Staring at cheese and crying
Finding calm under capitalism #1
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
How are you doing it? Surviving, I mean. How are you coping with the constant demands on your time and energy and attention? How are you managing the overwhelm?
When I wrote last week’s post I was nervous about the reception. I wasn’t sure if people would be on board with the idea of tradwifing as anti-capitalist. Instead I was flooded with people telling me they could relate. What’s more, they actually agreed. The tradwife as we know her on social media may have originated in the American political right, but actually when you drill down into it, there’s a lot of overlap with more left-wing ideas. What tradwifery is, more than anything, is libertarian. Just as homeschooling and anti-vaxxer sentiment exists at both ends of the political spectrum, so too could the tradwife.
I’d probably describe myself as lowkey hippy. I used washable nappies with my second child. I attended a hypnobirthing course. I’ve marched with Extinction Rebellion. But I’m not at the extremes of crunchy living. For one thing, I am a very big fan of modern medicine. For another, I simply do not own enough pairs of harem pants.
Anyway, as we established last week, I don’t actually want to be a housewife. But I do want to feel calmer. And I know you do too. For those of us who aren’t trad enough to commit to a life of pie-baking, but also aren’t rad enough to go completely off-grid, what do we do?
“The centre ground here is just… everyone dies of burnout?” wrote one friend.
I mean, maybe?
As someone else commented, overwhelm is a peculiarly isolating experience. When you’re in it, it feels like you are the only person experiencing it. This is partly because of the nature of it. When your brain feels frazzled, when it feels that at any minute the plates you’re spinning are going to come clattering down, it’s hard to see beyond that. One of the reasons I insist on a weekly meal plan for my kids is because, sometimes, at the end of the day, just looking in the fridge is too much for me. I can see food items, but figuring out what to do with them feels utterly beyond me. If your overwhelm level has hit *staring at cheese and crying* it’s safe to say your theory of mind is on a back burner.
But it’s also because we don’t really talk about it. Or, we do, but in quite broad terms and often flippantly. And so I want to hear from you. I would like to know what overwhelm feels like for you, what kinds of things set it off, and exacerbate it, and what, if anything, you do to manage it. But, because I truly loathe the idea of this becoming one of those tiresome articles about “6 simple things you can do to live better today,” I also want to know what you do to not manage it. What bad habits do you know make it worse, but that you struggle to break? What balls are you refusing to drop? What systemic problems make it impossible for you to see your way out of it? As always, I want to know what overwhelm means to us and how culture shapes our relationship with it.
A quick note before I hit you with the questions: I am deliberately not using the phrase “burnout” because I want to talk about what we do when we feel overwhelmed, when we feel exhausted, when we don’t feel we can meet the demands life is throwing at us, but we have to try to find a way through. So many accounts of burnout seem to involve people not being able to get out of bed for three days, or three weeks, or a year, and it is absolutely shocking to me that this has become such a familiar image, such a frequently-told story. Not because I think those people are being self-indulgent, or misrepresenting their exhaustion, or that wasn’t absolutely the only thing they could do to survive in that moment. But because it is not okay for us to be at the point of collapse before we do anything about it.
We need an alternative model for how we talk about and deal with overwhelm. Largely so we don’t get to that point. But also because not all of us can go back to bed. Even when we’re not talking in such drastic terms, I myself am frequently aware that a lot of what I do to look after myself is only possible because I work freelance. This is why I hate so much of what I read on this subject. It imagines that there are universal checks and balances that all of us can apply to our lives and that just isn’t true. It also feels fundamentally incurious to me. There are so many unique challenges and personal circumstances at play here. Let’s talk about them!
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My plan is to run these conversations throughout the year, showcasing a variety of experiences and insights. I want to find out how overwhelm shows up in people’s lives and how different that can look and feel. And I also want to know what works and doesn’t for different people because I just think it’s so individual (for example, I have tried and tried to get into meditation but it just won’t take) but equally, it’s often through these personal stories that we discover things we hadn’t thought to try. So while this is not intended primarily as self-help, my hope is that it might nevertheless prove helpful. I’m going to put them behind the paywall because this is pretty personal stuff, but I will also provide an overview for my freebie babes and whichever overwhelm-curious Substackers the algorithm sends my way.
If you would like to have a conversation with me about overwhelm, and be featured in Really Good Tomatoes (anonymously, if you like, but it will be paywalled so if you do decide to use your name, it will be among friends!) then drop me a line! Reply to this email, get in touch directly at frankicookney@gmail.com or send me a message via Substack.
What does overwhelm feel like for you?
When did you last feel overwhelmed?
What kinds of situations or events will trigger that feeling, for you?
What are the main obstacles, in your experience, to managing overwhelm?
Day to day, are there any things you do to mitigate overwhelm?
Day to day, are there any things you do that you know or suspect are actually making it worse?
At a broader lifestyle or cultural level, what helps (or you think would help) you feel less overwhelmed?
At a broader lifestyle or cultural level, what do you think makes it harder for you, personally?
Is there anything you feel you’ve sacrificed in order to avoid or mitigate overwhelm?
Is there anything you think you’ve gained, either through your quotidian habits, or the broader lifestyle shifts you’ve made to manage overwhelm (other than, obviously, less overwhelm)?
What’s the shittest advice you’ve ever read or received about managing overwhelm?
What’s something you’ve read or heard about that you think would help but that you’re yet to implement in your life?
Do you have any reading/watching/listening recommendations?
NEXT WEEK!
I answer my own questions and tell you everything I know about managing (and not managing) overwhelm. It involves cheese.
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I’m now ONLY on Substack.
When I wrote my piece about breaking up with my phone a few weeks ago, I was still half-heartedly trying to make Bluesky happen. But I logged on there this morning and just had the most profound “What am I doing here?” moment. I deleted it there and then! Substack is now the only place on the internet people can interact with me. Is this going to be good or bad for my career? LET’S FIND OUT!
Speaking of my career, I did a week-long comedy course back in February, loved it, and tonight is my VERY FIRST open mic gig. So, yeah, I’m a comedian now?
I’ve actually been dying to talk about this but there isn’t all that much to say yet. I am obviously not yet a comedian in any professional sense (ie I’m not getting paid) and becoming one is likely to be a long old road, filled, in my case, with childcare-shaped obstacles. But this experience really unlocked something in me and I want to see what I can do with it, even if it’s just better, funnier writing. Anyway, here I am doing my thing on stage at the graduation showcase. I appreciate you can’t tell from the pic but people were definitely laughing. I promise.
I’m totally stealing this idea from
’s essay, Everyone’s lonely but no one can hang out. She and her husband decided to try to combat the twin demons of loneliness and parenting logistics by making Saturday night dinner party night. Every weekend they’re in town, they invite people over and make them dinner. That’s it. It’s deceptively simple but they said it has really helped them a) see more of their friends and b) not feel so boxed in by the nuclear family.One question though… what if people cancel on you?
I came to this Esther Perel Instagram reel in a roundabout way, via a few different articles, but when I got there… oof! Quite the juxtaposition with the optimism of the above piece.
I said in my newsletter a few weeks ago that I thought friendship was going to be a major theme in 2025 discourse and this really nails it in a “Oh wow I thought it was just me but it turns out it absolutely everyone feels this way?!” kind of way. Will definitely be returning to this subject.
