Your circle isn't too small. It's too crowded.
There is a woman I know who spent years surrounded by people who loved her — or said they did. Every room she walked into, someone was happy to see her. Every decision she made, someone was nodding. She was never alone and never, not once, told the truth. The nodding was the problem. Approval is not the same as loyalty, and a room full of yes is one of the loneliest places a woman can stand.
What you need is not more people. What you need is three — maybe two, possibly four, but you know the number — who will look you in the eye when you are wrong, who will say the hard thing without performing the hard thing, who will love you enough to risk your comfort. That is rare. That is worth protecting. Everything else is noise you have been calling community.
The women who flatter you are not on your side. They are on the side of keeping you comfortable, which is also the side of keeping you exactly where you are. You were not built for stasis. You were built for something that requires people around you who believe in what you are becoming more than they fear your disappointment.
I cleared my circle once — not with drama, not with announcements, just with distance and the quiet decision to stop performing closeness I didn't feel. It was uncomfortable for about a season. Then it was clarifying in a way I had not expected. The women who remained were the ones who had always been telling me the truth. I had simply been too crowded to hear them.
You do not owe anyone access to you. Proximity is not the same as intimacy. A full table is not the same as a true one.
The size of your circle is not a measure of your worth. The quality of what is spoken inside it is.
Be the woman who chooses depth over count, who guards her inner world the way she guards anything she has worked hard to build, who is not afraid to let a crowded room get quiet.
— Kitty
