I remember one New Year’s Eve in my twenties.
There was good cheese on the table, overpriced champagne in our glasses, and the kind of optimism that only exists at the edge of a new year.
My girlfriends and I were talking about the future.
Not casually.
Women rarely talk about the future casually.
We dissected it.
We examined it from every angle.
The year we might get married.
The age we hoped to have children.
Whether our bodies would allow the timelines we had quietly created for ourselves.
The careers we wanted.
The things we dreamed of achieving.
The things we feared we might never achieve.
We talked about fertility before we needed to. We talked about motherhood before we knew what it would ask of us. We talked about whether we could have the lives we imagined, and what we would have to sacrifice if we couldn’t.
We were sitting there, champagne in hand, trying to solve the entire architecture of our futures.
At one point we all stopped and laughed.
Why couldn’t we just drink champagne and dance?
Of course we could.
And eventually we did.
But first, we had to analyse our entire existence.
Later that night, we made our way outside to find the boys.
We asked what they had been talking about.
We expected something profound.
The state of the world.
Politics.
The future.
Something worthy of a group of people approaching thirty.
They were discussing whether birds had penises.
I wish I was making this up.
There we were, carrying questions about fertility, ambition, purpose, relationships, and the direction of our lives.
And they were deeply invested in the reproductive anatomy of birds.
I still think about that moment.
Not because I wanted to be a man.
I don’t.
But sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to take a short holiday from my own brain.
To exist without constantly calculating.
Planning.
Anticipating.
Not all men, obviously.
But occasionally it seems like a beautiful thing to be free from mentally project-managing your entire future.
Because this is something many women learn early:
We are taught to prepare.
To think ahead.
To consider every possibility.
To hold multiple futures in our minds at once.
And somewhere along the way, many of us become very good at carrying things that no one else can see.
The Invisible Weight Women Carry
There is a kind of work women have always done that rarely has a name.
It is not the obvious work.
It is the remembering.
The noticing.
The emotional preparation that happens before anything has even happened.
It is knowing a friend’s voice sounds different.
It is remembering the birthday someone else forgot.
It is checking in because something felt slightly off.
It is knowing what everyone needs before they ask.
This is the invisible labour so many women carry.
And because it is invisible, it is often mistaken for something effortless.
People see the result.
They rarely see the woman creating it.
The Woman Everyone Relies On
There is a strange thing that happens when you become the dependable one.
People stop wondering if you need anything.
They assume you will say something if you do.
They assume you are coping because you always have.
Strength becomes part of your identity.
The capable one.
The organised one.
The calm one.
The one who can handle it.
But there is a quiet loneliness in always being the person others lean on.
Because even the strongest women want someone to notice.
Not because they cannot cope.
Because they should not always have to.
When Did We Stop Asking Who She Is?
I think about how often women are known by their roles.
Someone’s mother.
Someone’s wife.
Someone’s daughter.
Someone’s colleague.
Someone’s friend.
But underneath all those names is a woman who is constantly changing.
A woman with new dreams.
New fears.
New questions.
New versions of herself she is still learning how to meet.
And yet sometimes the people closest to us become attached to the version of us they first knew.
The carefree friend.
The ambitious friend.
The friend who always said yes.
The friend who was always available.
But life asks us to change.
Motherhood changes us.
Loss changes us.
Love changes us.
Healing changes us.
Growing older changes us.
The women we become deserve to be met with curiosity, not disappointment.
The Beauty of Being Witnessed
Perhaps what we are all searching for is not to be admired.
It is to be witnessed.
There is a difference.
Being admired is being seen for what you achieve.
Being witnessed is being seen when there is nothing to achieve.
It is someone noticing you are tired before you have to explain.
It is someone asking a second time when you say, “I’m fine.”
It is being allowed to arrive as you are, not as the person everyone is used to.
Learning to Put Something Down
For a long time, women have been praised for how much they can carry.
But perhaps there is another kind of strength.
The strength to admit you are tired.
The strength to receive.
The strength to allow someone else to remember for a while.
Because love should not depend on how useful we are.
We should not have to earn care by being endlessly giving.
There should be places in our lives where we are not the organiser, the caretaker, the strong one.
Where we are not responsible for holding everything together.
Where we are simply known.
Maybe that is the version of ourselves we miss most.
Not the younger woman.
Not the woman before everything changed.
But the woman who believed she could be loved without having to carry the whole world.
