053: What's Your Secret?
Hi friends,
It’s July! It’s almost my birthday! It’s also almost August, which is when I’m going to take an entire month off!
I wish I had more thoughts than this right now, but I’m a little brain dead, to be honest. I’ve mostly been gardening and writing my book late into the night. If that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in seeing more of, follow me on Instagram.
No further ados, I guess. Let’s crack into it.
The struggle, I think, with being a woman creating anything today is that we don’t have a rich history of women to compare ourselves to. There’s a medium-length history—Aphra Behn was making a living writing fiction in the 1670s—but there’s not a deep history of it. Aphra Behn’s work was good, but she’s also remembered in many ways just for being an exception, and the first. A woman writer! In the 1670s! I never!
This feels like a struggle because when a woman’s output inevitably gets compared to her predecessors, those predecessors are more often than not men. And that leads to a whole host of problems because comparing women’s output to men’s output makes it seem like women don’t (or can’t) work as hard or publish as much.
(Obviously, this is complicated further when you start looking at trans people and how their output is compared to cis people. But for this, we’re going to talk about cisgendered folks, and mostly hetero ones.)
On Monday morning, I was feeling frustrated and down on myself, wondering why I wasn’t further along in my book. My internal monologue was just a chant of: I’ve been working on it for months, why isn’t it coming along better, why am I not done yet?
And then I remembered this shitstorm on Twitter:
If you missed it, a few weeks ago on Twitter, @PeakTobi made a whole thread about how he was married with 6 kids but had managed to earn his Ph.D. and get promoted to CEO in 10 years. He thought he was giving advice, but what he actually did was highlight the huge gendered gap in home responsibility.
All of his advice was about careful planning and making lists and using organizational tools. I read the thread with horror and incredulity—how does this man not see how privileged he is, and how inherently misogynistic this list is?
Not one item on the list had anything to do with childcare, cooking meals, transportation, or cleaning the house. He never mentioned shopping for groceries, or even getting the car washed. All the labor he recommended was Sunday night planning for the week, morning planning for the day, and how to move tasks around if something urgent comes up or if you don’t finish in time.
And listen, all that is valuable advice, except that it’s not how he got a Ph.D. and became a CEO in ten years while being married with 6 children.
He was free to get his Ph.D. and pursue his career because his wife kept the house.
None of the tasks on his list are useful to women or people who are raising families. His ideas didn’t include things like, “Get groceries delivered to cut down on time sitting in traffic.” or “Pack a full week of your kid’s meals at once so you don’t have to think about it five times.”
He was able to juggle getting a Ph.D. and getting promoted to CEO because his wife handled all of the life stuff and he got to focus exclusively on his career.
@PeakTobi deleted his Twitter, so I can’t drop a link for you to see for yourself. You can read Dr. Caitlin Green’s response and the many responses to her, which include screenshots of his original tweets, if you want to go fishing:
I followed this obsessively when it was going down. As you can probably guess, the Twitter mob came for him. At first, he was apologetic. He was open to recognizing his biases, and at least said something initially about how this was an enlightening discussion for him about the balance of work in his home. Cool!
And then people started digging back further in his timeline, finding things like this:
I mean, there’s the obvious part: This woman is 37 weeks pregnant and she’s cleaning up this child’s room with no clear assistance. I understand that the impulse to nest can take over, but bro, you can’t help her? Bro, you wrote a tweet instead of helping her?
But also, look at the date. April 13, 2022. His infamous thread came in mid-June. Assuming she gave birth at 40 weeks, she had the baby sometime between—I’m guessing—May 3-10. Meaning that he had a 5-week-old newborn at home when he was tweeting his “how to get things done!” thread. His wife was parenting six children of various ages plus a newborn and he was on Twitter talking about his successful career without mentioning her.
At this point, he stopped responding to people.
And then came the final nail in the coffin: He’d already been called out for this behavior:
If you’re screaming in frustration, me too!
What makes me more furious is that it’s not just the wife doing everything. There are also a million service workers that are invisible here. Maybe they do get groceries delivered every week. Thank that worker! Maybe they have a part-time nanny that comes by so his wife can take a shower. Thank that nanny! So many invisible people enable @PeakTobi’s life, and he’s crediting his success to the Eisenhower Matrix.
I wonder if he’s getting more done at work now that he’s deleted Twitter. Is there some position higher than the CEO? Because frankly, I doubt he’s doing much more around the house with all his new free time.
