Pressing Pause: A Field Report from One Heck of a Day

I had a day recently. You know the kind. The kind where you begin the morning as a competent adult woman with a to-do list and end the evening sitting on the kitchen floor negotiating with the universe.

Some context. I have been a litigator. I have stood in courtrooms and argued in front of judges whose eyebrows could stop traffic. I have untangled regulatory problems so dull that describing them is considered a sleep aid in several states. I am, by training and by temperament, a person who handles things.

And this week I was brought to my knees by event logistics and an email editor.

The anatomy of a meltdown

Here is what nobody tells you about building something you love: it does not arrive in a manageable single file. It arrives all at once, holding hands with everything else in your life. The gathering we've been planning. The website. The emails. The vendors. The spreadsheets that breed overnight like rabbits with project-management certifications. All of it stacked on top of the ordinary freight of midlife — the family, the work, the body that has recently taken up improvisational theater.

I kept going the way I have always kept going: harder. More lists. More tabs. I had so many browser tabs open that my laptop fan achieved liftoff. Somewhere around the forty-seventh tab, I stopped being a woman planning a gathering and became a woman white-knuckling one — and let me tell you, you can hear the difference from the other room. Janine certainly could.

And then, over something genuinely small — I won't say what it was, but it involved software and I had already won harder arguments against actual opposing counsel that week — I broke. Full meltdown. Tears, the works. The competent adult woman left the building entirely and did not leave a forwarding address.

Forcing versus allowing

Here's the strange part, the part I keep turning over. Somewhere in the middle of the wreckage, a very quiet question showed up. Not a productive question. Not a to-do-list question. Just this:

What if the problem isn't the amount I'm carrying — what if it's the forcing?

Because there is a difference, it turns out, between rowing a boat and dragging it across a parking lot. Both are effort. Both look like commitment. Only one of them works with the water. I had been dragging — jaw set, shoulders up around my ears, insisting that if I just pushed hard enough, the calendar would apologize and behave. The calendar did not apologize. Calendars never do. They're at that age.

Regular readers of this Journal will recognize the next part, because we keep saying it: thought moves. The thoughts I was having at the bottom of the meltdown — I'm failing, this is all too much, everyone will be disappointed — felt like sworn testimony. They arrived with exhibits. And then I slept, and there was coffee, and daylight, and the same facts looked entirely different. The facts hadn't moved an inch. Something else had.

It is remarkably easy to see this in other people. It is remarkably humbling to watch it in yourself, on your own kitchen floor, mid-negotiation with the universe.

It's okay to not be okay

Now — and this matters — none of that means the exhaustion wasn't real. It was real. The plate was genuinely full. Midlife women are handed a freight load and then congratulated on our multitasking, as if that were a compliment and not a diagnosis. Sometimes the wise response to a real overload is not a better attitude. Sometimes it is putting something down.

Which is a funny thing to learn the hard way when you co-founded a company that exists to tell women exactly that. We built Sofrena on the idea that you should notice what's happening in you, take it seriously, ask for what you need, and stop performing "fine" for an audience that never bought a ticket to that show anyway. And there I was, performing "fine" in an empty theater at eleven o'clock at night.

So I stopped. I said it out loud — to myself, and then to Janine, whose eyebrow received the news with its customary eloquence: it's okay to not be okay. I am allowed to be a work in progress and the founder of a company about being a work in progress. Frankly, it's on-brand.

So we pressed the button

Which brings me to the news, if you haven't seen it yet: we are postponing our first gathering. New dates in the spring, city to be announced, everything wonderful about it still fully intended — just not forced onto a calendar that needed dragging across a parking lot to get there.

Yes. A menopause company, pressing pause. We have checked, and we're fairly sure this is the most on-brand decision in the history of commerce. Somewhere a marketing professor is weeping with joy and cannot explain why.

Here is what pressing pause is not: it is not quitting, not failing, and not an ending. Anyone who has ever used a remote control understands this. The movie is still there. The popcorn is still warm. You just needed to go check on something — in this case, us.

And here is what pressing pause is: it's the thing we will be teaching in that room when we finally pull up the chairs. Not as a slide in a deck. As a thing I did, on a Tuesday, with mascara halfway down my face, when I finally understood the difference between forcing a thing to happen and allowing it to happen well.

The gathering will happen. It will be better for the wait — better rested, better planned, and hosted by two women who took their own advice, which we understand is rare enough in the wellness world to qualify as a novelty act.

Until then: if you are white-knuckling something right now — a season, a body, a calendar, a version of yourself that used to fit differently — consider this your permission slip, from someone freshly off the kitchen floor. You're allowed to press pause. The movie will wait.

Come talk with us when we un-pause — join the list and you'll hear the new dates first. In the meantime, be gentler with yourselves than I was with me.

— Sheila