On Executive (Over)Functioning, Intimacy, Sex, & What Modern Life Asks Women To Override.

Brené Brown is known for saying, among many other things, "We are emotional beings who occasionally think, not thinking beings who occasionally feel."

I agree with her, but with an asterisk.

If being emotionally led is our natural state, then women, particularly mothers, have become remarkably skilled at overriding it. We've hacked our own operating systems. We've installed a bootleg version that allows us to survive modern life.

Most days, we don't have the luxury of being emotional beings. We have to be cognitive ones.

We're CEOs, project managers, executive assistants, Uber drivers, short-order cooks, triage nurses, homework helpers, logistics coordinators, and technical support, all before 9:00 a.m. Every one of those roles depends on executive functioning. We are constantly planning, prioritizing, switching tasks, solving problems, anticipating needs, and carrying the mental load of everyone around us.

These roles don't require emotional presence. In fact, they don't allow for it. The structures of modern life leave little room for our natural architecture to flourish.

Lately, I've been thinking about the two places where I consistently find my way back to my emotional self.

Writing and sex. It's a little meta, since I write about sex.

Most of my day is spent in my head. As a wife, mother, CEO, and snack-maker-extraordinaire, I live in my prefrontal cortex: planning, triaging, multitasking, pivoting, and planning again. My brain has become exceptionally good at executive functioning because modern life demands it. Don't worry, there are apologies thrown in for good measure because, as skilled as I am at all of these tasks, something inevitably goes wrong. Dinner, usually.

But then I sit down to write.

The first few minutes are cognitive. I'm searching for the right phrase or sentence. I debate whether a comma works better than a semicolon when I really just want to use an em dash but worry people will assume I've used AI if I do. Then I notice I wrote "just" again. I say "just" too much.

And on it goes. Until the shift occurs.

Thoughts initiate the first few keystrokes, but then the emotions rush in. They flood my system and quietly take over my fingers. What began as an intentional, conscious exercise becomes something much less deliberate. The writing starts happening through me instead of because of me. (Until I edit, that is.)

Within writing, I'm able to access a part of myself that's otherwise difficult to reach. But it's a specific type of writing. It's writing for others. It's definitely not journaling.

Most clinicians tout the benefits of journaling. I'm not against it. But I've never been able to access that same depth of emotion through journaling. I've tried, and every attempt makes me feel like a fraud.

"Today was a good day." "Today was a hard day." "Today will be a good day."

If I left journals behind when I died, no one would discover them and think, What an extraordinary emotional life she led. They'd probably conclude I never progressed beyond the third grade. They'd read about workouts or one of my children's soccer games, but they'd find very little emotional source code, and certainly no depth of insight or introspection.

But when I sit down to write about relationships, sex, intimacy, motherhood, desire, or love, something new emerges. My stories become not about me, but about the art.

I'm no longer trying to document my day or force a self-awareness exercise. I'm trying to uncover something true enough that another woman might recognize herself inside it.

Rick Rubin writes about becoming a vessel for creativity. That's what it feels like.

My stories aren't performative or confessional. They don't even feel like they're about me, even though they're deeply personal. They're often silly; about a guy who called me "broken" because I was on my period; or discovering the difference between a circumcised and uncircumcised penis while giving my first blowjob. They're about marriage, children, desire, communication, embarrassment, pleasure, and all the messy realities that make up a life.

But in the writing of them, they stop belonging exclusively to me.

It's like painting a self-portrait (something I know nothing about, so I'm making some creative assumptions here). The canvas is undeniably personal, but once the paint dries, it becomes something separate from the artist. Other people are free to stand in front of it and see pieces of themselves.

That's the difference between journaling and writing, at least for me. Journaling asks me to look inward, at myself, for myself. Writing about sex and relationships asks me to look outward, toward someone else. Journaling is about understanding myself. My writing is about understanding something true enough that another woman or couple might feel understood.

When I'm writing for someone else, I stop performing self-awareness and start becoming a vessel.

The more I've thought about this, the more I've realized intimacy works the same way. Sex often begins in the head.

"Do I like him?" "Does he like me?" "What should I wear?" "What should I do with my body?" "What if I look awkward?" "What if I'm not good enough?"

For many women, sex begins as an exercise in executive functioning. Add trauma, shame, abuse, religion, unrealistic expectations, and decades of cultural messaging, and what was once natural becomes anything but. Our code gets corrupted. Error messages appear one after another.

But something can shift when we find ourselves in a safe relationship with someone we trust. Responsive desire can emerge. The first touches give way to something entirely different. The planning softens and the performing fades. Our project manager logs off for the day.

Just as the first keystrokes eventually give way to effortless writing, the first moments of intimacy can give way to something deeper. We stop managing the experience and begin living it. We return to our bodies and our emotions. We return, if only briefly, to our factory settings.

If Dr. Brown is right—and I think she mostly is—perhaps our work isn't to become more emotional. (Oh no, there's that em dash!) Perhaps it's to create more opportunities to remember that we've always been emotional underneath the layers of planning, organizing, caregiving, surviving, and overfunctioning.

Modern life may ask us to function like machines. It rewards efficiency and optimization. It praises productivity and executive functioning. (I say, as someone who once helped develop executive functioning curricula for children.)

Operating within the constraints of modern life is necessary. Executive functioning skills allow us to raise children, update workflows and swimlanes, pay mortgages, and keep the trains running on time. But they don't comprise a complete human being.

We also need places where we don't have to manage everything. Places where we can stop optimizing and stop performing competence. Writing has become one of those places for me. Intimacy is another.

Intimacy matters not because sex is another thing to accomplish or another relationship task to optimize, but because it is one of the few places left in modern life where we can stop managing everything.

For a few moments, the trains can run on their own, and we can simply be. For a few moments, we get to return to our factory settings. We return to our most primal operating system, requiring no updates, no 2:00 a.m. restarts, no multifactor authentication, no facial recognition, and no charging.