Rupa was staring at her patchy, dark ceiling approximately four nights a week because 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
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