Have you been conditioned to drive yourself forward, relentlessly, like a machine with no breaks (ok, maybe one day here and there to catch up on laundry and the baseboards)?

Over the past three years I actually used my breaks to work harder! Vacations were precious, rare blocks of time when I could fully immerse myself in strategizing and making content and setting up automations and getting done all the stuff that I couldn’t get done in three or four hours a day while juggling entrepreneurship with my full-time day job.

My business is my passion. I have fun doing it. But it is also work. My work feeds my needs for purpose and accomplishment. But it doesn’t nurture and restore me like a really great night’s sleep or snuggling up under a blanket with a really great book, or even an evening spent solving the world’s problems with a small group of really interesting friends does. It isn’t restful.

Being a member of Gen X explains some of this. Gen X women in particular were conditioned to hustle and grind. We inherited the Boomer women’s approach to achieving our dreams of having it all by adapting and coping - or trying to, anyway.

Indeed, the hostility that met women who dared to compete with men for factory and corporate jobs and the benefits that came with them included refusing to adapt the workplace to account for the position that women have historically occupied in society as childbearing nurturers and providers. We have always been both.

Agrarian societies included women building and maintaining shelters, gathering, planting, harvesting, cooking, and storing food, crafting to create clothing, creating medicines for healing, composing and performing songs and stories, and vibrantly contributing to the wealth of knowledge that ensured societal progress. Women have never been second-bit players in that endeavor.

Industrialized societies saw women performing the impossible by juggling all of the above plus eight-to-twelve hours working in a factory or factory-related job. Not enough is said about women who worked alongside the men coalminers in Ireland, for example, or worked in the munitions factories of the West during the World Wars, or the women who back their babies while selling produce in Nairobi’s Gikomba Market.

The truth about patriarchy’s fragility is illustrated in the way that men in power established and/or allowed barriers to women’s participation in remunerated work to create extra difficulty for women.

From the 8am-5pm shift becoming standard for business even though that schedule functioned in tension with school hours, to the decisions to standardize policies that had no provisions for maternity leave or reliable universal child care, and penalized career “gaps”, to today’s irrational insistence on blanket return to office policies, men’s hostility to women doing more than what patriarchy said they were good for remains alive and kicking.

A couple of years ago an executive told me that return to office was a good thing because during the pandemic secretaries working at home could use a lull in their work day to throw in a load of laundry. Were they in the office, that time would be spent properly, organizing the supply closet. Or something.

This man actually resented women having the power to balance their home and office work.

Faced with this hostility, women, well aware of the enormous power differential and determined to enter the paid workforce anyway, put their heads down and attempted to figure it out. The response to the exhaustion and burnout that followed was to make women the problem.

Perhaps women really were not suited to the workplace because of their unstable temperaments and hormones. Perhaps, as former Harvard University president Larry Summers once argued, women simply did not have the cognitive capacity to keep up with men. Today, women are chided (by other women) for not Lean(ing) In. Or are scolded for daring to want to have it all (at once). A new (very old) discourse is emerging about a supposed ambition gap.

Because I really do always want to see the best in people, I hope that Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg and her collaborators’ decision to choose a framing that facilitates blaming women (again) for the struggles they wage in a hostile arena was intended to garner the attention that it did and wasn’t a rehash of Sandberg’s Stockholm Syndrome-laced position on what it takes for women to succeed in corporate. Ambition-gap. Really.

This Lean-In attitude and the history behind it had me envisioning vacation as a time to work more. For three years I worked sixteen hour days for at least five days per week with scarcely any rest.

Burnout, for me, was a gradual process, sort of like being boiled in a pot of water that heats up slowly over time so you don’t notice until it is too late.

I collapsed in December of 2024. The condition of my house and my body were the material evidence of what was going on inside that no one else could see. I had gained 30lbs and had no where to receive guests. I watched Horders and My 600lb Life with a glint of recognition and doom.

Thankfully, I have been building a relationship of kindness and nurturing with myself so that rather than beating myself up over the absolute disaster I presided over, I could remind myself that this was the price of bringing a company to over six-figures in revenue while believing the toxic hype that said I had to do it all myself . . . perfectly.

The titans of industry whose successes are waved in our faces have wives. Nothing is wrong with me. I just need a housekeeper. And a chef. And to change my attitude about rest.

This is what I was thinking this morning as I got up to put together an out-of-office message for this week’s issue of The Wallflower Life. The sun had set ust after 4:30pm the day before and, at 7am, when I woke up, was just beginning to light the sky.

Cocooned in darkness for all those hours I thought about nature and industrialized humans’ relationship to it.

The primary accomplishment of industrialization has been its contribution to humans being able to (largely) ignore nature. But we do so at our peril.

As biological beings, we are intended to adapt to the seasons rather than master them. There is a time for everything. Failing to heed our biological needs for downtime, inactivity, doing nothing, has contributed immensely to the rise in lifestyle illnesses that plague the “rich”.

The nights are longer for a reason.

To obey nature’s wisdom means taking a break from putting out a full newsletter for the next couple of weeks. The Wallflower Life is hybernating for a bit.

We will return on January 10th, rested and with the refreshed perspective that can only happen when we embrace and partner with our biological rhythms.

Merry Holidays. Happy New Year. Show yourself some love and get some rest.

xoxo,

The Wallflower Queen

P.S. Yes. I know about the equator.

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Celebrating everything wonderful about being solo and satisfied.

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