Most of us are not walking around with our own sense of self. We are walking around with a secondhand one,  a secondhand interesting, a secondhand valuable, a secondhand worthy,  all of it made by somebody else, handed to us, and carried so long we forgot it was never ours to begin with.

Toni Morrison called it "secondhand loneliness" in Sula. This episode extends that to the whole self.

This episode is The Invitation, a relaunch, a podcast about art, film, writing, culture, and the women building first-person lives. In this episode, we get into what decentering men actually is underneath the TikTok caption, why it is not primarily about men at all, and what it actually looks like when a woman stops locating her value in someone else's confirmation and moves the source inside.

This week's tool is the Permission Slip. 

new episodes every week. Find the full show notes, essays, and community at charliestoolbox.com or substack at charliestoolbox.substack.com

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Tools and stories to help you choose yourself in a world that socializes you not to.

Your sovereignty is your foundation. My role is to help you use it as a launchpad.

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