Who Does She Think She Is?: Becoming the Woman I Needed When I Was a Girl

Some women learn to shrink before they learn to read.Before they have words for it, before they understand they're doing it, they begin making themselves smaller. Quieter. Easier. Less. They learn the trick of taking up less space than they need so the room around them stays comfortable.By the time they're grown, the shrinking has become so practiced it feels like personality. They call themselves easygoing. They call themselves the strong one. They call themselves low-maintenance. They have no idea they ever decided to be any of these things.Who Does She Think She Is? is the story of one woman's reckoning with that question — and an invitation for every woman who has ever asked it of herself.Through deeply personal storytelling, CeWyon Chandler-Ward traces the roots of the silent rules women learn early: don't take up too much space, don't shine too brightly, don't let them see you break. She names the four-year-old who walked herself out of kindergarten when the room she fought to enter didn't want her in it. The teenager who learned that survival required disappearing in plain sight. The professional woman who built escape routes for a living and called it ambition. The mother who decided her daughters would never have to learn what she had spent decades unlearning.This is not a recovery memoir. It is not a self-help book disguised as a story. It is the truth about what happens to women who learn early to make themselves smaller — and the long way back to the woman who was always there, waiting.If you have ever caught yourself shrinking and wondered when you started — this book is for you.If you have ever asked what's wrong with me? and quietly suspected the question itself was the wound — this book is for you.If the woman you became is quieter, smaller, calmer, or more agreeable than the girl you remember being — this book is for you.She knows exactly who she is. And here she is. Read more