Love it enough to find your 25th hour

Since I was a child, I have felt that I have a special relationship with words. Many times the words are like dancing little people, churning in my head, urging me to write them out. In the old days, submission was an overly sacred and solemn thing. Countless times, I stood by the green mailbox with the submission letter, and hesitated to send it. I was afraid of sinking into the sea, and I was even more afraid of receiving a rejection letter. Slowly, little by little, I got taller than the green mailbox, but little by little my courage was gone.

Later, I went to the United States to study and work, and in the dark of the audit season, I still insisted on writing a little text every day. In a boring meeting in English, I wrote in my notebook with Chinese: "This past year should be a good day and a good scene." Even if there are a thousand kinds of customs, it is even more with whom. "The dream of words has gradually drifted away for me after all.

Later, I returned to China to develop, and the intensity of my work increased. With two more children, sometimes I want to write something, and then I have to start a head, and I have to accompany my child to do homework and read bedtime stories to my child. When I came back, the work email came again, and the conference call started again... The pain of working mothers is the same, time is never enough, time never belongs to themselves.

I have found that we are far more tolerant of our children than we are of our parents; we also give more to our children than to our parents. I remember last year I took a vacation to accompany my dad to Israel, and I met an elderly couple on the way. The trip was paid for by their son, but they preferred his son to be with them because they wanted time together. The disappointed expression on the faces of the old couple I still remember.

So, I wrote a "Take My Parents on a Trip" in one fell swoop, and my text was selected by a public account. So I wrote a lot of articles, and I actually accumulated more than 100,000 words before and after - about the workplace, about parenting thinking, about marriage, and about women's self-growth.

Today's working women often struggle with the contradictions of the workplace and family, and under several identities, there is a self that has nowhere to rest. The workplace will not be more tender because you are a woman, nor will you be a little more sympathetic because you are a mother. If women are still in high positions, the most asked question is "how to balance career and life".

For example, when I resolutely decided to leave foreign banks and invest in Internet finance, after many friends learned about it, the first question was: "What about your husband?" "Who's going to take care of the children?"

I did an interesting experiment. I asked my husband to tell his friends that he was about to leave the current foreign company to join a well-known Internet company, and the friends asked him what position he was going to take, what specifically he was going to do, and whether there was room for development in the work. No one would ask him, "What about your wife?" "Who's going to take care of your child?"

In fact, this also represents the problem faced by many professional women, in the eyes of the world, married working women, first of all, mothers, followed by wives, work just to not leave society.

When a working woman in addition to work, but also to open the interest of the "slash life" mode, constantly writing, publishing articles, publishing novels, every friend is asking me: "Where does time come from?" ”

In the company, I am afraid that the boss will ask where you have time to write novels, because I am afraid that the boss will think that I have not done enough work; in school, I am afraid that the child's teacher will ask, where do you have time to write articles, because I am afraid that the teacher will think that I have not "accompanied" me to check my homework; I am more afraid of my parents asking, because only my parents know, I will stay up late once I write articles, I am afraid that they are worried...

Yes, everyone has only 24 hours a day. Most of the 24 hours a woman in the workplace doesn't belong to her. Where did the 25th hour come from?

In fact, as long as you love, you will always find your own 25th hour. It's not a question of "where does time come from," but a question of "where has time gone?" Because a lot of time is inadvertently wasted by us, there is always a squeeze of time.

I would refuse to sleep in the dead of night and write masochistically. There is also the use of a lot of fragmented time on various domestic and international journeys. My 100,000+ article, "The Strange Status Quo of China's Motherhood", was coded on an international flight from Shanghai to Australia. During the Spring Festival, I took my family on a trip to Australia, and after more than ten hours of flight, everyone was sleeping or watching a movie, and I turned on a reading light overhead and wrote all the way.

Also, the door to the child's after-school tutoring class is also the best time to write. A recent 100,000+ article, "A 45-year-old woman's chicken feathers", was written at the door of her daughter's English tutoring class.

When other parents are brushing the circle of friends, I write articles on my mobile phone. Writing articles with a mobile phone is definitely not a pleasant thing, and a person who is willing to write a novel with a mobile phone is really because he likes it.

I'm a working woman, an Internet worker; I'm a mother— a mom of two children in school; I'm a wife, or the kind I often have to show affection to my husband.

But I'm more of myself, have fun dreams, and like code words.

Source: China Women's Daily