Moments I Chose Myself

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about the ways we abandon ourselves in love.

The things we swallow. The ache and wounds we carry. The cost of staying when something essential is missing.

It’s been tender work — heavy at times, I know. Because it asks us to see what we’d rather not.

But awareness is only part of the story. The other part is what comes next.

So today, I want to pause and open a different door.
Because after we name the ache, the question naturally rises:

What does it look like to choose myself instead?

This piece is my answer. Not a prescription, but a lived rhythm.
The small and grand choices that have shaped me.
The ways I’ve come home to myself, again and again.

I’ve known for a long while I’m not here for the conventional. At heart I’m a wild and sacred rebel. I refuse to live a life built on making other people comfortable while I ache with misery, slowly and silently going numb inside. 

Something my own journey has taught me is this: 
Whether it’s relationships, life, home or career — if it’s built using someone else’s template — if it looks like what everyone told me I should want—it’s not mine. It will always feel empty, lifeless and leave me feeling unfulfilled. 

And while our journey’s may differ, I want to share the small, everyday choices — and the grand ones — that helped me honour myself, create alignment with my authentic self and feel at peace in my own life. 

There were moments that didn't announce themselves as turning points until later. 

When the dust settled. 
When the ache softened. 
When I realised the life I have now began in a moment no one else saw as sacred. 

This is my rhythm of becoming, one truth at a time. 

The moments where I chose myself. 
Not always cleanly. 
Not always conveniently.
Not always with logic on my side—
but with truth in my body, again and again. 

I was engaged. 
On paper, it looked like the life I’d worked for — stable, secure, mapped out. 
But inside, I was fading. My voice was quiet. My joy was gone. 

Every day asked me to give up more of myself — and I did, until I couldn’t anymore. 

I asked the question I already knew the answer to: “Are you happy?” 
And when he couldn’t meet me in what I needed, I met myself. 

I left. 
The relationship, the imagined future, the family I thought I’d become part of. 
Not because it was easy — but because it was true. 

I could’ve stayed in Melbourne. Pieced together something new. 
But my soul needed more than a patch. It needed space. 

I returned to New Zealand — not to escape, but to exhale. 
To be on land that felt like soil. To begin again where I could hear myself. 

It wasn’t glamorous. 
It was raw, and quiet, and full of reckoning. 
But it was mine. 

Back home, the pressure set in: 
Get a good job. Buy a house. Build a life that makes sense. 

I tried.
Met with an agent. Toured houses. 
Said all the right things. 

But everything in my body whispered no. 

I didn’t want a life that fit. 
I wanted a life that moved. That expanded. That let me feel something real. 

So I chose travel. 
A year of curiosity, laneways, languages,
long-held dreams and late-night wanderings. 

And in all that movement, I found stillness inside myself. 

The message was everywhere: 
A good mother disappears. 

But I had already lived that story. I knew what it cost. 
So I chose another way. 
Not perfectly. Not without doubt. 
But with intention. 

I chose to stay rooted in my womanhood while becoming a mother. 
To integrate, not divide. 
To show my daughter that devotion doesn’t require disappearance. 

Not all acts of self-honouring came with rupture or reinvention. 
Some began quietly, in the kitchen, before the sun rose. 

I remember a season of depletion — breastfeeding, skipping meals, running on the fumes of motherhood. 
I knew I wasn’t feeding myself enough, or well. 

So I began with one thing I knew how to do: nourish myself. 
Fifteen minutes before Emila woke, I would cook an omelette with spinach, leftover roast vegetables, and whatever goodness I could gather.
A full plate to start the day — a reminder that I mattered, too. 

It was that simple. And it was enough to begin. 

I began spending less time in spaces where judgment ran louder than curiosity — where people critiqued lives they would never dare to live themselves. 

I started to retreat into my own company. 
To sit in the quiet. 
To spend time alone — to hear my thoughts, to feel my intuition, 
without expectation or performance 
To journal, inconsistently at first, and later with devotion. 

Meditation came next — painfully awkward in the beginning. 
My body didn’t yet know stillness could be safe. 
So I began with three minutes, letting myself move if I needed to,  
building to five minutes, then ten. 
In that stillness, I discovered my breath, presence in my body. 
I learned the difference between the noise in my mind and the wisdom of my body. 

