You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. So welcome back. I'm that hormone girl, Tracy Willingham, and today's rule is a quiet one, the kind that hums under everything in our lives. Ladies don't ask, is this it?
Tracey:They just reorganize the pantry again. And that's the rule, right? You know the feeling. Everything is technically fine. The people are fed, the job is handled, the calendar is full, and there's this thing sitting in your chest at 9PM going, Wait, is this it?
Tracey:Is this all of it? Is this everything? Is this the whole thing? And instead of saying that out loud, because that feels ungrateful and also a little terrifying, instead you get up and you alphabetize the spices. You redo the closet.
Tracey:You reorganize the pantry again. And now listen, I love a good organization, right? Don't get me wrong. Anyone who's ever worked with me used to love looking at how my highlighter, I mean everything in my life, I love to do it. But when we're doing it to hide something, to avoid feeling something, then it's not such a cool thing.
Tracey:So today we're going to talk about what you're actually doing when you reorganize that pantry from a place of questioning and wondering. Alright. So it's story time. Gather around. Here we go.
Tracey:So this is my is this it story, and it didn't come at nine p. M. Over a pantry. It actually came after I spent a ton of money going to a private college and working just a couple years in youth ministry. And if you haven't listened to some of my past ones, I love when I tell people this in public.
Tracey:My first job was a youth minister because I'm potty mouthed. No, I don't look. Maybe I look like a youth minister, but I sure don't sound like one. So I always love when people belly laugh at it. Sometimes I'm like, that kind of hurts my feelings.
Tracey:Like, can you dial that back a little bit, the humor of this all? But I get it. So I was a youth minister for just like two years. And I loved those kids. And I loved the work, right?
Tracey:I mean, I'm getting paid to hang with teenagers because listen teenagers are some of my favorite people. You know where you stand with them at all times, right? They either like you, they don't, not today, maybe tomorrow. Hey, that's refreshing. Adults, we're not so cool like that, right?
Tracey:You never know. So I loved it. I loved the work. But still, this quiet question started showing up. Is this all it was meant to be?
Tracey:And is this the whole road? So right around then when I started this questioning, I had a real chance to go deeper into it and to move to a church with my mentors, two of my mentors that I loved and respected. And I mean on paper, it was like the World Cup of youth ministry, right? I was like this is legit. But I kept filling this other poll, that question, the small honest voice saying maybe youth ministry isn't the career for me.
Tracey:And that was frightening because we just took out a lot of loans and got a lot of scholarships for this very expensive private school and I've worked it for two years and now I might be saying, I don't want to do that. So I had fallen in love with it, youth ministry from the side of someone who adored youth group, right? And this is sometimes the problem. I mean, this is a whole another podcast, but this is sometimes the problem with college. You know, we're like 18 and we're supposed to decide our life.
Tracey:And sometimes nobody's really guided us to say, You're seeing the side of this career you love. Have you looked at the side that people don't love of this career? And then weigh your decision, right? We just look at like, I think it would be fun to be an accountant. I think it'd be fun to be a teacher.
Tracey:But nobody tells you the other side of when it's not fun. And so I looked at it through the eyes of I'm going get to hang with teenagers. I'm going to get to go on trips with teenagers. I'm going to be responsible for developing spiritual, you know, I get the hard questions. I can't wait.
Tracey:But I hadn't yet lived the other side of youth ministry or fill in any job that you're thinking of. The church politics. People being frankly awful to each other. Hearing and knowing the stories of what families are going through. Really not liking what some people in their families were doing to others, and people just living this constant thing of me having to live in a glass house where everyone watched what I did, what I said, how I carried myself and you better not mess up or sin once Tracy because you're a youth minister.
Tracey:You can't be human. You have feelings. You perform. So as you can guess, since I'm here, I did the unladylike thing. I didn't pick the obvious path.
Tracey:It was scary, but I chose something new. And that was basically, I'm gonna go work for a few years, and I'm just going to pay the bills because I don't know what I want to do. I need to figure this out. And that road, that led me all the way into social work, which I love with my whole heart and it is who I am now. But here's the part that also I think we don't always acknowledge and I'm going to be honest about it is I still wonder sometimes what if I had taken the other path?
