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 that is my world. I feel as though I have climbed to the top of a mountain of skulls and bones. The road has left me weary, as if I have been marathoning through dense, humid air. I look behind me, and it seems like the path is littered with broken dreams and brittle relationships. I am unable to get away from criticism and allegations and bullying. Am I the only one to see this? When I look back on the world, it appears to be a battlefield. What do others see?

As I lay in my bed, trying to make peace with the confusion of how I could be so right and yet so wrong, the answer dawned upon me. The traits that people demand of me, as a cardiologist - assertiveness, leadership, confidence, logic - are fundamentally masculine. But the traits that are expected of me, as a woman, by those same people - warmth, patience, nurturing, compassion - are fundamentally female. It is so difficult to perfectly exhibit either trait - but to then strive to be perfectly masculine and perfectly feminine at the same time, that is probably impossible. And so, as a woman in the workplace, I am always failing. Unable to walk the tightrope, I err to one side or the other. But invariably, I am always failing - failing at something, failing someone. 

This is the problem.

Should I have pursued my ambitions. Should I have done what women of old have done. Focus on myself, and my beauty and my utility to men. Would it have been easier to stay within the confines of my 'place'. 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 depend wholly on the industriousness of the man I select (or who selects me) and to sink or swim by another's merits. That too would not have been a suitable outcome.

What is the answer to this equation. That would be the solution to the 'work-life' problem.