The trick to balance is not having any

3 of my painful truths + a bonus that will help you (if you can bear them)

This piece is part of the Parents Who Think (PWT) NOISE SERIES, a collection of personal essays where I share lessons from being a working mother of ten on a mission to fulfil my own potential too.

P.S. I have pretty exciting announcements coming soon that are going to steer my content for a bit, and I think you might be excited about them too! Stay tuned.

Artist: Lauren McLaughlin

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I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my hands dirty offline¹, so things have been a little quiet around here lately. I’m not sure how to say this, I’ll be honest with you. But don’t judge me.

These past weeks I’ve been overwhelmed with success.

It’s not popular to wang on about success. No-one loves a bragger. The threat of being labelled a boaster makes it hard to talk about what happens when success is monumental.

And it’s also tough because I'm frugal about the behind the scenes of my business life. Privacy is important to me. Because of the nature of my day job, confidentiality too.

So hold the applause.

I’m breaking silence to tell you a bit of what I’m learning, in the hope it’s valuable to you and your life.

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Success throws things out of whack.

I burned up² on things going so well. Which meant I was forced to throw away the final crumbs of hope I harboured about having balance in my life.

When I drill down to the vulnerable meat I realise that despite giving keynotes about work-life balance on hundreds of stages, I was (still) pining for solutions outside of myself.

Trying to achieve balance is a battle I thought I’d already been happy to lose.

I lied to myself.

Where was this lie hiding?

It was buried in between knowing that I have ALL the answers inside myself, and digesting what legions of women entrepreneurs running online businesses are calling “empowerment”.

Their nub: to be successful and live a balanced life, women must build ourselves out as brands. Balance is tied to being a brand.

What I think they’re actually selling us is an exclusive fantasy: how to be youthful, white, skinny, very pretty and very privileged. That’s not empowerment. It’s empowermyth. ~ Kelly Diels

Indeed. A fantasy. A myth.

What shook me was how much soul and time suck I was giving to internalising comparisons between other people’s branded exteriors of their balance, and my interior version.

But there’s no point agonising over other people’s curated life balance.

If you ever wind yourself up about balance, consider these ‘truths’:

🟧 First, stop positioning balance as if it’s an individual problem for individual women (especially for those of us who’re mothers and/or caregivers).

Most of us are bog eyed exhausted and over depended upon because the system is built on the backs of caretaking women. Domestic and familial maintenance and nourishment only functions because of our labour.

If you’re sick of unfair domestics, my interview with NYT bestselling author of “Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)” Eve Rodsky is here. And shoutout to portal queen

Victoria

for her caregiving resources and community!

🟧 Next, acknowledge the idiotic link between being a brand and balance.

I am not a brand. I was not born to be a fucking brand.

I’m a human being. I’m a human being living an audacious whole hearted life. Why must I (and all ambitious women) pretzel into being a brand version of ourselves?

As an important aside: I don’t want my children to package themselves into brands. I want them to live their lives as human beings. They also need to see me live a whole life that chimes with the one they’ll consume if they google their Mama.

It’s become far easier to be a personal brand version of ourselves than to be ourself.

Because branding ourselves in public and selling who we want people to see is simple. Being, on the other hand, is chaos.

And chaos is where real life is. Chaos is where fulfilment lives.

As a disciplined, order-focused person it takes a lot for me to bring you those words. They are hard won.

🟧 Then, give up on the social more that balance is anything other than a collective myth. It’s logical to give up on something that isn’t working for you. The idea that we must keep on trying to find balance is common, but it’s also terrible.

Truth is, I’m allergic to balance.

I don’t want balance (in my season of blooming) to be something to bother myself with. All the time I’m focusing on trying to balance life, I’m diverted away from living fully.

And although we’re supposed to want to live a balanced life, I despise the idea.

If consensus is overrated, I think balance is, too

I have no interest in living a balanced life

I want a life of adventure

~ Chris Guillebeau

🟧 Last, look to art to help understand the possibilities of balance.

A few years ago Argentinian-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone used a swimming pool as a canvas - his art dazzled one tile at a time across the pool.

Colours shimmer according to the light and water at any moment.

Now, he’s taken his colourful pinwheel aesthetic and reinterpreted it for a limited release inflatable pool lounger set to make a splash with design and colour lovers.

Feast your peepers on this! There are only 200 of these beauties

It’s art AND leisure - buyers can display their lounger as wall art or choose to bask in the sun atop it.

What’s all this got to do with balance?

“Colour only happens because of light, and light is the only reason why life happens. Light and colour are the very essence of visual art” Pantone says.

His work across different applications produces sensations of motion as the viewer’s position changes in relation to the work. His kinetic art invites audiences to witness an ever-changing display of movement, bringing them a dynamic and interactive experience.

In a prism, a single beam of light enters and is broken into an array of colours. Imagine shimmering rays of light across that pool changing colours throughout one single day. No colour or light the same.

The self is a prism too.

Pantone’s work is an inspiration for wider ways to consider balance. What I love about these designs is the way they highlight dynamism, transformation and impermanence.

It’s this impermanence that offers us exquisite potential. When we surrender to our inevitable lack of control and realise that nothing stays the same, we can stop wasting our precious gift of a life trying to capture the impossibility we call balance.

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Nothing is static:

🟧 Self-Control is a free app that lets you block your own access to distraction online. Set a period of time, add sites to your blocklist, and click "Start." Until that timer expires, you can’t access those sites.

🟧 Now here’s a brand that doesn’t half arse it. Asset is an anal health serum. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

🟧 Kinda tricky following that link. Wait, I’ve just the thing. There’s a butter emoji, did you all know? My life is complete 🧈

🟧 Words from Gloria Steinem: “At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m ‘passing the torch.’ I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much – and I’m using it to light the torches of others. Because only if each of us has a torch will there be enough light.”

Questions for readers…

How about you? What’s your relationship to balance? Are you chasing balance, adventure, or something else? Do you have a (non)balance adjacent resource to recommend? Share a link in the comments in the Substack app or hit reply, and say what your resource does for you.

Here’s to our torches amidst the chaos of life,

1. I’m slow living in the country + deal making in the City. [For the cynics in the back, it’s not an oxymoron]. I’m living it up, rather than documenting within an inch of my life.

2. I’m making the distinction between burned out and burned up here. Success brings ashes and we rise from them.