To the Overstimulated, Pre-Menopausal Woman Holding Up the Entire Ecosystem
If you feel like you’re drowning lately… it’s because you kind of are.
Not in a dramatic, movie-scene way. More like a slow, quiet, fully-clothed wade into deep water while still answering emails, signing permission slips, scheduling dentist appointments, managing staff drama, meal planning, and figuring out why your mom’s pharmacy suddenly needs three new forms.
You’re not just raising kids.
You’re leading teams.
Running a household.
Supporting aging parents.
Maintaining a marriage (or recovering from one).
Trying to remember if you drank water today.
And regulating a hormonal roller coaster no one prepared you for.
We joke about it, raised on 90s rap, feral childhoods, streetlights as curfew, dial-up internet, drinking from hoses, surviving without helmets, Google, or therapy language.
And now?
We regulate our nervous systems with memes.
We send “I’m fine” texts while internally buffering.
We watch 30-second clips telling us to wake up at 5 AM, journal, cold plunge, build a business, strength train, meditate, pack organic lunches, be emotionally available, financially literate, sexually vibrant (what does that even mean), spiritually grounded, and also somehow relaxed.
Ma’am. We are TIRED.
And here’s the part no one says out loud:
When you actually talk to these women one-on-one, most of them feel like they are failing.
Insecure about parenting.
Second-guessing leadership decisions.
Guilty at work.
Guilty at home.
Guilty resting.
Guilty not resting.
Just… guilt with a side of exhaustion.
Social media says “balance.”
Real life says “triage.”
And no, the world is not going back to a 1950s single-income household fantasy. Most families couldn’t survive on one income even if they wanted to. And honestly? Half of us would lose our minds anyway. We weren’t built to disappear, we just weren’t meant to carry everything at once.
Also, can we be real?
If we all suddenly stayed home full-time with no support, no village, no financial breathing room… we’d be back to chain-smoking on the porch, pouring wine at 5 PM, and whisper-screaming to our equally broke best friends. (Kidding. Mostly.)
Meanwhile, the world keeps accelerating. Technology. Expectations. Costs. Noise. Needs. Crisis after crisis after crisis.
So what gives?
Honestly… I don’t know.
I don’t have a 5-step system or a morning routine that fixes it.
I just know this soundtrack runs in a lot of our heads on repeat:
Am I doing enough?
Am I messing this up?
Who is taking care of everyone when I can’t anymore?
Why does everything feel so heavy?
If that’s you, here’s what I want you to hear:
You are not broken.
You are not weak.
You are responding normally to an abnormal load.
You are carrying multiple generations at once while trying not to drop yourself in the process. That’s not failure, that’s unsustainable heroism.
Maybe the goal isn’t balance right now.
Maybe the goal is survival with moments of meaning.
Maybe the win is simply not losing your shit today.
And if all you did was show up, keep people fed, answer the urgent things, love your kids, and collapse at the end of the day…
That counts.
It all counts.
You’re not alone, even if it feels like it.
Somewhere, another overstimulated woman is reheating her coffee for the fourth time, staring into space, and wondering how she became the central nervous system for an entire family tree.
We see you.
We are you.
And somehow… we keep going.