Misheca Seymour Gives voice to the weight women carry
THERE is a particular kind of woman people learn to depend on. She is capable at work, attentive to her family, and often the person others turn to when something needs to be sorted out. Her accomplishments are easy to recognise. The responsibilities she carries are sometimes less visible.
It is this woman, and the many different lives she might lead, who interests Misheca Seymour in her début book, The Weight We Carry: Stories of Women, Love, Loss and the Lives We Hold Together.
An attorney-at-law and group chief compliance officer at NCB Financial Group, Seymour has built her professional career in banking, compliance, and financial crime risk.
Writing has long been another part of her life. It was at St Andrew High School for Girls that Seymour discovered both her love of writing and her talent for it.
She began writing fiction in her early teens, filling exercise books with stories she still has today, some bearing the school’s name and emblem on their covers.
By the age of 21, she had expanded into motivational writing. Over the years, she continued to write sporadically alongside her professional and family responsibilities.
Writing remained a constant, even when it received less time and attention than she might have wished. With this début, she has made a deliberate decision to give it more room in her life.
The collection turns that longstanding creative interest towards a subject she has been reflecting on for years: the experiences women carry alongside the roles by which the world knows them.
“The Weight We Carry began with something I had been noticing for years, both in my own life and in the lives of women around me,” she explained.
“So many accomplished, capable women are carrying far more than anyone sees.” Those responsibilities can include raising children, caring for ageing parents, managing a household, and helping others through difficult periods.
They can also be less tangible: the expectation of being dependable, the loneliness that can exist within a relationship, or the effort of continuing with ordinary life after a loss.
For Seymour, the familiar description of such women as “strong” prompted a closer look. “Strength can be admirable, but sometimes what looks like strength is endurance,” she said.
“Sometimes it is a woman continuing because she doesn’t believe she has the luxury of falling apart.” That observation gives the book its central question: What might we understand about a woman if we looked beyond how well she appears to be managing? Rooted in a Jamaican context, the collection uses fictional and composite characters to explore love, responsibility, grief, and the choices women make as their lives unfold.
Its focus on women in midlife allows space for the accumulated experiences that can shape a person long before their effects are apparent to anyone else.
The women in these stories have lives that cannot be explained by a single role or experience. A career may be flourishing while a relationship is uncertain.
A mother may take pride in her children while wondering how much room remains for her own needs. Friendship may provide comfort at a time when other parts of life feel difficult to navigate.
The approach reflects Seymour’s interest in the conversations women have privately, when there is less pressure to present a polished account of how things are going. These are often the moments when an experience that seemed entirely personal turns out to be familiar to someone else.
Fiction offers a way to explore those experiences while allowing the characters to have lives of their own. The collection draws on emotional truths rather than presenting a literal account of the author’s life or the lives of particular individuals.
For readers, that leaves room to encounter the stories on their own terms. Some may recognise a feeling they have struggled to explain. Others may gain a fuller understanding of a friend, sister, partner or colleague.
The book invites attention to experiences that can be overlooked precisely because the woman living through them continues to fulfil her responsibilities. Seymour’s professional background is an established part of her story.
This début also introduces readers to a longstanding creative interest, expressed through close attention to women’s everyday lives.
At the centre of The Weight We Carry is a wish to make those lives more fully seen. Its women have achievements and aspirations, but also questions, attachments, and histories.
Understanding what they carry begins with allowing them that complexity. Published by SEMS Publishing, The Weight We Carry is scheduled to launch in November.
Pre-order information is available at www.theweightwecarry.com.
