After what feels like DECADES, my extremely dull weather chat™ is starting to pivot from “Grey and rainy, help me” to “The days are getting longer! The bulbs are starting to appear! Maybe everything isn’t so terribly awful after all!”
Except… it kind of does still feel a bit terribly awful? There’s natural disasters, full-on war, a government whose morals are in the toilet, the cost of living, and then all of our individual stresses just piled on top of that. How do we find any respite?!
Bear with me for a while, it does get more positive.
It’s tricky to write about feeling shit without making it sound like a desperate cry for help, or coming across like a privileged snowflake cry baby; I know my problems could be worse. I know there are hundreds of millions of people in far more miserable conditions than me. It crushes me that I go about my days trying to find a way to make my own life more manageable, and I can’t do the same for everyone else.
Whilst I have no idea what we’re really doing here, I’m trying to work out the best way to be a flawed human being and just keep going each day, whilst also doing what I can to make things less shit for other people too. I’m figuring out how to look after what I want and need, but also trying to navigate whatever this *gestures generally* is.
We’re been bombarded with messaging about women being able to have it all, but what happens if you don’t want it all? I want to be able to earn enough money to keep me and my family safe and well. I want to have time to read and learn. I want to see new places and experience new things. I want to be able to eat tasty food. But apart from that? I don’t need to have it all. I don’t want to discover a way I can put in over 12 hours a day at work whilst also figuring out how I can raise a child, have rock hard abs, get regular manicures, spent half the year in Dubai and be the CEO of a company. If that’s having it all, then I barely want any of it. Ok, maybe the rock hard abs would be nice.
It’s the little things that get me through the day. A cup of coffee in the morning, being able to walk outside with the dogs, the ability to watch Great Pottery Throwdown, a jazzy disco bop on my Discover Weekly playlist. There’s not much more I really need than that. Except a Barbie Cadillac. And financial stability.
What does ‘having it all’ look like to you? It’s amazing that we’ve gone from having a single minded view of women in society as housewives, their places in the home, figuring out how to take care of a family with all the pressures of society breathing down their necks, to a new, modern way of keeping women busy and oppressed: their place at home AND at work, figuring out how to take care of a family with all the pressures of society breathing down their necks. It’s not good enough to want to work in a job you don’t hate and decide how to spend your own time, the goal seems to be a carefully cultivated brand, planned, executed and girl bossed to within an inch of your life.
I think what I’m trying to work out is whether we can ditch ‘having it all’ as the benchmark, and instead start aiming for ‘having, and being able to sustain, what makes us content’? I don’t want to feel selfish for managing my time in order to be able to sit on my own for a whole afternoon and read my book. I don’t want to feel like I’m not good enough, or not working hard enough, or not as much of a decent member of society for taking an afternoon nap during the week, or for protecting my brain, myself and what makes me happy.
But, here’s the kicker: I *do* feel like that. I constantly feel like I’m not good enough, not doing enough, that there’s always more I should be aiming for, that being myself should be suppressed in favour of being a paint-by-numbers female in society. On good days, I wonder how I got so lucky in this life. To have a working body that means I can get out and about, a brain that wants and is able to learn, a place in a world that means I can write and use my voice and spend time with heaps of other fantastic women who just want the best for each other. How did I get so bloody lucky?
Society wants to tell me I’m not lucky. I don’t have a full time job, I don’t own my own house, I don’t have any Gucci items in my wardrobe, I’ve never flown business class, I hardly have any Instagram followers. But how many of those things do I actually care about? Instead, I have eczema, I’m anxious about the cost of renewing my car insurance, my phone and electricity bills are going up. Am I getting enough exercise and drinking enough water? But while these feel like all consuming issues in my brain, I know these problems are a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things.
What I’m trying to say is, can we just stop with the facade and do what we want for for a bit? I don’t really care what that is, as long as you’re not an absolute roaster about it. Nothing would make me happier than you taking a day off to look after yourself, or for you to buy yourself an early Easter egg because you want to, or going out on an early walk as the mornings get lighter, or asking your boss to actually listen to you and show you that they care about the points you’ve raised, instead of saying it’s on their list to do something about.
I guess I wanted to say it’s ok if you feel like it’s all a bit overwhelming sometimes. I feel like that too, but I just wish we didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t happening in order to feel like a fully qualified member of society. There’s no entry requirements to being an adult - your journey doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, and you don’t have have to curate your life into something you don’t want just because it feels like you should.
I’m currently feeling like I *should* end this on a profound note, when actually what I want to end it on is links to my favourite hand creams for my eczema in case it’s useful to anyone else. So that’s what I’m going to do.
CeraVe, Weleda, Nursem, Neutrogena
This post was a bit left field from the usual book chatter, but let me know if you have any thoughts about it. I’ve been thinking about turning this into something a bit more regular with paid for pieces, like the one above, in addition to free monthly book content. Would love to hear your thoughts!
We’ve got it all when we’ve got strong, honest pals like you Iona.
So I’m sitting in my slacks, watching tele, not feeling guilty.
I think it’s important to discuss how our life goals change (almost daily) and some days having no goals is a goal. Thank you x
Yessss I loved this a lot. Refreshing and honest and I completely agree. You forgot to mention playing Avalon with pals as one of your life goals/measures of joy and success though. I would HundyP pay for this x