Your Weird Little Coping Mechanism Is Fine

There was a post I made last week. Or maybe a month ago. I genuinely don’t know. Dates are numbers and numbers are math and I learned a long time ago that if I don’t pay someone to do my math for me, I will eventually end up in prison over a tax oversight involving a Staples receipt and a half-eaten protein bar.

So really, this is why I need to keep making money and you probably need sunglasses. Perfect - two birds with one stone here!

Anyways not the point.

I posted a video talking about which pairs of sunglasses work best for different face shapes. Very professional. Very fashion founder. Very “trust me, I know bone structure.”

Except I was holding a martini.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

Now before you get excited, it wasn’t even a particularly cool martini. It wasn’t some glamorous Slim Aarons moment. I was sitting in my office looking like a woman who had simply had enough of email for one day.

The response to that video was honestly astonishing. Not about the sunglasses. Nobody cared about the sunglass shape for their face.

What people cared about was the martini.

The amount of messages I got from women confessing their own secret little vices absolutely sent me into orbit. Women admitting they hide gummy edibles in old vitamin containers. Women secretly smoking cigarettes in the car before school pickup. Women stopping for McDonald’s on the way home from work and throwing the garbage out at a gas station so their husbands don’t see it.

One woman told me she sits in the grocery store parking lot alone eating fries in silence before she goes home to her family.

Frankly? Respect.

And it got me thinking: what the hell have we done to ourselves?

There was once a time where a three-martini lunch was practically considered a professional skill. Entire generations were absolutely shellacked by noon. Corporate America was basically held together by cigarettes and unresolved trauma.

Now listen, I’m not suggesting we return to that era.

Nobody needs to be driving their child to soccer practice absolutely torqued on gin and vermouth. “Jim martini lunch with the gals” should never end with operating a Honda Odyssey.

We’ve evolved. That part is good.

But have we swung so far in the other direction that everyone is quietly hiding every imperfect coping mechanism like it’s a criminal offense?

Because life is hard.

Like… offensively hard.

Adulting, as it turns out, is significantly worse than advertised. Why were we in such a rush as teenagers to cosplay adulthood? Paying bills? Scheduling dentist appointments? Keeping spinach alive in the fridge for more than 36 hours? Is this is what we were excited about when we were dreaming of playing house with Dylan from calculus.

There are beautiful parts, of course. There really are. Ice cream before dinner because we can should be celebrated. We’ve made it!

But there are also weeks where you’ve messed something up at work, forgotten a school form, snapped at your kids, ignored a text for six days because you mentally couldn’t handle one more conversation, and realized at 11:40 PM that you were supposed to defrost chicken. Again.

And I just think maybe we need to cut each other a little bit of slack.

Eat the edible. Smoke the joint. Have the fries. Drink the Aperol spritz at noon on a patio while wearing white linen pants and emotionally recovering from your inbox.

I am not condoning any of this. I am also not not condoning it.

I’m simply saying maybe we stop acting like everyone else is holding it together perfectly while we alone are one missed orthodontist payment away from complete psychological collapse.

And women especially are carrying enough already without adding performative perfection to the pile.

As a reminder - European women are outside somewhere right now smoking cigarettes, eating pasta, baking in the sun, and laughing loudly with zero shame while we’re over here hiding McDonald’s wrappers like federal evidence.

Honestly? They may be onto something.

So this is my official stance:

Be cool about your friends’ weird little coping mechanisms.

Mind your business.

Love people anyway.

And maybe stop pretending we’re all thriving every second of every day.

Now get out there and be the thing that makes the devil nervous this morning.

Thanks for being here,

Nat xx

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.