Damned if you do & damned if you don’t.

From the diary of a Gen X woman.

Alexandra Grounds Lunch Break, 2017 Oliver Cole Gallery

I don’t want to achieve anything anymore. I don’t want to be valued for my achievements, my looks, my skills, my jokes. I don’t think I even care to score another Olympic Weightlifting PB.

All these accomplishments seem meaningless, and I feel empty.

I think I know now why Britney Spears does her erratic dances these days. I am really tempted to join her. I just need a pineapple bikini.

I’ve just finished reading ‘The Heroine’s Journey’ by Maureen Murdock and I think I finally understood why I’ve been feeling the way I do recently.

A lot of us have challenging relationships with our parents. Even these people whose parents were like the do-gooding neighbours in The Revolutionary Road. Our mothers are either too successful or not successful enough. Too aloof and distant or too overbearing. A lot of us do not have positive female role models so we throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject our feminine side altogether.

For years I desperately wanted to be in the boy’s club. I rejected my (alcoholic) mother and therefore I wanted to impress my (very successful) father. And the more aloof my father was (very), the more I tried to impress him. That attempt continued even though I moved out and left the country. I sometimes feel like I will always be a Daddy’s girl – “see me, notice me, look – I did really well!”

For years I’ve been soothing my feelings of emptiness through acts of heroism and achievements. I did all these things (unconsciously)… for my Dad.

The trouble is that I am really exhausted by now. I know people behind my back say that things come easily to me, but they do not know the truth. I would rather die than admit that I’m like a mannequin looking pretty but having pins secretly keeping my back together. Complaining was never an option. If I wanted to whinge, I’d be told to go to my room and sort myself out.

In this patriarchal world, not just in my household, women are viewed as wimpy if we acknowledge our true feelings. We must be amicable hence so much people pleasing. We reject our feelings and plough through by numbing and disconnecting.

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

A strong woman is a woman standing on tiptoe and lifting a barbell

while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

A strong woman is a woman at work cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,

and while she shovels, she talks about how much she doesn’t mind crying,

it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles,

and she goes on shovelling with tears

in her nose.[1]

The Crucifixion of Saint Wilgefortis, c. 1497 by Hieronymus Bosch

I’ve done so many things in my life, I have literally worked my ass off since the age of seventeen, but whenever someone asked me, “What do you do?”, I was never proud of any of these roles / jobs / professions. Even when I was an HR Manager for a consulting firm in the City of London, deep down, I really couldn’t care less.

I craved to retire. I craved to retire as soon as possible. Not that I don’t want to work. From the moment I set out onto the big world I wanted to retire from being the Great Pretender.

Pretending that I wanted to be a successful businesswoman (I don’t). Striving always to be the best version of myself to please this internalised image of my father. I’m so tired (I want to re-tire) from this inner tyrant. The super woman is done. The mask of the Super-K, as some coworkers used to call me, is peeling off.

As the years went by, it took longer and longer to create Marilyn Monroe out of Norma Jean.[2] 

They say that menopause is the time where the masks that we’ve been wearing, start to fall off. I don’t feel angry for wearing so many masks (roles) as I am not a people pleaser and I never do what I don’t want. I wore these masks gladly. I’m just tired of doing so now. 

But it’s so damn hard not to. We women, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We either play in the men’s world pretending to be no-less than the boys or we choose to “stay at home” (sounds as if we stay on holiday a little bit longer because there’s nothing to do at home) and we’re branded as “trad wives”.

Option three is to try to “stay at home” and go to work, which is physically and – by definition – impossible to be in two places at once. So we burn out and never do anything to its full capacity, get mad and feel guilty at the same time. But don’t forget to smile, you’re so lucky!

Self-portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States of America

Frida Kahlo, 1932

For a long time, I convinced myself to strive for all the roles and achievements that didn’t truly interest me, and I rejected the feminine side of creativity, nurturing, and any housework. Eventually I ended up being in a place where I didn’t want to go to work but I didn’t want to do the housework either (deemed worthless in the capitalistic world view).