Tracey:What if Tracy went with those two badass mentors? Would I have been like the youth minister of all youth ministers? Would I be at a school teaching you how to do it? Who knows? Right?
Tracey:Because what would that Tracy's life look like? And I've made my peace with this, right? I love my life. My life has been pretty grand. But the thing I don't think we always acknowledge too is when you're at a fork in the road, you know what?
Tracey:The other way, it's not always a bad or like, Oh, I'm glad I cut that path off. It could have been just as beautiful over there. Right? But I was standing at that fork in the road and saying, Is this it? Is this it for my life and what do I want?
Tracey:And I took the big scary road, but guess what? I can tell you if I took that other road, I'd still probably have some pretty magical moments in my life. So usually, I mean, there are some times where we're like, Don't go down that road, girl. That is not good. But usually there wasn't one right answer that you missed, right?
Tracey:There were two good lives, two possibles, and you just pick the best one in the moment that you could. So let's look at the cost of this because there is research and honestly, it's kind of a relief. So for decades, researchers have found something called the U shaped happiness curve. And so life satisfaction starts high in your twenties, right? And then it starts to slide down through your thirties and forties, and then it bottoms out somewhere around the mid forties.
Tracey:And then ready? Plot twist. It climbs back up often higher than before into your sixties and seventies. And this shows up across more than a 100 countries. Okay?
Tracey:So let that sink in. It holds even after you account for income, marriage, kids, health, all the check the boxes. And they've even found the same dip in apes. Which I know some of you are be like, Where are you going with this? But I feel comforting in that, right?
Tracey:Okay, so it's not just humans. We got our ape buddies being like, Hey, happens to us too. So we don't feel so alone. So that is this it feeling that ambushes you in the middle of your life, it is statistically one of the most normal things about being in the middle of your life. It is not proof that your life is wrong.
Tracey:All it is is at the bottom of a curve that we don't really talk about that most of us are going to end up standing on. Mine happened to be early. Mine was in my 20s. But also guess what guys? Almost three years ago I quit my full time job to do this.
Tracey:So it hit me again at my mid forties of where I was like, yeah, I'm not going do this anymore. I'm going to do social work the way I want to do it. And I'm going to talk about women's hormones. So here's the cost that we don't always name, right? So when you don't know that you're in this known dip, right?
Tracey:You go looking for the reason. You're like, why? Like my life on paper looks good. Why is this happening? If we had talked about this as a society that, hey, this is a typical happiness thing that happens, we could all at least be like, it's here.
Tracey:I know what to do. And the reason for this is that it's not a documented life stage. So the reason becomes something's wrong with my marriage or something's wrong with this house or worst of all and what a lot of women do to themselves, something's wrong with me. So instead, I'm going to fix the feeling by fixing the furniture. I will rearrange that pantry.
Tracey:I will redo this. I will focus on this instead. Because it's the one thing in that swirl of feelings that you can actually control for twenty minutes. And you know, I've got to. I've got to because we're talking about midlife.
Tracey:I got to talk about the hormone piece because timing is brutal. Right? So perimenopause tends to land right in the bottom of that U. Right? So you've already got the flatness that comes with hormone health and shifts and the meh and the nothing tastes like anything.
Tracey:And it can get misread as my life is empty when a real chunk of it is a body chemistry shift. And that's a big part of what we untangle over at that hormone goal. So sometimes I say to the women I'm working with, the question isn't this or that. What it really is, is this my life or is this my hormones? Or is this my life and hormones together?
Tracey:So let's look at the history and how deep this goes because we gotta know guys, we didn't invent this here in 2020. So let's go back because a woman channeling a giant unnamed feeling into housework is not new. We're about to talk about one of my favorite ladies in 1963. Betty Friedan wrote about what she called the problem that has no name. She talked to housewife after housewife who described feeling empty, incomplete, this strange stirring they couldn't explain.
Tracey:One of them said, I feel as if I don't exist. And here's the part that should get you because it got me. For Dan described how these women tried to make the feeling go away. And guess what they did? They redecorated.
