Hey friend,

For most of my life, I could have told you exactly who I was, no hesitation.

I was the helper. The one who knows what you need before you’ve finished your sentence. The one who reads the room, adjusts, anticipates, smooths it all over. If you’d handed me a personality test, I’d have answered every question fast and confident and come back the same result every time: the giver. The selfless one. The one whose worth lives in being needed (at least when I was unhealthy).

And it fit. That’s the part that still gets me. It fit so well I never once thought to question it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why it fit so well — and I get into all of it in the new episode of The Joyful Rebel this week.

It fit because I’d become those things. Not because they were the truest thing about me, but because somewhere along the way I learned that being them kept me safe, kept me liked, kept everyone around me comfortable.

There’s a difference between a personality and a survival strategy. And I’d spent four decades treating one as the other.

Here’s the part I’m a little embarrassed to admit out loud. (So naturally, I’m putting it in an email to thousands of you.)

My joy — the childlike, light-up-at-everything, probably-a-little-too-much joy — I spent years trying to pray it out of me. I’d decided somewhere that if I showed up too bright, too loud, too playful, people would think I was childish. So I dimmed her. I performed the calmer, more useful version. And I called that my personality.

I came back a completely different woman.

(If you know the Enneagram — I went from a helpful 2 to a boisterous 7. If you don’t, just know I went from “the compassionate helper” to “the one whose actual gift to the world is joy.” Plot twist of the decade.)

And then, because I apparently cannot leave a thread un-pulled, I took five different assessments, fed every result into AI, and asked it one question: where do these all point to the same woman?

I fully braced for it to expose me as a fraud. Instead it came back with — authenticity, resilience, joy, whimsy, creativity, courage. She’d been there the whole time. I’d just been answering as someone else.

That’s the quiet heart of what I call Good Girl Ghosting™ — not only disappearing in relationships, but disappearing so smoothly at the level of who you are that you call the survival version your personality.

I hadn’t been managing my personality all those years.

I’d been suppressing my calling.

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This Week's Rebel Minute

Is This True, Or Is This Automatic?

Your first answer isn’t always your truth. Sometimes it’s just your training — the response the survival version learned to give so fast it feels like instinct.

The good news is you can catch it. Not by trying harder, but by slowing down for one breath and asking the question that started this whole unraveling for me.

So here’s the one worth getting curious about this week:

where are you still answering life as the woman you learned to be, instead of the one you actually are?

Three questions to take with you:

1. Where does your “first answer” come out so fast you’ve never once questioned it?
2. What’s one gift you’ve been quietly calling a liability — too much, too loud, too sensitive, too you?
3. If you trusted that gift completely, what’s one thing you’d do differently this week?

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Your Permission Slips This Week

You’re allowed to be a different woman than the one you learned to be.

You’re allowed to take the test slowly.

You’re allowed to change your answer.

You’re allowed to be the joyful one, not just the useful one.

You don’t have to keep being good at being who you were trained to be.

Childlike isn’t childish. Your joy was never the problem.

You weren’t made to be good at disappearing. You were made to radiate.

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🎧 This Week on The Joyful Rebel Podcast

This week’s episode is What If Your Personality Isn’t Yours? — The Survival Story Wearing Your Face. It’s a Rebel Practice Session about the day I found out I’d been ghosting myself for forty years — and the one question that gave me back.

→ Listen Here

→ Watch on YouTube

On The Petal & The Plot

This week’s essay, The Survival Story Wearing My Face, goes deeper into the whole unraveling.

Paid subscribers get the part underneath the part — what I found when I fed five assessments into AI, the result I fought the hardest (Rebel — of course), the Pinkie-Toe practice for taking a test like you’re meeting yourself for the first time, and a journal prompt for finding the woman under the survival story.

Because the essay is the story. The paid tier is the excavation.

→ Read The Survival Story Wearing Your Face on Substack​

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Favorite Find This Week

This one’s on theme, and I didn’t even plan it that way.

This week I reorganized my closet — not by what’s “useful,” not by what “goes,” but by how each piece actually makes me feel when I put it on. Perimenopause and Menopause are real, y'all, and some things I loved and felt incredible in a few months ago just ain't cutting it anymore.

So, I pulled everything out and made myself answer one question for each thing: does this feel like me and spark my joy? Or does this feel like a costume I bought to belong somewhere...or for a woman with a different body?

Friends. The “costume-meets-before-body” pile was humbling.

See, I did the deep closet work last year. For years it was pretty much split right down the middle — half of it dressing to be attractive, half of it dressing to blend in with the other moms at drop-off. Nobody assigned me either one. That was all me, performing two different versions of a woman, and neither one was actually her. (See? It’s the whole episode, hanging on velvet hangers.)

What’s remained after the first shift was so much smaller—and so much more me. What's remained after the second shift even more more. The me I am today...because as it turns out, we never stop growing and changing and rediscovering who we are.

It also turns out I’m “whimsical boho next door with vintage flare,” which might be the most Rachel sentence I’ve said out loud in a year. I feel like myself in it. I want to twirl in it.

My favorite find this week wasn’t a thing at all. It was finally dressing like the woman I actually am.

So here’s what I’d love to hear — and you can walk through whichever door fits:

What’s a surprising discovery you’ve made about yourself in your current season?

And/Or what’s a surprising tool or experience that taught you something deep about yourself?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Go find yourself in a quiet room this week, friend. She’s been waiting — and she is so much more fun than the version you’ve been performing.

With Joy,

Rachel

P.S. -It's Here!! The Rebel Response™ Mini Kit — the exact words for the moments you freeze or hand yourself over — is officially live this week. It’s $7 on Amazon, or just hit reply with the word KIT and I’ll send you the link. It’s the smallest, most doable first step toward catching that automatic answer in real time.

P.P.S. — If you take one of those assessments this week, do it slowly. Get somewhere that isn’t full of your roles — your car, your closet, a park bench — and read each question like you’re meeting yourself for the first time. That’s where she’s hiding.

If someone forwarded this to you and you want your own, come find me at RachelHarrisOnline. Be a Rebel!