I think at times I only felt alive when I was sick. Now I understand why a lot of us women are chronically sick. Because when we’re sick, we have an excuse, we can stop participating in a world where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

My accident was a blessing. It gave me an excuse not to participate (for 2 weeks). I didn’t listen. I made sure to ‘get back to my old self’ as soon as possible. Bah – even exceed my old self, five months post-surgery I was lifting more than pre-accident.

Then another venture failed through, and in a way, it was another blessing. It burned me, it depressed me, it slapped me, it stopped me in my tracks. I think I finally started to listen. I realised that yet again I set out on a mission to impress. But deep down I knew I didn’t really care for the achievements. And that’s why it failed.

So, I stopped everything. On the outside it looked like depression. Thank God I didn’t try to medicate. I suspect most women who go through menopause arrive at a similar point in their life: disillusioned and questioning their identity. Depression, anxiety, ‘Is that all there is?’ and if not, then ‘Who am I’?

Instead, I went into, as Maureen Murdock writes – voluntary isolation. ‘A period of darkness and silence and of learning the art of deeply listening to self.’

For so many years I desperately wanted to be noticed because only then that wounded child had a chance to be nurtured and loved and cared for. I’m the best performer out there. I’m the best joker if need be. I’ll be anything you want me to be, just notice me…

But that conditional love is no longer satisfying. Maybe I’m somehow getting wiser, but I suspect, I’m simply getting older, weaker, frailer. I do not have the stamina to keep tilting at windmills. I no longer have the strength to be Don Quixote. I retire.

I want to be accepted and loved for who I am, not for what I have done and achieved. But first I need to discover me, as I sincerely don’t know.

‘I’ve been trying to be somebody long enough, now I’m working on being nobody.’ - Ram Dass

It’s painful, not knowing oneself. But I never really did, because I didn’t think that I mattered. My achievements mattered.

That space of in-between, when we shed one side of ourselves and before the next vessel forms, is painful. But, as Maureen writes: moving to action too soon because the pain of holding tension of the unknown is unbearable, is like premature ejaculation.

Letting go of the old me, the habits that ingrained into my way of being, my samsara cycles – I see you. But the more I stay grounded, the more time I spend in nature, the more I ask myself ‘what do I really need now?’, the less I’m pulled into the old ways.

The truth is - everything is already within me. The courage, the strength, the creativity. I’ve moulded them like steel over the years. I’ve proven my strength again and again.

I need to let go of the resentment. Or the sentiment rather. Let go of the longing for the mother that I never had. For the father who was never there.

I used to abandon myself as soon as I felt that the action would not result in being seen, in being noticed. In being loved, cared for and ultimately mothered.

I so desperately wanted someone to look after me, I forgot that I’m strong enough to look after myself.

I need to start mothering myself. I need to pour that strength onto myself.

It is hard though. As I go through this space of letting go of my old self, I feel so weak. Even though I mothered my (alcoholic) mother, and so many people along the way, I don’t feel worthy or strong enough to mother myself. What’s the point?

You see, that’s the gist of the whole issue. If I grew up believing that I’m not worthy of my parents love and care (unless I earn it), then how can I love myself? I don’t feel worthy of love. What’s the point?

But, as I go through this space of decay, the letting go of my unworthiness, I see some glimpses of light. ‘Lead me from darkness to light’ as the Vedic mantra says.

Lord, make me an instrument of thy love.[3]

I am a child of this universe, and the daughter of the Mother Earth. And I will channel this one day. When I let go of my unworthiness.

EARTH, Seattle’s Treason Gallery Brian Kirhagis

[1] a passage from a poem by Marge Piercy, ‘For Strong Women’.

[2] Joyce Carol Oates Blonde

[3] St. Francis of Assisi