Muse: On Stop Abandoning Yourself, and the Woman in the Mirror Who Was Never Lost

You know that feeling when you catch your reflection and, for a moment, see yourself through somebody else’s eyes? A comment you heard years ago. A beauty standard you never agreed to but somehow learned to measure yourself against. A quiet thought that you should be doing more, looking younger, needing less.

Yeah. That feeling.

While reading Muse: The Magnetism of Women Who Stop Abandoning Themselves by Dr. Amanda Hanson, I kept returning to a simple, unsettling possibility: maybe we aren’t lost. Maybe we have learned, in a hundred ordinary ways, to turn our attention away from ourselves.

Dr. Lillian Moya is reading Muse as part of her research for the book on the Cuban diaspora she is writing. In the process, she has found ideas in it that feel meaningful well beyond that research, especially for women moving through changes in age, time, identity, and the shape of everyday life. The book examines the systems and stories that can pull women away from a self-led life, and it does so with an unusual combination of clinical grounding and warmth.

When the story of aging starts to sound like a warning

We hear aging described as a problem to manage. More work. Less time. A body that asks for new attention. A face we’re supposed to inspect for signs of change, and somehow correct before anyone else notices.

We’ve gotten really weird about it. We talk about getting older as if it’s a door that closes behind us, taking our beauty, freedom, and possibility with it.

But what if aging doesn’t have to mean less? What if it can also mean less willingness to spend our lives sizing ourselves up against a standard that was never made with our whole lives in mind?

This isn’t a claim that every transition feels easy. Bodies change. Responsibilities can accumulate. There are losses, uncertainty, and days when you may not recognize the rhythm of your own life. No inspirational sentence can erase those things. But the assumption that every change must mean a smaller life deserves a closer look.

A wrinkle isn’t evidence that the woman in the mirror has disappeared. A changing schedule doesn’t automatically mean your time belongs to everyone else. And becoming older doesn’t cancel the effort, tenderness, and courage it took to learn to love yourself.

We can acknowledge that change is real without treating it as proof that our best years are behind us.

The small ways we leave ourselves

Self-abandonment can sound dramatic, like a single life-changing decision. Often, it’s quieter than that.

It may look like agreeing before you’ve checked what you want. Taking care of everyone else because you’re good at it, then telling yourself you don’t need much. Staying silent about a preference because explaining it feels like too much trouble. Looking in the mirror and reaching first for the list of things that need fixing.

I’ve found myself noticing how automatic some of these habits can be: the quick “I’m fine,” the reflex to make room for everybody else, the assumption that the thing I want can wait. The turning point isn’t a grand declaration. It’s the little pause afterward: Wait. Did I even ask myself?

That question doesn’t accuse us. It gives us language.

Hanson’s central premise (that women are not broken, but may be abandoning themselves) offers a way to name these patterns without treating them as personal defects. Naming something isn’t the same as solving it. Still, it can make an invisible habit visible. And once we can see it, we have a little more room to wonder whether it still belongs in our lives.

The mirror we learned to look through

When we look at ourselves, we may be looking through layers of other people’s opinions: what a woman should look like, how much she should give, whether her needs are reasonable, and whether she has earned a moment to herself.

Those messages don’t arrive in one neat package. They can come from family expectations, culture, the media, a partner, work, or a passing remark that settles in longer than it should. Sometimes we absorb them so gradually that they begin to sound like our own thoughts.

Then a natural transition happens (aging, a change in work or relationships, a new caregiving role, a shift in the family) and the old way of living starts to feel cramped. We may respond by trying harder to fit into it. More hustle and grind. More effort to become the version of ourselves that keeps everyone comfortable.

I recognize that reflex: if life feels unsettled, surely I should be more efficient, more accommodating, more on top of everything. But sometimes the pressure isn’t a sign that we need to push harder. Sometimes it’s a sign that the life we’re trying to maintain no longer makes enough room for us.

A deliberate change in how we speak to ourselves can begin with noticing whose rules we’re following. Not to blame ourselves for learning them. Not to demand a perfect new mindset by Tuesday. Just to notice.

Choosing yourself doesn’t have to be a dramatic act

The phrase “choose yourself” can sound like one more assignment. Another thing to get right. But choosing yourself might be small enough to fit into an ordinary day: eating the ice cream cone without narrating what it says about your discipline; resting before every task is done; admitting you prefer a quiet evening.

Not every want has to become a plan. Not every realization needs an immediate response. A gentle beginning might be simply making space for the question.

• What do I want, before I start figuring out what everyone else needs?
• Is this expectation mine, or did I inherit it without noticing?
• When I picture getting older, whose voice do I hear describing what I’ll lose?
• What is one ordinary thing I enjoy that I’ve been treating as something I have to earn?

These aren’t tests, and there’s no correct answer. Some days the answer may be “I don’t know.” That counts as honest, too.

A reading companion for the in-between

Muse is not a promise that choosing yourself will make every transition painless. It’s a reading companion for asking why so many of us learned to set ourselves aside, and what might become possible when we begin to notice. Its promise is simpler than that: language for what we’re feeling, a framework for why, and permission to choose ourselves, possibly for the first time.

That question feels especially tender in moments when time seems to be changing shape. A day once organized around one set of responsibilities may look different now. A body may ask for care in a new way. The future may feel less like a long, open stretch and more like something worth tending carefully.

And still, there can be room. Room for curiosity. Room to change our minds. Room to recognize beauty without making youth the price of admission. Room to return to the woman we already are — not to become someone else, but to stop being someone we are not.

As I read, I found myself thinking about the woman in the mirror, not as someone we have to recover by working harder, but as someone who may have been here all along, waiting for our attention to return. Not demanding that we become a new person. Just asking, perhaps, whether we can stop leaving ourselves out of our own lives.

You’re allowed to slow down. You’re not a machine. And growing older does not mean the beautiful woman you worked so hard to love has vanished.

Maybe the mirror has never been asking us to go backward. Maybe it’s simply asking us to look again.