[deep sigh]
I was thinking of all of this on Monday when I was giving myself hell for not having finished my book already. When I first signed my contract and received my deadline, my goal was to be done by July 1 so that I could take a month off, revise the book in August, and turn it in.
Spoiler alert: I’m not done!
I woke up Monday morning giving myself hell about not being done because I didn’t understand how I couldn’t be done. I only work part-time, why isn’t this book done?
And listen, yes, procrastination plays a role here because I am an infamous procrastinator. It’s something I hate about myself and am actively in therapy for.
But also? I’m not done with this because I do so much else. This book isn’t the only thing on my plate! I have a part-time job and:
the Unruly Figures podcast (another part-time job, frankly);
I write this Substack and interview folks for it;
I cook all my meals;
I take care of a house and large yard;
I exercise 4 times per week;
I travel to take care of my parents when necessary;
I see my friends, especially for big life moments.
This doesn’t include little life things like doing laundry, getting groceries (which I do often order in advance and pick up), going to the doctor, or getting work done on my car. They don’t seem like big things but they’re necessary life tasks and drains of my time and energy.
I do get some help with these things. My trainer and friend, Jesse, is a huge help; my parents help me with the house and yard, not with manual labor but by explaining how to do things; my editors are patient and supportive and enable me to work as I’m able to. But mostly, I do these things alone.
No wonder my book isn’t done yet!
Sure, I could have refused to travel to Texas for most of June to help my folks when they needed it.
Sure, I could stay home and work instead of showing up to support my friends.
Sure, I could let the yard run wild, stop cleaning the house, and skip workouts.
I could make my life all about work. And hey, I might have to in July and August to get this book done on time!
But seriously—no wonder! When I set that goal for myself, I was thinking about the standard production time for a non-fiction book. A standard which is set by men like @PeakTobi who have wives at home taking care of everything else. I bet @PeakTobi could have his job and a podcast and write a book in six months or less, because that’s what @PeakTobi’s life is like.
Creative women often don’t have wives at home taking care of things. Wealthy women, like Kim “get off your ass and work” Kardashian, can pay a staff of people to take care of housework and yardwork and all the other work they don’t want to do. But most creative women are not wealthy women. Most creative women are doing housework and carework (what I’m calling all the parenting, meal prep, and work that goes into caring for a family, to emphasize that it’s work) on top of their creative work.
I cannot imagine trying to do everything I do and spend time with a significant other or parent a child (let alone both). It would simply be impossible.
This is why I was saying that I wish there were more historical examples of successful creative women so that we could see how they did it. Aphra Behn was only very briefly married and never had kids. I suspect that’s the only reason she was a successful writer. In a society where a marriage would have immediately meant that she would have been expected to bear child after child and take care of the house, a husband would have been a risk to her ambitions. He might not have let her write plays and stage them (or he might have let her write them but taken all the credit).
Think about some of the famous women writers we have throughout history:
Jane Austen: Never married, no kids.
Mary Wollstonecraft: Married with kids.
Mary Shelley: Briefly married, but Percy died young. Never married again. Had 4 kids and lots of help taking care of them.
Emily Brontë: Never married, no kids.
Charlotte Brontë: Married, no kids.
Louisa May Alcott: Never married, no kids.
Gertrude Stein: Partnered, no kids.
Virgina Woolf: Married, no kids.
Agatha Christie: Married with kids.
Harper Lee: Never married, no kids.
Toni Morrison: Briefly married, with kids.
Margaret Atwood: Married, one kid.
Alice Walker: Married, one kid.
Octavia Butler: Never married, no kids.
JK Rowling: Married with kids.
Zadie Smith: Married with kids.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to be a female writer and be married with kids. 6 out of 16 of them did it! But look carefully at the ones who were married with kids—they usually had money to pay servants or assistants to help them.
Anyway, look for my forthcoming thread about ✨the secret to how I get it all done.✨
Currently Reading
A few nights ago I started reading Elektra by Jennifer Saint. I always love a myth retelling, and this is one of the better ones I’ve read.
It follows a few mortal women who I feel like are rarely remembered: Clytemnestra, sister of Helen and wife of Agamemnon; Cassandra, seer and sister of Paris, who foresees the destruction of Troy; and of course Elektra, youngest daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon.
I’m only around 100 pages in as I write this, so I’m not sure how the book turns out yet. But if you’re looking for an easy summer read, I really recommend this one.
I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.
I’ve been writing a TON lately, including several pieces I’m pretty proud of. In Fresh Cup, you can read about a brief history of coffee & revolution. In ROADBOOK, check out my piece about hiking through mountains destroyed by wildfires.
If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?
