At 35 years old, I got my first wake-up call about the need for Self-Care. I don’t mean the self-care with a small letter “s” and “c.” I mean the Self-Care with big, fat capital letters that scream at you from the four winds. I mean the kind of Self-Care that requires a total re-evaluation of how you operate in life and work. This was the kind of wake-up call that stopped me in my tracks.

Like most healthy 30-somethings, I felt pretty invincible. I was driven, determined, and successful in my acting and singing career. When I was exhausted, I pushed through it. When I was stressed, I drank, or slept in, or went for a massage. There was a frivolity and disassociation with pain in my body, because I was filled with passion and a drive to succeed.

This is what I saw in the women around me too. I was surrounded by driven, passionate, successful women who managed to secure positions of leadership by developing valuable management skills, work habits, and attitudes for success. All of these attributes were masculine in nature. In order for women to be successful within the masculine systems and structures of government, industry, law, academia, medicine, and entertainment, we had to fit in to the well-oiled machine.