The Weight of It

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from being a woman. Not physical tiredness, though that is part of it. Something underneath that. The tiredness of being the one who remembers everything. Who tracks the appointments and the birthdays and what is running low and who needs what and when. Who notices when the atmosphere in a room shifts and quietly adjusts it. Who absorbs the moods of the people around her and manages her own on top of theirs. This is not resentment. It is an observation. The weight is largely invisible, which is part of what makes it heavy. Nobody allocates it. Nobody decides you should carry it. It accumulates, task by task, thought by thought, until it is simply what your mind is doing at all times, underneath everything else. It has a name now. The mental load. But the thing itself is older than the name. Women have always carried it. In households where survival depended on not forgetting anything, someone had to remember. That someone was almost always a woman. The instinct became habit, became expectation, became invisible. Knowing this does not lift it. But it does something. It means the tiredness makes sense. It means you are not failing at something others find easy. It means when you say I am exhausted and cannot explain why, the reason exists even if it cannot be itemised. You are not carrying too little. You are carrying too much. That is a different thing. So here is something to try. Write it down. Not a to-do list. A carrying list. Everything that is living in your head right now that you are managing, tracking, holding, worrying about. Get it out of your mind and onto paper where it has a physical form and can be looked at. Then look at it. Not to fix it. Just to see it. To acknowledge that it is real, that it is a lot, that it has weight. Then ask, for each item: does this have to be mine? Not everything will have an answer. Some of it is yours because it has to be. But some of it may not be. Some of it may have been yours for so long that nobody has thought to question it. You are allowed to put things down. Not all of them. But some.