From Substack: You're allowed to rest.

I’ve always been bad at resting.

Like my dad, I prefer a vacation that involves lots of activities and sightseeing over parking myself in a beach chair all week. I can maybe do one or two beach days, for a couple hours at a time, before I get antsy.

As an adult, it isn’t that I never sit on the couch scrolling on my phone. It’s just what I do when I’ve been going, going, going and my brain burns itself out. I always think, “Isn’t there a way I can make this resting more productive?”

Growing up Catholic, I heard a lot about the Third Commandment: Keep the sabbath day holy. But I just assumed that meant I had to squeeze in a Mass on top of everything else I had to do on Sundays—mostly homework. Even once I was out of school, Sunday became my “reset day” before a busy week—the day for laundry and grocery shopping and cleaning. The way our modern industrial workplace is set up, there’s no way I could do these things during the week. Sundays became the day that I knew my social calendar was less likely to be filled, so I could finally clean the bathroom undisturbed.

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From Substack: My favorite "oldest daughter" characters in fiction.

The oldest daughter discourse. Dun dun duuuun.

As an oldest daughter myself, I have mixed feelings on the onslaught of “oldest daughter” memes, articles, and psychoanalysis that has pervaded the internet over the past few years. Do I relate to a lot of it? Absolutely. Do I relate to all of it? No.

I wonder if this deluge came about because all of us oldest daughters collectively snapped during the pandemic, when our “take care of everyone else and not yourself” tendencies got pushed to the limit and we could rant about it on TikTok. For me, I started exploring this topic when I was contemplating doing the absolute unthinkable for an oldest daughter: moving far away from my parents. It didn’t matter that my younger sister had moved far away from home at age 18; the voices in my head berated me for being so selfish and so irresponsible for “abandoning” my parents and my entire extended family to move to my husband’s hometown. (My parents were supportive, but I was wrestling with my own feelings about this change.)

Once I was exposed to oldest daughter content, I started paying closer attention to how they were portrayed in media. Today, I’m sharing some oldest daughter characters that I have found the most compelling. Disclaimer: This is not a list of the best oldest daughter characters in fiction, just the ones that have meant the most to me personally. Sorry Meg March stans, we’re Team Beth in this house.

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From Substack: Saying "thank you" doesn't help the patriarchy.

According to my meager Substack data, y’all seem to like my hot take posts, so here’s another one.

As a newlywed and a Catholic feminist, I’ve been consuming quite a bit of content over the past few years about the mental load and splitting domestic chores fairly—not only to set the foundation for the rest of my marriage, but also to release the pressure I feel to live up to the I Don’t Know How She Does It ideal of modern womanhood. However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among content creators who post about these topics, and we need to call it out—because it’s not actually helping.

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