Sunday Journaling Prompt: The Triple Bind Problem, how do you undo the corset? 📔🖋️✨
Three ways to untangle the pathologies of female "containment".
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Fellow Empresses, How the hell are you?
Let me start by saying, please forgive any absurd typos in advance. My head is still barely crocheted back on and I’m on all these new meds that exacerbate the brain fog.
While stuck in bed this past week, I had the chance to listen to the
podcast with host Kim Van Bruggan chatting with acclaimed author about her remarkable book Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses.You can listen to their riveting conversation here:
Their exchange got me thinking about how midlife women are pathologized on multiple levels.
When you’re first diagnosed with a significant chronic illness like a seizure disorder (as I was)—or arthritis, MS, Diabetes, etc., it comes with a whole new set of rules, restrictions, and prescribed narratives for living. The disease is often defined by a certain pathology and protocol for managing it. In my case, suddenly, I could no longer drive. Tricky with kids. There’s often no cure for these conditions—only keeping them in check. You’re in a constant state of quasi-infirmity.
So, it can seem as though there’s a sudden, narrative tightening of the corset laces ‘cinching’ your life together. This is cinch number one.
On top of that, any feelings you might have about your diagnosis (understandable sadness, anger, grief, etc.) are often further pathologized as depression, anxiety, an adjustment disorder, or worse. This, then also comes with rules and protocols.
But, according to Fay, you are not your diagnosis and many of these feelings and disorders are addressable with therapy or meds to the point where you might actually find acceptance and feel or even be ‘cured’.
So, now you are doubly pathologized. More infirmity: mental health edition—another cinch tighter in the corset strings of your life’s narrative possibilities. Still breathing?
Then, I saw a super compelling IG post fly by from Ann Marie McQueen of
and that got me thinking about the third layer of pathology… You get to menopause and there are so many conflicting takes—the most prevalent of which—is that this all-systems transition is somehow a disease or a deficiency. Granted, we’re finally learning a bit more about midlife women’s health and how to protect ourselves as we age, but we shouldn’t be fear-factored into treatments that may pose long-term harm—given our unique genetic risk profiles.And beyond just thinking about hormones, we also pathologize menopausal rage on so many levels as well. In her book, Hagitude - Reimagining the Second Half of Life, Dr. Sharon Blackie (who I regard as a mythopoetic badass) dedicates much of the opening chapter to the symptoms of menopausal rage. “All rage emerges from pain”, she offers, and “a strong sense of exile and unbelonging.”
It recalled for me season two of Fleabag, in which Kristin Scott Thomas gives an epic soliloquy on how women are “born with pain” and that it only abates with menopause. She is completely and utterly liberated by the experience. An entirely inverse and, dare I say, uncorseted narrative.
How often have we cosplayed this exact scene?
Blackie, alternatively, reflects on how we are so conditioned from girlhood to repress rage that this leads to a myriad of mental health issues such as anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. She further references clinical research that links repressed anger to physical diseases such as hypertension, gastrointestinal disorders, heart disease, and certain cancers. Again, we’re back to tracing pathologies.
And, while the mind-body connection is deeply rooted, how do we undo this triple bind pathology—this third cinch of the straps—so that we, as women, have more narrative agency in our lives?
How do we resist being constantly framed as a diseased, weakened, hysterical cohort that needs an ongoing dose of Pinkham’s Tonic because our pathological corsets are all on too tight? What say you?
Your prompt this week: Write about your pathological corset. How tight is it? Or maybe it’s not? 🤍
I’m just curious… Not everyone is dealing with the same severity of symptoms or narratives, but having agency and not being boxed in by infirmity would seem to be a help to us all.
Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,
By the way, as a disclaimer, I am not a therapist or a physician. I’ve only been to the medical school of me so please take all of the above as mere musings and not at all legit medical advice.
Darlin' send me your address and I will send you a copy of my book on menopause -Gonepausal. It's my funny take on this time of life. My mother told me she went through it in one afternoon.
Dear god, I needed this! The question hit me early, in my teens: what does it mean to be a woman unbound? Unbound = truly free, and I’ve always LOVED that word in that context, although I can’t claim to have fully embodied its full potential (yet!). I actually think this idea has always informed my politics, in my advocacy for women’s rights to abortion care, healthcare and pay equity, because these things are foundational for women’s freedom. But as I just turned 50 I’m far more conscious of the context you expressed in this piece, as it relates to all the unaddressed/untreated physical and mental health issues that GenX women were never given the support to process and treat. In any case, BRAVA for bringing so much candor and insight to every single fucking post 👏👏👏