I came across a Facebook post recently that stopped me mid-scroll.
A woman, a professional, a mother of three young children 2 with significant needs. She is a wife who has quietly decided to leave a marriage she doesn’t yet have the energy to actually leave, and she was asking for practical tips from a group of strangers. She wasn’t looking for someone to fix her life. She was just exhausted, and she needed somewhere to put it.
She described what so many women describe and almost none of them say out loud: the vicious cycle of working more to earn more to pay more for the help that makes working possible. The invisible math of managing children’s needs, career desires, work responsibilities, schedules, and a household, mostly alone, while her spouse moves through the world with the uncomplicated freedom of someone whose life simply doesn’t require that kind of coordination.
She wasn’t asking anyone to solve her marriage. She wasn’t asking for a five-step plan. She was asking: “is there anything I can do, short of upheaving my entire life, that would help me feel like a person again?”
That question is one of the most important questions a woman can ask. And most of us wait too long to ask it.
The drain nobody talks about
We talk a lot about burnout. We talk about overwhelm and stress and the mental load. What we talk about less, because it’s harder to name, is the specific exhaustion of being a woman who is competent enough to hold everything together and isolated enough that no one notices she’s doing it.
This woman wasn’t failing. She was functioning at an extraordinarily high level under conditions that would flatten most people.
The exhaustion she described isn’t a productivity problem. It isn’t a time management problem. It’s what happens when every system in a person’s life is set to output and nothing is set to receive.
You cannot think your way out of that. You cannot optimize your way out of it. And you absolutely cannot make a clear decision about your life from inside it.
The thing nobody wants to hear, and why it’s actually right
My response to her was simple, and I’ll be honest: I know it probably sounded too small for the size of what she’s carrying.
I told her she needed some joy.
Not a vacation. Not a plan. Not a therapist’s assessment of her marriage, though that matters too. Just joy. The specific, bodily experience of being somewhere that is yours, doing something that has nothing to do with anyone else’s needs, for a few hours.
A farmers market on a Saturday morning. A bookstore you wander through without a list. A walk where no one is asking you anything.
Here’s why that’s not a small suggestion:
- When every area of your life is draining you, your nervous system has no reference point for what relief feels like. Joy isn’t a luxury in that state, it’s data. It reminds your body that another experience is possible.
- Most women in this position make their biggest decisions from a state of complete depletion. Those decisions, even the right ones, are harder to execute and harder to trust when you’re running on empty.
- Joy doesn’t solve the problem. But it creates the conditions in which you can see the problem clearly enough to actually do something about it.
“You don’t need a clearer head to find joy. You need joy to get a clearer head.”
On making decisions from a moving life
7 years ago, this was me.
I left my marriage. I had 4 kids, two home with me. It took me over a year from the moment I knew to the moment I moved, and I don’t regret a single day of that process.
What I know now that I wish I’d been told: the clarity didn’t come from analyzing the situation more carefully. It came from giving myself enough space, enough small moments of being a person outside of my roles, that I could hear what I actually knew.
I couldn’t see myself living the same way for ten more years. When I could finally say that clearly, without the fog of exhaustion coloring everything, the next step became obvious. Not easy. Obvious.
That’s the work. Not deciding from the bottom of the drain. Deciding from a place where you can actually see.
For the woman in that post, and for the women reading this one who recognizes herself, the question isn’t what to do. You probably already know, at least in outline form. The question is how to get yourself to a place where you can trust what you know and find the energy to act on it.
This is what being stuck actually looks like.
For most women, stuck is much quieter and much heavier than that. It looks like keeping the schedule running. It looks like doing everything correctly and feeling nothing. It looks like fantasizing about a different life, a smaller apartment, a different job, a morning that belongs to you, and then feeling the fantasy collapse under the weight of everything it would take to get there.
Stuck, for a high-functioning woman, often looks like thriving from the outside.
What we know from years of clinical work is that this kind of stuck has a specific shape. It’s not about lacking information or strategy. It’s about having the breathing room to move and the support to make the hard decisions that you are ready to make.
Better questions don’t make hard lives easy. But they change what your brain is able to see, and that changes what feels possible.
Is this where you are?
Get Unstuck: Ask Better Questions, Change Your Life is kicking off in just 2 weeks.
A 90-minute live virtual workshop on May 30th, built for the woman who has been holding everything together and is ready to ask what she actually wants and get it.
Register today and start getting unstuck right now.