1. Expanding on the “We’re alive and we’re lucky but we’re not ok” thought from yesterday: Anne Helen Petersen writes about the impact of collective loss and trauma:
…we have endured nearly a year—a year!—of sustained, slow-motion collective trauma. Some days might not have felt recognizable as such, but our brains are very adept at flattening trauma, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, into something survivable. We have borne witness, in some way, to deaths in our close community, in our homes, in our online circles, in our kids’ schools—to half a million American deaths and 2.56 million deaths globally. We have lived with some level of fear, for ourselves and for those we cherish, for a year.
And then there’s all the other, compounding trauma. Depending on your situation, you have endured unspeakable loneliness, deep anger at those who couldn’t be bothered to care about others, enduring financial precarity, and the feeling like your body is, quite frankly, disassembling under all that’s being asked of it as a parent, worker, partner, person.
2. Here for this: Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
The impact of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases was categorically absent when the concept of imposter syndrome was developed. Many groups were excluded from the study, namely women of color and people of various income levels, genders, and professional backgrounds. Even as we know it today, imposter syndrome puts the blame on individuals, without accounting for the historical and cultural contexts that are foundational to how it manifests in both women of color and white women. Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.
3. My feelings about the time change:
