Not Everything Is Meant to Be Born

You have to choose what lives in your body and what doesn't get the chance.

Photo by Kato Blackmore 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

I have more ideas than I know what to do with.

That’s not a flex.

It’s a liability.

It’s not creative chaos—it’s saturation.

I’m full of essays, programs, home decor visions, scripts, pottery projects, trip itineraries, personal epiphanies, emotional weather, conversation histories—and a thousand open loops in my own relationships.

At some point, what others might call brilliance or the gift of being supremely feminine simply becomes noise.

Internal noise.

Sensory overload.

I can easily get myself into states where it feels like I’ve made some weird soup out of my life and work—no one asked for it, I don’t want to eat it either and I’m too tired to clean it up.

Because when you’re capable of tracking multiple conversational threads, and you live in a body that is turned on and tuned in, it starts to feel like everything could become something.

And I get why so many women, by midlife, abandon the whole damn thing.

Especially the ones who always felt a little derailed by the experience of being female in the first place. They stop feeling. They stop wanting.

Because caring at the level I do isn’t particularly productive in the real world. And the world makes very little space for the actual inner contradictions a woman lives with, day in and day out, when she hasn’t numbed herself.

No one models for us how to express without blame. How to feel without writing a story. How to let go of things we can’t ever forget.

It gets harder and harder to convince yourself as you age that your emotions should be managed by a set of switches that other people, religions and self-help books control: feel this - but definitely not that. When you feel this one - the big red button one - don’t tell anyone, hide it in a complaint about something else or drink it away.

The world isn’t built for being human, but it is particularly poorly designed for being female. Or for my experience of being female that is.

I am not sure I really slept for eight years. Three pregnancies, three births, the feeding, the blood, the crying, and the hormone firehose of it all. In those seasons I still needed to de-escalate people, organize and facilitate American middle class life.

I’ll be honest looking back I really don’t know how I pulled it off.

And while my situation and the way I feel things in general may be extreme, I know I’m not alone in this.

A lot of people—especially women—reach a point where they feel completely overwhelmed by all the things they believe need to be born through them. They feel flattened out by the never ending list of ways to become and tasks to take care of.

But here’s the truth: not everything should live. Not everything needs to be said.

“I got a hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you.”
—Taylor Swift

Here’s where I am now:

I’ve dreamed. I’ve built. I’ve measured. I have a database of over 500 half-drafted essays. I’ve created things that people love and some things that confused people. I’ve raised three children. I’ve done work that’s changed lives. I’ve raised money for important causes and I have made financial mistakes too. I’ve painted almost every inch of my three-story house myself. Some rooms twice.

But being a constant generator comes at a cost.

Giving birth to so many things can leave you energetically broke and emotionally entangled in things you were never meant to sustain.

At this point a lot of women just start burning things down: the relationships; the business moves that were just about to pay back; the house routines and the social clubs all must go.

But it isn’t doesn’t have to go that way. Burning everything down is very lonely and it isn’t your only option - even if it’s the only one that’s ever been modeled for you.

I’ve realized something about myself that might matter to you too:

I’ve spent years birthing what’s possible.

But I rarely pause to ask what’s sustainable.

There’s a pattern in my life that I can’t ignore:
The things that feel the most exciting at first—spiritually aligned, emotionally charged, creatively brilliant—are often the ones I don’t finish. Or I can’t find a container for them that actually works long-term.

The relationship that was so immediately right but burns out just as fast as it began. The thrilling business idea that I propel into, only to feel the heavy weight of it being one more thing that takes more than it gives.

Meanwhile, the things that bring money, real-world stability, support or physical connection often feel confusing or clunky.

Like a second language I never learned enough to become fluent in.

So my body is fed from one place, and my soul from another.

And I am the one who keeps agreeing to the split. I am the one that keeps creating the split. If I burn it all down, I will just rebuild it with new characters.

This isn’t about focus. I can focus.
This isn’t about men, the economy or my childhood wounds either.

It’s about the grief of letting go.

Letting go of ideas and connections that feel so alive with potential but knowing that at this time they aren’t for me.

It’s about facing the fact that brilliance and high energy and attraction aren’t enough.

If I don’t ground a few parts of the massive load I’m carrying, I’m not actually in service either. I’m just living inside the storm of my own potential.

