A Letter to My Daughter on Becoming the Arbiter of Your Own Life

Growing up is mostly about learning to trust your ability to make decisions. As you grow and change, you rely less on the advice and guidance of others. This shift shows up in both the small things—like deciding what to wear or how to spend your time —and in the big things, like selecting a career path or deciding what relationships to maintain. The end goal, I think, is to reach a point where you are confident enough in your choices that you no longer look to others for direction or approval.

Many people believe adulthood begins somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In my view, however, adulthood is less about age and more about realizing you are the person most capable of shaping your life. This growth comes largely from learning to listen to your inner voice, even when social and cultural pressures urge you to silence it. Your inner voice is the core of who you are, and it deserves both your trust and your attention. Honoring it, I believe, is essential to maintaining one’s mental health. When I have attempted to ignore my inner voice, it becomes loud, nagging, and insistent—demanding to be heard. Continuing to dismiss it will only have one outcome: you will feel unfulfilled.

The thing about growing up is that it happens gradually—one decision stacked on another—until you’ve built the life you will lead. Even at age ten, you are making choices that shape who you will become. Over time, you will learn to trust yourself, gaining confidence in your decisions and taking ownership of your life. Not every decision will be perfect, and that is okay; you must give yourself space to pivot, to change your mind, and to change it again. Transitioning into adulthood means recognizing that you know what is best for you. It also means making decisions that center on your wants and needs and standing firm in those decisions. This doesn’t happen because you’ve stopped caring about other people’s opinions, but because you’ve begun to understand that you are the one who must live your life. You will be the one who must carry both the consequences and the joys of your decisions. 

It has taken me well over thirty years to understand that I alone must be the arbiter of my own life. For a long time, I believed that others knew what was best for me—my parents, my teachers, my bosses, my professors, my friends, my partner. And so I followed their advice and shaped myself based on their expectations. I was certain their guidance would point me in the right direction and that, as a result, I would find happiness. This, I discovered, was far from true. The more I tried to live according to other people’s expectations, the further I drifted from the very things I wanted to pursue.

Happiness only began when I let go of what others wanted for me and pursued what I wanted. I stopped asking for permission and seeking approval because I didn’t want others to decide what my life would look like. After all, they wouldn’t have to live it—I would. As girls and women, we are often culturally conditioned to rely on others to navigate our lives. We’re also expected to be accommodating to others in ways that aren’t healthy, like being expected to always put everyone else’s needs before our own. I encourage you to resist this expectation: it can erode your sense of self and undermine both your emotional and physical well-being. The reality is that no one experiences your life the way you do. Family and friends can offer empathy, but they cannot decide what is best for you.

Learning to trust yourself also means learning to protect yourself, which can largely be accomplished through established boundaries.  Say no when you must, and say yes when something calls to you, even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. People will not always understand your choices. That’s okay. They don’t need to.

There are many people out there who believe God knows what is best for them, that life is fully preordained. That idea saddens me. To imagine having no authority over your own life is to surrender the most profound responsibility you will ever have. You must become certain in yourself—certain that, every day, you have the power and the obligation to decide what is best for you.

But how will you know with certainty what is best for you? You won't, not really. You just listen to your heart, your gut, and your mind, and then you lean in. There is no certainty in relationships, careers, or finances. But there is a certainty in knowing yourself, and in recognizing the deep pull of your own heart and mind when something feels right—or when something feels wrong.

And so my wish for you is this: that you will always listen to that inner voice, that you will trust yourself enough to act on what it says, and that you will never give away the authority you have over your own life.