All Eyes on Me
There's a Tupac lyric that finds me at the strangest times. Folding laundry. Mixing paint. Wiping down a counter for the third time in an hour. All eyes on me. It surfaces uninvited, mid-task, and every time it does, I have to stop and ask myself the same absurd question: whose eyes are watching?
(If you know the song, you're already hearing his voice. There's no other way to hear that line.)
As a mother, there is no gauge of performance — or maybe the question is what the gauge of performance even is. All I have is that my children are growing, thriving, struggling, surviving. They are living their lives as kids, being the best little humans they can be. Am I supposed to measure myself against their performance? I can't help but measure myself against other mothers, other families, other children. I'm constantly wondering if I am doing this right.
No one is actually checking. No boss is logging my hours. No manager is reviewing my output. No one is grading whether today's version of me — mother, artist, partner, whatever I'm supposed to be adding up to — is hitting the mark. And yet I move through my days as if someone is watching, tallying, waiting to see if I've done enough to justify the space I take up. I built the audience myself. I just haven't figured out how to stop performing for it.
Dialed In
I know where this all started…
My second job out of college was with a tradeshow company. I sold custom booths — companies attending a tradeshow where we were the general contractor would get a call from me, and I'd try to sell them a booth that we'd design, build, and set up before they ever arrived. They didn't have to ship anything, assemble anything, figure anything out. Just show up. That was the pitch: stress-free, one-stop shop, ready when you arrive.
By my second year there, I'd learned the ropes, and I was ready to crush it. My boss had built a sales board — our names in a row, a marker for each of us that slid across the board as we moved toward our goal. The dollar amount was right there, visible from the cubes in the sales pit, every single day. We knew exactly how many calls we needed to make, how much production we needed to hit, and we could watch our progress in real time without ever having to wonder. I was even selected to test an automatic dialer — a machine that would keep calling until someone picked up, so we wouldn't waste a second waiting. We were dialed in. Literally.
I sat in that cubicle with a call sheet in front of me, and I knew, every single day, exactly what was expected of me. I wasn't great at it — I hated asking people for a sale, I carried a low hum of anxiety every day — but I was good at it, because "good" just meant completing the task in front of me. Whatever the task was, whatever it cost me, I could execute. The formula didn't require me to love it. It only required me to follow it.
The same was true in college. Show up, study, get the grade. Grade leads to job. Job leads to more of the same. There was a winning formula everywhere I looked, and once I learned it, I could execute it and win. It was hard work — but it wasn't complicated. There wasn't much thinking involved, not much creativity. That's probably where the formula eventually lost me. But for a decade, it worked exactly as advertised, and the board proved it, every day, in a number I could see from my desk.
The crux comes when the cubicle turns into an art studio and playroom.
The Equation I Keep Trying to Write
Formulas work. That's the nature of a formula — plug in the right variables, get the promised result. So when I left that cubicle for motherhood, and later for an art business with no board, no boss, and no call sheet, the formula-seeking part of my mind didn't switch off. It just began writing equations on its own — in my head, my planner, journals, notes apps on my phone, over and over, everywhere, trying to come up with the perfect equations to optimize my life.
The equation I am trying to write at this very moment is my mornings — work out for 20 minutes every day, write for an hour, and paint for an hour before everyone wakes up. Is that doable? Or should I write for two hours one day and paint for two hours the next, and alternate? Should I work out for 20 minutes each day, or 40 minutes every other day? On and on it goes. And I know that the formula will constantly change, because my life revolves around four other people. I have to fit myself into their schedules, into our life as a family. The formula includes other variables that change constantly.
The formula doesn't stop with just the mornings. It is all day long — if I work out this many days a week, plus run this many miles, I'll finally be toned. If I cut the sugar and refined carbs, I'll be healthier. If I get the girls outside three times a week, one library trip, one art project, they'll be calmer, happier, more agreeable. If I wear the kids out with enough activities, I'll earn myself time to work later. If I clean every other day and do laundry every day —
On and on. And when it gets to be too much, when time runs out, and I have to decide what actually matters most, there's another formula waiting underneath that one — a formula for choosing between formulas. It's endless. The board doesn't live on a wall in a sales pit anymore; it is inside my head, and I am the one setting the goals. I am the one moving the marker, or letting it sit still.
I don't hate the formula-seeking instinct, exactly. Structure is comforting, and some of these formulas really do work for me — grounding movement in the morning, a few hours of writing or painting before the house wakes up. These aren't chores. They're some of my favorite parts of the day.
But the board only has two modes: success or failure. That's my real problem with it — not what it does, but what it can't do.
The Board That Can't Tell the Difference
Yesterday was a good day. All three kids rocked their swimming lessons and patiently waited for their turns. My dad and aunt even came down to watch, and the three of us had a nice visit. After lessons, lunch with Lola (Grandma), then a playdate with friends, then dinner at Papa's. And before any of it started, I'd already written three hundred words. If I still had that sales board, I would have moved my marker all the way to the end.
Then there are the other days. The ones where I'm too tired to get up and write or paint, where I can barely scrape together a meal for the kids because I don't have it in me to cook or face the dishes after, where the laundry piles up and all I want is to curl up and disappear into Netflix. On those days, the marker wouldn't move at all.
