Women Are Ripping Apart The Societal Expectations Placed On Them, And I'm Clapping But Also Crying

“People cannot delegate themselves. They cannot delegate self-control, self-regulation, self-knowledge, or self-improvement. Everyone is ultimately responsible for themselves. That doesn’t mean we can’t have relationships or love. It just means that to do so to the fullest extent, we must own ourselves first. This unstated assumption is at the heart of discrimination against women. I am constantly deprived of personal resources because I have been held tacitly responsible for all the other adults around me. I have spent personal resources tackling everyone else’s problems without reserving enough time for my needs (much less my goals). I have worked myself into the hospital because I was told that my needs don’t matter or aren’t real. Sure, I am a completely functional adult who also supports two children, but that’s not all there is to me any more than a job/profession/income is all there is to a man.

I have not lived up to my potential or contributed my knowledge to the world or society because I was busy handling conflicts that were never mine to handle in the first place and could never be solved by me because they reside in others. I have enabled triangulation and contributed to manipulation without even understanding that I was doing so. I have prevented other people from learning about themselves because I thought it was my responsibility to handle their emotions.

If this were no longer true, and women just stopped doing it for others as the default assumption, we would hopefully get to the point where women wouldn’t be demonized for not doing it automatically. All people would naturally spend more time concentrating on communication, self-reflection, and how to engage with the world around them (or they’d piss everyone off, and people would leave them well enough alone). I’d like to think we would all be better people. I’d like to think it would be a better world. I’d like to think that our individual inner conflicts would stop being externalized in inappropriate settings, that we would develop more acceptable safe spaces as a society, and we could start working harder on the problems that affect us all.

That’s my hope, anyway.”

—Defy_Gravity_147