Certainly not the greatest, but the most important mistake we make is that of granting visas too easily, letting others travel through our time, our day, our hearts, and sometimes through our lives. Until one day you wake up with a jolt to find yourself, as if for the first time, with eyes and a voice — inward sight and an emotional tongue.

The borders of your "no" then shift, more comfortably now, further out until you feel emotionally safe. This new expression of your self-worth and of your spiritual tongue is now more aimed at your own preservation than at the approval of others. The preservation of your own integrity. For integrity is meaningless without a shape.

It has to do with the scaling-back of decisions taken around the feelings of others, which, out of decency, are always spared at the cost of yourself. Until your own content, watered-down and stripped of meaning, no longer satisfies you deeply. And you realise that it is not necessary to let insensitive opinions and shallow pronouncements bully you into the too-decent creature you have become.

Every now and then a person needs to contemplate her decisions: where they have sent her, what they have made of her, and who they have sent across her path and, above all, into her inner circle. Because it is especially those in our inner circle who have the most say in our personalities, and who, over time, shape us into their image.

Although most of us have never even come near the doors of a prison, the emotional fetters of other people's expectations, or the presence of wrong people in our life, is a longer sentence to serve out than that for common theft. A personality that has been held prisoner inside the intimidation or manipulation of a best friend, a spouse, a colleague — or inside the moods of a parent or a child — serves a longer sentence than most criminals.

Until grace, like a verdict, throws down keys for our emotions and we catch them one day and unlock ourselves to discover the freedom of our own self inside our own personality. Then you can smell from a long way off everyone carrying open or hidden fetters, and you become nimble enough always to stay just out of grabbing distance. A new you, in a new destiny.

You begin to travel delightedly through your own personality, without a passport, without fear, but on primal instinct, which lets you enjoy and err and simply be who you are, without any expectations from parents, from teachers, from family, from the church or from the community. Remade according to God's original recipe (which inner-circle people lost along the way), you become, without shame, who you are supposed to be. Comfortably yourself, to your own order and with your own ingredients. Every day breaks open à la carte before you, ready to serve up only what your heart orders and what your heart can stomach digesting.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer