Can women really have it all – and why not?

I spent identity crises watching various motivational speakers on YouTube while in parallel I fell into despair looking for my ‘real self’. They were usually well-built men, millionaires with a ‘no bullshit’ approach. Not because they are my type of man but because there are the most of them. When I would finally dig into inspirational interviews of women who have turned their lives, jobs and careers upside down I would most often cry, but not for them but for myself. I would stop being strong for a moment.

In moments I identified with the strong women I was watching and wondered if it was possible that all those fights they went through were waiting for me too !? Will I be sitting in a comfortable armchair in front of the cameras in twenty years, in new shoes that occasionally sting, telling my life story and making new generation of teenage girls cry?

Today I no longer hear buff men shouting that we need to be better because I don’t have time for it. It’s not up to mansplaining, I don’t even have time for women to ‘explain something to me for my own good’. At the moment, I am thinking of blissful moments when I had so much free time that I could afford to cry over the identity crisis in front of my laptop…But this thought kicked my mind.

She pounded me in the form of a Glennon Doyle book called Untamed.

I have been fascinated by the social currents of the last year that every word is questioned whether what is said or written is really meant. Whatever fact a woman makes about her life in public, something sure stinks: either she complains, or she’s actually too good, or she invents or fucks herself over…. something…

In general, 2020 has tired me out – from various movements that impose norms of behavior just because I have ovaries, to the strengthening of feminists who do not support women with whom they disagree, various fashion and cosmetic trends in the year we did not wear a bra… Global irony that lasted 366 days.

I was fed up with absolutely everything. From the hyperproduction of trivial content that has no long-term value to the lack of social life when even my introverted side began to feel threatened.

Instead of an identity crisis, a third-person observation of the world and personality began. While the girls I shared school desks marry and give birth to, while the male part of the team plays investors and buys real estate, I sit at my desk every day with headphones in my ears until the early hours of the morning creating some new realities. Next to me on the table is the book Myth of Beauty, and in the headphones are the verses “I gotta lotta bitches / All up on my dick and down it.” Random playlists are proof that everything passes.

With work, work, work and with a little more work, every day I remembered my teenage goals that were set aside because I live in Croatia, so everything is somehow nothing. As Elemental says, nature is beautiful, but fucked-up society and our damn ‘easy will’ mentality.

Dad called me to say he was going to the hospital. They say he will have an operation in a week at most. The mind took note. The body resisted a little.

I believe that every person in life, no matter how (un) ambitious, has a threshold of tolerance for shit in their life before they get angry.

It looks like a scene from the cult movie Network when Peter Finch starts shouting ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’. The only difference is that instead of getting angry as a society and starting to fix the crooked drines, even if they were ours, we clapped on the windows and balconies.

However, I was infuriated by many things, primarily impotence. I am no longer eighteen, I no longer have time to waste on thinking about who I am, I have no time… Because life is at stake. My life. It is easy for those who die because they no longer feel what is left behind.

I needed “I’m in the hospital information” to accept that I don’t have time while I have all the time ahead of me. At the same time, I decided to drive that part of my personality that is ready for crisis situations to extract the last atoms of strength from myself, and on the other hand, I took time for emotions and processing.

In chance encounters with known and unknown people with whom I exchanged at least a few sentences, I was told that I was one of the strongest people they knew. I would wave my hand with a smile. What is strong for me is a normal way of life. What is testing someone’s own limits for me is masochism to see how much I can progress, how much more than the set goals I can achieve, and the goals would fill at least three lives.

A few days ago I was talking on the phone with a friend. A woman says to me cheerful and smiling: ‘Marta, you do something all the time, always in some projects…’ I answer in the affirmative and add: ‘Yes, but… I have a feeling that it is not enough, that I can do much more.’ We both laughed at how much we women are programmed to prove to themselves that they can have it all. The same point and preferences could be discussed. After the conversation, both she and I realized that probably everything we do is enough, but we still decide that we will achieve what we set out to do.

I promised myself that this year I would dedicate myself to books, fiction, even more than before. Clever and already written. They say that certain books find us at the right time. Untamed found me.

Reading Glennon every night and morning, I discovered layers of myself that had calmed down as I grew up and conditioned society. Of course, no one holds a weapon against our temple, but half an hour on social media is enough to fall into a vicious circle of questioning if everything is okay with us !? Or on the other hand, should we contact the institutions now or immediately?

The guiding thought when I started reading Untamed was that if the book was good enough that I would order a printed copy. I am currently in the process of writing a list of people to whom I need to give the same book as a gift to get rid of the identity shackles that we have agreed to by ignoring the inner voice.

The book I’m writing about in the mainstream experienced a boom when Adele announced that it had changed her life. I can understand why. I also understand that some women think ‘fuck, if Adele can, I can too’, but also ‘easy for her, she has money, she can’. Never good! According to numerous media reports, the book became a New York Times bestseller because women embraced the process of questioning chronic dissatisfaction with relationships, marriages, jobs, children, themselves, or all together. The answer often lies in the fact that we tend to please others much more than ourselves. I accepted that my only way to be completely satisfied with myself is to use every day and the last atom of strength to go one step ahead, word forward, sentence, text…

Reading records about upbringing, transformation of her own identity, failed marriage and the difficulty of being human, I found a multitude of quotes that I would print out and share to women down the street with the sentence ‘YOU’VE GOT TO GET MAD!’.

I’m not the person that quotes a lot, but this one will be a part of my being from now on: “Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy. ”

Reading records of her upbringing, the transformation of her own identity, her failed marriage, and the difficulty of being human, I burst into tears. Not because Glennon, for myself.

For a moment I stopped being strong and wondered what the fuck.

P.S. this all started as a book review, but it turned into so much more.