Conversation

A powerful piece that resonated strongly with a bunch of mothers I know. Not so much with me though. I am sad about not having more time to get in flow states and create, and I yet I wouldn’t trade the daily work for the unbroken stretches. A thread:
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My meditation on the gendered politics of uninterrupted time. A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to themselves | Women | The Guardian theguardian.com/commentisfree/
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I loved A Room of One’s Own when I read it in high school, and I still do. And I feel the generational weight of so many women who didn’t have much of a choice. And on some level, the age-old and prevalent pain seems clearly more important than my own perspective.
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But we get to have both—right? Because I’m pretty sure that for a lot of women these days (far from all, probably not even most Americans? But I think a big chunk of those I personally hang out with) doing more of the daily stuff instead of taking long stretches is a choice.
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And it feels deeply unsettling to leave out that thread of the narrative. Partly for legible reasons like then underinvesting in infrastructure for channel creativity into bits and pieces of time. (Yay twitter!)
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But mostly for reasons I have a harder time articulating. More like a fundamental confusion about where value comes from that I don’t want to paper over.
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I emphatically don’t mean—let’s grok that the daily stuff matters and forget about wanting object-level creativity. And I think it’s so so good when people help their loved ones recognize and act on creative urges.
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More like, the daily stuff is sacred too. And when people choose to forgo something obviously sacred in favor of it, that illuminates its sacredness.
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