As I write this, I am sitting in my cozy house next to a window overlooking a beautiful grove of trees. In the mornings, two red birds jump from tree to tree, chasing and teasing each other. I have a little red candle on my desk that smells like warmth and spices and memories I want to make. A string of salt lights casts a warm orangish glow while I work. And I think I might be on my way to living out a wilder fantasy than I’ve ever had the guts to have. I’ll come back to that, but I felt like I should set the scene for how I’m feeling as I write this. In case it gets as delicious as life feels to me right now.
Being a woman and having dreams doesn’t feel like it should always go together. I don’t know if other women feel the way I do, but I think I have always felt, deep down, like I was primarily here to make other people’s lives better. Part of me has watched other women, especially the most beautiful ones, and assumed they belonged to some kind of club I had not been invited to, a club for women who are worthy of living lives that belong to themselves. Lives where other people feel motivated to take care of their needs, pay them respect, or notice them. For me personally, I’ve always felt that my highest calling was to enhance the lives of others, to notice them, to care for them, and to quiet the roar of my own experience enough that I could do all of that well.
In March of this year, I had this undeniable churning in my soul that was telling me something had to change. At this point, I will go ahead and label it a midlife crisis. When I was talking to my sister about what was happening in my life, I heard myself say, “I think I’m going through a midlife crisis. Well… maybe it’s only a crisis if I don’t take action.” And here we are. I’m taking action.
I’ve already shared that I made the difficult decision to leave my very good job in April (in response to the aforementioned churning). It was the latest chapter in a long history of trying really hard to hang on to something I felt I needed to do for other people, even though it wasn’t resonating with me. The signs were familiar. I had to force myself to bite my tongue almost constantly, vigorously exercise or use some form of sedative to get to sleep, and deal with a stomachache whenever I knew I had to engage in certain work activities.
My primary response was to work harder to develop coping mechanisms. Some I’ve experimented with include excessive drinking, therapy, exercise, journaling, going to church, doing a new project, going back to college, reading self-help books, getting up to cry by myself late at night where no one could hear me, and the list goes on. Interestingly, it never occurred to me until now that my lack of peace might be a signal that something was wrong and needed to change. It has taken 41 years to get to that point. But here I am. And I am listening now.
Here is the scary, wild thought I am having: What if I’m wrong? What if I’ve been wrong this whole time about my highest calling? What if I am meant to have a dream and a destiny that belong just to me? One that isn’t only about serving other people, but about being myself? An even scarier thought: What if being myself is my highest calling?
Turns out I’m not alone in some of the things I’ve been experiencing. I’ve been researching women’s experiences, and I want to share a few things I’m learning.
One of the concepts I’ve come across is self-silencing. In 1992, Dana Crowley Jack and Diana Dill developed a way to measure beliefs women hold about themselves in relationships, including that other people’s needs should come first, that certain feelings should be suppressed to preserve relationships, and that their worth depends on other people’s approval. A 2026 review of 126 studies found that women can internalize these expectations as personal moral obligations, meaning that putting themselves first can actually feel morally wrong. The review also found consistent associations between self-silencing and depression, especially in relationships involving unequal power, conflict, or a lack of mutual consideration.
Then there’s the heavy but invisible work of taking care of people. A 2025 study of 322 mothers found that women reported handling 73% of household planning and 64% of the physical work. Greater planning responsibility was associated with more stress, burnout, depressive symptoms, and lower relationship satisfaction.
Sociologist Allison Daminger explored this further in a study of 35 couples. She identified four parts of what she called cognitive labor: anticipating needs, researching options, making decisions, and monitoring results. Among 32 heterosexual couples, women were primarily responsible for anticipating needs in 26 and monitoring results in 21. But here’s the catch. In 28 couples, the actual decisions were shared. Think about planning a vacation. Someone has to recognize it’s time to plan, check schedules, research options, and organize the details before everyone sits down to choose where to go. The decision might be shared, but the work involved in getting there isn’t necessarily shared. And much of that mental work continues even when we’re supposed to be relaxing.
Spoiler alert: Our partners probably don’t know we’re doing this. When I discussed this research and my own experience with my husband, he admitted that he found it upsetting. He didn’t experience the same pressure to anticipate needs and follow up on things, and he hadn’t realized I had been doing it. He said it made him feel like a bad partner, like I didn’t trust him, and like he wasn’t pulling his weight. I don’t know what the solution is, but when I asked him how he wanted us to approach it, he said he was glad we were talking about it and thought he could help now that he was aware. I’m curious to see how we navigate this now that it’s out in the open.
And then there’s guilt. A 2026 study followed 305 adults for seven days and found that women experienced guilt during 17.8% of their leisure activities, compared with 9.2% for men. Those more prone to guilt also enjoyed their leisure less. Another review of 108 studies involving more than 22,000 people found that guilt about things outside a person’s control, or guilt without any clear wrongdoing, was strongly associated with depression. Apparently, feeling responsible for things that aren’t actually ours to fix can take quite a toll.
When I pause to reflect, I think guilt might take up about 80% of my waking experience of life. I can’t express how much time and energy I spend wondering if I’m doing the right thing, worrying about what I’m not doing, and wishing I could split myself into multiple clones so I could do all of the things. I can be doing something wonderful and still feel the weight of everything else I think I should be doing. My heart and soul ache from years of carrying so. much. guilt.
All of this has me thinking about how many of the qualities we praise in women involve taking responsibility, managing ourselves, and making life better for other people. There’s plenty to admire about those qualities. But I’m getting curious what happens when women start extending the same attention and consideration to themselves.
Which brings me back to this little red candle, the birds outside my window, and the fantasy I mentioned at the beginning. This is just a blog post. The world hasn’t changed yet. But my reality is cracking. What happens if I start to make decisions based on (or even become aware of) what I actually want, without immediately feeling guilty and asking myself if I’m being responsible, disappointing someone, or making people uncomfortable? I’m getting curious, anyway.
I don’t really know what that life looks like yet. But I am having a lot of fun imagining it. It’s so freaking good I can taste it. And for once, I don’t particularly care whether anybody else approves.
References
Aviv, E., et al. (2025). Research on cognitive and physical household labor and maternal well-being. Archives of Women’s Mental Health. Full study
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007
Jack, D. C., Brody, L. R., & Sikov, J. (2026). Advancing the next generation of research on self-silencing and depression: A narrative review and synthesis of three decades of research. Sex Roles. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01637-8
Kim, S., Thibodeau, R., & Jorgensen, R. S. (2011). Shame, guilt, and depressive symptoms: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 137(1), 68–96. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021466
Koo, H. J., Piff, P. K., Götz, F. M., Stieger, S., & Shariff, A. F. (2026). Leisure guilt. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672261462977
