I have kept things unsaid because I was afraid of what people would think.
Not because I didn't know what I felt. I knew. But knowing something privately and being willing to let it become known are two very different things.
There were professional considerations. Relationships to preserve. Questions about how people might interpret what they saw, what they might say, and whether something meaningful could survive being subjected to other people's opinions.
I could make a reasonable argument for my silence. In fact, I made several.
What I couldn't see clearly then was how much authority I'd given to people who weren't even part of the decision.
Nobody had forbidden me from speaking. Nobody had forbidden me from living. I had anticipated the consequences and decided against it myself.
Years later, I still think about what I didn’t say. And even more about what I didn’t allow myself to do.
Those experiences changed my relationship with courage.
They also changed the way I think about family, cultural expectations, and the decisions we make in pursuit of belonging.
We inherit more than traditions from our families. We inherit fears, loyalties, definitions of success, and unwritten rules about which lives are acceptable.
And then we call them our own.
We grow up watching which choices receive admiration and which provoke discomfort. We hear how relatives talk about people who live differently. We notice what gets celebrated, what gets questioned, and what everyone politely avoids discussing.
By adulthood, many of us have developed an impressive ability to predict the objections.
We know which career will be described as unstable. Which relationship will require explanation. Which move will be interpreted as abandoning family. Which ambition will be dismissed as unrealistic.
And because we love these people, their imagined reactions carry weight.
We don't want to hurt them. We don't want to seem ungrateful. We don't want our happiness to become the reason someone else feels disappointed.
So we begin negotiating, often without anyone else knowing a negotiation is taking place.
We adjust what we want until it becomes something easier to defend. We convince ourselves that a particular relationship would be too complicated, that starting a business would be too risky, that changing careers would be impractical, or that a move across the country would be selfish.
The most effective expectations don't require enforcement. We enforce them ourselves.
Nobody has to forbid the life we're considering. We've already assembled the objections and delivered the verdict.
After repeating a story often enough, we may stop recognizing it as a story.
It becomes our judgment. Our preference. Our personality.
We say, "I'm just a practical person," without examining how much of our practicality was learned in the presence of other people's anxieties.
In his 2014 commencement address, Jim Carrey spoke about his father, Percy, who had wanted to become a comedian but chose accounting because it seemed like a more reliable way to provide for his family.
He later lost that job.
The story is often reduced to encouragement to follow one's dreams. But I think it reveals something more unsettling about the promise of safety.
We routinely ask people pursuing unconventional lives to justify the uncertainty. We rarely demand the same justification from people following convention.
The aspiring entrepreneur must explain how the business will survive. The person moving away must explain why staying isn’t enough. The person choosing a relationship that defies convention must explain why love is worth the complication.
Meanwhile, the approved path is treated as sensible even when its costs are substantial.
A startup might fail. A move might not work out. A relationship might face disapproval. An artistic career might never provide financial stability.
But the conventional career can disappear. Staying home can come with its own losses. A relationship chosen for its acceptability can still fail miserably. And a life spent satisfying everyone else's expectations can leave the person living it profoundly dissatisfied.
Every consequential choice carries uncertainty.
The difference is that some risks are socially approved, while others require us to defend ourselves.
We know how to calculate the financial risk of leaving a job. We're less practiced at calculating the cost of spending twenty years in work that leaves us indifferent.
We know how to anticipate family objections to a relationship. We're less willing to ask what it does to someone to repeatedly deny or minimize the love they feel.
We know how to discuss the expense of moving. We rarely discuss the cost of remaining somewhere primarily because leaving would disappoint people.
Sometimes, of course, the authority others claim over our choices is painfully real.
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in Virginia because their interracial marriage violated state law. They simply wanted to marry, raise a family, and live together in their home state. Their fight reached the Supreme Court, and in 1967, Loving v. Virginia struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage nationwide.
Their love helped change American history.
They faced legally enforced racial discrimination, far beyond ordinary family disapproval. Yet their story reminds us that refusing to surrender the life we love can challenge the very rules that make it unacceptable.
And it leaves us questioning the expectations we still allow to govern whom we love and how we live.
For some, love is simply something to celebrate. For others, it requires an assessment of consequences.
Who will be upset? Who will stop speaking to whom? What happens at family gatherings? Will the relationship be acknowledged, tolerated, or treated as something better left unmentioned?
And what happens when someone decides those consequences are too great?
It's easy to tell people to live authentically when we aren't the ones who might lose the relationships, communities, or support systems that have sustained them.
Belonging is not a trivial need. Neither is the fear of losing it.
But I wonder how often we confuse the preservation of belonging with the preservation of love.
There's an idea circulating in spiritual circles that authenticity carries a higher frequency than love.
I find that provocative, particularly because we place so much importance on love when explaining the choices we make for our families.
We say we stayed because we love them. We chose the acceptable career because we respect their sacrifices. We kept a relationship private because we didn't want to cause pain.
But if love is the reason, why does it so often require us to become less recognizable to ourselves?
What if authenticity is the frequency that reveals whether what we're calling love is actually love, or simply our fear of losing it?
