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Instead, we must shake this off and do as the definition of Gnosticism suggests: return to our first nature and tap into our knowing. We must remind ourselves that this knowing, this instinct, has been there all along and that rejecting it keeps us separate from our deepest and truest desires, desires that are pure and worthy of exploration.
Rather than recognizing that what runs through our bodies is sacred, holy, and even divine, people in this first camp are in battle with themselves, looking outside for approbation and approval.
Toxic femininity is chaos and overwhelm, emotional disturbance and despair.
When we come into balance, when we relinquish our instinct to tamp down and control, we can kick up our feet and savor this experience, rediscover freedom and joy.
The body is the mechanism by which we experience the world. We are supposed to use it as a means for understanding, transmuting, and bringing ourselves and our world into balance. We are not supposed to badger it into submission with our minds, in the same way we are not supposed to subvert and overwhelm nature. The body and nature are both metaphors for the feminine: We must allow it to emerge, to reinstate it in a place of respect if not reverence.
We must identify the patriarchy’s practices and tactics so we can pull them out by the roots and then investigate the holes they’ve left in our psyches, the way they’ve perverted
some of our most natural instincts. Only then can we redress these wrongs.
For her—as indeed for many of us—an endless to-do list was her form of therapy, the measure of her time, the record of her productivity, a way to suppress whatever else might have been fermenting below. When you don’t stop, you don’t have to feel.
If we were always going, we would never get stuck. If we contributed—had important jobs—then we could anchor ourselves to some bigger idea of belonging, of security.
2020 book, Do Nothing, journalist Celeste Headlee
A timecard-punching “working class,” supervised by salaried, managerial overlords, defined early capitalism, but these days almost all of us participate in an economy that measures us by output.
The early promise of technology was to improve efficiency to liberate us from constant toil. In reality, it’s done the opposite.
So many of us recognize that we toil in silly and fruitless ways—that in “making it” we make nothing at all. For in determining the value of our minutes, capitalism also determines our values.
Of course, what we’ve missed in the equation that time is money is that time is a nonrenewable resource. It’s insane to put a price on something so valuable.
“The pace was so intense I would go from a call to a meeting to the next meeting until suddenly it was the end of the day and I had disassociated from my body,”
We aren’t working 24/7—it just feels that way because we’ve lost control of our days. Work feels relentless because it follows us to the gym, to the bedroom, to dinner, to the bathroom at 2 A.M. Work has become a sprawl, something we do, and think about, all the time, instead of being relegated to the confines of an office or the outlines of a traditional workday. Through technology, our work pervades and invades every corner of our lives, zapping us with endless anxiety. There is no distinction between home and work anymore, which is why, when I sit in front of Netflix with my husband, I’m
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We are all trying to show the world that we have done enough; we are all searching for safety, security, an expression of our value. We work, strive, and perform from a defensive position, trying to prove to the world that we’re earning our keep, that by doing enough we are enough.
But the comparative pain scale is part of the problem we find ourselves in: Our knowledge that it could be worse keeps many of us from putting words to the overwhelm and from fighting against it. We need to acknowledge that the way we’re functioning now is no way to live, and we need real systemic solutions for all families, including paid family leave and government-funded childcare. Absent that, women have no chance.
for a postpatriarchal world.
This isn’t simply a numbers game; it requires an energetic shift, an equalization between the Divine Masculine (structure, order) and the Divine Feminine (nurturance, care, creativity) in each of us and in our systems. We need to change the standards of society, and that will not happen while we keep doing it all ourselves. We must drop the ball and force others—men—to pick it up. We must let ourselves off the hook, cultivate deep self-love, and then learn how to turn and reflect it back on other women—unabashedly, fervently, with the full force of our empathy and compassion. We need our rest,
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Like other women, I am the bulwark against the storm of life, even as our culture insists that I’m simply protected by the patriarchy and not using my own back to hold it up. It’s a kind of gaslighting. The patriarchy outlines the expectations around our performance; we fulfill these every day, ratcheting up the standards as we go.
