I Know My Own Waters: An October Reflection on Letting Go of the Good Girl
At the beginning of this year, I carried an intention with me:
Let go of the Good Girl.
At the time, I thought I understood what that meant.
I knew the obvious places she lived — people-pleasing, keeping the peace, making myself smaller, worrying about disappointing people.
What I didn't know was how many quieter places she had learned to hide.
This year has shown them to me.
She was there when I questioned something I knew because someone else sounded more certain.
When I felt the need to explain myself until I was understood.
When I wondered whether I needed permission to change direction.
When I measured my choices against what made sense to everyone else before asking whether they made sense to me.
And life gave me plenty of opportunities to notice her.
There have been plans that didn't unfold the way I expected.
My body forced me to stop when I had other ideas.
My business changed shape.
Things I thought I was going to pursue fell away, while opportunities I hadn't planned for appeared.
I've had to make decisions in my work, my relationships, my motherhood and my own inner life without always having someone outside of me confirm that I was making the right one.
And somewhere along the way, letting go of the Good Girl stopped looking like becoming louder or harder.
It started looking like trusting myself.
Then October arrived.
At the beginning of each month, and with it the card I'd pulled back in December -
October's was the Elder of Water.
In this deck, the Elder corresponds with the traditional King. So underneath the Elder of Water sits the familiar archetype of the King of Cups: emotional maturity, steadiness, wisdom.
But it was the image that kept pulling me in.
An elder fisherman sits in his little boat at dawn. He is surrounded by water, a seal swimming nearby. The guidebook describes him as someone intimately familiar with the tides and moods of the ocean.
He has spent a lifetime in relationship with these waters.
And that landed differently for me.
He isn't standing on the shore asking someone else whether the water is safe.
He knows the water because he has lived with it.
He knows the tides because he has watched them.
He knows the current because he has felt it.
He knows how to steer because he has steered before.
There is a quiet authority in that.
And maybe that's what this year has been teaching me.
I have lived long enough to know some things.
I know what it feels like when I am abandoning myself.
I know what happens when I keep explaining after I've already said what needed to be said.
I know the difference between considering another person's perspective and automatically assuming they must know better than I do.
I know when something that once fit no longer does.
I know what happens inside me when I say yes while some quieter part of me is saying no.
I know my own waters better than I sometimes give myself credit for.
The Good Girl believed being good meant accommodating, understanding, smoothing things over, giving the benefit of the doubt and, sometimes, surrendering her own knowing in the process.
The Elder offered me something different.
I can listen deeply without abandoning myself.
I can understand someone without agreeing with them.
I can be compassionate without making myself responsible for another person's feelings.
I can change my mind.
I can choose differently.
I can let someone misunderstand me.
I can hear another person's certainty without allowing it to become more authoritative than my own experience.
And perhaps most importantly:
I don't have to prove that I know these waters.
I can simply row my own boat.
That felt like October's message.
Until apparently October had something else to say.
The card on my desk
A few days later, I was cleaning my desk.
Nothing ceremonial. No reading. I wasn't shuffling cards or asking a question.
I was just tidying up when I noticed a card sitting face down.
Now, I don't tend to believe much in coincidence.
And before I even turned it over, I had this feeling:
This belongs to the October reading.
So I flipped it.
Two of Water.
I laughed.
Of course it was another Water card.
I put it beside the Elder.
And before I'd even opened the guidebook, something about the two images caught me.
They looked like they belonged together.
I started imagining them as an old married couple.
There he is, out on the water in his boat.
He looks perfectly content.
This is his world. He knows what he's doing. He has somewhere to go, something to tend, a relationship with the sea that belongs entirely to him.
And then there she is.
She's standing beside a waterfall with her arms wrapped around a great big white dog, absolutely delighted.
She isn't sitting at home waiting for him.
She isn't staring toward the horizon wondering when he'll return.
She has a life.
She has joy.
She has companionship.
She belongs to herself.
And yet when I put the cards beside each other, I could imagine him eventually rowing home.
I could imagine her greeting him.
I could imagine them sitting together later, each with stories from the day.
They belong together.
And neither one appears to have disappeared into the other.
Then I opened the guidebook.
Me and you.
The Twos in this deck carry themes of balance, receptivity, attraction, polarity, reflection — and choice.
But there was one description that stopped me.
The movement from one to two is described as the movement from self into relationship:
Me and you. The self and the not-self.
Oh.
Because trusting myself when I'm alone isn't necessarily the difficult part.
The real practice begins when there is another person in the room.
Someone with their own feelings.
Their own needs.
Their own perspective.
Their own expectations.
Their own certainty.
That's where the Good Girl has historically been most convincing.
She tells me that being loving means understanding.
That being kind means accommodating.
That being fair means considering every possible perspective.
That keeping connection sometimes requires smoothing the rough edges.
None of those things are inherently wrong.
In fact, some of them are qualities I genuinely love about myself.
The problem comes when me and you quietly becomes you instead of me.
When understanding you requires doubting myself.
When accommodating you requires abandoning myself.
When keeping the peace means silencing something I know.
When there is so much room for your feelings, needs and perspective that I quietly vacate the room.
And suddenly the Elder's message became bigger.
I know my own waters.
But can I continue knowing them when I'm standing beside someone who knows theirs?
And then there was another layer.
In this particular deck, the Twos are connected to The Priestess — the High Priestess.
So, naturally, I went down that rabbit hole too.
Her themes include intuition, inner knowing, autonomy and listening to the inner voice.
Her shadow includes denying or devaluing those ways of knowing. Ignoring intuition. Dishonouring feelings.
And there it was again.
The same message arriving through another door.
Trust what you know.
But now there was relationship wrapped around it.
Not:
Trust yourself instead of trusting anyone else.
Not:
Choose yourself and reject the other.
Not:
If someone disagrees with you, dig your heels in harder.
Something much more nuanced.
Can I remain myself while standing beside you?
That may be one of the biggest things letting go of the Good Girl has asked of me this year.
Because I don't want to become someone who doesn't care deeply.
I don't want to lose my curiosity about another person's experience.
I don't want to stop considering perspectives other than my own.
I don't want independence at the expense of intimacy.
I want both.
Me and you.
I can listen deeply without abandoning myself.
I can honour someone else's experience without making it more authoritative than my own.
I can love someone and disagree with them.
I can change my mind because someone has shown me something I hadn't considered — without changing it simply because their certainty makes me question mine.
I can compromise without disappearing.
I can make room for another person without vacating the room myself.
I can belong deeply to the people I love and still belong to myself.
And maybe that's why I can't stop looking at those two cards sitting beside one another.
The Elder knows his waters.
She knows hers.
He doesn't need her standing on shore directing his boat.
She doesn't need him beside the waterfall in order to experience joy.
And when they come together, neither one has to surrender the life that exists within them.
Maybe letting go of the Good Girl was never going to end with me becoming someone else.
Maybe it was always going to bring me back to the woman underneath her.
A woman capable of loving deeply without disappearing.
A woman who can listen to another and still hear herself.
A woman who can say:
I know my own waters.
And then turn toward someone she loves and say:
Tell me about yours.
Perhaps that's what healthy togetherness really is.
Not two people becoming one.
Two whole people choosing one another, again and again, without asking either one to disappear. As always, thanks for reading. Always,
Juniper
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