We are all emerging. We are working to manifest an outer life that aligns and resonates with our deepest and most true inner selves. Some emergences may be more physically obvious than others, but the priciples behind them remain the same. It takes trust, courage, and community to emerge.
Janet Mock is a model of all three traits. Her transition was superpowered by her belief that she knew herself, and no one could tell her otherwise. She trusted that inner voice, had the courage to speak it aloud, and shared her story in her book Redefining Realness, a trans girl’s coming of age memoir, to serve as a blueprint for others. That’s radical authenticity, and it has the power to make meaningful impact in the world.
At the end of her engaging Emerging Women podcast, we asked Janet what she would say to women who are no longer willing to compromise their inner truths for outside audiences.
This is how Janet answered:
“All of us, everyday, are fighting so hard to take off the masks that we were trained to put on in order to survive.
A lot of the work is undoing all the things that we learned about what we were supposed to do in order to be deemed as valuable or to be deemed as heard. We have to do that work of taking off those masks and revealing ourselves.
It takes a lot of power to be that vulnerable publicly, to exert your truth publicly, to no longer listen to all the commentary and what everyone outside of you are saying but then to just listen to what you know is true for yourself. What’s going to bring you happiness, what’s going to bring you joy, what’s going to make you content in the world?
For me, it’s been a life’s journey to come to that space to say, ‘Just because you may perceive me in a certain way, I have a lot of experiences that you may not see on the surface, but they are a part of me and I will own them.’ I will no longer think that having labels of trans or black or woman as things that I should push aside in order to be seen as more powerful. You know what? I’m going to actually speak them out, because me speaking them out and saying them and reclaiming them actually gains me more power. There’s such power in the truth, and we can emerge from such darkness when we tap into ourselves and tap into our truths.”
May it be so, dear Emerging Women! Share your true voice with us in the comments section.
Have you heard Janet’s Emerging Women podcast? Tune in here:
