Meet Madame X

Fifteen years into an unhappy marriage, I confided to a friend that I was contemplating a divorce. Her response was not support, but a warning.

“Be careful,” she said. “At our age, the dating game is a massacre. Don’t blow up whatever cushiness you have. You’ll end up alone.”

Cushiness? Really?

The word implied that my life was soft, that I had it easy, that the ache I was describing was somehow a luxury problem. It suggested that my unhappiness didn’t count, that comfort, however deadening, should be enough. That I should be grateful.

I didn’t yet have language for why the word felt so wrong. I only knew that her voice didn’t feel entirely like hers. It felt borrowed. As if something else were speaking through her, and echoing inside me.

Coursing through the veins of every human being is a force that wants us alive. Alive in the deepest sense, not merely breathing, but expanding. Creating. Risking. Becoming more fully ourselves.

And there is another force with a very different agenda.

Psychiatrist Phil Stutz calls this opposing force Part X. It works against life by stopping it, by halting forward motion, severing vitality, and convincing us that safety is worth more than aliveness.

While Part X exists in everyone, it does not affect everyone in the same way.

Our culture tells women that our worth is based on age, fertility, and beauty. Over time, we internalize these messages, and a voice inside us becomes the enforcer of Part X’s agenda. I call this voice Madame X.

Madame X tells us to settle, to shrink, to call self-betrayal prudence.

When my friend urged me not to give up my “cushy” life, she was speaking with the voice of Madame X.

Part X is cunning. It dresses fear up as wisdom. It disguises paralysis as maturity.

But freedom does not come from choosing comfort over truth.

It comes from refusing to obey the force that asks us to trade aliveness for a small life.

In my next post, you’ll learn tools to shut Madame X down…