5 Lessons I Learned Before Turning 40 About Mental Load and Life
In a few days I'll turn 40.
For most of my life, that number felt impossibly far away. It belonged to grown women with sensible shoes and strong opinions, women who'd lived enough to finally stop caring what everyone thought. Now that it's here, the surprising part is that I don't feel like I've arrived anywhere. I feel like I've spent the last year pulling back the wallpaper to see what was underneath.
It started on a regular Tuesday, when the mental load turned up a notch out of nowhere. For years, back when I was overfunctioning, I'd move from step 1 to step 10 and be done in a blink. Now I go through each step one at a time, analyzing it, having personal feelings about it, juggling it against a multitude of perspectives before I'll sign off and let myself move to the next one. Like, where did all of this analysis even come from? It felt like the high speed crashed and I had to go back to dial-up.
At first, that scared me. Then I understood that the slowdown wasn't the problem, it was the whole point. Every step and every sub-step had quietly become an opportunity to upgrade my thinking or modify my behavior, and the things I'd been running on autopilot for years were finally getting looked at.
Is my taking care of this helping my son, or is it disabling his autonomy?
Am I really letting my husband take the lead if my nervous system won't let me release control?
Am I upset at the job, or am I upset at myself for staying this long without real growth?
That's when it clicked that this year wasn't a breakdown, it was an audit. I felt forced to go back through the shit I was doing by default and decide whether it was really what I wanted, or just the dysfunction I'd grown accustomed to.
So in season 39 I figured everything out… yeah right. But it was the year I stopped being able to ignore certain things. Some of it came through marriage, some through motherhood, some through work, some through watching my body change, and some of it came while I was standing in my backyard staring at plants that were either thriving or dramatically communicating their dissatisfaction.
The common thread was never age. It was attention. I started paying attention to the things I used to explain away, and once I saw them, I couldn't unsee them.
Here are five of them.
1. I'm More Exhausted by Invisible Responsibilities Than Visible Ones
For a long time I thought I was tired because I was doing too much, but lately I'm not so sure. What I've started noticing is how much of my energy goes toward the things nobody sees. The remembering and the anticipating. The following up and the keeping track. The checking in, the monitoring, the planning, the constant low-grade adjusting that never really stops. That is the part of mental load that can make you feel a little crazy, because from the outside it doesn't always look like labor. It looks like you're just thinking.
But inside your mind, there are 47 tabs open, three of them are playing music, one has an error message, and nobody knows where the sound is coming from. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the person who remembers what everyone else forgets. The appointments and the deadlines and the groceries and the schedules. The emotional temperature of the room. The thing that needs to happen next, the thing that might become a problem later, the thing nobody even knows needs attention yet.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that a lot of women aren't carrying too many tasks. They're carrying too much invisible labor. And unlike the browser on my computer, there's no convenient little button to close it all at once.
What I'm Pondering
I wonder how many women think they have an energy problem when what they might actually have a mental load problem.
2. Being Capable Attracts Work Like a Porch Light Attracts Bugs
I've spent most of my life being the dependable one, the one who figures it out and handles it and can always be counted on. Those are good qualities to have. Until they're not.
Because here's what I've noticed this year: the more capable you become, the more people hand you. Not always on purpose, and not always with any kind of malice. Sometimes people just get comfortable. They know you'll handle it, so they stop thinking about it at all. I've watched it play out at work, in relationships, in family, and in a hundred small everyday situations.
Competence is a gift, but it can quietly turn into an identity, and identities are hard to question. Especially for women who have been praised for being low-maintenance, helpful, understanding, flexible, mature, strong, or easy to deal with. Those compliments can sound sweet until you realize they may also be evidence that you trained people not to check on you.
What I'm Pondering
At what point does being helpful turn into being available for things that were never mine to carry in the first place?
3. My Body Was Trying to Tell Me Something Long Before I Was Ready to Listen
This has been one of the stranger seasons of my life, all the brain fog and the fatigue, the hormonal shifts, the forgetfulness, these changes I wasn't expecting and honestly didn't appreciate. For a while I treated every symptom like a problem to solve, a deficiency, a failure, something I just needed to push through.
