Outing Myself
I am outing myself — probably a little late for that, since anyone who has been paying attention has likely noticed already. Still, there is a difference between hinting at something and declaring it out loud, clear and proud. So here it is: I am a hopeful conservative who still believes in good old values.
Hopeful, because I want to believe that the world has not entirely lost its bearings, even though the evidence often makes me wonder. Conservative, because I believe some things are worth preserving, worth defending, and worth handing down intact to the next generation — not endlessly re-engineered until they collapse under the weight of theory.
Now, depending on how much of my life you know, this may come as a surprise. On the surface, I might look like a textbook feminist. I raised my children mostly on my own. I built a career and paid my own bills. I’ve worked hard, and I’ve stood on my own two feet for most of my adult life. Independence was not just a slogan; it was my survival. And if you stop there, it would be easy to stamp the label “feminist” on my forehead and move on.
But that would be wrong.
Because the truth is: I am not a feminist. I never was. And I’ll go a step further — I don’t believe men and women are equal. They never were, and they never will be.
Now, before you slam the door in my face and unsubscribe from my newsletter, let me be clear. I am not saying women shouldn’t vote. I am not saying women shouldn’t work or shouldn’t have the right to choose their own path. Those are rights we should never roll back. What I am saying is that rights are not the same as sameness. And the ideology that insists otherwise has done more harm than good, especially for women.
It has told us that to be valuable, we must be like men — strong, unbending, always competing, always proving. It has shamed men for being men and shamed women for being women. It has reduced femininity to weakness and masculinity to toxicity, leaving both sexes unmoored, suspicious of their own nature, and ashamed of what they long for most deeply.
When I was younger, I fell for some of these illusions myself. It’s almost impossible not to. The slogans are everywhere, and they sound so empowering. Be independent. Don’t need anyone. Prove you can do it all. And I did. I carried the load. I played the roles. I ticked the boxes. But it came at a price — to my own softness, my own longing, my own truth.
So yes, I am outing myself. Not to provoke, but to reclaim something I feel we are in danger of losing: the right to say men and women are different, and that difference is not a flaw to be corrected but a fact to be cherished.
This isn’t about rejecting women’s rights. It’s about rejecting illusions that rob us of what makes us whole.
Independence, But Not By Choice
When people hear that I raised my children mostly on my own, worked full-time, built a career, and kept everything afloat, they often give me that look. You know the one: a mix of admiration and pity, sometimes with a dash of suspicion. They assume it was all part of some feminist master plan — the noble declaration of a modern woman determined to “do it all.”
I wish I could tell you that was the case. That I stood in front of the mirror at twenty-five and said, “Yes, I will single-handedly juggle work, children, bills, school runs, doctor’s appointments, broken washing machines, and midnight fevers — because I am a woman, hear me roar.”
But the truth? My life was less a carefully choreographed feminist anthem and more a chaotic circus act where I was both the acrobat and the safety net, praying the rope would hold.
The secret that rarely makes it into neat labels is this: independence was not my preference. It was survival.
The Family I Wanted vs. The Family I Had
If you’d asked me as a girl what I wanted, I would have most likely said something utterly traditional: a family with both parents under one roof, stability, the kind of sanctuary where children grow up with the daily presence of a healthy father figure — ok, just not like my parents. I wasn’t allergic to homemaking. I wasn’t plotting a career at all costs, even if I tried to convince myself of the same at times. Honestly, I probably would have been quite content baking cakes, organising school projects, and playing the occasional game of housewife-turned-detective when the missing sock crisis struck.
But life, as we know, doesn’t check in with your childhood wish list. Choices — mine, his, ours — shaped a different reality. Some of those choices were mistakes, others were just the crooked paths that come with being human. And so I became what many would call a “strong, independent woman.” I wore the title proudly for a long time. But in truth, it felt more like a pair of ill-fitting shoes: necessary, but not necessarily comfortable.