Tracey:They moved to a better neighborhood. They had another baby. So in other words, they reorganized the pantry sixty years ago and we're still doing the same exact move. And here's who that served. You already know where I'm going with this.
Tracey:When you keep a woman busy noticing, managing, and maintaining the home and everything in it, You keep her too occupied to look up and ask the bigger question. The questions about her own life, her own wanting, the world outside that front door. The restlessness got quietly rerouted into doing projects. Busy is a fantastic way to keep a person from asking, is this it? And I have to be honest about who got left out of the story because it matters.
Tracey:So for Dan, she was mostly working with and describing college educated white housewives. Plenty of women, especially black women and working class women, were never home wondering if this was it. Right? They were already working a paid job and coming home to all of it. Their version of is this it?
Tracey:It came with so much more history, so much more discrimination, so much more questioning, and no bestseller was ever written to include those women and their perspective. This feeling was always going to be about white and middle class. And so we have to remember the full sisterhood when we look at the history. A lot of this history is going to come from the perspective of privileged white women. So if this could be said, it's going to sound like this, my friends.
Tracey:It's going to sound just like this. I'm allowed to ask, Is this it? And still love my life. I'm allowed to want more without being ungrateful. I'm allowed to feel empty in a full house.
Tracey:I'm allowed to not fix this feeling with a project. I'm allowed to be in a dip and know it's a dip. And I'm allowed to want something for me that isn't for anyone else. So here we go. This should piss you off because This should piss you off because there's a well documented 100 country decades deep pattern that says the middle of your life is statistically the hardest stretch and almost nobody talks about that information before it or even when you're standing in it.
Tracey:So instead you were raised to believe that a good woman with a good life should feel grateful and full. So when the dip hits, you assume something's wrong with you. I messed it up. I did something wrong. You turn a normal life stage into private evidence of your own ingratitude.
Tracey:And then cherry on top, you were handed an endless supply of little home projects to keep your hands busy and your questions quiet. And also, don't forget that's called self care. So how do you know if this is you? This might be you if you've ever thought, Is this it? And immediately felt guilty for thinking it.
Tracey:You clean or reorganize when you're restless in a way that you can't explain, like it probably did not need to be reorganized. Everything looks fine on paper, and something still feels flat. You keep waiting to feel like yourself again. You've got a mental list of things that would fix it and none of them are the actual thing. You can't remember the last time you wanted something just for you.
Tracey:If that's you, let me just tell you right now, friends, you're not ungrateful. You're in the dip. And the dip is a curve, which means eventually it will turn and go up. So for this week, the reflection, how I want you to take care of yourselves. This week, instead of organizing something, try naming something.
Tracey:So when the is this it shows up, don't reach for a project. Instead, I want you to reach for this sentence. I feel restless, and I think I want something for myself. And guess what? You don't even have to know what it is yet.
Tracey:You just have to stop bearing the question under a label maker. And if the flatness feels less like a mood and more like a fog that you can't lift, that's worth looking at through the hormone lens because sometimes the is this it is chemistry. Maybe not fate at your door yet. So take care of yourselves this week. Leave the pantry alone and sit with the question, I feel restless and I think I want something for myself because that is trying to tell you something.
Tracey:Because here's what you know now, right? Is this it? It's not a character flaw. It's a curve. And the curve turns back up.
Tracey:So feeling flat in a full life doesn't make you ungrateful. It makes you human. And you're right on schedule. You can stop fixing the furniture and start listening to that feeling, and you can let the question be a doorway instead of a threat. And a woman who puts down the label maker, who asks, Is this it?
Tracey:Out loud, who dares to want something just for herself, that's the most unladylike thing of all. Thanks for joining me today for That's Not Very Ladylike. If today's episode lit a fire, pushed your buttons, or called a little BS on the stories we've been sold, share it with another woman who's tired of being told to tone it down, smile more, or play nice. And help a girl out by making sure you subscribe, leave a quick review, and catch me on Instagram at that hormone girl. And until next time, keep getting loud, messy, and raising hell because being Ladylike is overrated.