Taking Your Power Back (You Never Actually Lost It)

Here's a phrase you've heard a hundred times: take your power back.

It sounds like a heist. Like your power is locked in someone else's vault and you need a plan, a crew, and a crowbar to get it out. And when you've spent years — maybe decades — feeling small, managed, and responsible for everyone else's weather, that's exactly how it feels. Like the power is over there, with them.

But here's what I've learned, both in my own unpacking and in the counseling room: your power was never stolen. It was handed over. Piece by piece, in tiny transactions that felt reasonable at the time.

You handed some over when you learned that keeping the peace was your job. Some more when you stopped saying what you wanted because it caused problems. A little more every time you apologized for having needs, shrank to fit someone's comfort, or picked up a bag that had somebody else's name on the tag and carried it like it was yours.

None of that was weakness. It was survival. You traded power for safety because that was the deal on the table, and you were smart enough to take the only deal available.

But here's the part nobody tells you: the deal expired. The environment that required those trades is over — and you're still paying on the old terms.

Taking your power back isn't a confrontation. Most of the time it doesn't involve the other person at all. It looks quieter than that:

It's saying no without a paragraph of justification. It's letting someone be disappointed in you without rushing to fix it. It's checking the tag on the anxiety you're carrying and realizing it belongs to your mother, your ex, your childhood — and setting it down. It's taking up your own seat, even when the person who's been spreading into it suddenly has a problem.

Nobody hands your power back to you. There's no ceremony. You just stop making the trades.

And the first time you do — the first time you keep your no, keep your seat, keep your peace — you realize the power was in your hands the whole time. You were just using it to carry their baggage.

Set it down. Both hands free now.

Travel light.

— TBT