Would I have loved to raise my children in the sanctuary of an intact family? Absolutely. Would I have preferred to be a homemaker at least for a season? Definitely — even if I tried everything to convince myself otherwise. Did I have that opportunity? Perhaps. But for reasons too complex (and sometimes too painful) to reduce to a single villain or excuse, that wasn’t my path.
“You’re So Strong!”
Let me tell you something about the word strong. When people call you strong, it often means you’ve had no other choice. Nobody calls you strong when you’re sitting poolside with a margarita, flipping through a magazine. No — strength is the word people use when they watch you hauling furniture up the stairs alone, juggling toddlers while paying bills, or showing up at work with dark circles under your eyes because your child had croup all night.
“You’re so strong,” they say, with admiration. Inside, you think: Yes, and I’m also so tired, so scared, and so desperately wishing someone else would be strong for once so I could just… breathe.
Strength, in my case, was never glamorous. It wasn’t lipstick and high heels at the boardroom table. It was sweatpants at 3 a.m., holding a feverish child against my chest while googling whether coughing like a barking seal meant emergency room or just humidifier.
But strength became my default. Not because I wanted to be the poster child of independence, but because my children deserved stability — and I would be damned if they didn’t have it as much as I could provide.
Feminist? Hardly.
From the outside, all this independence looked like feminism in action. Look at her — raising kids, building a career, standing tall without a man to lean on. Isn’t that what feminism was all about?
Wrong.
If anything, I lived the consequences of feminism, not its promise. Feminism may have told women they could “have it all,” but what I ended up with was “do it all.” I didn’t feel liberated. I felt exhausted. And no, I wasn’t striding around shouting, “Who needs men?” On the contrary, I often whispered into my pillow, “God, I wish I had one.” Not just any man, of course — but a partner. A teammate. Someone to fix the damn sink once in a while without me having to study a YouTube tutorial.
The Most Beautiful Compliment
One memory in particular has stayed with me. My daughter was — I don’t quite remember exactly — perhaps 15 or 16 years old. We were sitting at the dining room table when she looked at me and said something that stopped me in my tracks:
“Mami, when I grow up, I want to be a mother just like you.”
At the time, it felt like the most beautiful compliment a child could possibly give. It was this rare and precious moment where I thought: Maybe I did something right. Maybe all the long nights, the worries, the exhaustion added up to something worth aspiring to.
But in the aftermath, my feelings were more complicated. Because while I was grateful, deeply humbled even, I also thought: I don’t want her to follow in my footsteps. I don’t want my children to repeat my path of single parenthood. I want them to have more, to have better. I want them — and their children — to grow up in the sanctuary of a family where both parents are present and values are lived daily.
To this day, I am truly grateful for my daughter’s words, though I am not sure she would voice them the same way now. A part of me hopes not, because I want her life to hold something different: the fullness I couldn’t provide, the stability I longed for but could not secure.
Inside, I thought: This is not empowerment. This is survival with a roll of tape.
Pride, With an Asterisk
Don’t get me wrong — I am proud of what I accomplished. I am proud of my children, who grew into strong, capable adults with good hearts. I am proud that I managed to keep food on the table and love in the home, even when life was falling apart. But the pride always comes with an asterisk: not by choice.
I did not set out to prove I could be mother and father at once. I did it because life cornered me into it — and because of my choices, some deliberate, some forced upon me by circumstance. And while I wouldn’t change my children for anything in the world, I would change the loneliness, the burden, the quiet nights when I longed for someone to share the load.
If that makes me sound like a bad feminist, I will wear that badge with pride.
The Myth of “Having It All”
Feminism sold us the myth that we could “have it all.” Career, children, independence, fulfilment. What it didn’t mention was that most of us would end up doing it all alone. That the supposed liberation from men often meant the liberation to exhaustion. The rejection of traditional family structures often left children and mothers carrying scars that no social policy could fix.
I look back now and think: it wasn’t equality we needed. It was honesty. Honesty about the fact that men and women are different. That families work best when both roles are honoured. That pretending we’re interchangeable is like pretending you can drive a car with two accelerators and no brakes — sooner or later, it crashes.
