If I Am Not For Myself...

There are words I return to when I'm standing at a crossroads.

They belong to Hillel the Elder, a Jewish sage who lived over two thousand years ago. He asked three questions that have echoed through centuries of interpretation, and they surface in my mind whenever I need to remember who I am, who I've been, and who I am becoming.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?"

The rabbis who study these words distinguish between two selves: the "I," which is the deepest self, the divine image we carry, and the "me," which is the persona we construct through life. Hillel seems to be saying that if we do not advocate for that deeper self, no one else will. The "me" that operates in the world becomes a shell, a collection of influences absorbed from others. But the questions contain a check and a balance. If we are only for ourselves, we become something less than human. And if we keep waiting to act, we may wait forever.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

I have a tendency to give too much. To center others at my own expense. To shrink so that someone else can expand. This is not generosity. It is a form of self-abandonment that I have had to unlearn, slowly and painfully, over decades.

Hillel's first question is a corrective. It reminds me that I am the one who teaches people how to treat me. That self-advocacy is not selfishness but reverence for what I carry. That no one else can fight for my place in the world if I refuse to claim it.

I have spent years helping others tell their stories. I have sat with founders and leaders and built frameworks for their visibility, their positioning, their power. I have taught them to uncover what was always there and make it luminous.

But telling my own story has felt dangerous. Literally.

Self-Abandonment as Survival

Following my escape from an abusive marriage, I am rebuilding my life for the first time in over fifteen years. My marriage was a threat to my existence. He was in the process of killing me spiritually and emotionally, and I understood the physical abuse could have led to my death. For years, I made myself small because my visibility provoked his rage and I did not want to provoke him further. My success stoked his insecurity. Taking up space, shining too bright, being too much of what I actually am. These were not abstract fears. They were survival calculations.

I knew exactly how to help others claim their power because I understood, intimately, what it costs to have that power suppressed.

From Survival to Self-Actualization

I have written before about my mother, the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and how I spent years trying to emulate her careful self-presentation before I understood that it would never fit me. Her rituals, her routines, her measured elegance. What she was actually teaching me had nothing to do with her methods. It was simpler and harder than that: love yourself enough to care for yourself. Craft yourself with intention.

I learned to do that. I built my work around helping others do the same. But there was a piece I could not fully claim. Not because I didn't know how. Because it wasn't safe.

Now it is.

The waiting is over. I can finally live without the constant calculation of how my choices might land on someone who wanted me diminished. Some people despise me for holding my husband accountable. I lost community I thought would stand by me. But I have also discovered who will stay, who will show up, who will walk beside me as I become whole again. And my children are watching all of it. They are watching me rebuild. They are learning what it looks like when someone refuses to stay broken.

If I am only for myself, what am I?

Self-advocacy without service curdles into something ugly. But self-advocacy that clears the path for service is different. When I shrink, I cannot do the work I was put here to do. When I refuse to claim my place, I rob others of what I might have offered them. The woman who stays invisible to keep the peace is not generous. She is simply absent. Hillel understood this. The self that advocates for itself and the self that serves others are not in opposition. They are the same self, operating at full capacity.

My passion is my purpose is your progress. I cannot pour from an empty vessel. I cannot teach you to claim your power if I refuse to claim my own. Taking center stage is not vanity. It is the prerequisite for the work I am here to do.

If not now, when?

And so we arrive at the third question.

I have been patient long enough. I have been quiet long enough. I have watched the artlessness spread, the laziness calcify into industry standard, the brands that leave us unmoved proliferate until stirring something in someone seems almost radical. I am tired of it. I want to fight for beauty and complexity and elegance. I want to fight for mystery and wonder and the kind of meaning that makes people lean in rather than look away. I want to build things that matter, and I want to help others do the same.

That desire has never left me alone. It whispers when I try to sleep. It interrupts me in the middle of unrelated tasks. It has been waiting for me to have the courage and the safety to answer it.

I have both now.

If you have been waiting too, waiting for permission to tell your own story, to stop shrinking so that someone else can stay comfortable, to finally become what you have always had the capacity to be, then consider Hillel's questions an invitation.

Who will fight for you if you won't? What do you become if you fight only for yourself? And if you keep waiting for the right moment, will it ever arrive?

The answers belong to you. But the asking cannot wait.