The skill was never the job's to keep

WEDNESDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER

the eight of pentacles is the card of the long apprenticeship, and it turns up for women who served one without ever noticing they were doing it.

you learned a whole set of things by repetition. how to run a house, hold down a job, manage somebody else's moods, keep several plates in the air on a wednesday with nobody watching you do it. that was training. it just never came with a certificate at the end.

the difficulty is that all of it got filed under the role. the role ends, or thins out, and in your own accounting it takes the skill with it. that is why capable women go quiet about what they can do the moment the title stops applying.

the practice is yours, though. it does not live in the job or the house or the people, it lives in your hands, and hands do not hand anything back. worth holding on a wednesday, which is the day the gap between who you are and what you are doing tends to be loudest.

what is worth leaning into today: naming one thing you are good at without adding the sentence that softens it afterwards.

what is worth staying away from: describing yourself entirely in the past tense. it is doing more quiet damage than almost anything else you say about yourself.

my advice for today: write down three things you can do that took years to learn, and do not qualify a single one of them. read them back tomorrow, when you have forgotten writing them.

what did you get good at without ever calling it a skill. i want the unglamorous ones most of all.

/ affirmations

read these out loud, five times, in front of a mirror, right now

if one of those landed harder than the rest, tell me which. i am curious whether it is the same line for everybody.