Nobody Gave Us the Manual: Notes on Being a Woman Right Now

We were raised on a very specific promise: you can have it all. The career, the relationship, the glowing skin, the savings account, the friend group that meets for brunch every Sunday without anyone cancelling. Nobody mentioned that “it all” would arrive flat-packed, with no instructions and half the screws missing.

So here we are. Building it ourselves. On the floor. And the WRONG key, with wrong being the operative word and a description for the economy right now.

The goalposts have wheels now

Our mothers had a list. Not a fair list, not always a kind one, but a list. Get married by this age. Have children by that one. Keep the house, keep the job if you can, keep smiling regardless.

We threw that list out, and good for us. The problem is what replaced it: every list at once. Be ambitious but not intimidating. Be independent but make room for a partner. Be natural but also contoured. Rest, but also have a side hustle. Love your body, but here are seventeen ads for things to fix about it.

The goalposts didn’t just move. They grew wheels and started rolling downhill.

What I’m choosing instead

I’ve stopped trying to win a game where the rules change every time someone posts a reel. Instead, I’m working with three questions. They’re not revolutionary. They’re just mine.

Is this mine, or did I absorb it from somewhere? A surprising number of my goals turned out to belong to an influencer, a relative, or a version of me from 2019 who had very different priorities and much worse eyebrows.

Will this matter in five years? Not five minutes. Not five days. If the honest answer is no, it gets a smaller slice of my energy.

Can I do this without abandoning myself? Ambition is good. Ambition that requires me to stop sleeping, stop eating properly and stop calling my friends is just a slower way of falling apart.

Modern womanhood is a draft

Here’s what I’ve made peace with: there is no finished version of me waiting at the end of all this. There’s no day when I’ll wake up fully healed, fully funded, fully figured out.

Modern womanhood isn’t a destination. It’s a draft. You edit it as you go. You cross things out. You keep the good lines. Some days the whole thing reads like nonsense, and some days you surprise yourself.

That’s what this space is for. Not a manual, because none of us got one. Just notes from someone else on the floor, holding the wrong key, figuring it out as she goes.

Pull up a cushion. It’s going to take a while.

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