Ep. 225: When You Can't Put It Down...And Nobody Gets It

I want to start today by saying something that I don't hear said enough in the self help sort of space:

The advice to "just take some me-time" is one of the most tone-deaf things you can say to a woman who is essentially drowning.

What we commonly hear are things like:

"Put something down." "Fill your own cup." "You can't pour from an empty cop.”

These things are true. I say them too, I teach them too. 

But I think there’s an additional conversation that needs to be had. We can’t just keep it there…where we give you the solution as though one size fits all…because we know that not all lives are the same. 

And if we don’t have a follow up conversation, that advice can feel cruel and insensitive to a woman who feels like has no one to hand anything to and is struggling to keep her head abo ve water. 

Because here's what that advice assumes:

It assumes you have someone who will catch what you drop.

It assumes that if you stop spinning one of the plates, someone else in your house will pick up the stick.

It assumes there's a margin somewhere in your life where "you time" can live.

And for a lot of the women I know That assumption is wrong. Completely wrong.

So today, I'm not going to tell you to take a bath. I'm not going to suggest a morning routine. I'm not going to hand you another coping strategy that requires someone else to cooperate.

But I’m here to have a different conversation…so that’s where we’re headed. 

Resources mentioned in this episode: Midlife Clutter: Explained and Solved over on Substack:

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Transcript

Okay, so what I've realized is that my superpower is being really a truth seeker and a truth teller. And so what I'm gonna do is tell you the truth about what's actually happening in this time of the me time conversations and give you something real that you can hold onto if that just doesn't fit for you. Because you deserve more than just a candle and a face mask. So let's get into it.

Well, if you are a woman who feels like you are caring everything, I need you to hear me when I say you are probably not exaggerating. I talk to women every single week who are managing the house, the calendars, maybe the kids, kids of all ages. And there are a growing number of grandmothers who are also stepping in to raise grandchildren.

They're also managing aging parents at the same time, the job, the finances, the emotional weather of everyone under their roof. And they're doing it all with little to no backup. And it's not the, well, my husband could help more kind of backup. It's not the, I wish that my mom lived closer kind of backup that they're missing. It's zero backup. Women who are doing this completely alone. Women in marriages that feel more like work than partnership.

Women who have asked for help so many times that they've stopped asking because the answer, whether spoken or unspoken, is always no. Women who have given everything they have to keep this machine running and there is just nothing left over. And when someone suggests a self-care routine as a way to ease her anxiety or slow the racing down that happens in her head and all of that common tension that the stress lives in, well, I get why this

can land almost like a slap in the face. Because if this resonates with you, here is something I know about you. This is what I know about the women that I am talking to right now that relate to what I'm saying. You don't need someone to tell you that you matter. You already know that. What you need is for someone to look at your actual life, not the Instagram version, not the ideal version, your real life, and talk to you honestly about it. And so that's what we're going to do. The load that you're carrying is real.

The fact that you can't just put it down, that's real too. The fact that life keeps adding more, more responsibility, more needs, more expectations, those things, they're all real too. And the exhaustion that is underneath all of that, that's real too. I'm not here to minimize any of that, but I am here to challenge one specific part of the story that you might be telling yourself. Not the part that says this load is heavy. That part is actually true.

The part that says nothing can change. So there's a particular kind of trapped feeling that midlife women regularly describe to me. It's not just tired, it's something deeper. And it sounds like this. I've just accepted that this is the way it is. I've stopped expecting anything to change. I'm just surviving until things get easier or I die. One of the two. And...

When I hear that, honestly, my heart breaks a little bit because those are not just words. Those are actual beliefs. And our beliefs, they shape everything. They shape what you look for, what you ask for, what you allow, and what you unconsciously decide you don't deserve. And here's the sneaky thing about feeling like you're trapped. When a person believes that the walls are completely closed in, they stop.

looking for the door. They stop looking for the escape route. They stop asking the uncomfortable questions. They stop noticing the small places where something could potentially shift because the brain very efficiently decides, well, there is no point. And I want to be really careful here because I'm not going to do what is so often done and tell you that your circumstances are just a mindset problem. That would be so dismissive and honestly kind of insulting.

