A friend recently shared this article on Facebook:
Every woman has an ‘I Don’t’ list. And it’s about time we shared them.
TL;DR? Women today feel the need to appear to be doing ALL. THE. THINGS. … even as we inwardly feel certain we’re not enough, because we aren’t squeezing productivity out of every single second of the day. It’s exhausting, feeling like you’re never doing quite enough.
I accept this as truth, and I accept the challenge issued at the end of this article. Hence, my “I don’t” list.
- I don’t cook dinner during the week, and I haven’t for nearly two years. I’m fortunate to have a life partner who’s willing to either pick up the slack or go out most weeknights.
- I don’t cut up my own fruit; I pay Publix (or someone else) to cut my fruit, because it’s realistically the only way I’ll ever eat it … and I. Love. Fruit.
- I don’t grade everything within 24 hours. Or 48 hours. Or sometimes, even within a week. (I do try to, but I just don’t succeed consistently.)
- I don’t turn off my digital devices hours before bedtime. In fact, for the last 1-2 hours I’m awake each day, you can usually find me with at least two screens in my face — a TV and my tablet. And as much as I try to psych myself out of falling down this rabbit hole every single night by uninstalling it every morning, much of the time I stay up altogether WAY too late playing spider solitaire. I can’t help it, y’all. I LOVE IT.
- I don’t leave “happy birthday” messages on friends’ Facebook pages. I’m of the mind that if you cannot do it consistently for everyone, you should just have a policy of never doing it at all. So that’s what I do. I’m sorry I miss wishing you a happy birthday publicly. For the closest of my friends, I usually manage to remember a card or a text or something else. But even then? I’m wildly inconsistent.
- I don’t call my mom enough. (To be fair, we have this in common.)
- I don’t call my dad, unless I need advice on some DIY project. (Again, to be fair, he reciprocates.)
- I don’t go to work-related social events with Doug. It’s to the point where even Doug says, “People are starting to wonder….” But despite the bad-wife guilt I’ve got over it, I just don’t have the emotional bandwidth for after-hours or weekend functions approximately 99% of the time.
- Like the author of the original post, I don’t iron. I haven’t owned an iron for at least two decades, in fact.
- I don’t make time for exercise. I don’t do a physical yoga practice hardly at all anymore. I don’t meditate.
- I don’t return most emails quickly, if at all. If it goes more than about 5 hours without a reply, there’s a good chance I will forget, move on, and feel ashamed the next time I interact with the sender.
- Ditto texts, often.
- I don’t have meaningful conversations with my partner very often, especially mid-semester. (Thankfully, he is in academia, too, so he falls into the same patterns, and we don’t hold it against one another.)
- I don’t even begin to approach consistency when it comes to training/disciplining my dogs, especially Ginger Wigglebottom. She’s not especially well behaved.
I could go on … and on … and on. But you get the point. It may sometimes look like I’ve Definitely Got My Shit Together, but y’all … I’m just winging it, too.
What’s on your ‘I Don’t…” list?
