I never thought of the certifications as armor when I was collecting them. I thought of them as furniture. Reasonable, practical, load-bearing — the kind of thing a serious person builds a house around. It didn't occur to me until much later that a house made entirely of load-bearing walls has nowhere for anyone to sit.
The specific tiredness
I have been thinking about this because a friend asked me, over voice notes at 11:47 on a Sunday night, what I would do differently if I started my business over. I told her I wouldn't take out any of the training. I meant it. The training is not the problem. The problem was what I did with it — which was to wear it, in layers, so nobody (myself included) could see how uncertain I still was underneath.
What I'm practicing now
Fewer frameworks laid out in advance. Fewer “here's what your chart says” openings. More: tell me what's happening, and let's stay there for a minute before we do anything about it. It is much scarier. I like it much more.
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— T.
I read fiction the way other people meditate. Not casually, and not as a treat. As medicine. I have a shelf of self-help I no longer touch because at some point I noticed that the sentences weren't actually landing in me — they were bouncing off the surface and then dissolving into whatever the next Instagram carousel was telling me to feel.
What sticks, for me, is a specific woman on a specific page, doing a specific thing wrong in a specific way, and me suddenly recognizing myself in her without having asked to. That's the whole trick. Fiction gets under the guard because it wasn't trying to.
What I've been reading
All Fours, again. Piranesi, always. A re-read of The Guest. The Elena Ferrante Neapolitan series when I want to sit inside another woman's whole life for a week. I am not looking for uplift. I'm looking for company.
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— T.
The eldest-daughter tax is the one nobody handed you a receipt for. It's the way you learned, sometime around age nine, to read the temperature of a room and adjust yourself to lower it. It's why you're competent at almost everything and honest about almost nothing. It's why the first person you disappoint on any given Tuesday is yourself.
I did not know I was paying this tax until I stopped being able to afford it. I paid it in credentials, in over-preparation, in polite bios, in refusing to look tired in public. I paid it by being the one who kept the group chat organized when what I actually wanted was to leave the group chat and lie on the floor.
What I'm trying instead
Saying I don't know when I don't know. Sending the shorter email. Letting someone else be the competent one in the room for once, and not narrating a reason. It is small and it is glacial and it is, so far, working.
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— T.
My son and I have been in an Ancient Egypt unit for six weeks. I planned four. We are still there because we accidentally spent a whole afternoon on the Rosetta Stone and I refused to interrupt him. If homeschooling is the plot, this is a plot hole. If homeschooling is the room where the actual learning gets to happen at its own pace, this is just Tuesday.
I don't want to sell you on homeschooling and I don't want to sell you off it. It's the shape our life happens to take right now, and it is much less curated than the accounts on Instagram would suggest. There are days when the math workbook wins. There are days when we watch a documentary and call it school and I don't apologize for it.
The through-line
The through-line, if there is one, is that the version of parenting I'm building is very close to the version of business I'm building — both of them get quieter and more specific every year, and both of them look less impressive from a distance than they actually are up close. I'm okay with that.
— placeholder post, full pass to follow
— T.