This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

by Tabitha Carvan

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.”

There is—and isn’t this always the case?—a headline from the Onion that illustrates this perfectly: “Mom Hasn’t Ordered Favorite Pizza Topping in over a Decade.” It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

That’s the joke of motherhood: you don’t get to have children and be yourself. When you eat pizza, you eat pizza as a mother. Every day—hundreds of times a day, every day—you give up what you want and how you want it in so many tiny little ways, that whatever squeezed-out orange-half remains of you, that’s who you are now. It’s fine, really.

Fathers are able to see themselves as other things because, typically, their professional identity is less affected by having children, and also because they simply have the uninterrupted time and the space to do so—thanks to mothers doing more than their share of unpaid care and domestic work.

Pure leisure requires a deliberate choice to carve out nonpurposive time just for yourself. For women, Schulte explains, that’s “nothing less than a courageous—subversive, almost—act of resistance.” But shouldn’t that feel good?

“You know, there are a lot of people, their lives revolve around golf. They don’t feel guilty.”

I only know what Brené Brown would say about this because my best friend reads all her books and tells me about them. I’m too embarrassed to buy a self-help book. I’m not like the other middle-aged women.

I get that completely: If only you could see what’s going on inside here. I’m so much more than you think.

But now I realize, with the clarity that comes with minor mortification, that it’s not a clever trick to keep your inner world invisible from the outside one. It’s a trap. It splits you into your real and pretend self.

“Once we’re adults, we relinquish play far too thoroughly. The so-called Protestant work ethic is a total rip-off.”

“Beating oneself up for what really gets you excited, it’s a masculine approach to women’s experiences,” Emma says. “We have been acculturated to do it to ourselves.”

I realize that I too am tired of seeming. It’s exhausting. I’m tired of always trying to stay one step ahead of perceived criticism. I’m tired of the second-guessing, the diagnosing, the explaining, the hiding, the talking about what it all means.

Taken together, caring a lot about how you make other people feel comprises a good chunk of what it supposedly means to be a woman.

We’re always staying one step ahead, holding ourselves to account, acting our age, always on the outside looking in. You can’t get hurt that way—which is good! But it’s hard to cultivate a coherent sense of who you are when it’s built on how you seem. The foundations are too shifting.