This is one of those articles that doesn’t say anything NEW but what it says is so important to me that I have to shout about it a little bit or maybe a lot.
This is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.”
Yes.
From the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow.
Women aren’t expected to flow.
Yes.
…they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends.
YES.
Brigid Schulte’s book Overwhelmed is not a new release, so I’m not sure why I’ve been encountering her all over the internet. Some sub Baader-Meinhof thingy? Anyway. I think I might finally be more or less breaking through my own overwhelm, and not because I’m lowering my already rock-bottom standards, but because of 5am starts + spielgruppe + kids growing, ie a natural, predictable and long anticipated shift in life’s daily rhythms. Yay! I’m still struggling with the contaminated unflowy time confetti, very much so. But I’m getting stuff done. And I feel a whole lot more human.
Woolly thoughts (and fuzzy logic) 