You came here from an article, which means something in it landed close enough that you wanted to keep going.
This is the thing the articles keep pointing at. It is a set of questions about what you are actually carrying, where the rule came from, and what it has been costing you. It takes about ten minutes if you are honest and about three if you are not.
Before you start
- Nothing you write here is submitted anywhere. There is no results screen and you are not being scored. Your answers stay on your paper.
- You need paper, or a notes app, and about ten minutes where nobody needs anything from you.
- There is no advice in this document. It is only questions. What to do about the answers comes later, and only if you want it.
- Several questions will feel like they are about somebody else’s life. Answer those ones anyway.
Write the answers down. Do not do this one in your head — the whole pattern this is looking at is the habit of keeping the accounting internal, where it never has to be totalled.
Part one · The ledger
Not what you do. What you carry, which is different and mostly invisible.
1. List everything you are currently holding that would fall over within a week if you stopped holding it. Include the small things. The renewal that nobody else knows is due. The relationship you maintain on behalf of the family. The appointment somebody else needs but has not booked.
2. Go back through that list and mark each item with who assigned it. A name, or “nobody.” Be accurate rather than generous.
3. How many are marked “nobody”?
4. Which item on that list would surprise the people closest to you if they knew you were carrying it?
Part two · Where the rule came from
Underneath the ledger there is usually a rule. It was learned somewhere, it was reasonable at the time, and it is still running.
5. Finish this sentence without thinking about it too long: In this family, the person who notices things is the one who —
6. How old were you when that became your job? Not roughly. The specific year, if you can find it.
7. What was it protecting you from, or protecting somebody else from, back then? This is not a rhetorical question. There was usually a real thing.
8. Is that thing still happening?
Part three · What it costs
This is the part most women skip, because the cost has been folded into normal for so long that it stopped reading as a cost.
9. What have you stopped doing in the last three years that you used to do because you liked it? Not stopped deliberately. Stopped by attrition, without a decision being made.
10. What symptom have you decided is not worth mentioning at an appointment? Write down the actual symptom and how long it has been going on.
11. When did you last say something plainly, without softening it first, and what happened?
12. Who benefits from you holding all of this? Answer the question directly. Sometimes the answer is that nobody does and it has simply been running unattended for a long time. That counts as an answer.
Part four · What you would put down
13. Go back to the list from question one. If you were told, by someone whose judgment you actually trust, that you had permission to put three of them down, which three?
14. What would happen to each one? Not the catastrophic version. The realistic one.
15. What is the smallest of the three?
What to do with this
Nothing today. That is not a rhetorical device — the document does its work by existing on paper rather than circling in your head at 3 a.m., and adding a task to the ledger at the end of an audit of the ledger would be its own kind of joke.
Put it somewhere you will find it. Read it again in a week.
Most women find that the answer to question fifteen is the one that moves first, and that it moves without much effort, because the reason it was being carried stopped applying some years ago and nobody had checked.
If you want the next part
There is a second document that works through what the answers to questions five through eight usually mean, and the one thing that changes once the rule is named. It is written the same way as this one. No programme, no calls, nothing to join.
You do not need it to have got value from the last ten minutes. If you want it, leave an email address and it comes to you.
One email, then a second a few days later. You can leave whenever you like, and the link is in every one.
Written by Nora Whitfield, Editor, Blue Leaf Journal. Informational only, not medical or psychological advice. If any of the answers above brought up something you would rather not sit with alone, that is worth taking to your GP or a therapist, not because something is wrong with you, but because it is a reasonable thing to want help with.