On the alternatives to fitting in at all costs
Today I went out for lunch with a former colleague. A guy (in my former line of work the majority of colleagues fall on that side of the gender line).
He told me about one his female colleagues. “She’s an inspiration to me,” he said. “She joins meetings on the way to work because her husband is so useless so she does it all.”
She works, she takes care of her kids, she organizes everything. And THEN she even remembers the majority of details of her technical work to conduct said meeting from the comfort of a traffic jam. “Don’t you find that inspiring, too?”
I felt my body tighten just listening to this, because the instant response rising in me was (I hazard a guess I am not the only one): no. The story reveals so much about the world we live in. Here is a woman managing to carry everything while staying perfectly productive inside a system that leaves her not a minute to listen to herself. And despite the increasing discussion about mental load we still call that inspiring. Even though I feel that we are awakening more or less rapidly to the fact that it’s a bad idea, we’re still chasing ‘having it all’, doing it all and being it all.
It’s impressive, for sure, this female capacity for adaptation. But we are pushing that capacity far beyond what is healthy.
Gabor Maté, in The Myth of Normal, points to a worrying pattern: over the last century many autoimmune diseases have increasingly become women’s diseases. His explanation is mostly not biological but cultural and psychological. Many women learn very early that belonging depends on adaptation. That love can be fragile and that it is safer to keep the peace than to speak the uncomfortable truth. So we become experts at overriding ourselves. We swallow anger, silence intuition, smile when something inside us says no. But the body does not forget. Sometimes the immune system begins to mirror that same pattern: turning inward, attacking the self that has been forced to disappear. And if this reads to you like victim blaming then no, quite the opposite.
I cannot speak for that colleague. Maybe she is happy and that’s great. But as someone who used to have that kind of life (and my husband is not completely useless) I can say that I wasn’t. In fact, I carried such a giant ball of resentment and rage in my body that I sometimes felt poisoned from the inside. I remember googling: Why am I so f**g angry?
It often feels as if women today are pulled between two caricatures: on one side the demand to fit into the existing system even better: higher, faster, stronger, always available, always performing. Boss babe of the Year. STEM programs to encourage female participation in the sciences. I am not saying that this is a bad idea. But here we are still treated as we have only just started to enter the space. But women have always been part of the intellectual and creative history of humanity. They have been engineers, mathematicians, and programmers long before certain corners of the tech world started behaving as if computing had been invented exclusively by hoodie-wearing men in San Francisco.
And on the other side is the old stereotype that is making a remarkable comeback at the moment of the woman tied to the kitchen, the household, and the children. She sacrifices, supports and makes herself small for the ‘greater good’. The capacity to bring forth life, the most miraculous biological process we know has often been used to reduce women’s roles to something quite narrow: bringing up children and cooking dinner. But the spark that creates life is not limited to offspring and soup. It is creativity, intuition, relational intelligence, the ability to hold complexity and sense patterns and connect things that appear separate.
For centuries our civilization has been obsessed with breaking the world into smaller and smaller pieces. We split disciplines, specialized knowledge, divided matter into molecules, atoms, and quarks. We became extraordinarily good at analysis, at separating things into ever finer fragments. And again that is incredibly impressive. We learned so much about the universe we live in. But we also put our blinkers on. Science can discover what science can measure. And somewhere along the way we forgot the complementary skill: seeing the whole again (even the parts that escape our instruments), putting the pieces back together, holding connections rather than only dissecting them.
When I told that same colleague that I once hitchhiked through Eastern Europe, he looked at me and said immediately, “That’s very courageous.” And yes, perhaps it was. We have a great fear of putting ourselves at the mercy of strangers. And so, some of the bravest things I have done in my life were not the ones that looked impressive from the outside. Not studying in a male-dominated field. Not getting a PhD. Not speaking at conferences- and that used to terrify me so much I nearly got a nervous breakdown from mere practicing (so my talks were generally spontaneous affairs).
Those things require anlaytical skill, endurance, discipline, and the bravery to keep taking the next step. They are the sharp, hard qualities on which our conventional idea of success is built.
But the courage that has shaped my life far more deeply is something else entirely: the courage to keep an open heart. To keep your guard down enough to stay curious about people. To trust life enough to engage with it fully. To resist the temptation to harden, withdraw, dominate, or shut down. That kind of openness is often mistaken for naivete. But it is not a fragile softness. Its power is easily overlooked because it is not like the sharp edge of a sword or a cannonball: force concentrated on a small surface. It is more like the sun shining on everything. For centuries we have defined strength as domination: competition, conquest, winning, climbing mountains, beating the other person in the race. That model built the modern world, and it has taken humanity very far. But it has also brought us to the brink of ecological and social limits.
What makes a great story? It usually needs a problem to solve and a hero who goes on a quest to do just that. But what is the motivation behind risking your life for it? It is usually the love story behind that is the beating core. The reason that ties it all together. In many modern stories, especially films, love has been trivialized into something smaller than it really is. It has been reduced to sexual attraction or romantic fulfillment.
But love speaks to something much deeper: the recognition that life only becomes truly meaningful when different parts of being human are allowed to belong together again. It’s not about men versus women. And it’s also not about competition versus retreat. It’s about the completeness of mankind and the realization that a fully human world requires the whole spectrum of what we are.
So maybe the revolution we are waiting for is not women proving that we can dominate inside this system just as well. Maybe it is something far more radical: strength that keeps the heart open. That kind of strength does not conquer the world. It envelops, opens and unites it at the same time and it is unstoppable because it has no limits.