The Cost of Being the Good Girl | Gail Watson

**Anna McBride** (0:02)
Welcome back to SHE Asked, Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I am so glad you're here with us today.
Every week we explore the stories, tools, and insights that help us navigate life's transitions with greater courage, clarity, and hope. If you found yourself asking, who am I now? After a divorce, loss, care given season, career change, or simply years of putting someone else's needs or everyone else's needs ahead of your own, today's conversation is for you. Before we begin, I want to remind you that if you're navigating a life's transition and looking for support, I offer coaching, workshops, online courses, and complimentary consultations through my website, annamcbride.com. Now let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Gail Watson. Gail is an entrepreneur, writer, and creative force whose life has taken her through remarkable personal and professional chapters. After building a successful reputation and career, Gail found herself facing a series of profound transitions, an abusive marriage, the loss of her mother, family caregiving responsibilities, and the difficult process of rebuilding your life and identity after years of living in survival mode.
What emerged from that experience wasn't simply a new chapter, it was an entirely new relationship with herself. Gail, welcome to SHE Ask. I'm so glad you're here today.

**Gail Watson** (2:02)
Hi.
Oh my God, that intro is amazing. Thank you. And God, yeah, that it sounds like a lot. It was a lot.

**Anna McBride** (2:12)
Yeah, you've been through a lot. So we like to begin our episodes with a story. So please share with us your experience of how you went from losing yourself to finding your way back.

**Gail Watson** (2:29)
So I think in a lot of ways, my story is not uncommon. I'm the oldest daughter of the oldest sibling, you know, the first grandchild, first granddaughter. And I have a brother who has emotional mental needs, nothing terrific, but he demanded a lot of attention. So I became the good girl, you know, the girl who took care of everybody, made sure everything was smooth and whatnot. I was great at it, really great at it. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. So also that sense of independence and just doing things on your own, you know, like striking out to doing things the way you want to do them, is also sort of ingrained in me. After I graduated high school, I went to art school, I was not given a lot of encouragement to do my art. And so I went into the business that I grew up in, which was food and became very successful at it. It was great. And I did it for 25 years. And one day I woke up and I was like, I am exhausted. You know, I had been giving and caring, and my business, I was in the wedding cake business, I worked every single weekend. So I had very little social life and you know, all that kind of stuff. So I hadn't had a partner, I'd gotten divorced 12 years into my marriage. And so it was just like, I needed a change. And so after being the caregiver, I wanted to be taken care of. And which was really, really weird for me.
And so I ended up with someone who really wanted to do that, but because they could manipulate me and you know, I was for them. You know what I mean? We weren't for each other, I was for them.
It was surprising to me because I think I was told everything that I wanted to hear. You know, when you evolve in a situation where you're always not thinking of yourself, when someone turns their attention on you and says, you're amazing, you're so wonderful, I've never met anybody like you, you're like, oh, all the things that I've always wanted to hear. And so yeah, so I fell, you know, long and hard. And then after we got married, this is my third marriage, actually, things immediately started to fall apart. It's like, all of a sudden, I was just became very controlling and difficult. And then in the midst of all that, my mother developed dementia, which is a very difficult thing for me, because my mother was a very big person in the community. I grew up in a small town on the east end of Long Island in Greenport. And she was the other mayor. Everybody knew May Watson. She ran a business in town that was very successful. Everybody hung out there. She was like, Mama May. And my mother always took care of everybody else, but never really took care of me. So it was like this weird dynamic of having this super dynamic mother I was very proud of, and I thought it was pretty amazing.