Your circumstances are real. But here's the question that I want to sit with today. Are you carrying everything that's in your life right now, or are you carrying the belief that you must carry it exactly the way that you've been carrying it forever with no renegotiation, with no adjustment, and with no room to question any of it? Because

Those two things can feel the same when they're weighing you down on your shoulders, but they are not actually the same. One is reality, and the other one of those things is actually a story. And sometimes the story is sitting on top of us, again, just as heavily as the actual responsibility. And so let me lean into this phrase that we often hear, right? Put something down, because I think it's being used to mean the wrong thing.

When most people say, just put something down, they mean remove it. They mean quit doing it. They mean stop doing it entirely. They mean walk away. And for many women, that is genuinely not an option. I'm one of those women. You cannot put the stick down on a sick parent. You cannot pretend that you don't have a child who needs you. You cannot walk away from a mortgage or a job that keeps the lights on.

You cannot simply stop being the person that your family depends on. I know that, right? I'm not gonna pretend that it's different than that, but I wanna offer you a different way to think about this. What if putting something down, that phrase, isn't about removing the responsibility, but what if we allowed it to be about renegotiating and redesigning how you carry it? I worked with this...

I'll call her Sarah, and she was the primary caregiver for her mother who had dementia. She was also working full-time. She had two teenagers of her own and her husband traveled for work. When someone told her to take a break, she would essentially laugh and think, take a break? Take a break from what? From her mother not knowing who she was, from her kids needing dinner, from her job that paid the insurance that covered her mother's medication?

The load wasn't going anywhere, but here's what we discovered when we actually dug in. Pretty quickly, we found three things that she was carrying that weren't actually hers. She was carrying, number one, guilt. Every single day, guilt for not being a better caregiver to her mom, for not being there for everything that her kids quote unquote needed her for. Even though by any objective standard,

She was doing these things in an extraordinary way. She was carrying the emotional labor of keeping her husband informed and emotionally regulated about everything going on at home. This was the second thing she was carrying that we really discovered wasn't hers. She was doing this all from a distance, via text, at the end of her already decimated days. And third, she was carrying the belief, and this is a common one,

She was carrying the belief that if she felt exhausted, she was somehow failing. She was somehow doing something wrong. She was just not strong enough. And those three things, in reality, none of those were hers to carry. The guilt was not necessary. It was not earned and it was not useful. The emotional labor with her husband, that was a real conversation that needed to happen and it was a hard one.

But it was his responsibility to show up more fully, not hers to constantly manage him from a distance. He could step into what managing himself looked like more. And then there was that belief that exhaustion meant failure or that she was somehow weak. And that is just a straight up lie, but it is such a common one that women have. Exhaustion in her situation, it was not anything close to a flaw.

It was a completely human response to an impossible load. She couldn't put down her mother's care, but she could put down the guilt. She could put down the invisible emotional management of her husband, and she could put down the belief for sure that she was failing. And when we were able to put those things down, that created some room. Not a lot of room, but just enough room.

enough room that she could breathe. And so I want to spend some time here because this is where most conversations stop way too soon. We talk a lot about the stuff that makes up the tangible load, right? The tasks, the appointments, the responsibilities, the calendar. But we don't talk nearly enough about the invisible weight. The invisible weight is that layer that sits on top of all of those actual responsibilities that you can visibly see.

And in my experience, for many midlife women, the invisible weight is heavier than the real one. So let's unpack some of what that invisible weight can be.

And these are things that you probably aren't hearing anybody else talk about because these are much more obscure. So there's the weight of watching and anticipating, constantly scanning the emotional temperature of everyone around you, noticing when someone is off before they even say a word, preemptively solving problems that nobody's told you about yet, being the one who sees everything and then quietly managing it without anyone even knowing that you're doing it.

That's kind of that weight of watching and anticipating. Then there's the weight of the standard you hold yourself to. Not the standard anyone else has set for you. The one you have set for yourself. The one that says you should be handling this better. You should be able to work harder. You should be able to stay up later or get up earlier. The one that compares you to some imaginary version of yourself who doesn't crack, who doesn't snap, who doesn't need anything. Who can just keep going and going and going.

