I’m Leading from Their Permission—How to Claim My Own
You are leading from a place that feels like it should be working—you have the knowledge, the calling, the infrastructure of a life built to serve. But nothing is lighting up. The people you touch do not seem transformed. Your own hands feel like they are moving through glass. And you cannot name why, because on paper, everything is in place.
This is not a failure of your gift. This is a power source that was cut off long ago, and you have been running the whole house on a memory of electricity ever since.
The Dark House, Wired
Picture a house—real, solid, beautiful in its bones. Every room has been wired. The switches are in place. The outlets are waiting. Someone has drawn up the plans and installed the infrastructure with care. But in the basement, the main breaker is tripped. The power is cut at the source. A visitor could walk through every room, flip every switch, turn every knob, and nothing would happen. The house would remain dark. Not because it is not wired. Not because the design is flawed. But because the current that feeds the whole system was interrupted years ago, and no one ever told her—or she never believed—that she could walk down those basement stairs and flip it back on.
This is what it looks like when you lead, teach, and heal from an authority that is not actually yours. The calling is real. The gift is real. The infrastructure you have built is real. But you are still drawing from a permission slip signed by someone else’s hand. A parent who told you to be smaller. An institution that required you to perform smallness to be safe. A version of yourself that you inherited instead of chose. And that permission—that broken breaker—has never been replaced with your own.
Why the Power Was Cut
Here is what happens in most childhoods, and what happened in yours: someone you trusted to keep you safe—a parent, a teacher, a system that claimed to love you—taught you that your own power was a problem. That your knowing was unsafe. That your authority was something to be managed, doubted, subordinated to someone else’s comfort or vision. Maybe it was said outright. Maybe it was conveyed in a thousand small silences. But the message was clear: you are too much, or not enough, or in the wrong way—and the parts of you that are most alive, most certain, most your own are the parts that must be dimmed.
So you dimmed them. You became extraordinarily skilled at running on someone else’s voltage. You learned to lead by checking in first with the voice in your head that was not yours—the internalized parent, the internalized doubt, the internalized permission slip. The breaker in the basement of your house was not broken by an accident. It was switched off by someone you loved, in the name of love, and you have been reaching for their hand ever since to switch it back on. They are not in the basement anymore. They may not even be alive. But you are still waiting for them to give you permission to illuminate your own life.
How to Take Back the Current
Here is what I need you to know: flipping that breaker back on is not dangerous. It is the only way the house becomes yours. And I need you to know this not as poetry but as a practical fact—you have a therapist, a trusted guide, people in your life who see you whole, and this work of reclaiming your own authority is the deepest work you will do. It is not separate from healing. It is the foundation of it. A good therapist, someone trained in how power and permission live in the body and the mind, can help you trace the exact moment the breaker was switched and can walk with you as you reach for it again. This is not weakness. This is the most rigorous form of courage there is.
And here is the other piece: the moment you flip that switch in your own name, your teaching will change. Your healing will change. Your leadership will change. Not because you will become someone different, but because you will stop waiting for someone else to validate the person you have always been. The lights in that house will come on—not all at once, but room by room. And the first light to come on will be in you. It will cost you some relationships that were built on you being smaller. It will cost you some versions of safety that were never actually safe. But what it will open—the authority, the clarity, the power to actually reach people instead of performing reaching—that is worth every cost.
| What runs through your mind | What’s actually true |
|---|---|
| If I claim my own authority, I will hurt the people who depend on me to stay small | Your true power teaches people how to claim theirs; performing smallness teaches them to perform smallness too |
| I don’t know how to lead from my own permission; I only know how to lead from theirs | You do know—you have always known—you have just been taught to doubt it |
| If I stop waiting for their approval, I will be alone | You are alone anyway, as long as you are waiting for dead voices to bring you to life |
| Flipping this switch will make me selfish | The only selfish thing is keeping your own light off so others can stay comfortable in the dark |
A little help, while you’re here
- Write down, in one paragraph, the exact moment you learned that your own knowing was unsafe. Not the interpretation of it, but the scene—what room, what words, what was said. Then read it aloud to someone you trust, slowly. Let them hear it. Let yourself hear it witnessed.
- Find one choice you made in the last week in order to get someone else’s approval, and reverse it. Make one small choice in your own name only—not to hurt anyone, but not to protect them from your realness either. Notice what happens in your body when you do.
- Call a therapist this week if you do not already have one. Not next month. This week. This is not a suggestion. This is a requirement of the work you are about to do.
The First Light Comes On
The house is yours. It has always been yours. The wiring is yours. The design is yours. The breaker box in the basement is yours, and it is waiting for your hand on it. When you flip that switch—and you will flip it, because you are here, because you are reading this, because the part of you that came alive when you saw this is not going away—the first room that lights up will be the one that holds you. And then the next. And then the next. Not all at once. Room by room, the house becomes luminous. Not because it is different. But because it is finally, finally drawing power from its own source.
Your gift is real. Your calling is real. And they have been waiting, patient in the dark, for you to come into the basement and claim them. The infrastructure is intact. The only thing that was ever missing is you—the whole of you, unwaiting, unapologetic, drawing from your own authority instead of from someone else’s ghost. That light is yours to turn on. Not dangerous. Not selfish. Not wrong. Yours.
Flip the switch.