Love and fear can produce remarkably similar behavior. Both can make us stay, sacrifice, and put someone else's needs ahead of our own.
But fear asks us to keep the peace at the expense of our truth. Love should be able to withstand the truth, even when it is uncomfortable.
And what about the love we claim to offer others?
If we say we love our children, our partners, our families, but require them to conceal essential parts of themselves to remain acceptable to us, what exactly are we loving?
The person standing in front of us, or the version of them that allows us to remain comfortable?
We can spend years offering our families a carefully edited version of ourselves, never discovering whether they could have loved us as we are.
And families can spend years believing they know their children while knowing only the parts those children have learned are safe to reveal.
I have experienced what happens when we give people the chance to see more of us.
Fourteen years ago, during an intensive yoga teacher training, I wore white turbans, listened to kirtan, and immersed myself in practices far removed from the Catholic tradition I grew up with.
My mother awkwardly asked whether I’d converted to another religion. I explained that I hadn’t. I was exploring a spiritual practice, not converting to a different faith.
The extended family talked. There were questions, whispers, and no shortage of opinions about what I was doing. I kept showing up in my white turban, posting photographs and teaching Kundalini yoga. I wasn’t hiding, and I wasn’t waiting for anyone’s permission.
Over time, something changed.
My mother saw that these unfamiliar practices were making me a more grounded human being. She stopped worrying so much about what I was doing and became curious about the spirituality that was shaping me, even when it looked nothing like what we'd grown up with.
She didn't have to adopt my practices or agree with every choice. She saw their effect on me, and the unfamiliarity stopped mattering.
Years later, after returning from India, I founded a nonprofit in the wake of #MeToo focused on medically accurate sexuality education and supporting survivors in their healing.
I expected my parents to be horrified. After all, sex was never exactly a topic of conversation in our household, and here I was founding a nonprofit devoted to sexuality education.
I had braced myself for my mother’s shock. Instead, I discovered she had been proudly telling people about my work, celebrating the very boldness I thought would embarrass her.
All that time, I’d been preparing for her disapproval.
The same woman I'd once worried might be embarrassed by my spiritual practices was proud of work I had assumed would make her deeply uncomfortable.
She saw the person I was becoming and how full of love I was. That mattered more to her than understanding every choice I made. While she was looking at my heart, I was imagining the limits of hers.
I underestimated her.
That realization stays with me because it complicates the story we often tell about family expectations. Sometimes the resistance is real. Sometimes the consequences of defying it are serious. But sometimes we're arguing with an imagined version of someone who might surprise us if we gave them the opportunity.
We can be so determined to predict other people's reactions that we forget to let them have one.
And sometimes our assumptions about their limitations say as much about us as they do about them.
I've offered explanations that were perfectly reasonable and not entirely honest. I've made decisions I could defend intellectually while knowing that fear had a seat at the table.
Being able to explain a decision doesn't necessarily mean we've examined it.
Human beings are extraordinarily capable of constructing persuasive narratives around what we are afraid to confront, especially when the alternative threatens our sense of belonging.
Ten years can pass while we're waiting for the right circumstances.
The business we once dreamed about becomes something we wish we'd tried. The move we kept postponing becomes a place we wonder whether we could have called home. The person we loved becomes the life we'll never know. And the words we were so afraid to say become the ones we'd give anything to have spoken while there was still someone there to hear them.
Meanwhile, the people whose approval once seemed indispensable have continued living their lives.
They may have changed their minds. They may barely remember the objection that felt enormous to us.
Some may no longer be here.
And we are left with the choices we made, including the ones we made by doing nothing.
I don't believe every unchosen path is a tragedy. We cannot know whether the alternative would have made us happier.
But I do think we should be more honest about the reasons we decline it.
Did I choose this because it honored my heart and reflected my values? Because I understood the consequences and was willing to live with them? Because I consciously chose to place another responsibility above my own desires?
Or because I couldn't bear the thought of someone being disappointed in me?
Those are not interchangeable reasons.
I've learned that regret isn't always about making the wrong decision.
Sometimes it's about recognizing that we never gave ourselves permission to make one.
I cannot recover every opportunity I've missed. I cannot return to every conversation and say what I wish I'd said. I cannot know how things might have unfolded if I'd been more willing to withstand other people's opinions.
But I can change what I do with the opportunities still in front of me.
I can be more honest about what I want. I can take practical risks seriously without automatically treating convention as safer. I can listen to the people I love, honor their perspectives, and care deeply about how my choices affect them without surrendering my authority over my own life.
And when something matters, I can try to say so while there is still someone there to hear it.
If we want to know what we truly value, we should ask ourselves a question that sounds almost absurd in its simplicity:
What would I choose if my life were entirely mine to live?
Because somewhere between honoring the people we love and anticipating their disappointment, we can forget that we are the ones who must live with the consequences.
I don't want another decade to pass before I find out what I might have chosen.
I want to be able to say that I considered the people I love, understood the risks as best I could, and still participated fully in the decisions that shaped my life.
That I didn't let the possibility of disappointing someone become the reason I disappointed myself.
That I loved and lived out loud.