The third piece of this invisible weight that I don't think anyone has talked about is the weight of unspoken grief.

because midlife brings unique and unexpected losses that don't get funerals or the time to process the grief that comes directly from these losses. I'm gonna say that again, because that is powerful. So there's this unspoken grief and it's there because midlife brings unique and unexpected losses that don't get funerals or

the time to process that grief that comes as a result of those losses. What kind of losses? The loss of who you thought you'd be by now. The loss of a marriage that was supposed to feel like a partnership. The loss of a body that used to have energy. The lost of time. The slow creeping realization that the years are moving faster than you planned. That's a big one. The fourth weight that we're carrying is the weight of resentment.

that you don't say out loud because you're not that kind of person. You don't complain. You don't make it about you. You're there for everyone else and you just bottle all of your own stuff up and it turns into resentment. But you push through and the resentment, it just sits there and it gets heavier and heavier and heavier. None of those weights that I just mentioned are on the to-do list. None of them have a task that you can cross off.

but they are taking up, especially collectively, an enormous amount of space. And here's the thing that you can't me time your way out of when it comes to invisible weight. In reality, you can't bubble bath your way out of unprocessed grief. You can't journal your way out of resentment that's never been named, let alone addressed. What you can do, and what I'm going to ask you to consider, is to start by naming it.

because the invisible weight only has power when it stays invisible. But when you can name it, you can start to separate yourself from it. And when you can see it clearly, even if it doesn't go away, you can stop unconsciously carrying it. Now, awareness that we're looking to build here, it isn't the same as a solution, but it is always

always the beginning of a solution. So what I'm saying is, is if you've been trying to figure out how to stop being so bogged down, how to stop being so bone deep exhausted, and you've been looking for solutions like planners or a better routine or better habits, but you haven't taken the time to become aware of what...

what weights are actually on your shoulders, like some of the ones I've talked about today, no solution is gonna work. You have to get the awareness first.

So shifting gears to one other thing I talked about briefly that I don't want to gloss over here. I want to address the support issue directly because I know it's just sitting there. And the reason that so much advice about self-care falls completely flat is because it was written for women who have a support system, who maybe they have a husband who participates, maybe they have family nearby, maybe they have a budget that includes childcare or eating out.

or hiring someone to clean their house. It's for women who have a job with some flexibility when you need to take yourself or a family member to the doctor, friends who can step in when you need a lifeline. And not everyone has that. Some of you are genuinely alone in this. You've asked for help and you've been told no, or worse, nothing. There's been no response. Just the deafening silence of people who are counting on you to keep going so that they don't have to step up.

And I'm not going to pretend that that isn't a real situation, because it is. And I'm not going to tell you that you just need to ask better, or you need to communicate differently, or you need to let go of control so that others can rise to the occasion. Sometimes you've asked every way you know how. And the answer, again, whether spoken out loud or not, has been no. So let me say this as clearly as I can. The work that we're doing here as we talk today,

It isn't about fixing anyone else or even asking anyone else for anything. It's about you. It's about what you have access to inside yourself, even in the absence of outside support. Because here's what I've learned. Support, real, substantial, change-making support, really doesn't start from the outside. It starts from the inside.

It starts when a woman decides that she is worth protecting, even before anyone else agrees. That decision, know this, it's not gonna fix your circumstances, but it changes your relationship to your circumstances. It can change what you say yes to. It changes what you say no to, even imperfectly, even when there's friction, even when nobody else in your house agrees with what you're saying.

It changes how you talk to yourself about what you're living through, about what your reality is. And I know that that sounds small, but I have watched that decision, that one quiet, private, internal decision be the beginning of the end of drowning while in survival mode for so many women. And know that it doesn't happen overnight. It's not a moment. It's more like a direction. The direction changes.

But it all has to start somewhere. And it usually starts with a woman who finally decides to stop treating herself as the one person in her life who doesn't matter. And I wanna give you something completely concrete before we end today, because I don't wanna leave you with just words that resonate. These things, they are not tasks. They are not strategies that require you to have a partner who cooperates or a schedule that has margin.

or a support system that can show up for you. These are three internal shifts and they are accessible to you right now in the life you actually have because why? What did I just say? I just said it starts with a decision. These are available to you because you decide that these are available to you. Number one, shift number one, stop pretending you're fine. The amount of energy that it takes

to maintain the appearance that everything is OK when it isn't is enormous, absolutely enormous. And most of us don't even realize that we're pretending. We just keep going. We just keep showing up. We keep answering, yeah, I'm fine, when someone asks. Not to anyone specific, not necessarily out loud, but to yourself. Stop pretending. The first shift is to get honest privately in your own mind about what is actually hard, not to complain.

And not to sit in it and wallow, but to stop spending energy pretending that it isn't hard. Honest acknowledgement is not the same as giving up. It's actually the opposite. It's the beginning of addressing something real instead of just managing it on the surface level. Because you can't solve a problem that you won't name. So that's shift number one. Shift number two is to separate responsibility from ownership.

