The moment I started choosing myself

It took one flight, and another 25 years.

I was on a plane to Helsinki, thousands of feet in the air, sun on my face, butterflies in my stomach. I looked down at the clouds and thought: I know I need to do this. I would regret not having done this.

My marriage wasn’t working. I just didn’t know what to do about it yet. I was 23 when we got married, 25 now. We had just moved to Silicon Valley from Vancouver for my work. I had been offered a Product Marketing position at Verifone. It was exciting. I was travelling, meeting new people, and at the center of the dot com boom. Life was starting, and I felt alive. But the same wasn’t true for my husband.

He wanted to be back home, close to his parents, have kids. The big wide world didn’t seem to call to him as it did to me. He struggled to fit the fast-paced dynamism of Silicon Valley. When I’d go on business trips, he would drink all the alcohol in the house and use my work Internet connection to entertain himself with women’s naked mud wrestling. It was dial up connections back then and the content got flagged on the work system and I received warning emails. Not great.

Life was great, but we weren’t. I realized that one of us was going to end up unhappy. Either I was going to drag him around the world when he just wanted to be back home, or I’d end up back home feeling like a bird with clipped wings. The tension grew... but I didn’t do anything about it. I was too scared. It had only been about two years. It felt like such a failure.

I’d always believed people got divorced too easily. That they just didn’t try hard enough. On top of that, I grew up Catholic. We’re not supposed to get divorced. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I held it all inside and it would try to come out of me through green bile vomit.

I must have eventually mentioned something to someone at work. Or perhaps I just started looking worse for wear because somehow I ended up seeing a company-funded counsellor. And that’s where I learned the difference between my learned self and my authentic self. Who I learned to be was the girl who married my husband. But my authentic self was someone different. She was starting to emerge, like a tiny light amongst the darkness, shining light on things that didn’t fit who I truly was or maybe who I was meant to become.

I hadn’t been able to trust my internal voice because it was still such a quiet whisper. I needed something external to help me see more clearly. And then I met someone on a business trip. He was a business guy who wanted to experience the world, someone who got it, who felt the pull of it the same way I did. Suddenly I was facing a choice: stay with my husband, take the safe route, maybe have a pleasurable life. Or take a risk and possibly have the love and romance of a lifetime, the kind people only dream about but few ever experience. I booked a flight to Helsinki to see him.

I knew people would have opinions about it. A married woman flying to another country to see another man. But for the first time, I felt something I hadn’t felt before. A quiet, solid knowing that this was right for me, regardless of what anyone else thought about it.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment on the plane was just the beginning. I was starting to choose myself, maybe for the first time.

But truly learning to choose myself? That took another 25 years. Because even though I had made a bold move, my authentic self was still just emerging. I had so many patterns and learned behaviours pulling me backwards, keeping me stuck. It took time, and experiences, and a lot of work to strengthen that voice. Shit, the journey was hard. And it’s not over yet.

Maybe you’ve had a moment like that. A moment when the door to choosing yourself opened, even just a crack. It doesn’t have to involve dramatic decisions or big life changes. Sometimes it’s just a quiet pull inside you, nudging you toward something you can’t quite name yet. If you feel that, pay attention to it. That pull is your authentic self. And she’s worth listening to.