Emma Hardy

I think that whenever we have like a point of tension like that, it's not helpful to try and hide it or bury it.

Or I don't find it interesting personally to try and hide it or bury it because unpacking that tension is how we understand, is how we come to understand the stories that shape how we've come to understand the world.

Like by unpacking the stories of or by unpacking the tension of is this like a feminist horror or am I saying the taboo kind of anti-feminist thing of women are unfit for work.

By unpacking that I could see more clearly the layerings of like medical misogyny that made it harder for women to actually access treatment or have their pain be heard.

And I could also kind of start to separate it from this kind of girl boss ideal of being able to be perfectly fit and functional all the time.

Especially in, I think you were saying this before, a nine to five kind of workplace that's not actually structured to the ways that women's bodies are made or that our hormonal cycle actually functions.

So I think...

I wasn't looking for a neat answer.

I was kind of looking to figure out what story shaped the ways that I saw myself, that I saw my body and that I saw work.

Does that make sense to you?

I just wonder, like, when should you push through?

But also like at home, the things that I was getting really angry about and that I needed to, though this phrase is so helpful, but it really pissed me off of like sitting with discomfort.

I had to practice sitting with discomfort.

And I was like, how many women just sit with discomfort all the goddamn time?

And here I am, and this is what's supposed to make me better is sitting with discomfort.

It made me so angry.

And then I had to sit with that discomfort.

But it would be like my partner would not do the dishes or he would do them badly or he would practice some kind of very normative male incompetence or laziness, really.

And I would be so angry about it.

And I think that anger is kind of justified.