Reducing Overwhelm Through Micro-Feminist Actions
The world is a lot & I work in healthcare. Here are approaches that are big, small, and concrete that I'm trying this month.
I have an extremely precocious essay I wrote when I was 16 for a high school English class that asked us to imagine what we wanted to be when we grew up. For whatever reason (good, bad, and odd!), I wrote about wanting to be an adolescent psychiatrist when I grew up for girls with eating disorders. I had never met an adolescent psychiatrist, and I never struggled with disordered eating or body image. Yet, there was my dream regardless.
Since the beginning of medical school, the response I’ve gotten from people about wanting to this career path has been increasingly emphatic replies such as, “Oh, God bless you!”, “We need people like you,” and, coming in at number one, “I could never do that, that must be so hard!”.
Most of the time, I’m very grateful for my job, 15 years of intense work later. It is meaningful, and eventually I’ll be able to live comfortably (…and pay off my med school loans). As I’ve started the final part of my training this year in child fellowship, I still believe 16 year old me was right. I also have learned that it is important that I take what other people say—that this job is hard, in many ways—seriously. If I allow myself to internalize that this work is strenuous, complex, and at times downright hostile, then the way I treat my own sense of overwhelm or internal distress becomes a lot more generous and much more kind.
You, my dear reader, may not be a child psychiatrist, but you might be something else that entails the kind of labor that a patriarchical world has heavily invested in you not knowing and valuing as labor. Perhaps you are a school teacher with an underresourced class of 30 kids, all of whom have been impacted by the developmental repurcussions of the COVID19 pandemic. Perhaps you are a woman who is both a mother to young kids and the primary daughter of aging parents, caught between expanding care needs for everyone but yourself. Maybe you are a new mother, going back to work and yet still breast feeding, expected to be the primary parent and not let anyone at work know the toll this additional, round-the-clock work takes.
We fight for a better world. We protest against the injustice in our communities. We toil and we resist and we imagine a world better than the current direction we are going in. If we want to not let our bodies be the battlefield, we must also rest. To rest, many of us need to see the reasons we are so very tired.
This past year, I’ve found myself being drawn to the thought leaders online that can speak to experience—and thus wisdom—that I as a white woman do not have. Black women in particular have freed my thinking from restrictions I was not aware were there.
If I am to speak about the small changes I’ve been applying, I must first recognize the women I have been learning from over the past year, if not longer. Dr. Cecilia Regina has been the primary voice who has taught me to see and deconstruct much of the white supremacy and misogyny that exists in day to day life, and how to have a sense of humor and power when addressing it, both in the outside world and within myself. The Nap Ministry has been doing this work and writing about it for years, and has been one of the first invitations that made me reconsider my relationship with work and rest. BurbnBougie both on TikTok and Youtube has done the work of sharing stories from around the internet and Reddit of women waking up, and introducing with humor the term “Find Out Season” to my consciousness. There are many, many more I could list here. Finally, Adrienne Maree Brown’s book and this particular podcast episode have changed my understanding of pleasure and its part of a free woman and sustainable advocacy. Part of the failure of feminism has been the resistance to intersectionality, and therefore the failure to integrate wisdom from women who have been forced to question all systems we live under—not only patriarchy. Follow them, pay them—they are leaders and their work is life-changing.