So yes, I became independent. But independence is not the flag I wave proudly — it was a weight I carried. It was the unglamorous reality of circumstances, choices, and consequences.
And if you wonder how a woman like me — a girl who once dreamed of stability, family, and sanctuary — ended up buying into certain illusions along the way, you have to look back at my younger years. The years when slogans sounded convincing, when ideology disguised itself as common sense, when I thought liberation meant becoming less of myself in order to be more like a man.
That is where the story of my youth and ideologies begins.
Youth and Ideologies
With youth and innocence also comes a kind of privilege. The privilege of being ideological. The privilege of being, let’s call it plainly, a little stupid. The privilege of not having lived enough real life yet to know what actually holds up once the bills arrive and the nights get long.
When we are young, we tend to idealise things. We think we are invincible. We believe in equality, in justice, in the slogans thrown at us with the confidence of a marching band. Today’s youth is no different — though I sometimes pity them for having to endure the relentless indoctrination of social media on top of it all. Perhaps my generation was lucky not to carry that extra burden.
And yet, I’ll admit it: I had ideals too. Many of them, I later realised, were misguided. But isn’t that the deal with youth? We learn, we stumble, and afterwards we tell ourselves we are smarter. At least a little.
So what changed? Life. The same thing that changes everything. You start living it. You start paying bills, feeding children, showing up to work whether you feel strong or not. You learn independence not as a slogan but as a necessity.
I’ve come to believe we are the sum of our experiences and our choices. That’s where the shift happens — in one direction or the other. And yes, for a while, I even took pride in repeating some of those slogans. I wore independence like a medal, even if it was heavy. But the truth is, at my core I was always hopelessly old school. Old-fashioned, even. I cherished the old values, and I still do. I never wanted to erase the difference between men and women. On the contrary, I wanted to live into the strengths of each.
Did I, for too long, absorb some of the ideology from the left? Yes. But I never denied my femininity. I never tried to become a man — except perhaps emotionally, in the early years. (That’s another story, one I’ll tell a little later.)
The thing about youth is that it makes us easy to influence. The thing about age is that it teaches us resistance. The older we get, the more life we have lived, the harder it becomes to sell us illusions — provided we remain awake, provided we haven’t signed up for supervised thinking, provided we still know the difference between right and wrong.
And maybe that’s the best part of growing older: the gradual arrival of an attitude that says, I couldn’t care less what’s fashionable to believe. I care about what is true.
A Wake-Up Call
Most of my working life was spent in male-dominated industries. Early on, I absorbed the idea that to succeed, I would need to suppress my emotions. Business was no place for tears or tenderness — or so I thought. There was only one way to survive: be tough, be professional, never let emotion leak through the cracks. And God forbid I appear weak in any way.
Later, I joined a company where the environment was different. For the first time, I worked primarily with women. My role required me to be on stage often — presenting, hosting, giving lectures, and running trainings. It was a shift in atmosphere, but I carried with me the same armour I had learned to wear: competence first, feelings later.
Then came the day that cracked that armour wide open.
I was scheduled to go on stage after a kind of eulogy. A partner I had admired deeply had just died of breast cancer. She was a mother of young children, devoted to her family and to her work. So devoted, in fact, that she managed to come on stage one final time only days before she passed. Before my presentation, they showed a video of her and spoke words in her honour.
When I walked up to the microphone, the weight of it all hit me. I froze. My throat closed. Tears began streaming down my face — not delicate, cinematic tears, but the messy, unstoppable kind. I stood there, weeping into the microphone, trying not to make too much noise, but completely undone. After a few moments, I managed to whisper, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this,” and walked off stage.
I was mortified. Embarrassed. Convinced I had humiliated myself in front of the entire audience. I wanted the ground to swallow me up.
Shortly after, a colleague came up to me and said quietly, “I wish you would do that more often.”
