Double Dipping into the Curse
- Restoried Biblical Counseling
- May 6
- 6 min read
I woke up exhausted. And not the fun kind. Not the “we really committed to that dinner party” kind or the “I stayed up finishing a genuinely great book” kind. Just the kind where your body has apparently filed some paperwork overnight that you were not consulted on, and the paperwork says forty.
I stumbled to the bathroom, mascara halfway down my face, hair doing something I can only describe as architectural, and stared at my reflection for a long moment.
“That’s it,” I announced to my husband, who was getting ready for work and had not asked. “I am no longer double dipping into the curse.”
He turned around. “I’m sorry. What?”
“Your curse is the ground,” I said. “Toil. Sweat. Resistance. Mine is childbearing and pain and hormones and whatever fresh perimenopausal betrayal my body has decided to unveil this week. Brain fog. Heart palpitations. Fatigue. Night sweats. Random emotional collapse over a commercial about soup. I do not think it is unreasonable that if I am already dealing with all of that, I should perhaps be exempt from also answering emails and basically anything that remotely looks like effort.”
He just stared at me.
“See, the way I understand Genesis,” I continued, now fully committed to the argument, “is that I handle the Eve stuff, and you go handle the Adam stuff and work the soil.”
I was mostly kidding.
Mostly.
Because the older I get, the more I think women deserve at least a small commemorative parade for surviving the sheer endurance sport of inhabiting a female body.
First, puberty shows up uninvited and never fully leaves. Then comes decades of cramping, hormones, bleeding, migraines, bloating, emotional fluctuations, and trying to calculate whether you are crying because of genuine grief or because your progesterone has quietly collapsed in the background like a failing bridge.
Then pregnancy enters the chat.
Now I have to say that pregnancy is a truly remarkable miracle if by miracle we mean a nine-month physiological hostage situation. You are nauseated, exhausted, swollen, leaking, overheating, starving, emotional, unable to sleep, and somehow expected to glow through all of it like a whimsical woodland creature in a linen dress standing in a field of lavender.
Meanwhile, your organs are rearranging themselves.
Then comes childbirth, which people describe as beautiful.
And it is.
It is also the most physically extreme thing a human body can survive and then be expected to recover from while someone hands you a baby and a pamphlet about latching.
And after that comes postpartum recovery, nursing, sleep deprivation, hormone crashes, identity shifts, and the strange realization that your body no longer belongs entirely to you for a very long time.
Then just when you think perhaps you have crossed the finish line, perimenopause quietly appears in the distance holding a folding chair.
Nobody warns women properly about perimenopause. One day you are looking for your car keys and the next day you are standing in the pantry sweating aggressively while forgetting basic nouns and wondering whether you are dying or just low on estrogen.
Everything shifts. Skin, sleep, brain, patience—all of it quietly renegotiated without your input.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, modern culture taps you on the shoulder like an overly enthusiastic life coach who definitely sells something on the side and goes, “Okay but have you tried a morning routine? Cold plunges? Journaling? Juicing? Gratitude?”
Enter eye roll.
Because at some point, somewhere between nursing babies and Googling why my left eye is twitching for three weeks straight, I began to suspect that humanity may have misunderstood something fundamental about being embodied creatures.
The interesting thing about Genesis is that the curse is incredibly specific. The text does not simply say suffering entered the world in a vague and generalized way. It distinguishes the fractures.
Adam gets the ground. Eve gets the body.
And it is not because work or childbearing were punishments invented from scratch. Both existed before. The garden still needed tending and the earth still needed filling. The soil that once yielded now pushes back. A body that once carried life now carries pain alongside it. Same tasks, entirely different friction.
The problem was never the body itself. Scripture begins with embodiment being called good. The tragedy of Genesis 3 is not that humanity became embodied, but that embodiment itself became fractured by resistance, pain, exhaustion, and death.
Perhaps that is why modern conversations about gender so often feel confusing. We are trying to discuss human beings while pretending bodies are irrelevant.
But they are not.
Hormones affect perception. Stress affects cognition. Pregnancy literally restructures the brain. Sleep deprivation dismantles emotional regulation. Testosterone shapes aggression and risk. Estrogen governs memory, mood, and the nervous system in ways science is still catching up to.
