The Myth of "Doing it all”
As I contemplate the new year and all that it represents, I am sitting in front of a thoroughly dehydrated Christmas tree that I probably should have removed last weekend. I was asleep by 10:30 on New Year’s Eve with a strange sense of anxiety about all of the metaphoric time and space that was about to open up and roll out before me like a red carpet. These days, I have a lot of disdain about calendrical markers that have been hijacked by society to pressure us into doing more—better.
Four years ago, we were about to plummet from our naïve precipice of breakneck pace into COVID. I was reading Katherine May’s Wintering, and feeling at peace with the blessed idea of doing less: allowing the January cold to draw me into myself and my creativity, dreaming, and feeling my way through the oddness of a new year and another winter season. Alas, COVID put us all in that space of forced halting, even if we did not want to. Do you remember when a grocery store trip during COVID was the outing for the whole week?
I am not trying to wax nostalgic about the early days of COVID, but more want to remind us that once upon a time, we were asked to stop and be. If you remove the noise and anxiety of that time period, we were so grateful for the permission to do less. After we stopped scouring Pinterest for 101 fun and educational activities to do at home for our kids, we found the quiet. In a simplicity of a time when few people expected greatness from us, we simply existed.
Humans are incredibly adaptable, though, and our society has resumed its familiar pace of somewhere just past exhausting and the ever-increasing momentum. We have a real obsession with those we think are “doing it all.” This is a thing I hear often from clients. We all think that everyone else has unearthed the philosophers stone of time management and that, somehow, we are the only ones who are failing at juggling our lives the way the magical stone allows everyone else to.
Every time I hear this, I try to remind them that even Michelle Obama has decried the myth of women “leaning in” and doing it all. I am almost always met with suspicious eyes from the couch across from me. If we do not believe the former First Lady about the myth of doing, being, and having it all, then who will we believe?
In this season of my life I am working, mothering, and chasing my PhD. People often say to me, with uncomfortable awe, “I don’t know how you are doing it all.” To which I will now honestly answer: I unequivocally do not do it all.
In fact, I am often dropping balls, flailing, sometimes drowning, occasionally crying, staring blankly at screens, misusing time, finding myself annoyed with myself, and once in a while, upsetting a child, friend, family member, or partner because of it all. There is nothing in my life that has not had to bend to the omnipresent force of everything I am trying to manage, and I often wonder if it is worth it to make things bend so far to chase this dream. I evaluate these thoughts frequently, and always come back to following my heart, but even the follies of the heart come at a price—one I am sincerely aware of and carry heavily with great care.
None of this is intended to garner pity because I name these things with lightness, having accepted my humanity. I also say them because, as women, it is a massive disservice to proudly embody the projections from other women that we are one of the lucky few who have found a way to do it all. If you meet a woman that tells you that, give her my card because she’s lying and probably on the brink of an emotional breakdown.
Once and for all: there is no doing it all.
You have missed no magic. There simply is no such thing.
In the face of this acceptance is the confrontation with ourselves, not what we imagine we should be or even what social media has insisted we need to be. It is essential that we meet ourselves in the space between our highest hopes and our reality, even when it is not what we imagine it should be. While we’d like to do an hour of yoga every day, perhaps 20 minutes, 3 times a week is all we can manage for now.
My weeks are a constant assessment of what I can say yes to, which inherently means I am saying no to something else and vice versa. Sometimes those choices are easy and sometimes they make my heart ache. I legitimately found myself longing for Hermoine’s Time Turner for Christmas. When we wish that we can bend the rules of time and manifest more of it, this is a clear indicator that we need to reevaluate our relationship with it. Otherwise, we will become soulfully emaciated. We will also resent the people and things that constrain us with our permission (or at the very least, omission).
I will leave you with a quote from the only “self-help” book I have read and not loathed:
“The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.” - Oliver Burkeman Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
This new year, I hope that you will believe deeply that you are not required to do it all, because, like Hermione’s Time Turner, “all” isn’t real anyway.