They Tried to Keep Me Small. It Didn't Work.

Follin’s Journey, Part 1 — The Fools Journey In This Modern World

This is the beginning of a story about a woman named Follin and every woman who has ever been told to make herself less.

There is a particular kind of cruelty that doesn’t look like cruelty. It looks like love. It looks likefamily. It looks like the people who raised you, the people who claimed to know what was best for you, the teachers who promised to guide you, the healers who said they could hold what you carried. It looks like a world that smiled at you while quietly teaching you to take up less space.

The woman reading this knows exactly what I mean.

You know the look, you know the tone and you know the sentence that sounded like concern but landed like a cage: "You have everything you need right here." You know what it is to be loved on someone else's terms. You know what it is to be shaped year by year, comment by comment, silence by silence into a version of yourself that was easier for everyone around you to manage.

You were told it was for your own good… you know better now.

I am not going to tell you my story in this article. My story is mine, and the specifics belong to me. But I will tell you the shape of it, because the shape is what you will recognize.

I was made small by people who said they loved me. I was silenced by people who said they were protecting me. I was preyed on by people who said they were healing me. I was shaped by a culture that profits from women who believe their own voices are too loud, their own bodies too inconvenient, their own power too dangerous to use.

I spent decades inside that shape.

Then one day, not in a blaze of fireworks, not in a single clean moment, but slowly, steadily, the way a seed insists on light something in me refused.

I do not call that hope. Hope is too soft of a word for what it actually is. What I found was something older something underneath. Something that had been mine the entire time, waiting for me to stop apologizing for having it.

I found my power and the first thing I did when I found it I stopped making myself small.

Now, I want to introduce you to someone, her name is Follin and some of you will know her before I even begin.

Follin lived in a village that was never unkind… that was the problem.

Nothing about that village was harsh enough to force her to leave and yet, something inside her had already gone. The streets were familiar, the doorways were familiar, the smiling faces were familiar and each of them carried the quiet expectation that she would stay exactly as she had always been.

Predictable. Reliable. Small in ways no one ever said out loud.

One evening she paused at the edge of that village and watched the last light stretch across the hills beyond. She realized something that she could not unrealize.

There was nothing wrong with this life. But it no longer belonged to her.

Somehow, that truth felt heavier than fear. The next morning… she left.

Someone who loved her stopped her at the gate. "You don't have to do this. It's dangerous out there. You have everything you need right here.”

Every word was reasonable. Every word made sense. Every word sounded like safety.

But something inside her did not agree.

"What if it doesn't work?" they asked.

Follin opened her mouth to answer, but they were not finished.

"You can't just run from whatever you're dealing with inside yourself. You have to face it."

Follin almost laughed because that, too, was the village's voice. The voice that had taught her for decades that whatever was wrong was inside her. The voice that turned her own pain into proof she wasn't trying hard enough to heal it. The voice that had kept her sitting still in rooms that were never going to be safe, telling her the problem was her work to do alone.

She hesitated, not because she didn't have an answer but because, for the first time, she didn't need one.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "But I think staying will cost me more."

Follin is going to walk a long road, where she will meet teachers some real, some false. She will climb mountains she didn't think she could climb and throughout the journey, she will lose things she thought she needed and find things she didn't know she had lost. She will discover, the hard way, the only way it can ever really be learned, that everything she needed had already been placed within her. She is going to become the woman the village was never going to let her be.

Somewhere along the way, she is going to turn around on the face of the mountain still climbing, still in the effort, still finding her own footing and she is going to reach her hand down to the next woman on the path and light her torch. Why? Because that is what women who have found their power do.

We climb, we remember, we reach back and we hand the fire to the next one behind us. The fire goes all the way down the mountain, torch to torch to torch, until it reaches the village we left and finally, finally, lights up the windows of the place that tried to keep us in the dark.

This is not a story about being stuck.

This is not a story about hope.

This is a story about finding the power they tried to make you forget you had and refusing, ever again, to make yourself smaller than you are.

Follin climbs her mountain. I climb mine and I cannot wait to show you what is waiting on the other side.

If you have ever been told to take up less space by family, by faith, by lovers, by healers, by a culture that benefits from your silence then this story is for you. Walk with us.

The next chapter is coming.

~ Inger Purifory