At first, I was furious. I thought he was mocking me, encouraging me to make a fool of myself by crying on stage. I bristled at the thought. Hadn’t I worked hard to be taken seriously? Hadn’t I built a reputation on being composed, professional, always in control? And now he wanted me to cry more often?
It took me a while to understand. He wasn’t mocking me. He was pointing me back to myself. He was telling me that my vulnerability, my care, my raw humanity was worth showing — that it connected more deeply than all the polished professionalism in the world.
That moment, though painful, was a wake-up call. It forced me to ask: Who had I become? Was I about to cross the line into becoming the “ice queen” I never intended to be? Was I so determined to prove myself that I was willing to amputate the very part of me that made me whole?
To this day, I am grateful for that colleague’s comment. It taught me more than any management seminar ever could. It reminded me that authenticity is not weakness, that femininity is not a liability, and that caring openly is not unprofessional — it’s a strength.
And perhaps most importantly: it reminded me that I liked that woman — the warm, emotional, vulnerable one—far more than the hardened, businesslike mask I was about to perfect.
That day on stage stripped away the illusion. It showed me that no ideology, no role, no performance is worth losing yourself over.
The Cost of Feminism and Ideology
The promise of feminism was liberation. The story was simple: women would finally be free to live without limits, to chase careers, to shape their own futures. It sounded noble, even irresistible. But what has followed in its wake is not liberation at all. It is a strange, hollow inversion of freedom: women competing by denying who they are, men apologising for being men, and an entire generation quietly wondering why everything that once felt natural now feels suspect.
When Womanhood Stops Belonging to Women
The most striking irony of all is that feminism, in its attempt to elevate women, has ended up eroding the very essence of womanhood. What began as a demand for equal rights has morphed into something far stranger: a worldview where womanhood itself is no longer grounded in reality, but treated as a costume that anyone can put on and take off at will.
Sports are a glaring example. Women train for years, honing their strength, only to find themselves forced to compete against biological males who identify as women. The outcome is predictable: podiums are swept, records broken, and female athletes are left humiliated, silenced if they dare to protest. It is an absurdity that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, and yet here we are — told with a straight face that it is “fair.”
The same erosion seeps into language. Words like mother and woman are quietly replaced with sterile, bureaucratic phrases: birthing parent, menstruating person. The richness of identity is reduced to biological functions, while the lived reality of womanhood — its history, its struggle, its beauty — is flattened into gender-neutral categories. We are asked to applaud this as progress, even as it strips away the very uniqueness feminism once claimed to defend.
What was once sacred — the deep, embodied experience of being a woman — is now hollowed out, dismissed as interchangeable, or worse, forbidden to name.
The Shaming of Masculinity
And while women are pressured to deny their essence, men are shamed for theirs. Masculinity, once seen as strength, protection, and provision, is now branded as “toxic.” Boys are told to sit still, to lower their voices, to suppress their instincts. They are medicated for being restless, punished for being assertive, and mocked for being “too much.”
But the truth is: boys are too much sometimes. That’s their glory. Their rough energy, their drive, their risk-taking — these are not diseases to cure but forces to be guided. Turn them into liabilities, and we don’t just emasculate men; we rob society of inventors, builders, protectors, and leaders.
What happens when men are ashamed of being men and women are ashamed of being women? We end up with confusion, distortion, and relationships that collapse under the weight of roles no one knows how to play anymore.
From Common Sense to Dogma
It didn’t have to be this way. Common sense once told us that men and women are different, and that difference is not a threat but a complement. Feminism, in its healthiest form, could have honoured that truth while insisting on dignity and respect. But ideology crept in.
Ideology is what happens when common sense is replaced with dogma. It is no longer about reality but about theory. And theory, by nature, is impatient with difference. It wants everything neat, tidy, uniform. It insists on sameness because sameness is easier to control.
So we are told that biology doesn’t matter. That motherhood is oppression. That fatherhood is optional. That difference itself is dangerous. That the obvious must be denied, and the denial repeated until it feels normal and even true.
