has helped me do just that. And I hope reading it will do the same for you.

Instead of beating myself up and wondering, What’s wrong with me? and, "Why did it take me so long to really know and live me?" I’m replacing those tapes that run in my head with some gentle, loving kindness. How about a double dose of that, please! 

I extend compassion and grace to myself for who I’ve been over my life journey:

The feisty and playful little girl

The diligent, rules-following teen

The wayfinding twenty-something

The ambitious thirty-something

The pioneering forty-something, and now

The my-life-on-my-terms fifty-something

Every day, through plenty of ups and downs, I’m finding my way to my innermost core self. My heart opens a little more, I own more of who I am, and I release more of my true self into the world.

I celebrate the small steps each day of knowing more about who I am. I give myself a high five every time I choose me.

I realize that some might think of choosing yourself as a selfish act. I find that, especially with women, we’ve been taught not to focus on and prioritize ourselves. I know for me, it started in childhood when I was raised to be seen and not heard, to not draw attention to myself, and to put others first. Then, in adulthood, to honor this cultivated belief, I often put others’ needs and wants before my own.

I lived this way for a long time, but I’ve grown to believe that it’s critical to put ourselves first. I prefer to think of this very nurturing and life-giving act as being self-full.

Self-full is choosing yourself. I know that when I choose me, I’m becoming the best version of myself…doing things like resting and recharging, taking time for myself, asking for what I need, enlisting the support of others, and accessing resources available to me. And when I’m the best version of myself, I can be the best whatever I need to be for everyone and everything else.

First and foremost, I have to make space for me inside my bucket of life. That me space includes time for myself, the relationships that matter most to me, and work and activities that Light. Me. Up. Then I fill in with everything else. 

So, before we begin, let me ask you:

When was the last time you chose you?

What if you chose you more often?

How would always choosing you get you closer to living your true self and the life you most want to live?

This is the journey I want to take with you. Let’s get started!

Chapter 1

Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a natural state of being—our birthright—and living a life of fulfillment is a radical act.

–Co-Active Training Institute

Fulfillment.

I didn’t know it yet, but this word was about to completely unravel me. And for years following, through a slow and steady shedding and delayering, I would allow for the most beautiful and true version of myself to emerge.

It was spring of 2012, and I decided to enroll in coaching certification. The firm I had started, Raven Group, was a little more than a year old, and coaching was a core part of my business model. It seemed important to have formal training in it now, though I’d coached nonprofit leaders for years as part of my earlier work leading a regional arts council.

Walking into the hotel conference room the first morning of the first weekend, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began chatting with other participants. They would become my cohort peers and friends over the next year and a half.

A large banner hung above the coffee and breakfast pastries, covering much of the wall. It read, "FULFILLMENT IS A BIRTHRIGHT." I stood staring at it as I sipped my coffee, wondering what that really meant.

As soon as our leaders began the program, I knew that I was in for far more than credentialing. They looked around our small circle of a dozen participants, their eyes stopping briefly on each of us.

What are you longing for?

What would you love to be different about your life?

I began to sink into the questions as the facilitators invited me out of my busy life and into a journey inward. I felt something substantial coming—a call to invest in myself to dig