This audio recording took me back. It took me back to the much larger circle of people I socialized with in my 20's. I'm grateful it was full offor t
This audio recording took me back. It took me back to the much larger circle of people I socialized with in my 20’s. I’m grateful it was full offor that time because there were glorious moments.
The decade of your 20s is, for many, a time of self-reflection.
In your early 20s, people are still gathering a self. Everybody is trying on language, politics, religion, romance, spirituality, careers, aesthetics, diets, friend groups, and futures. One by one, your friends make it known that they are doing a new thing.
You are happy for them.
They found something. They feel steadier. They have a community now. They have words for things they used to feel but could not explain. You can see the relief in them. You may even celebrate it because belonging is a beautiful thing when it gives people breath.
Things make sense, now.
But sometimes, depending on how close they are to you, you also get a script.
Not just “This helped me.”
But, “This is how women are supposed to live now.”
“This is how women should dress.”
“This is what women should eat.”
“This is what women should cook.”
“This is how women should speak.”
“This is what women should accept.”
“This is what women should stop questioning.”
“This is what a good woman does.”
And that is when the air changes.
Because now their belonging has become your assignment. Too.
Their new certainty comes with instructions for your body, your voice, your appetite, your clothing, your relationships, your womanhood, your boundaries, and sometimes even your safety.
That is when friendship becomes quieter inside you. Not because you are not happy they found meaning. But because you begin to realize, “I can love this person and still refuse the script they brought back with them.”
That is one reason friend groups become more concise with age.
Not necessarily smaller from bitterness.
Smaller from discernment on the part of all parties.
By a certain age, many women no longer seek a crowd, realizing that every crowd has beliefs and expectations about women. But then, as you age, you develop your own, and maybe you like them just fine right where they are.
There is a grief in that, but also a voluminous blessing.
Because a concise circle can be a mercy.
A smaller table can mean fewer performances.
Fewer scripts.
Fewer negotiations with people who only respect your womanhood when it is useful to their beliefs.
And maybe that is the quiet wisdom age gives us: you can be happy someone found a path and still refuse to let them make your life the road.
Generally speaking, women have never lacked love. We have carried kindness and compassion through kitchens, churches, courtrooms, sickrooms, families, and places where no one even stopped to ask who was carrying us.
But there is a difference between love and management.
In this powerful audio reflection, Tonya GJ Prince explores how women are often expected to become service workers for someone else’s comfort while swallowing their own discomfort in silence. Through the biblical story of Mary and Martha, this recording asks a necessary question: What happens when a woman chooses herself and refuses to be sent back into a role that keeps her only useful but unfed, unconsidered, and unprotected?
This reflection is for women who have been told that boundaries are cruelty, discernment is rebellion, discomfort should be ignored, and goodness means abandoning themselves.
A woman can be loving and still say no.
A woman can be kind and still name harm.
A woman can be compassionate and still protect her privacy, her peace, her body, her children, her faith, and her soul.
Because kindness without consent becomes compliance.
Compassion without boundaries becomes extraction.
And love without truth becomes a cage with flowers painted on the bars.
Listen when you need a steady reminder: your goodness was never meant to be measured by how easily you can be persuaded to disappear.