Your own weather

I've had a lot of conversations lately, with different women, about how differently we're all actually built, underneath the version of ourselves we perform for the world, and it's got me thinking about something I don't hear talked about enough.

Some of us can go full tilt. Properly on, for weeks at a time, saying yes to everything, holding the job and the house and the people who need us, running hot and capable and switched on right up until the wheels genuinely come off, and then we need to stop completely. Not a slow evening in, but a full and total collapse, days of doing absolutely nothing, of not answering the phone, of staring at a wall if that's what it takes, because that's the only thing that actually refills us.

Other women I know have never worked like that at all, and never will, they taper instead, a bit of rest most evenings, never quite as blazing at the top of their energy and never as flat at the bottom of it either, just a steadier line running through the middle of most days.

Neither of those is the ‘right’ way to be a person, and I want to say that plainly, because I think a lot of us have spent years assuming the other way is the mature one, the together one, the one grown women are supposed to grow into. If you're a full-on, full-off woman trying to live like a taperer, you'll feel permanently guilty for needing to disappear when you crash. And if you're a taperer trying to live like a full-on woman, you'll feel permanently guilty for never hitting the highs everyone else seems to be having, and wonder quietly what's wrong with you that you can't switch off the way she does either. And equally, there might be some versions that sit in between the taperer and full-on/full-off that I haven’t mentioned but absolutely exist. (If this is you, I would love your take!)

I've started thinking of it as your own weather, actually, because that's closer to how it behaves than any of the productivity language we usually reach for. Weather isn't a flaw to fix, it's just what's happening, some days sunny and some days a proper downpour, and you don't try and talk a storm out of itself, you just dress for it and wait it out. I think most of us were never taught to read our own weather at all. We were taught to perform sunshine regardless of what was actually going on underneath.

Then there's where the energy is actually coming from in the first place, which most of us were never taught to think about at all. We talk about energy like it's flat, like it's a battery that charges the same way every day if you just sleep enough and drink enough water, and for a lot of women that's simply not how it works. There's a cycle running underneath everything, whether or not you're paying attention to it, and some weeks you'll feel like you could take on the world and mean it, and other weeks the exact same to-do list will feel like wading through wet sand, and it's not because you've suddenly become less capable. It's because you're not the same woman, chemically, every single day of the month, and pretending otherwise is a large part of why so many of us feel like we're failing at a game nobody explained the actual rules of.

I know that for me, in recent weeks in fact, I have landed on the fact that once a month I have a prime week that is perfect for leaving the house, fitting in as many ‘face to face’ meets and social opportunities as I possibly can - and actually love it - and then I retreat, gladly. I can’t believe how long it has taken for me to land this, but I also acknowledge that maybe - in a past identity - this simply wasn’t my mode. But it very much is now.

Here's the bit I keep coming back to, though, because I don't think any of this is fixed. I think it's a pattern you can learn, the way you learn anything else about your own body, and then life goes and changes the entire climate on you, usually right when you've finally got the pattern figured out. Motherhood is the clearest example, and one I know something about myself, because whatever your weather used to be before children, it very rarely survives them intact. A full-on, full-off woman used to being able to properly vanish for a weekend, phone off, house quiet, coming back a different person, suddenly finds there's no full off available any more. There's always a monitor on, always a small ear listening for you even when you're technically resting, and the total collapse she used to reset on simply isn't there for a good long while. She has to learn an entirely different way of resetting, in smaller pockets, more often, because the big empty stretch she used to rely on has quietly disappeared from her life along with a whole lot else.

I think this happens every time we move through one of these shifts, whether it's motherhood or a relationship ending or a career you've outgrown or simply getting older, that the way you used to reset yourself stops being available to you, and you're left having to build a new one without necessarily noticing that's the job in front of you. You just feel tired in a way rest doesn't seem to touch any more, and you assume something's gone wrong with you, when actually the old system fit the old life, and the old life isn't the one you're living now.

So maybe the question worth sitting with isn't just how do I get more energy, but what does my own reset actually look like now, at this stage, in this version of my life, rather than the version I built it for years ago. Are you a full-on, full-off woman or a taperer? Where in your cycle do you actually have the most to give, and where do you need to protect yourself instead? And has something shifted recently, quietly, that means the old pattern doesn't fit any more, even though nobody's told you that's allowed.

I don't think there's anything wrong with you for needing what you need. I think most of us have just never been given permission to notice it properly, let alone build a life around it.