Every time I hear the phrase “you are enough,” I think, enough of what? Turning fifty has reconstituted me. I don’t want to be enough. I want to be content—with who I am, what I have, and what I aim to accomplish. To me, contentment means feeling satisfied. At peace. Sufficient. It means existing in a perpetual state of gratitude. Contentment is what my girlfriends and I talked about for hours during a weekend trip to Arizona in the summer of 2024.
“I’m burnt out,” Jasmine sighed as she sat on the edge of the pool—her slender brown legs swirling clockwise in the lukewarm water. A successful entrepreneur, she’d worked for fifteen years in an emotionally draining field that requires a saintly level of impulse control. The work alone could lead to burnout, but it was also the hours piled atop self-induced pressure to show up for family and her partner and friends in all the ways good children and spouses and besties are expected to.
We are living and working in an era inundated with talk of burnout. The plethora of books and articles and posts and movies make clear that collective exhaustion is taking women by storm.
According to Atlanta-based Christian psychologist Dr. Alduan Tartt, by the end of 2024, Black women had begun leveraging FMLA to press pause on an unrelenting rotation of serving. The traditional short breaks—weekends, vacations, spa visits—proved insufficient for the soul-deep fatigue that chronic self-sacrifice had ignited. Apparently, women in his practice were going to extremes to find their center, like choosing between their marriages and their well-being. Some simply assumed their partner couldn’t or wouldn’t meet them halfway. Others had summoned the courage to ask and were handily rejected with uncivilized versions of “this isn’t what I signed up for.”
This saddened me, and begged the question: what did women sign up for? What do we want in return for our compounding labors of love? For many, the answer is a thriving professional life, healthy partnership, and peace of mind. In conversations with high-achieving women, and in Dr. Tartt’s recounting, the reality of this three-pronged longing is falling far short of the dream.
“Women are opening their laptops at two o’clock in the morning after full days exercising, meetings, emails, doing hair, making dinner, having sex, caring for aging parents, serving the community, and worrying about the state of the world,” he said, incredulous.
“Do you think men are doing that? No. We’re getting our rest, waking up early to go to the gym. We’re going to work. And when we’re done, we’re looking for that dinner you made.”
This take wasn’t new, but hearing it this way—especially during an acute attack against our civil rights—was triggering. It reminded me of what my friend Soraya Chemaly wrote in her masterpiece Rage Becomes Her about women being seen as vessels, instead of human beings with agency and dreams and needs. Honestly, it made me want to burn it all down and move to a small, beautiful place where people were too busy loving the land to worry about standing on people’s necks.
We talk a lot about boundaries. Someone taking advantage of you? Set boundaries. Too much on your plate? Set boundaries. People asking for more than you have to give? Set boundaries. But Dr. Tartt rightly pointed out that when everything on your list is important, and you’re not confident the gaps will be filled without you, setting boundaries feels risky.
He’s worked with women who are scared to push back against the onslaught because they don’t want to “blow up their own spot,” or lose what they have—their family, their spouse, their home, their jobs, their status. He asked what I thought the world would look like if women opted out all at once. I’m seldom at a loss for words, but my brain couldn’t do that calculus. Women’s work is weaved into everything we do, even when we fail to recognize it. Days later, after I’d had a chance to think, I imagined a less kind, less beautiful, less connected, less inspiring world, because that’s what we are now observing as the new administration and associates call for more “masculine energy.” On the ground, I envisioned a lot of hungry, dirty, unkempt people of all ages who, even as they circumvented huge piles of laundry, still had no idea where their socks were.
More than once, I’ve overheard my young adult sons in lively conversation with each other lamenting the quality of the dating pool: “They don’t make women like they used to,” they say, shaking their heads.
“Good,” I think to myself, while shaking my own. I hope that by putting myself before the world, I can show them a different way to “woman.” Time will tell.
Tara Jaye Frank
