All the Ways Women Disappear

We are drowning in a sea of mediocrity.

This article originally appeared in Medium on 11/25/2024.

A few months ago, I was walking with my daughter along a breakwater in Maine. It was pouring down rain that morning; the heavy drops pelting off our hoods and running over our hands where they were clasped together.

We were going to see a lighthouse. I thought of my father, who loved lighthouses, and how much he would have enjoyed this walk, rain and all.

I mentioned this to my daughter then, wondering if she thought perhaps he might be with us for this trek. Maybe his spirit was coming along, like in the movie Coco where the living keep the dead close by remembering them.

Emelia paused, thoughtfully. Then she said:

“I think where you can go in death depends on how you were buried.”

She reminded me that we had spread my mother’s ashes in a river, so “she’s free to roam waterways wherever she likes.” But with Dad, we released his ashes on land, in the woods where I grew up, so he can only move amongst the trees.

If my dad wants to go see the water, we have to bring him there in our thoughts. So, that’s what we did.

We spent the rest of the walk thinking about other people we’ve lost, too, and where they might be roaming. We keep my father-in-law in a rocket-shaped container, so Emelia pointed out that he has the most freedom of all, because he gets to roam the sky.

Emelia is 10. She constantly says things like this, gorgeous observations that are both unhindered by judgment and piercing in their simplicity. She once remarked that spring is the most special of the seasons, for it connects two opposites — winter and summer — together. (Fall works in reverse, and transitioning from hot to cold is not as impressive.)

Emelia was born in the spring. She’s pretty special, too.

What strikes me, though, is not just the way she sees the world. It’s the way her views are so clear, so her, so unencumbered by how the rest of the world thinks. Emelia doesn’t have to try to come up with new angles or fresh takes — that’s just her natural state of being.

I believe we all start out like this, as complete originals. We may not all have Emelia’s way with words, but we all begin our lives as remarkably singular beings.

Over time, though, we lose that. The world drills the originality right out of us — especially the girls and the women.

I think it’s time we take it back.

***

I started out as a very weird kid. Ben Franklin was my imaginary friend, and I slept every night with a book about the planets tucked in my arms. I thought I’d grow up to be an inventor. I was an oddball, and very content to be so.

But the world had other ideas. As I grew up, it kept teaching me how I should change.

When I was 9, I learned to shrink. My family was falling apart, and I took it as my job to not be a bother. I tried to minimize my footprint by keeping quiet and not asking for too much.

When I was 13, I learned shame. My father was an addict, but everyone told me that it was it wasn’t his fault. It was a disease; he couldn’t help it. So when he left us, I assumed the fault must be mine.

At 17, I learned to flee. I enrolled myself in college and moved across the country, thinking maybe distance would mend my wounds. Later, I escaped to Africa. It never was far enough.

In my twenties, I learned to survive. I worked 30-hour weeks all through school, and I threw myself into my first jobs. Earning money meant freedom.

In my career, I learned to perform. My bosses taught me to internalize the company values, to tow the corporate line. To give over my identity to my job, be loyal and never complain. Expect nothing and be grateful for what I got.

As a mother, I learned sacrifice. “Your baby can’t nurse? You’d better do everything you can to try.” They said, “breast is best,” and “formula will ruin her.” Good mothers prove their love by giving up their sleep and their sanity.

I listened. I contorted.

And over time, I disappeared.

The weight of the world crushed me as I grappled with these expectations. I lost myself in the juggle.

This is how we do it: How we make our women disappear.

We drown them in good behavior until their originality is all squelched out.

I interviewed Emelia once, for an episode of a podcast I was making.

I asked her to explain to me what it’s like to be inside of her brain. She has ADHD and has always seen it as a superpower, not a weakness.

I asked her what it means to her, and how she might describe it so others could understand.

Here’s what she said:

“It means you have this little burst of energy, and you look at stuff differently.

Like, say, a tree. Most people look at a tree and all they see is a tree, you know?

But me, I plan out the best way to climb it. I imagine what could be living in there.How would they get in?

It’s a really good thing.”

When I listen to this, it makes me weep.

How long will it be before she’s told to stop daydreaming like that?

How long before the various threads of our social fabric conspire to snuff her burst of energy all the way out?

***

We are constantly trained to become the most boring version of ourselves.

It starts early, and it happens everywhere. As Elaine Lin Hering illustrates in her stellar book Unlearning Silence, we teach children from a very early age to stop speaking up.

Good girls, in elementary school, are the ones who don’t cause trouble and know how to obey. Chatty kids with loud opinions are “difficult,” and quiet rule-followers are “a pleasure to have in class.”

The double standards start very early. We expect more discipline from the girls, and we tolerate more acting out from the boys. This is where it begins, and it never lets up.

In every life stage, we amplify insidious signals about good behavior and self-sacrifice, and we encourage young women to blend in and not stand out.We contradict ourselves, proudly promoting individuality up until the moment it becomes inconvenient to those in power.

“Use your voice!” we shout, and then whisper, “but not like that!”

The mixed messages only proliferate in motherhood. As new and young mothers we are told to celebrate our right to work and to parent, because we get to have it all — but we have to do so with little to no social support to make it all work.

We are idealizing an unrealistic and outdated model of traditional gender roles even as we wonder why our boardrooms are still full of more men named Dick than women or underrepresented populations.

Tradwives are trending, and women voted in droves just this month for the political party that ran on a platform of reducing our bodily autonomy.

Childcare has never been more unaffordable, grandparents have never been older, and God forbid we admit aloud that we’re depressed, or struggling, or crushed by the uneven split of domestic labor.

We gentle parent while internalizing our rage, and then criticize others for too much coddling. Our kids are busier than any generation before, and yet we wax wistful about the unstructured, tech-free summers of our youths.

We have tangled ourselves up inside of a generational and cultural straitjacket.

At work is where it is the worst. We are told to put our heads down, stay humble, earn promotions but never ask for them, that speaking of salary is vulgar, and we should use milquetoast platitudes when describing our views and skillsets instead of talking like real, human people.

We preach authenticity, and yet we struggle to really be ourselves. We don’t know who our “selves” are anymore.

This is done to us, and we also do it to one another. As women, and as allies of women, we collectively uphold the archaic norms of a corporate culture designed by men, for men, generations ago. The gender wage gap is narrowing, yes, but at an astonishingly slow pace.

It’s no wonder that by the time we reach the threshold of the C-Suite, many women flame out, burn out, run into walls, or opt out altogether.

We are losing ourselves to mediocrity. And this has to change.

We have to normalize the act of taking up space and knowing ourselves, so we can break free from these damaging standards that strip us of who we are.

We have to change the messages we are sending to our women and our daughters, so that girls like Emelia have a chance to stay who they are.

We have to change the virtues we signal to our young girls and children, so we don’t lose the voices and perspectives that make our world so unique.

We have to. Or all of us will disappear.

***

At the end of our interview, I asked Emelia about her thoughts on death.

It’s one of my favorite exchanges.

“What do you think happens when we die?” I asked.

She said:

“Well, you know how you’re born with a soul? You’re born knowing yourself and your soul, and I think you get that from somewhere, from the life you had before.

So depending on how you do in this life, that decides what you will become in your next one. Maybe you’re a human again. Maybe you’re a butterfly. Maybe you’re a doorknob, if you lived a bad life before.”

“You think you had a life before this one?” I asked.

“I think so, because I’m very lucky.”

“What do you think you might have been?”

“A frog.

Or maybe I was a fish egg. That would have been cool.

I wonder what it’s like to be inside that little egg.”

Here’s hoping she never loses that sense of wonder. What a terrible loss that would be.