Now, this one takes a little bit of time to sit with, and so I want you to really think about it. There are responsibilities in your life that are truly yours, things that you are responsible for doing or seeing to. And there are things that you have quietly taken ownership of that were never actually yours. Ownership means that you feel personally, emotionally responsible for the outcome, not just the task, but the outcome, the feelings.

the result of success or failure. You might be responsible for making sure your teenager gets to their appointment, but are you also owning their emotional state when they get there? Their attitude during it? Their gratitude or lack thereof? Are you carrying the weight of whether they're okay, even when they're adults? Even when they're capable? Even when it's genuinely not your burden? I wanna ask you...

I want you to ask yourself, where have I taken ownership that doesn't belong to me? You can care, but that doesn't mean you have to carry. And we women, especially midlife women, have built a pattern that has spanned years, maybe even decades, of thinking those are the same thing. Thinking that if we don't carry, that means we don't care. And that is not true. When it comes to responsibility and ownership,

the responsibility might stay. But the ownership, the weight of carrying the emotional outcome for everyone around you, that can likely be released in a lot of instances, slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of practice. But it can be released. That's the second shift. It's to understand and then separate responsibility and ownership. They're not the same thing. And the third shift that you need is to find one question, not one answer.

I'm not going to give you a to-do list, but I am going to give you just one question. And I want you to sit with it, not for just now, not even for today, but I want you to marinate on this for a week. And we're not looking to fix everything. We're not looking to solve anything. Your job is just to marinate on this question and just to notice. And so the question is this.

What am I carrying that isn't actually mine to carry? Not what can I quit, not what can I remove from my life, just essentially what is in this backpack that I carry every day right now that I didn't consciously choose to put there? Maybe it's the guilt that isn't deserved. Maybe it's the worry about an outcome that is related to an event in someone else's life. Will your daughter's husband get the promotion at work?

so that they can stop struggling so much? You can care about whether or not he gets the job, but you don't have to take ownership of the emotional aftermath that comes with what if he doesn't get the job? You can care without carrying the emotional load of the worry. You can care without carrying.

It could also be that you are carrying the emotional labor of managing everyone else's experiences in your family every day. Maybe it's the belief that if you stop doing everything, everything will fall apart and it would be your fault. Maybe you're carrying a standard that you hold yourself to that you would never in a million years hold your best friend to. You don't have to decide what to do with any of these discoveries that you might make, but just ask the question.

and see what shows up. What can you find that isn't yours to carry even though you care? And I want to end today by saying this directly. If you're in a season where everything is genuinely hard, where the load is real and the support is thin and the future feels like more of the same, I'm not here to tell you that it's all in your head. It's not. But I am here to tell you that the version of you who shows up every single day for people who need her

who keeps going without being asked and carries more than her share without complaint. That woman deserves someone in her corner. And until someone in your life figures that out, I want to be that voice. I want to be the person in your corner, not telling you to try harder, not telling you to hustle your way out of burnout, not dismissing your reality with a bubble bath and a journal prompt that's going to make everything better. But.

walking with you honestly in the middle of the actual hard thing and saying, hey, you know what? This is real. And you know what? You're not failing. And you're not broken. You are not a woman who needs to be fixed. You are a woman who has been carrying an extraordinary load, often without credit, often without rest, often without anyone else seeing it. And I see you. I want you to know that you are seen.

And that shift that can happen as a result, it starts small. It starts inside those shifts that you need to make. But it all starts with someone finally seeing you clearly enough to help you understand why you're so worn down. You're not crazy and it's not in your head. And I hope that today was some of that for you. I hope that you finally see, feel seen. And I hope that you

Start with the shift of asking yourself, what am I carrying that I can still care about? But I know I have to stop carrying this. So know that if this conversation resonated today, if you found yourself nodding along or finally felt like someone was actually talking about your life, I want to invite you further into this conversation. Every week, I write about this exact kind of thing in my sub stack, midlife clutter explained and solved.

It's honest, no-fluff writing for midlife women who are done pretending they're fine and ready to actually do something about it. You can find my writings at midlifeclutterhelp.com and it's free to follow along there. And if you're in a season where it feels like the invisible work of your life is finally, finally crushing you, reach out. Seriously, send me a message. Because sometimes the most powerful thing is just having someone to look at your life, to look at the real

messy parts of your life without flinching. And I'd love to be that person for you. And so until we talk again, make it a great day.