You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union

Author:Gabrielle Union
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

10

Fuck Balance

I’m going to tell you a secret about life. You might know part of it, but chances are you don’t know the whole story.

Wait, hold on. You’re multitasking right now, aren’t you? You can’t even read or listen to a book without having something else productive going on. This is exactly the thing I am talking about: whether or not you have kids, there’s that creeping sense that you are borrowing your time from others. If it’s not your family, it’s your job, your friendships, your abs, and the most guilt-inducing, your potential. Anything for you is at the expense of something or someone else, and you’re always in the red.

Your life is not just a hamster wheel. It’s an elaborate but creaky system of about five wheels you are expected to keep moving with precision timing. You know the whole thing is being held together with some gum here, acrylic-nail glue there, and maybe a dried-out but still passably sticky Band-Aid you found in your bag. You tell yourself that if you make one wrong step, the whole thing will fall apart, but the truth is if you make any step, the whole contraption is liable to fall down on your hamster ass.

But you keep going, and the second things start to go off track, the helpful message you get is, “Find balance!” It’s always phrased as something you need to “find,” right? As if it’s waiting to be discovered and you just haven’t tried hard enough.

You won’t find it. Because balance doesn’t exist.

“Balance” is actually a multilevel marketing program—what we used to call a pyramid scheme. You know those things. They target your high school friend or cousin, usually a woman who has kids, and tell them to invest their money in a product and then sell it to their friends and family. Worse, these women are told to recruit their friends to become “consultants” so they can access their network. I guarantee you, check your old Facebook inbox—there’s a message lurking in there that begins “Hey girl!” as a preamble to tell you about an exciting opportunity involving nonessential oils or tie-dye leggings.

No matter how much time or energy they put in, those women never turn a profit. The same goes for balance: you will be continually urged to invest in the idea of balance but never find it as you work yourself to death. Women in the public eye, myself included, are encouraged to promote balance as a concept to everyone in our reach. Whether you’re a senator or CEO, an actress or athlete, you need to have a practiced answer for the question every single interviewer will ask you: “How do you find balance?” It doesn’t matter how absurd the answer is—“I get up at four A.M. to work out so I can be present as I make breakfast for the kids before work.” You just need to have one. Nobody really cares about the answer, mind you, because it doesn’t mean a damn thing.

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