This is an extract from my forthcoming book called Enough! Healing from patriarchy’s Curse of Too Much and Not Enough.
Bring your ‘I am too much’. Bring your ‘I’m not enough’. Bring your fatigue, your messiness, your confusion, your brain fog, your rage, your self-doubt. Bring me your nice girl and your wild woman. Bring your wholeness, your magic, your glow, your genius. Lay it bare because it is welcome here. You are welcome here.
There is nothing you have to do to warrant being here, to know that you belong. There is nothing you need to do to make you deserving of the time you need to recover from the curse of too much and not enough. There are no conditions, no hoops to jump through, nothing to measure up to, nobody to compete with because this book is a space that is just for you.
I want women to be fully, openly, lustrously, and unrepentantly ourselves. I want to create spaces which nurture women’s realisation that we are enough, just as we are. The pain of living with the belief that you are too much or not enough is pain that I wish women did not carry, but we do. Too much and not enough are within us, but do not belong to us. It is a curse we have lived with for aeons, born into us through the struggle, trauma, pain and conditioning of those who came before us.
The curse is a control system within the system which bows to the rich white male and attempts to belittle and marginalise those whom it decrees are less than. The system does not offer respect to those it does not recognise as resembling itself. Patriarchy breeds power and control through its tentacles of racism, classism, ableism, capitalism, and if you happen to be a woman, you can add misogyny to the intersections of these isms which may already be marginalising you. Patriarchy needs women to be run ragged under its curse to keep us out of the way.
If all of us women were well, rested, fully empowered within the knowledge and experience of being enough, then we would be fucking dangerous. Dangerous to the system that seeks to keep women oppressed through preoccupation with trying to have it all or get it all done, struggling to be the fullest expression of themselves while busily trying to make ends meet. The drive to have it all and get it all done was sold to us by patriarchy, packaged for us as the temptation of being Superwoman. Let me break it to you: you will never get it all done.
Women would be dangerous because we would be wise to the curse and its falsity. Instead, we would choose to nurture ourselves back into the truth of who we are. Back into our glory, our power, our magic, our goddamn enoughness, and lifting up other women while doing so. Healing ourselves little by little and being healed by seeing the women around us rise, stepping into their enoughness. We would reclaim and own the places we’ve already earned as change-makers across the platforms where we already show up and weave our magic; in board meetings, politics, arts, justice, parenthood, education, health and so many more. We would show up from the place of enoughness without anything to prove. We would no longer be competing with ourselves and each other to prove we could do it, to prove we could make it in the man’s world.
Yet truly, those of us in the West have it easier than women who are fighting the curse under regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women battle to uncover their glowing enoughness while demanding the right to education, an income, healthcare and basic freedoms which we take for granted in the West. But I can’t pretend that some of those struggles do not exist for the Western woman too, albeit in a less brutal form.
In the UK, we are not likely to be stoned to death for adultery, unlike our sisters in Saudi. In the UK, US, and Europe, we know women are unfairly paid for the work we do, whether it be in the boardroom or as home care assistants. We know we are marginalised by Western medicine and its lack of understanding of our cycles. We know we live in a rape culture where jokes about sexual violence are normalised on television. We know that when we speak out about these injustices, we are labelled as Feminazis or simply as uptight, too vocal, too much. We don’t need to look at statistics to feel in our bodies and know in our hearts that this oppression is real. Patriarchy casts its shadow upon humanity, with women being fucked over most spectacularly in the male-favouring social milieu, where women must navigate the headfuck of a riddle that is the curse of too much and not enough.
Enough! will be available in late Summer 2023 from online book retailers.
Inside her pages we will delve in to:
Recovery from perfectionism
Developing body acceptance
Owning your sexual sovereignty
Healing the good girl/busy girl narrative
Moving beyond the wounds of emotional and narcissistic abuse
Recognising abuse of power in destructive cults
Weaving a new relationship to feminine power