The undertones are Orwellian. We are instructed to say things we do not believe, to use words that make no sense, to nod along with claims that contradict our own eyes. To question is to risk being branded ignorant, hateful, or worse. It is not just ideology anymore; it is supervised thinking.
The Silent Cost: Families and Children
The cost of this cultural distortion is not just political. It is deeply personal. It plays out quietly in families, in classrooms, in workplaces.
Children grow up in fractured homes, told that family structures don’t matter. Mothers are pressured to prove their worth by replicating male standards of success. Fathers are diminished, their role reduced to a paycheck or an occasional weekend visitor. Schools, instead of grounding children in clarity, often sow confusion, teaching that identity is fluid, reality is negotiable, and tradition is outdated.
And the result? Children grow up more anxious, more medicated, more rootless than ever. Women burn out. Men withdraw. Relationships falter. Communities weaken. The very fabric of society — woven for centuries out of the complementarities of men and women — frays at the seams.
The Illusion of Progress
We are told this is progress. That this is liberation. That to object is to cling to the past. But progress that erases reality is not progress at all — it is regression dressed in fashionable language.
Progress should mean building on what is true, not denying it. It should mean protecting what is precious, not discarding it. It should mean handing down to the next generation a world richer in meaning, not poorer or utterly meaningless.
What we are living through instead is a kind of cultural amnesia. We are so desperate to appear enlightened that we willingly forget what every civilisation before us knew instinctively: men and women are different, and that difference is the foundation of life, love, and continuity.
The Need for Courage
To say these things aloud today requires courage. It is easier to stay silent, to nod politely, to pretend you don’t see the contradictions. But silence is costly. Every time we refuse to name what we know is true, we surrender another inch of ground.
The real cost of feminism and ideology is not just exhaustion, not just confusion, not just fractured families. The real cost is truth itself. The right to look at reality, to name it, and to live accordingly.
If that is taken from us, what remains? A society of people nodding along to things they don’t believe, afraid of their own words, disconnected from their own nature. That is not liberation. That is captivity and self-censorship.
A Call Back to Sanity
The time has come to return to what is sane, what is natural, what is human. To say again, without shame: men and women are different, and that is good. To defend the spaces that belong to women. To restore honour to masculinity. To raise children with clarity instead of confusion.
This is not nostalgia. It is not regression. It is the only way forward that does not collapse under its own contradictions. Because the truth, no matter how much ideology tries to obscure it, will always surface.
And the truth is this: men and women are not problems to be solved or categories to be blurred. They are gifts, meant to balance, challenge, and complete one another. Feminism and ideology may have tried to erase that, but they cannot erase reality.
And reality, when we are brave enough to face it, is always the beginning of renewal.
What Truly Matters: Values, Not Ideologies
Ideologies are loud. They shout their slogans, demand allegiance, and punish dissent. They parade themselves as moral truths, but they are not values. An ideology is a system — rigid, brittle, impatient with nuance. Values, by contrast, are quiet. They don’t need to be imposed or policed. They live inside us already, waiting to be remembered.
This is one of the great confusions of our time: we have been taught to mistake ideology for value. We are told that repeating the right phrases or flying the right flag makes us virtuous. But real virtue doesn’t live in slogans. It lives in how we treat each other when no one is watching.
Values are timeless. They are not invented in think tanks or legislated in parliaments. They belong to no party, no movement, no ideology. They are universal and deeply human, written into us long before hashtags or manifestos. They are the compass that orients us when culture pulls in every direction at once.
Kindness. Chivalry. Forgiveness. Femininity. Compassion. Common sense. Decency. Just to name a few…
None of these requires a political program. They are not fashionable or unfashionable. They are simply human. And yet in their simplicity lies their power.
Kindness restores dignity where ideology dehumanises.
Chivalry honours difference instead of flattening it.
Forgiveness breaks cycles of bitterness no theory can fix.
Femininity affirms the beauty of womanhood rather than erasing it.