These are not moral failures, but embodied realities.
Neuroscience is finally catching up to what Genesis already knew. We are integrated creatures. Mind, body, hormones, memory, relationships, labor—all of it tangled together, affecting everything else all the time.
Which means men and women can share the same humanity and still carry burden differently.
Men may not experience cyclical embodiment in the same visible way women do, but many carry another kind of relentless burden: the pressure to produce, protect, succeed, absorb stress quietly, and remain emotionally steady no matter what is happening internally. The modern field may be corporate now instead of agricultural, but the nervous system often responds the same way—hyper-focused, problem-solving, carrying the constant tension of responsibility and outcome. And over time, that pressure leaves its own imprint on the body: elevated cortisol, emotional suppression, chronic stress, burnout, isolation, anger, numbness.
Women, meanwhile, often experience burden in profoundly embodied and cyclical ways. The female brain is more densely connected between hemispheres, more integrative, more likely to loop. It does not compartmentalize as cleanly. It holds everything at once. And the body keeps interrupting it. Monthly. Yearly. Across decades. Each hormonal shift—puberty, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause—does not merely affect mood. It restructures cognition, memory, perception, and emotional regulation from the inside out.
Despite all of this...we know how much we hate limitation, so we fight it. We buy the supplements, start the skincare routine, wake up at 5 a.m., and convince ourselves that this time we are finally going to become fully functional people. I say this as someone who owns the planner, takes the magnesium, and has a paid plan for red light therapy.
And look, I am not saying throw the supplements in the trash and lie face down on the kitchen floor in protest. Some of this stuff genuinely helps. Medicine is good. Sleep matters. Drinking water is unfortunately effective, and I resent that deeply. There is wisdom in caring for our bodies. The problem is when care slowly turns into a relentless pursuit of becoming untouchable by limitation altogether.
Here is the thing nobody puts on the wellness influencer’s Instagram grid: You can do everything right and still be a person. A tired, limited, occasionally crying-in-the-Target-parking-lot person.
The reality is that we cannot optimize our way out of the fall.
No matter what we do, the ground still resists. The body still resists. The brain still resists.
We are still east of Eden.
Which is why I am deeply suspicious of any system that claims to have perfectly solved human flourishing. Life does not cooperate with clean formulas.
The widow. The infertile couple. The disabled. The single mother working two jobs. The exhausted caregiver. The person quietly unraveling behind a functioning exterior. The one who is simply trying to survive another week.
Genesis 3 does not offer a formula as much as it offers a diagnosis. And the diagnosis is deeply human.
Which is maybe why I still laugh at my own “double dipping into the curse” joke. Underneath it is a real question about what it means to live faithfully inside bodies and minds that were never meant to carry this much strain.
Redemption is not the erasure of limitation, nor is it the endless optimization of it. Wisdom may begin the moment we stop apologizing for being finite, when we stop performing invincibility and when we stop mistaking constant endurance for health.
The most spiritually mature sentence a person may ever say is this: “I have limits.”
So what do we do with all of this?
The quick answer is that we stop believing there is some future version of ourselves that will finally be enough. Because grace does not meet us once we have perfected ourselves. It meets us right here, in the unfinishedness of being human. In the exhaustion, in the limits and in the moments when we realize we cannot hold everything together no matter how hard we try.
Here is what I know about Jesus: He did not watch human suffering from a safe distance. He showed up in a body, with tired feet, real grief, and a crown made from the same cursed ground Adam was handed in Genesis 3.
He entered it.
Which means your exhaustion is not a sign that God has left the building. It might actually be the exact place He is trying to meet you.
The Gospel was never about becoming someone who does not need help. It is about finally being honest that you do.
So grieve what is worth grieving. Rest when you are tired. Put down the performance because you were never supposed to be God. That job is taken, and honestly, the hours are terrible.
Steward well, but do not lose your life trying to preserve what was always temporary.
One day everything broken gets fixed. Every curse lifted. Every limit gone.
But today? Today you are human. Finite. Held.
And that is enough.
