The Impossible Art of Being Everything

Who are we trying to keep up with, and when did we learn that we were never quite enough?

Somewhere along the way, being a woman became an impossible balancing act.

We are expected to be nurturing mothers, loving partners, supportive friends, attentive daughters, successful professionals and capable homemakers. To raise emotionally healthy children, maintain meaningful relationships, contribute financially, keep a beautiful home, cook nutritious meals and somehow find time for ourselves.

And while we're doing all of that, we're also supposed to look good.

To stay fit, youthful, attractive, well dressed and effortlessly put together. To embrace ageing gracefully, but not visibly. To love our bodies while simultaneously being encouraged to improve them.

We're told we can have it all.

But what nobody seems to ask is whether we can actually hold it all.

Or whether we should have to.

The invisible weight of being a woman

There is the work that everyone sees, and then there is the work that nobody notices.

The remembering. The organising. The anticipating. The emotional temperature-taking of everyone around us.

Who needs new shoes? (What size are they now) When is the dentist appointment? Have we remembered the birthday present? Is everyone happy? Has someone been unusually quiet? What are we eating tonight? Have we done the washing so everyone has clean underwear? Is there enough milk?

The endless mental lists that continue long after we've physically stopped working.

And somewhere amongst all this, we are supposed to remember who the f**k we are.

Not just as mothers or partners or professionals, but as women with our own desires, creativity, curiosity and need for rest.

Yet even our rest has become something to manage.

We schedule yoga, meditation, exercise and self-care into already overflowing diaries, as though wellbeing is simply another task we must successfully complete.

Even looking after ourselves can begin to feel like another thing we're failing at.

I've been asking myself lately, who exactly are we trying to keep up with?

I find myself wondering where these expectations came from.

Who decided that a successful woman should be able to work, raise children, maintain a home, nurture relationships, stay physically attractive and still have enough energy left to be interesting, sociable and sexually desirable?

And perhaps more importantly, why have so many of us accepted this as normal?

We live in a world where we are constantly exposed to carefully curated glimpses of other people's lives which in reality are impossible lives as they are only that...glimpses not whole messy, chaotic everyday living.

We are constantly exposed to the immaculate kitchen. The beautiful family holiday. The successful business. The toned body. The mother who seems endlessly patient, present and grateful.

We see the finished picture, but rarely the exhaustion behind it.

We compare our messy, complicated, beautifully imperfect lives with carefully selected moments from someone else's even if we think we don't, I'd challenge you to prove me wrong because unfortunetly we are bombarded with these ideas (mostly sublimanlly) and visions whether we engage with social media or not.

And somehow conclude that we're falling behind.

But behind whom?

And towards what?

Where did we learn that our worth depends on what we do?

I wonder how much of this begins when we are little girls.

As little girls, many of us were praised for being helpful, kind, thoughtful, pretty and well behaved and considerate of others.

We learned to notice what people needed. To be accommodating. To avoid disappointing anyone because that would feel shit.

Perhaps we also learned that being good meant being useful and having value. I know I have grown up measuring my own worth and value against how useful I am and how much I do and my status in the world....oh and how well I look!

That approval came when I achieved something, looked a certain way, made someone proud or put somebody else's needs before my own. Sound familiar?

And those lessons don't simply disappear when we become adults.

They can quietly shape the way we mother, work, love and measure ourselves.

We become women who find it easier to care for others than to recognise our own needs.

Women who feel uncomfortable sitting still when there are things to be done.

Women who can be utterly exhausted and still feel guilty for resting.

And when we inevitably struggle to keep all the plates spinning, we don't question the number of plates.

We question ourselves.....eye roll incoming!

When did exhaustion become a badge of honour?

There seems to be an unspoken admiration for the woman who does it all.

The one who never seems to stop. Who works hard, keeps going, manages everything and somehow holds herself together.

We call her strong.

We call her inspiring.

But I wonder whether sometimes we're celebrating her ability to endure something that should never have been expected of her in the first place OR we are celebrating what we see from the outside without realising the impact and damage that is happening on the inside?

Being endlessly capable like that can become its own kind of prison.

The more we manage, the more we are expected to manage. The more we make it look easy, the less we are tole how well we manage and the more we feel undervalued and so the harder we may try.

And then the harder it becomes to admit that we might need help, or that perhaps we simply don't want to do it all anymore because to admit that may mean we have failed and to fail, is to be worthless or less than or not enough and so can feel utterly heartbreaking to that little girl still sitting quietly inside the sub-consious waiting to be seen and heard and loved and praised.

There is a difference between living a full life and living a life that is constantly full.

One can nourish us.

The other can slowly empty us.

Perhaps we need to redefine what enough looks like and be ok with that somehow

What if we stopped measuring a woman's success by how much she achieves?

What if a good mother wasn't the one who did everything, but the one who was allowed to be human?

What if our homes could be untidy, our bodies could change, our ambitions could shift and our energy could ebb and flow with the seasons of our lives?

What if we could love our children deeply and still long for solitude?

What if we could enjoy our work without wanting it to consume us?

What if rest didn't need to be earned?

Perhaps the real challenge isn't learning how to become more organised, productive or resilient.

