We are collectively feeling emotional and mental exhaustion. It’s a lot of devastating news, from domestic terrorism in grocery stores and hair salons, to stripping back of reproductive rights. Let’s not forget that we have already lost over 1 million lives to Covid, but the pandemic is far from over.
For women specifically, one source of exhaustion that we often overlook is what comes from constant translation — that is, we are persistently trying to construe our worth, our experience, our bodies, and even our lives, into terms that we think (and hope!) might actually break through. It’s a never-ending marketing campaign.
Here’s a taste of what I mean:
We distribute infographics widely about how much a mother would make if paid for her unpaid labor. See? What we do is valuable in dollars.
Similarly, we translate our mothering skills into lingo that fits into LinkedIn terminology — Time Management Skills, Negotiation Skills, Communication Skills. We have transferable skills, skills, skills!
We start advocacy organizations named to resemble a bastion of American capitalism — the Chamber of Commerce. Maybe if we liken mother’s interests to capitalistic interests, we can create and instill a sphere of influence and power. We are the Chamber of Mothers!
Whenever there is potential harm to women and girls, we translate this impact in such a way to appeal to men with daughters, because we fear that otherwise, men just won’t care. This could happen to your own precious daughters; ergo, this impacts you!
Like a legion of marketers on a mission, women are constantly meeting them where they are. Construing, and sometimes contorting our lived experience into tag lines, economic research findings, and Instagrammable infographics to communicate that we are worthy. The campaign of it all is draining. Wouldn’t it be nice to just “be”? What would happen if we stopped translating our worth for mass consumption? What if we stopped packaging up our lived experience into products and messages that are deemed valuable by some external forces?
It’s a mental exercise that’s worth trying in this moment. For me, consciously stopping myself from translating my worth leaves me with… stillness. Resisting the urge to meet people where they are, I’m left to stand in my own self-evident worth. It’s about turning off my internal marketing machine — one that has been on overdrive my whole life, growing up female, and a visible minority.
If all women did this exercise and stopped the translation/marketing campaign, what would happen?
My natural guess is that we would be swallowed whole. We would lose our rights. We would lose our sense of safety. All of our effort to fight and campaign has been to achieve these advances in establishing our freedoms, so the natural result of stopping that effort would be the loss of those gains. Right?
Maybe not. What if we channeled more energy into building spaces where our autonomy is understood without translation or explanation? Where our power just exists without popular election. Where there are no auditions on worthiness. Where motherhood is an objectively holy endeavor and is revered as such. Where there is no need to quantify in economic terms the value of our bodies for childbearing, the value of our mental load, the value of our breastfeeding, the value of our work inside and outside the home. Could this energy possibly serve us better, and drain us less?
I admit, these are theoretical queries that may not immediately have practical impact. But I believe that we benefit when turn off our marketing machines sometimes. Instead of meeting them where they are, we need to build where we are. Tell our own stories, in our own words, without running them through an economic calculator to determine our stories’ worth. Choose our own descriptors, instead of searching for the most relevant labels, or the most strategic hashtags.
This message, in many ways, is the one I have needed the most, and the one I want to put out in the world. There are unquestionably large, systemic forces that we do need to fight and help shape. But we can’t forget that we have agency over our own life, and reserving some of our attention to build it in manifestation of our truest, self-evident values, is in itself, a powerful act. It is also potentially the best marketing there is.
#14 Tired of Translating
It's such an automatic reaction, in a way -- the defensiveness, the explanations -- but you're so right to question it.
Oh wow. I so appreciate this as a vision for the future, even if it feels like so much of our current mental gymnastics is necessary to assert value in a society built for and by men. I wish our society didn’t require the translation of worthy caretaking activities and values into the language of capitalism.