This Barbie is

tired

I’ve written this entire post in bed because while my brain works in overdrive, as it always does, my physical body is crying today. I’m increasingly feeling that disconnect between mind and body where they don’t seem to be in sync anymore. This post is dedicated to certain girlfriends who, without knowing it, carry me through the mundanity of getting through the days. But you should definitely read it because it’s probably about you, too.

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Dear girlfriends, by now you should know I hold you to a high standard - I like you ambitious and independent, sassy and smart, the very model of a modern elder millennial. Your handshakes must be firm. I want to see in you what I could be. I look at you all and I see a mixed bunch of artists, writers, lecturers and scientists, dentists and bakers and publicists. Not all are mothers, not all are lovers. All of us juggling our part time gigs as carers, cleaners and therapists. Unpaid of course.

We know we are yet to peak in our intellectual prime, having grafted so many years to get to this point - autonomous and confident, more sure of ourselves than ever. Many of us are finally doing the thing we always dreamed of; to write the book, start the ceramics business, curate the exhibition, earn ‘director’ as a job title. By now we know grappling with impostor syndrome is a waste of mental energy because it turns out everyone is faking it anyway.

Yet it’s now that biology and society conspire to screw us over. Everything constantly reminds us that irrelevance is around the corner - if it’s not the invisibilisation of women in their 40s then it’s the last scramble to freeze eggs or find partners, or the barrage of targeted shapewear ads that point out flaws we never knew we had.

It’s the visceral nagging hum in our joints and the sagging of jowls reflected back at us in the morning, the period pains that get more erratic just when we thought we had finally tamed our cycles; it’s the moment in the day when we’re zapped of energy and have to lie on the sofa.

It’s the slow, then sudden realisation that men don’t notice us anymore; it’s the absolute terror that the word m***p**** invokes in us.

It’s the spasm we get from eye rolling as we watch younger peers pout and pose nonchalantly on Instagram knowing full well that these are calculated thirst traps, and the immediate self-flagellation for thinking jealous thoughts about younger attractive women, and then the bitterness that we should even have to police our own judgement, and then the weariness at the constant pitting of women against each other, and the inevitable surrender to the weariness of engaging in petty feminist discourse. It’s the self-hate that we wasted 30 minutes even scrolling through these internalisations.

It’s the grief that you can spend a decade’s worth of hard earned money and time trawling secondhand websites building the perfect wardrobe only for your body to one day refuse to fit in it, just by the most infinitesimal of inches, though not enough to throw out the trousers but enough for them to hang unworn and forlorn at the back of your cupboard for two years or more. One day we will slip back into them!

It’s the actual grief of our parents dying in quick succession and no one having ever prepared you for how to handle it.

It’s the discomfort of eating the wrong amount of chickpeas and being gassy and bloated for a whole week.

It’s the sting of being called an aunty, but not in the way that Gen Zs think it’s cute to call themselves aunty.

It’s the fortitude required to steel ourselves as we enter a meeting with men where we began as equals, and left as the subordinate who took minutes, were spoken over and sent the calendar invite for the next meeting.

It’s the loss of identity as you forever become known as someone’s mum and not just, you.

It’s the mental load. If you don’t know what that is then you’re exactly the person who should be looking it up.

It’s how much we laughed during the Barbie movie but started crying in the scene where Barbie finally experiences the world as a human - the scene that Greta Gerwig says is the heart of the movie and that she refused to cut - although for me the other heart of the movie is the line ‘We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come’. It’s that we don’t care that America Ferrera’s lengthy diatribe was criticised for being heavy handed on the feminism 101, if only because all the women in the cinema were getting whiplash from nodding so much while the guys seemed uncomfortable or bemused at best. Those nitpicking film critics can pipe down until, as Helen Mirren narrates, ‘all problems of feminism and equality can be solved’.

It’s that watching the Barbie movie was bittersweet for me and for all the women who played with Barbies as little girls because deep down we knew that Barbie wasn’t about showing little girls that they could achieve anything if they wanted it hard enough. Barbie was always pure fantasy. Barbie doesn’t have a vagina forgodssake, she exists in a world that doesn’t have to stitch up perineal tears, and she will never have to torture herself with deciding whether dermal fillers are succumbing to patriarchy or justified self-empowerment. It would be undermining our innate intelligence to think we were playing with Barbie to map out our IRL ambitions. I was playing with Barbie to escape because I knew the inequality and pains of womanhood awaited me.

My girlfriends, you and I are killing it, I just want you to know that. I’m grateful my mother never told me I was pretty, she just encouraged me to be smart. The cynics among us knew never to rely on our sex appeal because sex fades; instead we put in twice the hours, studied twice as hard and worked twice as much, just to level up with the boys. We have incredible grip strength from just clinging on to what we’ve achieved, lest it’s taken away and given to a sexier, more entitled version of you. That, and from carrying all our tote bags because dresses don’t have pockets.

But we also belong to a generation of girls who learned to be self-effacing, to be grateful to even get a foot in the door. To never ask for help, because we were told we can do it all. We went through a lot to get to where we are, only to become tired, quite unexpectedly.

If only we were Barbie with the plastic genitals and convenient immortality, of course we could achieve it all. But curve balls are inevitable when you’re a mere human.

To my girlfriends, I didn’t write this for anyone but you. I wanted to say thank you for leaving your WhatsApps and DMs wide open and for sending me memes and screenshots with uncanny punctuality, just when I most need to laugh. Thanks for what you have been through and for showing me that I deserve kindness from myself. Thank you for holding me in radical sisterhood.

“Women get more radical as we get older, because we experience ... not to over-generalize, but ... men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, women get more radical because they lose power as they age.”
— Gloria Steinhem