Hashtag Blessed, But Unironically

I got some very interesting comments under yesterday’s piece on living too much in my head (from women, at last!). They both said they had a knee-jerk reaction to “hashtag blessed” used as a description of most women’s writing, compared with my own which is supposedly too intellectual for this audience. That’s why few women read me, my husband says, I write more like a man than like one of them, and so it’s not relevant to their interests.

I had the same reaction to this in the beginning, and my first instinct was to look for counterexamples of women who do well in the intellectual fields. Of course women can be great thinkers too! But it is precisely because I’m highly intellectual and think a lot that I became so detached from my body. If I want to learn how to take good care of it, the solution won’t come from my intellect - or anyone else’s!

Is there something wrong with not being intellectual all the time? Is there something wrong with caring about beauty, fashion, or other typically feminine stuff? Is there something wrong with putting effort to look attractive for my husband? For years I thought I was above such superficial things. Whenever someone asked me about my skincare routine, I took great pride in saying I never had any.

But now that I ended up on a holiday where the only thing I did for myself was writing this newsletter, it makes me wonder. What’s more misogynistic - saying that women typically care about different things than men, or dismissing all the things that many women historically cared about as dumb and not worthy of anyone’s attention? Could there be some deep wisdom in the hashtag blessed approach, which I haven’t yet noticed because I was too busy making sure I don’t appear dumb and vain?

I’m not sure yet, but I hope that my intention for this year to live more fully in my body and spend less time in my head will give me some answers soon. I get a sense there’s a whole equally deep kind of wisdom that can’t be accessed through logic and words, only through a sense of being present in the material world.