Are You Stuck in Your Head Too?

- I called my newsletter Grandmotherly Wisdom, and it’s still mostly men reading and especially commenting on it - I told my husband the other day.
- That’s because you’re still in the tech bro mindset and very intellectual and heady. Have you seen how women actually write? It’s all yoga and hashtag blessed.

I wanted to give a few women as counterexamples, but then I realized, there’s 1) actually very few of them compared with all the men whose stuff I mostly read, and 2) nearly all of them are techbro-adjacent. Point taken, I guess.

I’ve always been a very heady person. Living in my body doesn’t come to me naturally. Given the choice between doing stuff on my computer or yoga, I will almost always choose the former, unless there’s a whole group of people waiting for me to join. Unfortunately, few such groups meet up during our daycare hours, and so I end up doing yoga a few times per month at most.

I love yoga and could easily practice it alone at home, but something else always takes priority. I love sauna and literally have one on my way to the daycare, but I haven't visited them even once. Last month I started taking good care of my whole house before deciding that taking good care of my body might be a worthy goal too. I even bought a whole online course about getting more in touch with your body because I realized I might have a problem here. I still haven’t opened it, even though it's been more than a month, and I already had a call with the course author in hope it would motivate me.

Where is the resistance coming from? In a way, I know my body wants to tell me a few things that I certainly don’t feel like hearing now. But another large part of it is the background attitude I took from my childhood home, that paying attention to your body is vain and superficial, that people who do so are boring and dumb, and that because things like that are usually women's business, then women’s business itself is mostly vain and dumb too.

I took these beliefs as my own without realizing, and for years I told everyone I was “one of the guys” who just “can’t make friends with women for some reason”. This changed in my early 20s when I met a bunch of awesome women of all ages, but even though I learned to make friends with women as people, I still disregarded beauty, fashion, and other typically feminine hobbies as not worthy of serious consideration. This conversation made me realize that I carry the same attitude towards taking care of my body too.

Another large part of it is feeling like this is a zero sum game. On most days when my daughter is not in the daycare I have her crying under my door even before I step into the shower. And while I can rationalize letting her cry there while I’m washing myself, anything unnecessary like putting cream on my face has to wait. Prioritizing this would mean I’m a terrible mom.

Only now I’m beginning to realize the effect this might have on my daughter. Will she hate being a woman like I did and see herself too as one of the guys? Will she still read only stuff written by men, decades later, and look down on her body as a silly and vain thing? If I want her to grow up in touch with her feelings and her feminine side, I’d better take good care of my own feminine side first.

That’s why my resolution for this year is to spend much more time in my body and less time in my head, and to find my rituals that will make me feel like I'm taking good care of myself. Not because I’m focused just on myself, but because I can’t give what I don’t already have, and feeling at home in her body is something I wish for my daughter - and all the other little girls - to grow up with.