On good days, I move the marker in my head with pride. On bad days — I suppose the word bad should be taken into consideration; empty days maybe — my frustration mounts, because that board doesn't take into consideration that my tank is empty. You can't be full all the time. When you give everything you have, there will be days you run the tank dry — that's just the nature of giving your all. The empty days aren't empty because I failed. They're proof I spent everything I had on the days before. And on those days, what I need isn't more effort. It's a chance to replenish. The board doesn't take into account what it took to get where you are. It's just a static board sitting there, taunting you on the empty days and cheering for you on the good ones.
A friend of mine feels this all too viscerally when she is filling out forms at the doctor's office. Her son was born with a genetic disorder that prevents him from walking. She told me that she hates going in for his general checkups — not because they're at the doctor's office constantly, though they are, but because of the questionnaire. Every visit, it asks the same list: is he talking, is he pulling himself up, is he walking. That last one stayed on the form for years, and every time, from age one to five, she had to write no. The form never asked why. It just wanted the outcome.
What the Board Won't Let Me Do
If you haven't gathered by now, I need to ditch the board. It isn't doing me any favors. Or is it? The board is creating anxiety; is that such a bad thing?
I was talking to a family member the other day about anxiety — it runs rampant in our family. I told them that once you get it under control, if you can find a way to manage it without it running your life, anxiety really does serve a purpose. It is a signal. My anxiety tells me to get up and work out, to work on my art, to eat better, to get my kids outside. When I am not taking the action that keeps my family and me healthy, anxiety comes knocking, and she tells me to get it together. I need her. However, I don't need her as a sales board. Life is too obscure for that. I suppose the best word for what we should be aiming for, with the risk of using buzzwords, is intention. Moving through your day with intention gives me the flexibility the board never could.
The Pixar movie Inside Out 2 comes to mind when I think about anxiety — the character couldn't be more accurate, especially as she shows up in a teenager's mind. But like the movie makes clear, anxiety needs her friends. For a mother, that friend is rest — a sabbath day. Nightly sleep should be automatic, although for many of us it is not; after a hard day's work, we sleep. Sabbath rest is different — it feels optional, but it shouldn't be. It shouldn't have to be earned. It should be baked into the week the same way laundry is baked into the week — not optional, not something you negotiate for, just a fixture of being alive. A source of replenishing, yes, but also a day to recognize that this isn't a race. This is life. We have places to be, things to do — but there are also birds to notice, fresh air to breathe, a stream to put your feet in, and plenty of Netflix to watch. You don't have to earn any of it. Just bake it in. You need the anxiety to keep going. You need the sabbath to fill back up.
There Was Never a Judge
I recently came across this divorce lawyer on my social media. A lot of my favorite hosts were interviewing him — he had some insight about kids that was a bit jarring when I first heard him say it. He said he thinks it's sad when people say their greatest achievement is their kids. It felt condescending in his tone, but the words are what stayed with me - kids and an achievement. Then I sat with it and realized I don't disagree with him, though maybe not in the way he was saying it. My kids aren't my life's work — not because achievement is beneath them, but because there was never anything to achieve in the first place. They're human beings coming into their own. My job is to care for them, expose them to the world, and get out of the way while they pave their own path. Their thriving isn't proof I did it right. They aren't my life's work. They are part of my life.
Rest is the same shape of truth. It isn't proof I worked hard enough to deserve it. It isn't a receipt I have to produce at the end of the week. And the strange, quiet exhaustion I feel — the one that shows up mid-laundry-fold as all eyes on me — is the sound of a formula still running long after the board came down, still grading a performance no one is watching anymore.
There was never a boss. Never a marker. Never a board. Just a habit of grading myself after the fact, the same way we call something a life's work only once it's finished — as if the value has to be assigned later, proven in hindsight, instead of being true the whole time we were living it.
No formula is going to make my life work — and if there were, how incredibly boring. Life is not meant to be solved with fixed answers. What I can do is figure out what works today - what fills me up, what my intentions are moving forward, what my values are, what my north star is. There are infinite ways to get where I'm going. I tell my partner that all the time — we always arrive at the same destination, but we'll get there in completely different ways.
I still catch myself reaching for the formula. Even just the other day while writing this piece, I sat down to write out exactly how I'd handle my food intake, workouts, and work once I got home from vacation. In the middle of it, I stopped myself — no formula's going to hold for me right now. Maybe I need to ground down on a few things that keep me whole. But mostly, I just need to wake up each morning and keep moving.
I don't think I'll ever fully turn off the part of me that's always looking for the solution, and maybe I don't need to. A little bit of laissez-faire, a little bit of structure — both, by design.
Maybe the actual work isn't finding a better formula for motherhood, for art, or for rest. Maybe it's refusing to wait until the end to decide if any of it mattered. There was never a judge. There's nothing to prove. There never was.
If this resonated…
I wrote a journal for exactly this — the tension between knowing you need to rest and not knowing how to let yourself. Returning to Stillness was made for the days the board doesn't understand. It's not about earning a break. It's about remembering rest was never something you had to earn in the first place.