It's OK.
This is a letter to the women. The women with kids, without kids, with kids who never made it, or kids who are no longer here. It’s to the women who are married or not, to the women who love men and the women who love women. It’s to those who identify as women. It’s to working women and women who don’t work. It’s to big women, small women, strong women, disabled women, healthy women, sick women. It’s to black women, brown women, white women, poor women, wealthy women and the women in between. It’s to all of you - every woman - because whatever stage you are at in your womanhood journey there is one thing that we all share.
We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, invisible, except to each other.
Our very potential as baby-growers and birth-givers is enough to render us at a huge disadvantage in this society and, as it’s still Mental Health Awareness week, I wanted to make one thing clear.
It’s ok if this has an effect on your mental health.
We have to work harder, we have to work more, we have to love harder, and yet at the same time compartmentalise more. We have to be chameleons, shape shifters and improv-artists. It’s exhausting, it’s demoralising and more than anything, it’s confusing and disempowering.
It’s ok if that has an effect on your mental health.
We have to look over our shoulder, hold our keys between our fingers, pretend to be talking to someone on the phone. We have to process daily micro-aggressions and not-so micro aggressions. We hide our scars, cover our blemishes, laugh off inappropriate comments. We take home less money, we shoulder the mental load, we take on the responsibilities that have been passed down to us from the patriarchy, via our female ancestors who told us this was ‘women’s work.’
It’s ok if that has an effect on your mental health.
We have to be the woman we believe we are, but also the women we are told we should want to be and the woman they actually want us to be. We have to walk the right way, talk the right way and hope that our clothes or our make up don’t act as an invitation to ‘Enter Here’.
It’s ok if that has an effect on your mental health.
We have to have kids but not if we want to smash a glass ceiling and if you choose the glass ceiling over the kids then you have to hear the shocked gasps and they struggle to put you in a box that suits them. If you have kids then, as the old saying goes, “You have to work like you don’t have kids and parent like you don’t have a job.” And if that’s too much for you? Then you’re ‘just’ a stay at home mum…a pigeon hole that is small and uncomfortable and worryingly reductive.
It’s ok if that has an effect on your mental health.
Mental health issues don’t always arise because of a crisis, or a specific trauma. Sometimes, mental health issues are a result of tiny, low-level attacks on your being and self-esteem over a period of time that all of a sudden feel overwhelmingly violent.
And it’s ok if that affects your mental health.