Perhaps it's learning to question the expectations we've inherited.

To recognise which responsibilities genuinely belong to us and which we've collected along the way.

To notice when our choices come from joy and when they come from fear of disappointing someone.

And to ask ourselves whether the life we're working so hard to maintain is actually the life we want to be living.

Because there will always be another job to do.

Another standard to meet.

Another version of ourselves we could strive to become.

But somewhere beneath all these expectations is a woman who was born with a creative energy flowing through her feminine being.

Perhaps that energy has never been discovered. Perhaps it was never given the space or freedom to emerge.

And when I speak of creative energy, I don't necessarily mean being an artist, a writer or a maker of beautiful things. I mean something far more intrinsic. An energy that exudes life itself, that allows us to experience all the richness, wonder and beauty that life has to offer.

The freedom to simply be ourselves. To show up authentically, to follow our curiosities, to honour our desires and nourish our own needs, without feeling that we must first justify our existence through what we do for others.

Because when we finally close the door on this life, it won't be the endless lists of things we accomplished that define our experience of being here.

It will be how deeply we allowed ourselves to live. What we felt, what we loved, what moved us, what awakened something within us.

And perhaps that is also what we leave behind. Not simply the things we did for others, but the imprint of how we lived, how we loved and how fully we allowed ourselves to be.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the generations of women who follow us, is the permission to live a life that truly feels like our own.

But how do we start to do this?

It is one thing to understand these concepts intellectually and quite another to embody them in the way we live.

We can talk about self-love, authenticity and honouring our bodies, yet how often do our everyday choices reflect these values?

I look around at younger generations of women and see faces being altered with Botox before they've barely had the chance to age, alcohol and drugs consumed as though it's an essential ingredient of enjoyment, and an endless pursuit of beauty, perfection and external validation.

And I wonder, when did we stop questioning these things?

When did altering our appearance become more normal than learning to love the face we were born with? When did drinking to excess become such an accepted part of socialising? When did we become so accustomed to following trends that we stopped asking whether they actually nourish us?

Of course, every woman has the right to make choices about her own body and how she wishes to live. But I wonder how many of those choices are truly our own, and how many have been subliminally shaped by the world around us.

We speak so freely about empowerment, but is it empowerment if we are simply exchanging one set of expectations for another?

Perhaps the most concerning thing isn't the behaviour itself, but how little space we seem to give ourselves to question it.

To ask: Why do I want this? Where did this desire come from? Does it bring me closer to myself, or further away?

Because there is a difference between choosing something from a place of freedom and choosing it from a place of feeling that we are somehow not enough.

And perhaps this is where the real work begins.

Not in learning another practice, buying another product or becoming yet another improved version of ourselves, but in developing the courage to question what we've been taught to desire.

To recognise the difference between what genuinely brings us joy and what we've been conditioned to believe will make us happy.

To become conscious participants in our own lives, rather than simply following the current of a culture that rarely encourages us to stop and ask where we're going.

So this is what I suggest you can do to start your journey home to yourself......go and buy yourself the most beautiful journal and pen (dont skimp here even if you need to save for it) feel like it's a part of your soul and fill it with recipes of reflections and questions whenever you get some time (instead of doom scrolling).

I have personally been revisiting 'The Artist Way' and writing my morning pages or when I go for a walk or run, I find the questions and clarity comes in surprisingly short bursts, out of nowhere, so I use voice note on my phone to remind me to come back to it later or to write and record a little bit of wisdom I found in my thoughts.

Writing things down has an unusual effect and it doesnt happen straight away. It may take days or months but at some point you will find your thoughts start reorganising and finding purpose, you will find you start to rediscover the road less travelled as you weave through the ideas you have about yourself and the reality of what it means to be you, to be alive and to actively participate in the creative birth of yourself.

I am sharing a poem I recently wrote from one of my musings as I wrote about life.

There Is Only Being

It’s as if the world catches us

in a glade of seasonal change.

The sun’s beam is like a pocketful of pennies,

and the wind blows the dusk,

everything that has willingly let go.

A torrent of snow washes down the mountain

without a care in the world.

Yet life stands still

when we hold on to the body we’ve lived with,

so still, you can hear a pin drop

against the soft palpating heartbeat

that is calling us home.

Everything now seems so much brighter

and more vivid

when we have to say goodbye.

Birdsong is suddenly all I can hear,

and I’m reminded of a child’s laughter

as it ripples through an internal sea of memories

that wander and drift

like clouds through my mind.

Every opening,

the thick velvet curtains of a stage.

Act one is the last scene,

a melting pot of curiosity, vision

and tender love for the audience I stare back at.

A field of faces.

Each blade of grass a vision

of familiarity and longing.

The wind changes direction

and with it, I carry my gaze south

towards the ocean.

The smell hits my nostrils first.

I fall deeply into its embrace,

as the slumber I awake from

frees my beliefs

and I am no longer bound by human containment,

but instead I am everywhere.

The buzzard’s wings,

the cat’s eyes,

a storm’s thunder,

a strawberry’s seed

and a rose’s petal.

There is only being,

and being is all there is.

Me and my everyday happy normal life...in bed with the cats and writing away with a cuppa next to me.