The want that doesn't need a permit

MONDAY, AUGUST 24

Today's energy is about other people's outsides. six of wands sits with visible success, the sort that gets announced, and monday in late august is when a great deal of it seems to arrive at once.

everyone is back from somewhere. the photographs are up, the plans for autumn are being described with confidence, and somebody you went to school with appears to have arranged her life beautifully. the week starts and you find yourself doing arithmetic you did not sit down to do.

the fault in that arithmetic is not that you compare. everybody compares, it is how people locate themselves. the fault is in the units. you are putting your inside up against their outside, which is a bit like weighing a house against a photograph of a house. one of those has the boiler in it.

worth remembering too that a woman who is managing well and a woman who needs to be seen to be managing look identical from across a room. you cannot tell which is which from the outside, and neither can anyone looking at you.

what is worth leaning into today: noticing what you are actually envying when it happens. it is rarely the holiday. it is usually the ease, and ease is a thing you can build in small amounts without anyone's permission.

what is worth staying away from: the monday audit. a full review of your life conducted before ten in the morning, using other people's summer as the benchmark, will reach the wrong verdict every single time.

my advice for today: when the arithmetic starts, ask what you would have to give up to have her version. the answer is usually specific and usually unattractive, and it ends the sum faster than any amount of talking yourself round.

i am curious what the envy turned out to be pointing at, once you looked properly. write and tell me, and be more precise than the obvious answer if you can manage it.

/ a reflection

on who told you what a good life is supposed to look like from the outside

here is what i have been turning over. most of us are carrying a scoreboard we never agreed to, and if you look at what is written on it, the categories are oddly dated. a garden that is under control. children who ring on sundays. a marriage that other people describe as lovely. a kitchen that would survive an unannounced visitor.

nobody has audited that list since about 1987. it was assembled from the women who were adults when we were girls, and it measures things that were visible from the street, because that was the only information anyone had about anybody.

what strikes me is how little of what actually makes a week good appears anywhere on it. whether you laughed. whether anybody said something true to you. whether you were interested in anything. whether you slept. none of those show from the street, so none of them count, and so a woman can have a genuinely good life and still feel she is losing.

i am not going to tell you what should be on your list instead, partly because i do not know and partly because a scoreboard handed to you by somebody else is how we got here in the first place.

but it is worth knowing that you are allowed to score a different game. and if you want a place to start, the useful question is not what is missing from your life. it is which of the things you are measuring would still matter to you if nobody could see them.

send me one thing you would put on your own list, the one nobody else would think to measure. i collect those, and they are almost always small and very specific.