Compassion reminds us that we belong to one another.
Common sense cuts through dogma with the clarity of the obvious.
Decency anchors us when the world tilts toward madness.
I sometimes think about how small acts of value shape life more profoundly than grand ideological gestures ever could. A stranger holding the door when your arms are full. A father teaching his son to shake hands firmly and look someone in the eye. A woman who chooses to forgive when she has every right to stay bitter. These moments will never trend on social media, but they are what hold a society together.
Meanwhile, ideologies rise and fall like fashions. The slogans that sound unassailable today will be forgotten or mocked tomorrow. Yesterday’s orthodoxy becomes tomorrow’s embarrassment. But values endure. They carried our grandparents through war and famine. They carried parents through nights of worry and days of sacrifice. They carry us still, if we let them.
The tragedy is that we now often confuse decency with weakness, compassion with naivety, femininity with oppression, masculinity with toxicity. Ideology has twisted the lens so thoroughly that we forget what is right in front of us. And yet — the human heart still knows. Children instinctively know fairness. Lovers instinctively long for loyalty. Families instinctively crave stability. These are not theories. They are truths written into us. They are in the core of our being.
Perhaps the real challenge is not learning new values but recovering the courage to live the ones we already know. To choose kindness when outrage is easier. To choose forgiveness when revenge feels justified. To honour difference instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. To act with decency when the crowd is jeering.
Because in the end, we will not be remembered for the slogans we repeated. We will be remembered for the values we embodied. And unlike ideologies, values do not expire. They are not tools of control. They are the quiet foundations that allow us to live with dignity, meaning, and humanity.
Not Preaching, Just Sharing
I have no interest in pretending I’ve lived without contradictions. My own journey has been full of detours, wrong turns, and lessons learned the hard way. I’ve made mistakes — some small, some costly. I’ve believed things that later proved hollow. I’ve tried to force myself into roles that didn’t fit, convinced at the time that they were necessary.
So I am not writing this from a pedestal. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I don’t even claim to have the neat, tidy version of the truth. What I do believe, though, is that with age and experience comes a certain clarity. A clarity about what ideology is and what truth is. A clarity about what is dogma and what is value.
Ideology changes with the wind. Values endure. Ideology shouts. Values whisper. Ideology demands obedience. Values invite us to live with dignity, integrity, and meaning.
And if there is anything my life has taught me, it is this: no ideology will ever substitute for the simple, stubborn strength of values. They are the things that carry us when theories collapse, when slogans lose their shine, when the noise of the world grows deafening.
So no, this is not preaching. It is simply sharing. Sharing what I’ve learned, what I’ve unlearned, and what I now hold on to.
Because perhaps the future will not belong to the loudest ideology, but to the quiet endurance of those who still dare to live by values.
🎶My Song for you
Land Of Confusion by Genesis immediately came to mind while writing this post and this is an amazing live performance of this song. As always, play it LOUD!
For more good music, go to this Spotify playlist where you can find all the songs from the Change & Evolve Letters!
📚My Poem for you
Is by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850—1919)
The Worlds Needs
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs.
👀Impression
I hope my children will forgive me for posting this picture of them but it is one of my favourites…❤️
What values do you hold on to — even when the world tells you they’re outdated?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, leave a ❤️ or send me a message. I always love hearing from you.
Wishing you a peaceful weekend wherever you are.
Yours
Tanja 🤗
PS. You can now also find my podcast on Spotify
Change & Evolve and feel free to get in touch
What an amazing post Tanja. It really is a tour de force and I have passed on to my nieces. I have copied this section for my future use:
Kindness restores dignity where ideology dehumanises.
Chivalry honours difference instead of flattening it.
Forgiveness breaks cycles of bitterness no theory can fix.
Femininity affirms the beauty of womanhood rather than erasing it.
Compassion reminds us that we belong to one another.
Common sense cuts through dogma with the clarity of the obvious.
Decency anchors us when the world tilts toward madness.
Thanks so much for taking the time to share your journey.