Brigid Schulte, the journalist who wrote Overwhelmed,
Schulte went straight to it: “To be a human and to be alive is painful because we’re not really quite sure what we’re doing here. I know a lot of people have faith, and I think that’s wonderful, but we don’t know what comes next. The only thing we know is that it’s brief, and that we will die, and there is real pain to that. Busyness does cover some of that up.”
When we resist what’s hard, when we are not fully in it, swirling and splashing around in the muck and the mess, we grow tight and small. We atrophy.
“Women struggle to acknowledge what they want,” she offered, “in part, because we’ve been conditioned to believe we don’t actually have wants.” Pow.
the women who grate on our nerves are typically telling us what we want. They are the ones who are holding up a mirror.
Gilligan asserts that to achieve full women’s rights, which we still haven’t done, we must enable “women to consider it moral to care not only for others but for themselves.” This means we must begin to prioritize and assert our own wants and needs, to give them a voice, to let others hear our desires.
As Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider write in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, “We can believe in a woman’s equality and yet, as women, feel guilt when we put our own needs forward or uncomfortable when other women do the same.”
Jia Tolentino’s brilliant essay collection Trick Mirror,
Poet and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer goes deep into the cycle of reciprocity according to a Native American framework in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass.
Boorstin, who wrote a book called When Women Lead, about the superlative leadership skills of women, believes that confidence modulation is one of the reasons women-led companies deliver results.
It is a denial of source, or the universe, when we try to be something less than what we are.
When we eat beyond our hunger or override our hunger instinct entirely, we seem to be saying: I cannot metabolize my feelings and emotions, I deserve no pleasure, I want to disappear, I want to die.
As Geneen Roth offers, “Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. Spiritual hunger can never be solved on the physical level.”
Or we can find a different allowance: We can eat what we want until we’re satisfied, we can let our bodies wander, we can let them lead us into our futures, relinquishing control to what they want to be.
It’s “natural” for men to want money, to go after it, to discuss it freely without shame. It’s expected that a guy will negotiate for himself—if he offends the hiring manager, there will be more opportunities. Men do not have to play by the same rules: They’re instructed to not only play the game but play to win it. For men, greed and ambition are good—or if not a virtue exactly, then expected—respected and admired.
“Women have shame when they make or have too little money,” she noted to me, “and shame when they have or make too much.”
Our minds use a tremendous amount of energy ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. Unless you train yourself to focus on the present, you will always be tired.
scarcity causes people to “tunnel,” a type of hyperfocused, obsessive thinking, and that the resulting constriction in bandwidth has a profound effect on how we function.
The perception of scarcity puts someone at a thirteen-point IQ disadvantage. When the threat of scarcity disappears, IQ scores recover. The paralysis of not having enough impedes our ability to think, to operate, to make sound decisions.
“If you think about water when it’s moving, when it’s flowing, it purifies. It makes things grow, it cleanses. But when it’s hoarded or held or stuck, it becomes stagnant and toxic to those who are holding onto it.”
Along with a paycheck, the ease of defining myself by a single sentence had vanished. Culturally, being unemployed is one of the most stigmatized states, more than infidelity or divorce. That, and my job had been the container for my creativity for a long time. I mourned the loss of community.
“We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.
It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.” Belonging certainly, and a longing just to be.
We have fifty thousand storage facilities in America; as Twist pointed out in a conversation we had in 2019, we have hundreds of thousands of homeless people, yet we pay rent to put a roof over stuff we no longer want to live with.
is just internalized patriarchy, a reflection of how women have been set up to police each other on rules of morality.
I wonder how many women are disassociated from their bodies because they don’t believe their own history, which is housed in their own flesh.
yet another pernicious example of how women are expected to sacrifice their bodies and psyches to keep the reputations of others safe.
as soon as we begin to identify how we feel and what we need, we become much harder to control and oppress. How many of us are compelled in our daily lives by what we think we should do? By what we have to do?
This internalized anger, or protest, often manifests as depression.
