Excerpt from a YouTube interview (Dean Graziosi channel) featuring Lori Harder. In this segment Harder describes realizing she wanted more from life but feared family rejection; she sought out spaces where she could express her true self, gradually finding her voice and building the courage to have small conversations with family about her choices.
I was just thinking you were talking about the person who's suffering in silence. I absolutely have been in that situation where all of a sudden you wake up and you realize there's more that you want to do, but then your reality doesn't match where you want to go. Your family's opinions, their ideas, their ideals. There's such an unspoken conversation that we're in that if you go and do something different, we don't know if we'll be accepted. So when I woke up in that situation, it was like, what is my family going to think I was that person that was like, how do I figure this out when I feel like if I go and do the thing I want, I'm going to be rejected from the people that I care about the most? What I started to do is just find the places where it would be normal for me to talk about who I really was and how I really felt. And I slowly started spending a little bit more time there. It allowed me to find my voice. It gave me enough time to kind of find who I was and my voice and what I really believed. And it made me get strong enough to be the person who could maybe go back and have these small conversations.
