Dr. Maya Shankar

So there's hope for selves.

Those selves reflect our dreams and aspirations.

There's feared selves.

Those reflect our worries and anxieties.

And then there's our expected selves.

Those are the ones that we just think are most likely to happen, irrespective of whether they're good or bad.

And

What our brains can do actually is overly constrain us in the face of a change when it comes to the possible selves we now imagine.

And that constraining can happen as a result of stereotypes or assumptions we make about people who are in certain situations.

So we might have biases around the type of possible selves that are available to a caregiver.

or someone who's just lost their job, who's unemployed, or someone who's a college dropout, or someone who is a teen mom, or in my case, a woman who's child-free.

And what I realized from my whole experience is that I was influenced by all of these societal norms and pressures around being a child-free woman.

And it actually required challenging a lot of the assumptions that I'd carried as a child.

I mean, one thing change can do is that it can serve as a point of revelation.

It reveals to you

all these beliefs that you were laboring under that may have been previously hidden from view.

And now that they're in the light, you have this rare moment to challenge them and to think, well, do I actually believe this?

Do I actually believe that you cannot live a full life if you don't have kids?

Do I actually believe that a woman's worth should be tied to motherhood?

I don't actually think those things, but it can take a lot of unwinding.