This.

"You don't want your daughter to be like me." I said to my colleague one day. He peered over and replied "Not like you? You're a successful interventional cardiologist." I am indeed, but it has been difficult to exist in this vortex of a world. I feel as though I have climbed to the top of a mountain of skulls and bones. The road has left me weary. I have been running too long and I cannot breathe. 

When I look behind me, I see broken dreams and brittle relationships. Is that a mirage? I am unable to lose the criticism, insinuations and bullying. Does anybody see this? My world is a battlefield, and I am not sure if I want to be here. 

I lay in my bed, trying to find peace in the confusion of how I could be so right and yet also so wrong. In the workplace, I have to be assertive, confident, logical, and fundamentally masculine. In life, I must be warm, patient, nurturing and compassionate. 

It is hard enough to embody one side or the other - but to strive to be perfectly man and woman at the same time, is a feat that feels impossible. 

So, as a woman in the workforce, it seems that I am always failing. I cannot walk the tightrope - and I often sway too much to one side or the other. 

This is a problem.

Should I have pursued cardiology? Should I have been who women of old have been. Should I have lent my attentions to beauty and to my utility to men? Would life have been easier to stay within the confines of my 'place'. I know that that could never have been a palatable option. To abandon myself to the mercies of fallible men and to have no option of escape. To sink and to swim by another's merits.

I do not know the answer to this problem. Do you?