she was coordinating her life to a grid: what she was told to do on the horizontal axis, who she was expected to be on the vertical. Layer atop this grid the ever-pressing dictum for women to be, as writer Karen Kilbane puts it, “pathologically grateful,” and you get a silent, invisible, internalized sense of failure: What’s wrong with me? Anyone would be grateful for this. I can turn this around. I need to get it together. This is the way so many ambitious women spend their twenties, thirties, and beyond—building the “balanced life” they were told everyone wants, then not wanting it
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