The Myth of Balance

A perennial lifestyle meme/debate/whatever you want to call it that bugs the crap out of me has to do with the question of if and how one can "have it all," usually specifically whether women can "have it all." And e'rrrrbody's got an opinion.

Why does it bug the crap out of me? Well, for one, because the phrase "having it all" does NOT in fact refer to having "it all"; it's almost always used as short-hand for having a very specific subset of things: A high-powered successful career, a healthy social life, a reasonably functional relationship (if you feel like it), and of course, the absolutely non-negotiable pièce de résistance, children, because what normal woman could ever *possibly* hope to have a happy, fulfilling life without squirting some crotch spawn out into the world. (Mostly, though, "it all" seems to refer to a super successful career & kids.) Yes, I get that a lot of women do want those things and are sad if they can only have some of them, but those things by no means constitute "all" there is to have in life. It bugs me that society acts like they are. A woman could have all of those things and still feel frustrated and unfulfilled.

Second, it bugs me that society treats women and our life desires as if they're all the same, like all four billion of us want this exact set of things, bomb-ass career, bomb-ass relationship, rockin' social life, reproduction, like it's some sort of cookie-cutter happiness checklist. Newsflash, we DON'T all feel like we need those things to be happy in life. Some of us actively DON'T want some of those things! And the vast majority of us have other non-negotiable items on our happiness checklist. Stop trying to put us all in the same box.

And last but not least, it bugs me because "having it all" is also shorthand for getting everything you want, when you want it, without having to make any compromises or sacrifices. Well, newsflash; no, you can't have it all. No one can. Not men, not women, not anyone. You can have some things that you want. Maybe you can even have everything you want some of the time. But no one gets everything they want all the time without sacrificing or compromising something.

Now, I'm not saying we can't be happy most of the time, but I think the missing piece there is sometimes really thinking through "it all" with a critical eye and really asking yourself what is non-negotiable, what you really need to be happy & fulfilled most of the time, and what you're willing to compromise in order to make those non-negotiables happen. There's not an infinite supply of time, energy, resources, and life hacks in the universe; there's just not.

It's the same when people talk about "life balance" or "balancing everything" (and, yes, of course, again, we are almost *always* talking about women, here). People ask me sometimes how I "balance everything," meaning I guess a pretty busy career that takes me on the road a lot, a long-term relationship, normal life stuff, and, oh yeah, running and training as much as I do. (Which, no, is definitely not all that much compared to professional athletes or even more serious/competitive athletes, but it's still way more than your average person who is just trying to stay reasonably fit & healthy). And sometimes I feel like maybe it's because from the outside it looks magical and amazing and completely impossible and unrealistic and they feel like there is some kind of super magical secret involved.

You want to know the secret? Here's the secret.

1) "Balancing everything" is really just a nice way of saying "slightly failing at everything all the time."

2) If you really want to kick ass at something, there IS no "balancing everything."

I think the first thing to remember is that unless you're super close to someone and know what's going on with them on a day-to-day basis all the time, you really do not have a sense of how well they are "balancing" anything. We all know this is how social media works, right? We see people's highlight reels on Teh Internets and every now and then maybe hear about something particularly hard they're dealing with. But we don't see the day-to-day, minute-to-minute sausage-making, all the little micro-failures that are inevitable when you're trying to balance a bunch of hard, time-consuming stuff.

Like maybe you heard about how I trained for & ran a bunch of pretty decent races and spoke at three national conferences and renovated a house with my lovely boyfriend. But you also maybe didn't hear about all the times I was late to work and missed deadlines and missed workouts or let people down and screwed up key tasks with the renovation and ate cereal for dinner or spent my long run wanting to quit running forever and disappointed friends because I didn't get my workout done in time to make it to a social event.

There are failures.

All.

The.

Time.

And the not sharing them isn't even about trying to preserve some unrealistic image of what my life is actually like; it's just that all those little micro-failures are so common and so frequent and so much just a part of my everyday life that it just doesn't occur to me that they're particularly noteworthy or that anyone would even care. It's just life. You do the best you can and accept that you're going to screw up a lot and that's better than not trying at all. That's the closest thing there is to real balance, just balancing out all the failure as evenly as possible

Now, can you truly kick ass at something if you decide you want to? Of course you can. But ask any professional athlete, the trade-off there is that there is no balance. If you are running 100+ miles a week and spending who knows how many more hours doing strength work and PT and massage and micro managing your diet and also being sure to sleep 10 hours a day so you can *maybe* have a chance of competing at a national level, you aren't balancing all that with anything. Your social life is probably mostly limited to the people you train with. You probably can't do a bunch of favors for your friends & family members. If you're lucky enough to have a functional relationship, it's probably only because that person 100% gets how important this is for you and is willing to take a massive backseat during your season. If you have kids (and let's not even get into all the complications female pro athletes face when it comes to having kids), again, it's probably only because you have a capital-U Understanding with your partner about what child-related responsibilities you can and can't handle and when. You're probably not the Room Mother or running the PTA fundraiser or picking your offspring up from school every day.

My own (very very micro) version of that was the fall that I trained for my BQ at CIM. I trained more and harder than I ever had before and it paid off, but believe me, there was no balance anywhere. We ate a lot of takeout. Our house was often a mess. I missed a LOT of social events. I took on way less at work. We skipped our usual fall wine tasting trip. A lot of nights I was too tired or too concerned about an early morning to go do anything fun. For those four or so months, there was no balance.

So. To recap.

Can you have "it" "all"? No. But you can think through your priorities (what even is "it all" to you??) and make some decisions about what you really need to be happy and what compromises you're willing to make to get those things. Maybe that means doing a bunch of things pretty well but accepting you're going to be far from perfect in all of them sometimes. Maybe it means throwing 90% of your time and energy and resources into one bucket and accepting that most other things in your life will be on the back burner for a while.

The good news is, it's your life and you get to choose (within reason)! But don't spend your life chasing the myth of "having it all" or "balancing everything" and end up missing out on what will make you pretty happy most of the time.