The woman who should herself.

If you asked most women if they thought they were independent, most would say yes.

It would then be followed by a sharp stab, where they would actually question their answer.

We all know that sharp stab.

One that is made to stop us in our tracks, put us back into place?

I am guilty of using the word should.  I am pretty sure my memoir would be: “The woman who should herself.”

Excuse me for the dirty pun, but somedays women still have to put up with so much shit, it should be illegal.

Unfortunately, it has become our way of life, dodging the all the shoulds and s^&t flung our way.

So much pressure on women, I have written before about the Motherload women have, but it is also the mental load.

Women have so many tabs open, there is no free space in a woman’s mind, it is occupied or rented out by all things, a woman must remember, all the little and big moments of life.

It is exhausting and decision fatigue is a real thing, I have no doubt it is one of the major players in female anxiety.

So, when it is not being the sounding board to everything in life, women also have the expectations of other people’s should. These shoulds are at times worse than the ones we inflict on ourselves.

The other day a friend of mine spoke about a man’s ‘freedom of mind’.  There is some truth in this, women carry the load, it is our minds that never turn off. I don’t know if I could ever truly turn off. It would be nice to think of having a freedom of mind.

Maybe that is why, some men have the time to throw around shoulds to women.

This would be a wonderful time to remind all the beautiful women in the world, that you don’t have to change who you are, be a certain type of woman, follow other people’s rules or stereotypes of what a woman should be.

Women like the decades evolve, and with that, certain stereotypes of how women should be, no longer exist, in fact some of the ideologies, cultures, political and religious beliefs about women, should never have existed.

Women are more than the shoulds given to them. Women are not merely built from the shoulds, expectations and ideals, of what society believes we are.

No, we should know better than that, but even for the most empowered woman, she sometimes feels that stab that makes her question not just who she is  but her place in a patriarchal world holding the knife.