I’m creating chaos for anyone that I bring into my storm too.

That’s my mirror.

Maybe it’s yours too?

“Don’t let the gold dust fool you, love—it’s still just dust if you don’t shape it.”
—Brandi Carlisle

I don’t need to be in a season of perpetual ideation.
I don’t need to numb my flow either - that would kill everything the people in my life love about me.

I need to be in a season of sorting.

Not asking “What could this be?”
But “What belongs in the next version of my actual life?”

What do I want to see on my calendar?
What do I want to feel after a client call or an email?
Where do I want my money to come from?
And who do I want to keep touching me?

I’m not interested in being high-frequency and low-impact.
I’m not here to dazzle people who never hire me.
I’m not chasing attention at the cost of commitment.

And I’m done letting relationships that have no path to embodiment feed me emotionally and energetically only to float away as unformed as they landed.

But, unlike my past, this isn’t about closure.

It’s about choosing what gets my blood next. I think a matured version of the feminine is highly selective. When she does choose something it gets her full effort and protection, so she’s very careful in the choosing.

To actually become selective you have to leave the theater and get down into the nuts and bolts of what is and is not working in your life. What is and is not paying you dollar in your business. Who is at the dinner table with you and who is only a character in your phone.

“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen
(And Fiona Apple, who added: “Yeah, but too many cracks and the whole thing shatters.”)

If I could take my sweet, idealistic 19-year-old self by the cheeks, I’d say:

Baby, you are pure mother energy.
You see potential everywhere.
There aren’t many people like you left.

But not everything you’re curious about is meant to be born through you.
Not everyone you could love should get access to your heart.

Be careful what you bring into form—a life like yours can get so full of shiny things or things you are trying to fix that there’s no room left for what actually feeds you back.

Looking back, I think what would’ve been hardest for me to accept is how much failure and loss live in those directions. I was so heavily conditioned to be good, be pretty, be smart, be nice, be helpful, be thankful, make the most of it—that I was never really given permission to say the things I needed to say most.

Things like:
I’m not willing to offer that to you.
That isn’t enough ‘money’.
I can’t do that—but I could do this instead.
I like things like this.
I do not like things like that.
This is important to me, that isn’t.
I need more time.
I don’t want to wait.
I don’t have the capacity for you.
I think this will work—but it means I have to let that go.
I feel this very inconvenient and possibly unfair thing that needs to be considered.

This communication sorts life. Even if you don’t ever say it out loud. Even if these are only thoughts you express to yourself. They sort.

No one taught me how to sort.
So I became this wide, unfiltered funnel for whatever anyone needed from me, wanted from me—and sometimes I just pulled in what was shiny, or what matched an old wound.

As I’ve grown more into myself, what started as a “healing” journey quietly became a “being my own damn self” journey. And something started happening with men that was hard to explain.

Things got slower. Or they blew up almost immediately.
By date two, the reasons it wouldn’t work were already on the table.

For a time, I thought that meant I was doing something wrong.
But now I see it for what it was: growth. I was sorting.

I was forming actual preferences. I was developing tastes, instincts, and boundaries that made me less of a fit for certain people. I wasn’t failing—I was facilitating clearer, faster misalignment so I could move toward something real.

I don’t think all these pseudo-partnerships work—the kind where you give someone full access to your life, call it “love,” and hope things evolve. They require pretty much nothing real from either person so the actual choosing sometimes never really happens.

Sometimes they do morph into marriage.
But more often, it’s just rings and rituals layered over a foundation that never really held.

Next comes the move. The business. The baby. The couples retreat.
Some new momentum to distract from the quiet knowing that something’s always been off.

That’s not a popular opinion in a world obsessed with subscriptions and upgrades, where everything is month-to-month and nothing requires a real choice.

But I’m holding it anyway.

Because I posted something today that feels more true to me than almost anything else I’ve written this year:

Being able to see potential isn’t the same as being the one meant to carry it through.

I’m done anchoring my life in possibility and high energy alone.

I’m building now—only—with what feeds me back.

If it’s not real, it doesn’t run me.

And if it is?

I’ll make room for it—with both feet on the ground.

Even if it means letting go of everything that was just beautiful noise.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.