The girl boss graveyard

And I've an essay in a book.

I wrote an essay for an anthology called So Hormonal about the men who invented the pill and the IUD and my living in a body reliant on their work. It’s called ‘If rabbits, why not women?’ and is near the back of the book. You can order it here. Writing something during the start of lockdown left scars, so I hope you like it. And if you don’t, there are many other essays to read.

I was deleting content on my Kindle – all the longreads I promised I’d read with a cup of tea to hand as my limbs and notebook rested on a plush duvet dressed in ironed white sheets, all the interviews I told myself I’d read with a forensic and cynical eye – and I noticed a pathetic trend. From 2013 until 2017 I attempted to consume a LOT of articles about women and careers: their secrets, their ambitions, their challenges, their bugbears, their hopes, their presents, their futures, their negotiation tactics, their depressing naked white-of-the-bone honesty that negotiation skills don’t matter because the map runs out when you’re a gal.

There’s therapy, and then there’s selecting any article with the words ‘lean in’ in the title, pressing delete, and saying ‘fuck off’ as you lie in bed. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.

It’s funny how we have this narrative built like a video game architecture. Put the head down, be good at school, have the right amount of fun at college, plan your career, be a good intern, be an astute employee. Hey presto, you have unlocked that homeowning dream, two annual holidays abroad, the odd weekend at a spa hotel with the girls life. Your next level is a stress-free retirement with two pension streams. Maybe some investments are rolling in. Oh, and you have a partner who earns loads working for some American company which pays SFA tax here. He’s that cheat code for The Sims - rosebud was it?

None. Of. That. Happened. Or, if it will, it’s the third cousin twice removed version of the good life. We’re the generation who can’t afford familial estrangement. We sometimes get told by the comfortable sort that we're expecting too much. To that, I like to fall back on that scene in Pygmalion where Eliza and Henry Higgins come home from the ball and she says to his confused face: "Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else".

Some of those articles I recall being honest about the long con of capitalism. But a huge chunk lied and implied that working harder meant a, not necessarily easier, but less bumpy life. Now we're facing into a barrel of women, especially working mothers, being screwed over by another great recession. I only see women screaming. It's exhausting being sooty canaries. The game is snake and ladders with a dice loaded to make sure you never win.

The articles in the graveyard that make me click delete with an index-fingered slam? Side hustles, finding that second job, nurturing your freelance income stream. The girl boss bullshit that grew like black mould in a Dublin rental during our last great recession promised me a middle management job which included a flourishing side career as a novelist or yoga instructor. Not only would I be able to accomplish those pursuits in all the time I’ve carved from my Interstellar bedroom, but they would also be profitable. My Zoom background was meant to have my name on the shelves behind me. A few weeks ago I told my mother that if I have a daughter I’m going to tell her to train herself up as a psychic or palmist so she can make money from nothing. Be an empathy alchemist and don’t pay taxes on the cash intended for shoes and palettes.

I'm fine. I'm grand. I'm from the comfortable sort. I can't complain. (But also, I can. And I will.) Getting near a nice existence is something I can sit down and do. Some decisions can take me there. I'll be more exhausted than I am and my actual ambitions will be scrap, but it is possible. And I probably can achieve those ambitions if I stop looking for tweets dragging Justin Hartley for what he did to Chrishell Stause. Still, I'm annoyed at the amount of time I and others wasted listening to the noise and possibly believing its gospel. I'm sick of the taste of soap in my mouth.