I don't think I've spent my life being the nice girl. If anything, I've questioned things a lot, and spoken up plenty, standing up for my kids when something at school felt unjust, always the one rooting for the underdog, wanting to pull people in rather than leave them standing outside the circle. That's never been the hard part for me.
The hard part has been the relationships where speaking up cost too much, where the price of being loved was being a certain way, dancing around someone's expectations just to keep the peace. I did that in one relationship in particular, for a long time, right up until the day it finally did cost me the relationship anyway. That's the trade so many of us were taught to make: harmony over honesty, keep the peace even if it costs you a piece of yourself. And here's the part nobody tells you. Sometimes you make that trade for years, and you lose the relationship regardless. That's a real cost. It deserves to be named plainly, not smoothed over.
That's a different story to "I was quiet." It's closer to this: I picked my battles, and some of those choices cost me something too.
A generation writing a new script
My mum's generation had one script. She stayed home, cooked, ran the house, loved and raised the family. It was clear, even if it wasn't always easy.
Mine has been a different kind of hard. We've had families and juggled work, moved through male-dominated rooms and workplaces built long before anyone thought to ask what women might need from them, and tried to be seen while still working out what "being seen" was even meant to look like on our terms. It's been a genuine balancing act, standing in structures that weren't built with us in mind and trying to reshape them anyway.
And for so many women my age, in those mid life years, that balancing act has meant real decisions. Leaving marriages that no longer fit. Going back to work, building our own income, deciding what we will and won't tolerate at a stage of life when we finally have the standing to decide at all.
The tides have turned
The scales have shifted for women of my generation, and I think that's worth celebrating rather than dwelling on. So many of us now provide and nurture. We handle the practical and the emotional: the lawns and the finances, the school / kindy granny run and the softness waiting at the end of the day. We haven't lost anything in that. We've simply expanded into more.
Somewhere in that expansion, some of us get told we're being masculine, or that we can't surrender, can't receive, can't soften. I don't experience it that way at all. I think it just means we've grown more capable, more resourceful, more whole, and the world hasn't quite caught up with language for what an expanded woman looks like yet.
What I do know, plainly and without any bitterness in it, is that women deserve to be properly respected in this world. We don't always feel that we are. We don't always feel as valued or as cherished as we'd like to. That's not a complaint. It's just true, and worth naming with love rather than resentment.
This is exactly why I create consciously, connected, and curated with love. Consciously, because every choice matters: the fabric, the make, the wage, the person paid fairly for every seam. Connected, because we're all stitched together far more than we realise, and everything we do ripples outward into how we treat one another. Curated with love, because that's the only way I know how to do this. Love Threads was never just about the clothing.
Softening isn't surrender
None of this makes us less feminine. It makes us women who've done an extraordinary amount of holding, and who are allowed, now, to put some of it down.
It's okay to say no. It's okay to stop being perceived as the nice one, the easy one, the accommodating one, if that's what standing in your own truth costs. It's okay to stand up and speak out, plainly, without apologising for the space it takes. That's not a threat to the men in our lives, it's an invitation. We're not trying to do this alone out of preference. What so many of us actually want is real partnership: someone who can see the exhaustion before we have to explain it, who notices the guard is up and doesn't demand we drop it on command, but stays anyway, long enough that we start to want to.
This is exactly the woman Love Threads was built for. Not the woman performing softness she doesn't feel, and not the woman who has to stay armoured forever either, but the one who's earned the right to choose, day by day, how much she carries and how much she finally lets someone else hold. Clothes that don't ask anything more of you. No performance, no shrinking, no proving. Just ease, exactly where you need it most.
Because at the end of the day, our Humanity is a Common Thread, and so is knowing when it's finally safe to soften. With love Kate