A while back, I was working with my neighbors who were helping me load and move hay from my sister’s farm to mine. They are a couple who farm mostly forage, including hay.

They were both picking up 70-pound bales and loading them onto the end of the trailer. I was then stacking them in a criss-cross pattern to keep them stable when the trailer was moving. About half way through this hoisting gruntfest, somebody’s watch started beeping. “Oh”, said Emily.

“What was that?”, her husband asked.

“My Fitbit just said that I’ve done my 10,000 steps today.” It was 9 a.m. “No more exercise needed, I suppose”, she said as she continued to pick up bale after bale. This was the second 300-bale trailer she had hauled out to a farm that morning. Needless to say, she is in great physical shape.

At a size 18, Emily doesn’t feel that she is in the type of shape that she should be, hence the reason why she was wearing a Fitbit. It’s instilled in us as women that we need to be quite thin to be healthy. Yet, you can’t be a size two and move hundreds of bales of hay in a day. It requires muscles in order to farm and lots of them. So, there’s this paradox, where women cannot meet these opposing ideals and still be able to do our jobs. We are all striving constantly to achieve that which is not possible and we are made to feel badly about not doing so.

The constant feed of ideal beauty splattered across our airwaves, our print media, even our medical information, has instilled an inferiority in us as women. We never feel that we are entirely adequate even when we are quite successful.

There is a tyranny of assumptions about a woman’s competence. Her abilities should match the size of her figure in our culture. An overweight woman isn’t acceptable in a position of power. I know this to be true because I have encountered cultures where this prejudice doesn’t apply. Women are treated differently there and, often, weight and age give them greater gravitas. They are considered more competent, not less.

In my own experience, people have assumed things about me just from my physical size that were patently untrue, mostly because I’m not thin. An older, overweight woman could not possibly be technically astute and wouldn’t know or understand technology. Sometimes, it takes a great deal of convincing to get them to understand that I wrote the instructions they are quoting back to me. Yes, mansplaining is a serious problem in my life.

So, what is enough? Can we draw a line, saying that we are good where we are? Are we, as normal working women, constantly doomed to feel like we failing, trying to reach an ideal we cannot achieve? Can we stop the madness of always feeling bad about our bodies? Can we understand that we are more than merely competent? Can we be happy in our achievements?