On not having it all, at all

A rogue fart thought I had while driving home from my daughter’s school.

It’s always funny to me when people insist you need to “niche down.” And they declare this with such confidence, as if every corner of your life must have a business plan attached. As if anything you make has to serve an ulterior motive beyond “I felt something and wanted to put it somewhere.”

Alright, maybe that’s true if you’re monetizing your personality like a tech startup. But Substack, for me, is one of the last places where I don’t feel required to optimize myself. I don’t have to overfluff, or overexplain, or even pretend there’s any kind of strategy hiding behind every sentence. If two people read my ramblings, great. I save my business-brain for LinkedIn. That’s where I talk shop and share the marketing thoughts that have some kind of utility. Here, you get me as a WHOLE person.

So this is my tiny disclaimer: if you’ve wandered over from LinkedIn expecting another breakdown of “how to think about social strategy in 2026,” I’m afraid this won’t always be that. Sometimes you’ll get insight and other times you’ll get whatever thought was rattling around my head. TOTD (thought of the day, is that a thing? Anyhoo, I wrote this piece after a week where nothing seemed to go right, at work or at home.

---

Some mornings, like today, I wake up already negotiating with myself. The ambitious woman wants to sprint but the mother of three wants to lie down on the floor and let life simply happen around her. But instead, I do what most working mothers do, and I split the difference and feel guilty about both

My internal monologue is a rotating audit:

• Am I focused enough?

• Am I present enough?

• Am I layering on the generational trauma?

• Am I a dependable colleague?

• Am I even in my own body anymore?

It’s a pretty charming cocktail of ambition and guilt. Shaken nightly and served warm.

This is the first year I’ve tried to hold all of it at once. I’ve got an infant who treats my body like a public utility, a toddler whose independence is admirable in theory but definitely catastrophic in practice, and I have a teenager in the middle of a hormonal reboot that breaks my heart about 7 different ways because I can’t fucking remember the last time I picked him up.

Meanwhile my career has finally started to accelerate, which makes me think that life is nothing but a big fat joke.

Therapy has been clarifying. And if you haven’t gone then I think you should. I think—emphasizing that this is my opinion—that everyone should go to therapy. What I’ve learned is that none of this mess belongs solely to me¹, and all of it moves forward whether I’m ready or not. I’ve learned that society may demand a lot of mothers, but it’s our internal auditor that is downright sadistic. She loves a red pen, and she does not believe in extensions.

Every November the burnout arrives like clockwork. People call it “a season of reflection,” but I’ve never found reflection to be particularly restful. It feels more like the month when every load-bearing wall in my life files a deeply worded complaint.

A friend sent me a clip of Indra Nooyi saying she doesn’t believe in “having it all.” Something always falters. Something always gets pushed, or delegated. But the trick is to find coping mechanisms. You need to find ways to cope or you’ll always be circling the drain.

So I’ve started collecting a short list of permissions. I originally thought mantras but I’m too tired for that bullshit:

1. Unless you work in an ER, the word “emergency” does not apply to your job.

2. Dinner is not a daily referendum on your competence.

3. Childcare does not subtract from your motherhood.

4. Hire someone to clean.

5. You can love your work just as much as you love your children.

6. Being inconsistent is not a crime.

7. Lower the bar, then lower it again.

Writing this obviously doesn’t solve anything, but it does let me vent to a bunch of strangers readers on how tired and overwhelmed I am, and not have to think about it again today, because I definitely won’t read this draft again. My final thought on this is that I don’t think the goal should be to find balance. I think, ultimately, we should stop feeling less at war with ourselves.

1. Surprise! Yet another experience that is not even remotely unique.