Self-abandonment doesn’t look like a nervous breakdown. It looks like a random Tuesday.
Nobody sees it happen.
That’s the whole point. Self-abandonment is a private act.
It happens in the space between what you know and what you allow yourself to do. And it’s so quiet, so habitual, so woven into how you move through your life that most women don’t even recognize it as a pattern.
Let me show you what it actually looks like.
I’m not going to give you the the textbook version. I want you to see the random Tuesday version.
It looks like writing a post that says exactly what you mean — then rereading it and adding “but that’s just my perspective” at the end so nobody feels challenged.
It looks like knowing your rate should be higher but quoting the lower number because the silence after the higher one feels unbearable.
It looks like finishing a talk outline you’re proud of, then Googling what other people said about the same topic and suddenly feeling like yours isn’t good enough.
It looks like volunteering to help someone else launch their thing while yours sits in a folder called “Almost Ready.”
It looks like going quiet for two months after one post that got less engagement than you hoped because the silence felt like proof that you don’t have what it takes.
It looks like having seventeen drafts, four half-built courses, a manuscript with six good chapters, and a bio that still says “aspiring.”
None of this looks dramatic. All of it is expensive.
Here’s what I need you to understand about the cost.
Self-abandonment doesn’t just cost you output. It costs you confidence because of the story you tell about yourself.
Every time you override your own knowing — every time you edit the real thing into the safe thing, every time you swallow the ask, every time you delay the deadline because you aren’t sure you’re allowed to share it; you deposit a data point into a narrative that says:
I don’t follow through.
I’m not consistent.
I’m not the kind of person who puts herself out there.
And the longer that narrative runs, the more it feels like fact. Not a pattern you fell into. Not a habit you can change. Just who you are.
That’s the real cost. Not the unfinished drafts. The identity you build around them.
The thing is — self-abandonment is smart.
Let me be clear about one thing…this pattern didn’t develop because you’re weak.
It developed because you’re perceptive.
Somewhere early in your family life, in school, or first professional environments, you learned that visibility carries risk.
Maybe you watched someone get punished for standing out.
Maybe you were praised for being helpful but never for being brilliant.
Maybe you expressed something real and were met with silence, correction, or the particular kind of attention that taught you it’s safer to stay small.
So you built a system. A brilliant, invisible system that keeps you from the kind of exposure that once felt dangerous.
Over-editing is part of that system.
Perfectionism is part of it,too.
The “just one more pass” loop is also part of it.
The sudden busyness that shows up the day before launch — that’s part of it as well.
Every behavior that looks like procrastination or self-sabotage is actually a protection strategy doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you from being fully seen.
The problem isn’t that the system exists.
The problem is that the system was built for a room you’re no longer in and it’s still running.
Here’s where most advice goes wrong.
Someone tells you to “just do it.” Just post. Just launch. Just put yourself out there and let go of perfectionism.
And that advice isn’t exactly wrong. It’s just operating at the wrong level and in the wrong sequence.
Telling a woman whose nervous system has coded visibility as social danger to “just post it” is like telling someone with a fire alarm blaring to just ignore the noise.
The alarm isn’t a mindset problem. It’s a system responding to a perceived threat and until you address the system — until you learn to recognize the alarm, understand what tripped it, and build a practice for moving through it instead of obeying it — no amount of motivational language will hold.
You can’t discipline your way out of a nervous system response.
You can’t content-calendar your way past a belief matrix.
You can’t accountability-partner your way through an identity-level conflict.
You need a different kind of intervention. One that matches the level where the problem actually lives.
That’s why I use the word self-abandonment instead of procrastination, or perfectionism, or imposter syndrome.
Those words describe symptoms.
Self-abandonment names the mechanism.
Procrastination is the behavior. Self-abandonment is the moment you chose to override what you knew — that the work was ready, that the rate was fair, that the post was honest — in favor of what felt safe.
That moment is the intervention point. Not the behavior that follows it.
And once you can see that moment — the exact second you disappear on yourself — you can do something different inside of it.
That’s not a theory. That’s a skill that can be learned.
I want to tell you something about that skill, because it matters for everything that comes after.
Learning to catch self-abandonment in real time doesn’t mean you stop feeling the fear. It doesn’t mean the alarm stops ringing.
It means you develop the capacity to hear the alarm and not obey it.
To feel the tightness in your chest and still hit send.
To notice the urge to soften, to hedge, to disappear — and choose to stay anyway.
Not because you’re fearless. Because you’ve built a practice strong enough to hold you in the moment your old pattern says run.
That practice has a structure.
It involves learning to read your body’s signals before they become thought spirals.
It involves naming the beliefs driving the pattern — not just the behavior, but the story underneath. It involves building tools you can reach for in the five minutes before you publish, pitch, or present. And it involves tracking your evidence so your fear can’t gaslight you into forgetting what you’ve already proven you can do.
That’s what this publication teaches. Not in theory. In reps.
If you read this and felt a sense of resonance— then you already know this is your pattern.
You don’t need more information. You need a place that names it without shaming you for it, gives you tools that match the real problem, and helps you build a rhythm of release that doesn’t require you to be brave every single time — just willing to trust yourself one more time than you did yesterday.
Subscribe to Get Untrapped. This is where we reverse the pattern. One rep at a time.