Life is hard work. And it feels like even today, life as a woman is extra hard. I often wonder: was it harder for women in the past, with the tedium of daily duties and lack of most life expectations we now take for granted? Or is it harder in the present, with the tedium of daily duties (but also electricity!) and the added expectations we have nowadays of doing and being all the things?

True, in the past we had no choice but to hand wash every item with well water, churn our own butter and make soap from God knows what in between caring for children and aging relatives. And that’s before taking into account the realities of a very restricted position within society, not to mention regularly dying off during childbirth- if tuberculosis or typhus didn’t do you in already. Now that I’m spelling it out, it seems clear that it was really, really hard to be a woman a hundred or more years ago, and truthfully at no point have I ever thought I would prefer to trade places. I am grateful to be alive today, in this age. Antibiotics and epidurals, amirite?

But regardless of the manifold advances the last century has gifted us with, the truth is this: It’s so damn hard to be a renaissance woman in today’s grind culture. The expectations feel endless. Endless. I know this is not an original thought, so forgive my unoriginal ramblings. And yet, it’s the thought that occupies me and pretty much every woman I speak with.

Overwhelmed

Whether you are overwhelmed because your work expects you to give 120% every day and you don’t have kids so everyone thinks you must not have any obligations and should be fully available and energized at all times; or whether you are overwhelmed because your work expects you to give 120% every day and you have kids and a household that take up another 180% of your energy and you vaguely remember that you once had a romantic relationship with your spouse and are somehow still supposed to have sex twice a week when all you really desire is a good night’s sleep;  or whether you are overwhelmed because there are so many potential opportunities to ‘fulfill your purpose’ and ‘make something of yourself’ and you want to so badly but you don’t know where to begin, there are so many reasons for us to be overwhelmed.

It doesn’t help that these days it seems like everyone has their own podcast, reads thirty books a month and sends out a weekly newsletter of original insights after their daily 10k run. We keep upping the ante.

And, to quote the Cat in the Hat (because I have three small kids and this is now my intellectual horizon):

‘but that is not all! oh, no. that is not all…’

Dr. Suess, “The Cat in the Hat”

Underwhelmed

If you are anything like me, you are also struggling with feeling underwhelmed, perhaps a sentiment we do share with our female ancestors. Because in between all the to do lists and the feelings of not enough and the push to prove our value day in and day out via a constant stream of productivity, it seems like we often think the best lies just ahead of us. If we can just make it through this week, if we can just cross off these urgent items, if we can just finish this presentation and reorganize the closets, then life will really start. And before we know it, another month has gone by, another season, another year and we still feel like we are waiting.

Both/And

It’s so easy for me to feel both underwhelmed and overwhelmed. Perhaps those two states of being feed each other. The feeling of underwhelm leads us to an increasingly frenzied search for meaning, for purpose, an even more feverish push to do and do and do in hopes of catching up to the expectations that always seem to be just a few strides ahead of us. So we become even more overwhelmed. And we have even less time for magic, and awe, and joy. So we become even more underwhelmed. 

Bertold Brecht said in his incomparable Threepenny Opera:

So, go running after happiness, but don’t run too hard, for everyone is running after happiness while happiness is running after them. For man is not undemanding enough for this life, therefore all his striving is only self-deception.

Bertold Brecht, “The Threepenny Opera”

I’ve thought about those words regularly. And yet, more often than not, I still fall into that self-deception. There is a part of me- a sticky and insistent part- that genuinely believes I can find happiness by doing more and pushing harder. In short, by being Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way. Except Mary Poppins eventually gets to ride her umbrella back into the sunset, leaving childcare, household and a position she was clearly overqualified for behind, while the rest of us, sadly, do not.

Ending the cycle

You would think I’d have learned the lesson by now, but this is the lesson I will apparently be chewing on for the foreseeable rest of my days. How can I end the cycle? This cycle of one day feeling so full of productive energy that I believe I have just about caught up with happiness and the next feeling so drained I can barely will myself to peel a carrot, let alone create anything of lasting value?

So, my question is: How can I just be whelmed?

And apologies if the title fooled you into thinking this article would provide an answer. I don’t have one. Truthfully, the title should have included a question mark. But Dear Reader, if you have figured it out, please DM me. I’m listening.