To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

I’ve been considering putting an out-of-office reply on my personal email. By “personal” I really mean the email address not given to me by my currently employer, because the inbound messages are 99% “hi, please do a thing” and 1% “hey how’s life” from friends and family.

I feel weird about this, despite having seen versions of this move out in the wild protecting the inboxes of people (women! all of them are women!) I respect.

I feel weird about this because I am not sure I quite “deserve” to ask people to understand that I’m going to take a minute (weeks, really, and probably months) to get to their messages and I’m probably not going to be able to speak at your thing because I have a more-than-full-time job with a compliance department that does not mess around and sometimes on weekends I just want to go to a yoga class or play videogames.

I feel weird about this because I always, always feel guilty about reclaiming my time. I want to be the kind of person who can do it all; I am in fact the kind of person who is six months behind on her expenses* so she can be on top of managing the various Secret Projects for which she is responsible at work.