How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?: Essays on Modern Life

by Pandora Sykes

A woman’s flattening happens when one of those fragmented parts absorbs the rest of her identity.

A woman can be fragmented without being flattened, but she is rarely flattened without being fragmented first.

Even when sitting on my sofa in tracksuit bottoms, feeling simultaneously stressed and stagnant, I try to remind myself that I have agency. That my different social identities are a relief, rather than a bind. That however disparate I look to the world outside, I am still the same person inside. I love, and am loved, and that love cannot be fragmented by anyone unless I let it.

‘Are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off?37 Or are we only what we still have left to do?’

The truth is, we have the same amount of hours in the day whether we work our way through them in furious distraction or with methodical purpose – considering both the value of our work and the value of ourselves as we