What Tex is teaching me about my own needs

I got a puppy two weeks ago.

His name is Tex. He's eight weeks old, nips at everything that moves (toes and shoes especially), and his idea of a nap doesn't match anyone else's idea of a working day. He replaced a family dog we'd had for seventeen years - one who knew the pattern of the house so well that her presence had become invisible to me. I didn't realise how much I'd been operating around her until she was gone, and I had to build a new pattern around something that doesn't yet know what the word means.

The first week was the hardest. I felt stretched in a way I hadn't anticipated. Work didn't stop. The house didn't stop. The client deliverables didn't stop. And now there was a small living thing in the middle of all of it whose needs were immediate, loud, and non-negotiable.

This week, I've started to see it differently. Not because he's easier - he isn't really. But because I've started to see what he's actually here to teach me.

I've never really learnt to switch off.

There are all these things I want to do. Walk more. Work out more. Read books that aren't about business. See friends. Be in the garden without my phone. I already do some of it, but only if there's any time left, only when everything else has been handled, only when I've earned it. My own needs sit at the back of the queue, and I'm the one who put them there.

It's not because anyone else is asking me to. My husband isn't asking me to. My son isn't asking me to. My clients aren't asking me to. The house isn't asking me to.

I'm asking me to.

There's a part of me that needs to make sure everyone is okay. That needs to control the state of the house, the wellbeing of the people in my life. That feels personally responsible for whether things run smoothly. And when that part is in charge, my own needs become the thing that gives way - because they're the only thing I have full permission to overrule.

I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of women operate this way. I think we were conditioned to.

It goes something like this. Be helpful. Be considerate. Notice what others need before they have to ask. Don't be difficult. Don't be demanding. Don't take up too much space. Don't make a fuss. The reward for doing all of this well is being seen as good - and the punishment for not doing it is being seen as selfish, or cold, or too much.

You absorb that early. You absorb it from the women who raised you, who absorbed it from the women who raised them. You absorb it from teachers, from films, from the comments adults make about girls who behave well versus girls who don't. By the time you're an adult, it's not external anymore. It's the voice in your own head. The one that says I'll go for a walk after I've finished this. I'll book the appointment when there's a less full week. I'll see my friend when work is less full-on.

The walk never quite happens. The appointment gets moved. The friend gets a text instead.

And underneath all of it is an unexamined assumption: my needs are negotiable, everyone else's are not.

Tex doesn't let me operate like that. He can't. He's eight weeks old. His needs aren't negotiable - if he needs to go out, he needs to go out, and there isn't a version of this where I push it to later. So I'm being forced, several times a day, to stop what I'm doing and attend to a need that isn't mine but also isn't optional.

And what I've noticed is this. When I take him out, I move. When I move, I think differently. When I think differently, I come back to my work with more clarity than I left it. The thing I'd been pushing through to finish gets finished in half the time, because I'm not running on the fumes of a brain that hasn't had a break since 7am.

Maybe he's not slowing me down. He's showing me how badly I needed to be slowed down.

The guilt is still there, of course. The conditioning doesn't dissolve because you've named it. I still feel a small tug when I close the laptop in the afternoon to play with him. A part of me still thinks I should be at the desk. A part of me still feels like I'm getting away with something.

But the guilt is the symptom, not the truth. The truth is that I've been running myself into the ground in service of an idea of what a good woman, a good business owner, a good mother, a good wife looks like - and that idea was never mine to begin with. It was handed to me. And I've been holding onto it like it was a personal value rather than an inherited script.

I'm starting to rewrite that script.

Not all at once, and not without pushback. But in small, daily acts. The walk. The workout. The closed laptop. Saying ‘no’.

Tex isn't a replacement for the dog we lost. He's something else entirely. He's the small, insistent, slightly chaotic teacher who arrived at exactly the moment I needed someone to remind me that my needs are not the negotiable ones.

They never were.

I just believed they were for a very long time.

Kaz x

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