It would have been easier to look away.
To keep moving, keep achieving, keep distracting myself with the surface of life.

But the truth was—my shadows were still steering the ship.
Old wounds I thought I’d outgrown still shaped my choices.
Unspoken grief was sitting in my body like stone.

So I turned toward it.
I let myself feel what I had spent years avoiding—rage, shame, loneliness, heartbreak.
I traced patterns back through my childhood, and then further still, to stories my mother, grandmothers and all the women before them carried.

It wasn’t just my pain I was meeting—it was the weight of generations.
I began the slow, unglamorous work of releasing what was never mine to hold.

There were days it felt like breaking apart.
But with each layer I shed, I created space—
for joy, for love, for a future where my daughter and her children could inherit more light than I did.

Because healing was never just for me.
It is for every life that will come after mine.

Motherhood came with a story I didn’t subscribe to— 
the one where our identities as women were now obsolete . 

I refused to let that be my story. 

So I began to reclaim myself in how I dressed. 
Getting dressed on purpose and choosing clothes that felt like me,  
not just what was easy or expected. 

I stopped settling for maternity wear that didn’t speak to me, 
or activewear that didn’t reflect who I was becoming. 

When I looked good, I felt good. 
And feeling good became a quiet act of rebellion— 
a way to stand taller and show up fully. 

This was more than clothes. 
It was a way to honour my identity as an individual and a way to express myself. 

I’d invested in a shared home with family — the kind of choice that felt secure. 
But the more I became who I really was, the more I felt the tether. 

My life was starting to orbit around what would keep the peace. 
It became a rhythm of postponement — when this happens, then I can… 

But I’ve known the cost of delay before. 
And I didn’t want to keep deferring my life. 

So I chose myself. 
Even when it caused rupture. 
Even when I was misunderstood. 

Because peace that cost my truth isn’t peace at all. 

For so long, growth had felt like punishment. Like I needed to fix myself before I could be enough. 

But I began to see another way. 

I started noticing the ways I had been conditioned to stay small, to accept mediocrity.  
And I realised: I was not made for mediocrity. 

So I began to choose differently. 

I tapped into my beliefs—EFT tapping, journaling, reflection—gently shifting the stories I told myself about what was possible. I started to believe in more, to want more. 

I began seeking circles, mentors, friends who also wanted more—more pleasure, more fulfilment, more purpose, more expansiveness. 

And I invested in myself in ways that aligned with the woman I was becoming. Sometimes it was a book, a course, a coach or mentor. Sometimes it was simply an outfit—a tangible embodiment of the life I was stepping into. 

Step by step, choice by choice, I started to live in the expansion I had only dared to imagine. 

There was someone. 
Someone I felt deeply with. 

But the path asked something else of us. 
And I didn’t force. 
I chose myself. 
Held the vision. 
Trusted the ache. 
And believed in love’s quiet unfolding. 

The ache lingered. 
It came in waves — through my breath, through my bones. 

But I chose myself there, too. 

I let it move. 
I let it speak. 
I turned it into something sacred. 

Words. 
Ritual. 
Beauty. 
Truth. 

I met the parts of me that rose with the ache, and said: you belong. 

I didn’t choose myself because it was easy.
I chose myself because not doing so would have meant losing everything that mattered. 

Each moment was a quiet rebellion.
A soul-deep decision to trust my rhythm, not the one handed to me. 

Sometimes that meant leaving cities, relationships, investments. 
Sometimes it meant an omelette at sunrise. 

Alignment meant walking away. 
Fulfilment meant letting go. 
Living my truth meant being misunderstood. 

But it also meant coming home — to myself. 

Because I would rather live a life that is mine—messy, sacred, honest—than anyone else’s idea of enough. 

If you’re somewhere in the in-between— 
wrestling with decisions, standing at the edge of your own clarity— 

Know this, lovely: 
We are not wrong or selfish for choosing ourselves. 
We are simply waking up. 

With love, 
Rhian xx 

This piece is part of a series. Check out the other posts in the series here.