Then I started wondering if I was asking the wrong question entirely. Instead of asking how do I get back to who I was, I began asking what if my body is trying to tell me something. Not in a mystical way. In a practical one. They say your body keeps score, and honestly, I believe it. The body remembers stress and grief and years of carrying too much. It remembers everything our minds work so hard to normalize.
I think this is part of what makes life transitions so humbling for women over 35. Your body may start telling the truth before your life has made room for that truth yet, and that is inconvenient because the calendar still has plans. The family still has needs. The job still wants what it wants. The bills still bill. The laundry remains wildly committed to its own reproduction cycle. But the body starts sending little memos anyway. Slow down. Pay attention. This pace is not free.
Maybe that's part of why I've gotten so into gardening. Plants don't respond to pressure, they respond to conditions. You can want a pepper plant to grow all day long, but it still needs water and sunlight and nutrients and time, and no amount of frustration is going to change that.
What I'm Pondering
What if healing isn't about getting my old capacity back? What if it's about building a life that doesn't keep running on my emergency capacity in the first place?
4. Most People Are Living From Stories They Never Chose
This is the one that may have changed everything for me. I've spent a lot of time this year thinking about the invisible beliefs we inherit. They usually start off with:
good women don't complain about…
strong women can handle …
a good wife should…
a good mother should…
a successful woman can…
a bestie would…
Most of us never sat down and consciously chose any of that. We absorbed it from family and culture, from religion, from relationships, from years of just watching how things were done. And then we go and organize our whole lives around it without ever realizing it's there.
That is where people-pleasing gets sneaky, because sometimes it doesn't feel like people-pleasing.
It feels like being thoughtful.
It feels like keeping the peace.
It feels like being mature.
It feels like being the bigger person.
It feels like doing what you're supposed to do.
Until one day you look around and realize you built a whole life around everyone else's comfort and called it character.
The more I've examined my own assumptions, the more I've found that some of what I thought were personality traits were actually programming. Some of what I called strengths were survival strategies. Some of what I called normal was just familiar.
What I'm Pondering
How much of my life was built from conscious choice, and how much of it was built from scripts I inherited without ever realizing it?
5. I Don't Think I Want Freedom
For years I thought I wanted freedom. Freedom from stress, from work, from pressure, from obligations. But the more I sit with it, the less accurate that feels. I don't actually want a responsibility-free life.
What I want is greater ownership over my responsibilities. Ownership of my time and my attention and my energy, ownership of what I build and what I grow, ownership of what I let into my life and what I keep out of it.
When I look at the things I keep gravitating toward, the writing and the gardening and the preparedness, the family legacy, the making of things that actually belong to me, they're all connected. Not by a niche. By a desire. A desire to participate more intentionally in my own life.
That may be the biggest personal growth lesson of this whole season for me. I don't want to float through life untouched by responsibility. I want to stop defaulting into responsibilities I never consciously chose.
What I'm Pondering
Maybe the goal was never freedom. Maybe the goal was sovereignty.
As my 39th Season Comes to a Close
I've stopped resenting my system's update. I'm clearing out unnecessary programs and optimizing for what's important to me and for me in this season. I'm not letting unnecessary things, random conversations, second thoughts, or somebody's stray opinion live rent-free in my head, because my mental capacity got upgraded to a much simpler setting: if it don't serve me, it can't disturb me.
I know what being bothered feels like on a whole different level now, and it's just not worth it.
I can't care to be bothered anymore. I know what being bothered feels like on a whole different level now, and it's just not worth it. You know how you see older women who are just peacefully unbothered? I used to wonder how they got there. Now I get it. And some folks won't like this version of me, but that's a personal issue… I learned that too.
So as I get ready to leave my 30s behind, I don't feel like I've found my answers. I feel like I've finally found better questions. Questions about responsibility and identity, about marriage and work, about motherhood and mental load, about invisible labor and inherited expectations, about all the stories I've been living inside for decades without realizing they were even there.
Maybe that's what this season has really been about. Not reinventing myself, and not becoming some new person, but just paying closer attention to the woman I've already become and deciding, little by little, what comes with me into the next decade. By choice. Not by default.
Love Yourself,
Ebony
