Wunmi Adelusi: How Much Balance Is Really Possible for Women Pursuing Their Careers?

How do you balance it?

That is one of the first questions women ask when they meet another woman who seems to have it all: the career, the family, the side projects, the composure. I understand the question. I’ve asked it myself. But the longer I live, the more convinced I am that we are asking for something that does not exist.

When we ask for balance, we are really asking for the two sides of the scale to weigh the same, all the time. Equal weight to work and home. Equal weight to ambition and rest. Equal weight to the people who need the self and us we are trying not to lose. A scale, perfectly level, held steady every single day.

But nothing honest works that way.

Consider this: every major system of thought humanity has ever built carries a trade-off; a cost baked into its benefit. Prioritise individual freedom, and you risk the collective; protect the collective, and you constrain the individual. There has never been a framework, political or economic or moral, that delivered every good thing at once with no side effect. That is why no government pleases all its people, and why even the most admired ideas have always had their critics. If perfect balance cannot be engineered into our grandest theories, why do we expect to achieve it in a single human life, lived in real time, with finite hours?

Balance, I’ve come to believe, is a myth. Not a lie exactly, but a mirage. You cannot give one hundred per cent to everything simultaneously. Something always gives. The only real question is whether you are choosing what gives, or letting it be chosen for you.

So I’ve stopped chasing balance. I’ve started practising seasons.

In every season of life, the demands are weighted differently. There are seasons when work must take more. Seasons when family must. Seasons of building, and seasons of recovering. The wisdom is not in holding all things equal; it is in reading accurately which season you are in, and letting your energy follow it without guilt.

Within each season, there is a second discipline, one borrowed from an analogy many will know: learning to tell your glass balls from your rubber ones. Some of the things we juggle are rubber. If you drop them, they bounce. The deadline that can shift. The event you can miss. The email that can wait till Monday. They feel urgent, but they recover.

Others are glass. Drop them, and they crack, sometimes beyond repair. Your health. A child’s childhood. A marriage. Your integrity. Certain relationships and certain moments that do not come round again. The tragedy is how often we exhaust ourselves protecting the rubber balls, answering every message, meeting every expectation, saying yes to everything, while a glass ball slips from the other hand.

Knowing the difference is the real skill. Not balance. Triage. So when someone asks me how I balance it all, my honest answer is: I don’t. Nobody does. What I try to do instead is stay awake to my season, and clear-eyed about which balls in my hands are glass.

Some days I get it right. Some days a glass ball wobbles and I catch it just in time. Some days I let a rubber one fall on purpose, and feel the strange relief of choosing. That, I think, is the most any of us can do. Not a perfectly level scale, but a steady pair of hands, and the wisdom to know what must never be allowed to break.

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