Embracing Personal Power Quotes

“After a lifetime of contorting myself to fit into boxes never meant for the likes of me—it’s true. I got tired of feeling ashamed all the time. It is wildly subversive to say that I no longer feel ashamed—not in body, soul, beliefs, or movement through the world, not for who, what, or how I am. I do not hold an apology for the ways, hows, and whos of my work, my desire, and my love. There is an ownership of power in this simple fact that refuses to fit into words. But if you see me, you’ll know it.
Sovereignty. That’s what I call it. Somehow, through all the twists and turns and fuckery of this life, I became a woman who is sovereign unto herself.

Does this mean I’ve beaten all my demons and that I don’t give a fuck, and that everything is peachy keen all the time? Oh, hell no. Not even close. I am a woman who will forever be grappling with herself—pushing and growing and expanding and contracting, learning and unlearning, and tripping over the same lessons 50 times or more on the way to integration. It gets messy in this brain, heart, and body of mine. That’s just how I’m made.

But the fact remains that no person, relationship, religion, belief system, or organization holds me to any agreement that negates my contract with myself.

Fact: Your shame serves nobody. In fact, where there is shame, there is no pleasure. It is your pleasure that the universe spirals eternally toward.

There comes a time in human evolution when a woman gets tired of asking permission to live, breathe, be, and love in the most honest and true way. When she stops looking outside of herself, she writes her own permission slip and doesn’t look back. A time when she is ready to own her story. Remove the masks. Shed the shame. Speak and write and live as a human sovereign unto herself.

Are you ready to be subversive? How about revolutionary? Is this finally your time?”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Life can sometimes seem an endless experience in compromise, in bending into the break, in the give + take + lead + follow of interconnection. This is all so good and necessary to building a community of souls, trusting that we are not in this world on our own, learning the power of leaning into the collective good. And yet. There are spaces and places and ideals in my life that are not open to discussion, not up for negotiation, not an invitation to debate or argue or compromise. Leading this list are the terms of my own freedom, the ways I have learned to know and name my ownership of this one life I am living. I have come to name this sense of ownership my personal sovereignty. It is mine and mine alone. The container of this sovereignty—what it includes and leaves behind, the way it moves through the world, how it dances with others—all of this may change a million times over, but that is mine and mine alone to decide.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc