After I finished reading Caitlin Moran’s most recent More Than a Woman (here’s a great shortie by her), a take-away, head-nodding passage I tucked away from the book was about the too-much or too-little syndrome that often exists for us ladies. (Fellas, you might have a comparable situation, but you’ll have to talk amongst yourselves about it.) It’s the sense that you’re being way too much (by living large, laughing, or dancing on a table as I may have been about to do in the photo above) or you’re not enough and failing at a relationship/friendship/job, fill in the blank. The just-right emotional place is frustratingly around some corner that is evasive. And it’s confounding, really. Whether a baked-in from the beginning kind of deal or a marinated over time flavoring, the idea of always looking for a way to strike the balance in life is something I’ve aimed to master since forever. I look back with absolute certainty at the me above and know without doubt that I was cycling through a series of thoughts in that moment. They went a little like this: Damn, it feels good to let loose like this. And all my ladies are here. And whatever band is playing are maybe playing Kiss covers. Hell, yeah. Take my picture. Where’s the bar so I can climb on top and dance.” It was unadulterated fun. But I guarantee you, because I remember, when I saw this picture two weeks later (because back in the before-time, we had to develop film, then wait for whoever took the photo to share it with us. Unimaginable.), I felt a flush of embarrassment. Not because my vest was too damn vinyl, but because I might have had too much damn fun. What did people think? Was I telegraphing the wrong impression? Was I too much? And then, the next time I went out and a cover band kicked into “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night,” that photo would have flashed into my brain pan and I would have gone to the bar. Not to dance on it, but to drink at it. That would have distracted me from being too much. Not a good look.

And about that too little…this is an area I think us ladies can all agree spans a whole lot of real estate. In the wider world currently, that too little encompasses women who are working from home while educating their kids and also running the household or caring for a parent all simultaneously like a bear juggling on a ball. I bow down to you all because often that’s a combo plate of too much to do, too little you to accomplish it. But in general, the too-little, I’m-not-enough moments spring from an emotional place of just trying to be all you can be while feeling like you’re failing spectacularly. I do feel this as a gendered thang. I can’t recall any moment when I interviewed men in bands who said, “I’m not enough at what I do”–mind you, they may have been thinking it, but they didn’t say it. While I definitely did get quotes from musical ladies that turned on the idea that they didn’t live up to expectations (“My songwriting’s still evolving” “I looked crap in that outfit” “I’m getting better at [the bass/guitar/drums/triangle/whatever]”). Even Courtney L. had a wary not-enough-ness that lived under the surface, although she’d have never said it out loud to me and she compensated by living incredibly out loud so you wouldn’t notice.

This week a distinct intersection between too much/too little made an appearance in my life. Two things happened: I’m winding up the semester with the two students I’m tutoring. One of them has three papers due, all in succession. All of them involving one of these topics: gender, religion, theology. Each of the higher-ed profs outlining what’s needed with twenty-five syllable words when probably a four-syllable jam would do. But that’s not really the issue. The issue became me thinking There’s too much intellectual expectation here. I may not be able to help her. And that corresponded with All I want to do is work on my own writing and I have too little time to do that. And that, my friends, dovetailed into the knowledge that a few of the writers in the fiction course I’m taking have had some interest shown by agents for their finished novels and instead of me celebrating their great good fortune or recognizing that I’m not actually done with mine, so no agent would show interest yet, I was instantly despondent. As if, like one of those grab a ring games or musical chairs, there are only maybe six chances in the whole world to get an agent and I was likely missing mine because A) I’d wasted time and ended up with too little too show or B) I was expecting too much of myself and shouldn’t count on my writing as something to put all my eggs or words or baskets in. Which I guess brought me to my go-to C) I’m not brave enough to take the plunge and just quit everything and dedicate all my time to writing my novel. I know, I know, most would actually call C) delusional in that, no, until there’s someone who says “Please finish your novel because I feel I can sell it,” it’s a fool’s errand to shove off from a perfectly well-paying gig.

Sooooo, right back to the Goldilocks of life. The just right we are all looking to achieve. The balance that asks for a recognition that no, ladies, we’re not too much when we grab all the rings and swing, that we’re not too little when we just can’t give that extra hour because we want to do our own creative thing. So we keep trying all the porridge, the chairs, the beds until there’s the just-right one. In the meantime, please share if you know or have found it (or even if you haven’t). I’ll be over there finishing a chapter.