Aug 17, 2026 · 57 min · 12 segments
“I’m afraid of living a small life. Of not living up to my potential. Of never being great.” We hear this often: people wondering whether their life is enough—whether *they* are enough— and whether…
Sheryl PaulHost
Victoria RussellHost
Well, one of the things we talked about when we were talking this through was and I think it's important to start here, was to place this in a historical context because mostly I hear this fear from women.
I mean, granted, most of my audience is women, so maybe men are having this fear too, but that historically women were confined and condemned to a very, very small life.
And it's only been in recent decades, very recent, compared to how long humans have been here, that women have been allowed to dream big, to leave their hometown, to have agency and choice over who they marry and what our career is gonna be.
And if we want to have children or not, So this is so recent that it's like when people come to me with relationship anxiety and they're afraid of marriage and they're afraid to get married, but they're afraid of just the word marriage, that marriage itself connotes the word wife, which connotes, oh, I'm suddenly going to have this really small life and I'm going to be this frumpy, boring person that all I do is like... hang around the house and take care of my husband and my kids and all my vitality is gone and all of my creativity and my dreams and my wishes and my fantasies just gone.
It's in the same vein of historically That was a woman's job, was to take care of the home, take care of her husband and her children, and that was it.
And that, except for, you know, the very fringe anomalous woman who was able to break out of that, for the most part, that was a woman's lot.
And like I can hardly think of anything smaller than – it's one thing if that's your choice.
But if it's the only choice you have and there's no choice, then it's an imprisonment, right? There's no freedom in that.
And so I think that – That's a really important piece to name and that connected to a small life might be some sense of a lack of freedom.
Am I free to be fully who I am? Am I free to live where I want to live? Am I free to explore the career paths that I'm curious about? Am I free to Explore the parts of myself that I wasn't allowed to explore growing up.
Am I free to explore my sexuality in the way I want to explore it and called to explore it? So, you know, we are in this incredible time.
Certainly a thousand challenges of the time we're in, but we're in this incredible time where we are breaking free of a lot of shackles that have defined us.
And people are, there's a lot more freedom to explore who am I, not what my family has told me or my religion has told me or my society, my culture, mainstream culture has told me who I am.
Am I free to discover who I am? And if in that process of discovery, I learned that, gosh, what really makes me feel alive is staying right where I am in the town where I grew up and living close to my family and doing the job that I'm currently doing and maybe having a little garden in my back.
But for somebody else, it might be, wow, I grew up in this small town and I'm so curious what life in a big city is like.
And I always wanted to be a teacher or whatever it is that we take the time to slow down and really sit with what can be a very long process.
It can be a very long process of discovering who am I and what is the external life that supports who I am on the inside.
Well, one of the things we talked about when we were talking this through was and I think it's important to start here, was to place this in a historical context because mostly I hear this fear from women.
I mean, granted, most of my audience is women, so maybe men are having this fear too, but that historically women were confined and condemned to a very, very small life.
And it's only been in recent decades, very recent, compared to how long humans have been here, that women have been allowed to dream big, to leave their hometown, to have agency and choice over who they marry and what our career is gonna be.
And if we want to have children or not, So this is so recent that it's like when people come to me with relationship anxiety and they're afraid of marriage and they're afraid to get married, but they're afraid of just the word marriage, that marriage itself connotes the word wife, which connotes, oh, I'm suddenly going to have this really small life and I'm going to be this frumpy, boring person that all I do is like... hang around the house and take care of my husband and my kids and all my vitality is gone and all of my creativity and my dreams and my wishes and my fantasies just gone.
It's in the same vein of historically That was a woman's job, was to take care of the home, take care of her husband and her children, and that was it.
And that, except for, you know, the very fringe anomalous woman who was able to break out of that, for the most part, that was a woman's lot.
And like I can hardly think of anything smaller than – it's one thing if that's your choice.
But if it's the only choice you have and there's no choice, then it's an imprisonment, right? There's no freedom in that.
And so I think that – That's a really important piece to name and that connected to a small life might be some sense of a lack of freedom.
Am I free to be fully who I am? Am I free to live where I want to live? Am I free to explore the career paths that I'm curious about? Am I free to Explore the parts of myself that I wasn't allowed to explore growing up.
Am I free to explore my sexuality in the way I want to explore it and called to explore it? So, you know, we are in this incredible time.
Certainly a thousand challenges of the time we're in, but we're in this incredible time where we are breaking free of a lot of shackles that have defined us.
And people are, there's a lot more freedom to explore who am I, not what my family has told me or my religion has told me or my society, my culture, mainstream culture has told me who I am.
Am I free to discover who I am? And if in that process of discovery, I learned that, gosh, what really makes me feel alive is staying right where I am in the town where I grew up and living close to my family and doing the job that I'm currently doing and maybe having a little garden in my back.
But for somebody else, it might be, wow, I grew up in this small town and I'm so curious what life in a big city is like.
And I always wanted to be a teacher or whatever it is that we take the time to slow down and really sit with what can be a very long process.
It can be a very long process of discovering who am I and what is the external life that supports who I am on the inside.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
