What's wrong with me?
Stop tormenting yourself.
Quick note before I start - This is the first in my new series for paid subscribers, which will drop once a month. I am in the throes of writing my next book - Unburdened: Ditch the mindf*ckery that keeps you overwhelmed, to reclaim your time, energy and sanity and I’m going to be trialling, theorising and coaching it through this space this year before it launches in September. My free columns will be the other 3 weeks for now. Thank you to everyone for being here, and thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting my writing work. It takes a big chunk of time each week and I really appreciate it.
“What’s wrong with me?”
This is what Ann, a smart, stylish, so-impressive-at-holding-everything-together, 51 year old woman, with funky hair and a penchant for perfectionism screamed at herself as she stood in the throbbing SuperValu heaving with a glut of desperate women on the frenzied Christmas food shop. She’d been wading through the throngs of sharpened elbows, grateful for her weekly pilates class so she could contort herself to reach over the short women to grab the last beetroots over their heads, (short women winning on the lower stacked asparagus) when the text came through from her husband.
“I’m heading to the pub for a couple of pints. Christmas has begun!” Sweaty face emoji.
It was the sweaty face emoji that did it. She told me the fury flooded through her system so fast she thought her head would start spinning 360 degrees right there in the cold meats and salami section. (But then wait! Her all-tabs-running brain told her to stop spinning out for just a second while she grabs the last three packs of cured meats for the charcuterie board and with a shakey hand ticks it off list). Back to head spinning in resentful rage.
“I thought there and then I would divorce him,” she told me. “How dare he go to the pub and I’m in this hell which is only the midpoint of the hell, because while I’ve already planned all the meals, made the shopping list, and now buying it, then I’ve got to pack it all, get it home, unpack it all and then make another list of the things I couldn’t get because of all the short women and the tall women who where more flexible in their grabbing, so need to plan another shop even though I swore this would be the last shop because I’ve already done four this week. And he’s gone to the bloody pub!”
I smiled in sisterly solidarity. Every woman knows the annual hell of the Christmas food shop(s).
But then just as quickly as the fury had flooded her system, now it withdrew and the guilt swept in. He’s not a bad man, and will in fact be cooking a lot of the Christmas food. So now she feels bad on top of feeling stressed because doesn’t everyone tell her how lucky she is to have him? Hence the “what’s wrong with me?”
It’s something I’ve asked myself many times, and something many women ask them themselves, many, many times. We think it’s us. We think we’re not spinning plates well enough, haven’t planned enough, haven’t explained to others enough that they need to contribute more, but it always feels wrong. Always feel we’re wrong.
What’s wrong with you? Nothing.
Like a bad break up line, it’s not you, it’s the system. You are running around like a blue arsed fly trying to juggle and muddle your way through the mayhem that appears to be your life. It may look great on paper, but underneath the carefully wrapped exterior, it feels like a shit show. And even if it doesn’t look great on paper, you’re supposed to just get on with it and not make too much of a fuss. (That’s on the Female Instruction Guide that you got when you graduated out of nappies: Rule No. 1 - don’t make a fuss and don’t put people out. Oh and pick up dinner and your mum’s prescription on the way home.)
What’s wrong with you is that you’re trying to fit a square shaped expectation into a round shaped reality. Women are led to believe that being busy is a badge of honour. Being overwhelmed and constantly stressed, the prize for smiling sweetly and having it all. When someone asks you how you are, you reply “Busy!” so as to appear relevant and normal. But it’s not normal. It’s the opposite of normal. Renowned psychologist Gabor Mate in his ground-breaking book The Myth of Normal lays out why this mile-a-minute life where you have no time to process, no time to self-invest, no time to just be is not, in fact, normal. It’s all a made-up social construct that is slowly killing people (sometimes actually, but definitely killing their joy). He writes: “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources - these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
But women face a whole other level of obliteration. Not only is the system shockingly structured to create maximum pressure, that system was never developed by, or for women at all.
What’s wrong with you is that you likely have a severe case of what I’ve come to call Blizzard Brain, the state whereby you have so much going on up in your head, it feels like you are trapped in a snow globe and life is just shaking you around like a toddler on sugar. Blizzard brain is the state many women find themselves in today because there are just so many (snow)balls in the air it feels like you’re walking face-first into a blizzard of thoughts, To-Do lists, guilt and “shoulds” so you can’t see where you are, you can’t see where you’re going, and you can’t see a way out.
In extreme cases and times, you can’t see you. And that’s a lonely blizzard to be in. There are moments I can literally feel paralysed by the “too muchness” of what I have to achieve in the next hour. There is the pressure to perform, then the weight of responsibility, then the residue of resentment because you can’t do the things you want to do because of all the things you have to do and should do, and then a lashing of guilt for feeling resentful because, sure aren’t you really lucky?
What’s wrong with you is that that perpetual Blizzard Brain leads to on-going slow burn (like burn out but with no blow-up-your-life-drama ). This is not the kind of burn-out that requires a nice hot scented bath and an early night. As Anne Helen Petersen says in her 2019 essay on burnout: “You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unf*ck yourself”. You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “Anxiety baking” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.”
That’s because this is not a phase (although there can be more phases intense than others). It’s become a way of living, and as many of you know, there’s not a lot of “life” in that sort of living. There is laundry. There is looking after. There is lurching from one errand to another. But there is not a lot of “life” with jazz hands.
What’s wrong with you is that
