I had the great pleasure of spending the weekend surrounding by some unbelievably cool women. Strong, intelligent, driven, emotional, wounded women. Outside of feeling very lucky, I realized something. I had a revelation if you will.
I am going to speak primarily about women here, because, well, I’m a woman. That’s not to say that men don’t have this very experience. At all. It is just to say that I want to focus on women. Anyway, I realized that as women, we tend to couch and caveat and hide and cover-up when it comes to our stories. We fear judgment. We fear feeling things in a real way. We fear uncovering and unearthing such that we have no choice but to deal with our shit. We are so scared of our own shadows that we allow our voices to be quieted.
Yes, I’m aware that I am generalizing here, but I can tell you that I’ve been around a LOT of women in my life and few of them feel completely comfortable telling their full story. There is always a piece of it that has been left behind. Always.
Of course, there is the overarching theme of gender roles at play here. There is the perception of things and that plays a huge part in how women present themselves. It’s more than that though. I think we’ve been conditioned to be humiliated when it comes to shit that we’ve done or when shit has been done to us.
Once some thing has happened, you are tarnished and unworthy of love and admiration. So, you mostly avoid sharing that thing with anyone. If you do decide to speak of it, you’ve likely reworked the story so it feels better for you. More comfortable. You don’t necessarily lie, but you might withhold. You might change the smallest of details so you feel better. Maybe you avoid the discussion or reveal altogether.
Why? Well, as I said above, there is still an antiquated societal framework in place whereas women are labeled in a fairly derogatory fashion when they come out and admit that they’ve made a mistake in any way. You cheated on your significant other? Slut. Whore. You fucked up at work? Sloppy. Distracted. You fell off the wagon on your diet or fell off your exercise routine? Lazy. Slovenly. Weak. You are having trouble with your kids? Inept. Heartless. Don’t even get me started if you’ve decided not to have kids or to table working on attracting a partner. This is just a snippet of what I’m referring to. There are so many stories. There are so many slants and views and points of view. And yet, for most of us, those interesting and colorful and life changing stories are muted and stripped down to make everyone else around us more comfortable and save us certain embarrassment or trauma.
So fucking sad. You know what isn’t sad? When these women began to tell their stories, I could see a strengthening in their resolve. I could see them sit up a little straighter. I could see them smiling a little more broadly. I could see that they felt understood and included. I fully grasped the concept that they could engage more meaningfully with the world because they had finally owned their full story and not just a part of it.
Yes, I’m referring to women because again, I am one, and I understand a lot of the pressure and bs that prompts the kind of hiding I’m referring to. But, it’s important to look big picture at all of us. I think there is a general problem with people being really honest about who they are and where they’ve been and what they’ve done and what they want.
I get it because it took me years not to consciously curate my tales before I shared them with others. I wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone, but I also wasn’t trying to face the kind of judgment that would only exacerbate my pain.
This magical thing happened when I finally started to really own my narrative. I could heal in a really profound and important way. I could recognize all the ways in which I fucked myself to do things better and smarter the next time around. I could release myself from the burden of shame that I had been carrying around for so long.
It’s terrible that we engage with each other this way. I don’t understand it at all but then, I also understand it better than most. What I realize, most importantly, is that we can’t expect meaningful change to happen if we continue to live this way. If we promote fear mongering and shaming and judgment instead of openness and understanding and compassion, then we are lost. We cannot help each other unless we encourage each other to help ourselves.
I’ve said before that no one can save us, that we have to do the impossible work to get there. It’s more than that though. We can’t even do the work until we release ourselves from the idea that where we’ve come from is garbage and is best left firmly and definitively in the rear-view mirror. That sounds great, right? What I mean is that it sounds good to take all the not so fabulous things that have happened to us and leave them far enough behind us that we don’t stress at all. But, then we will likely rinse and repeat. Or, we will feel compelled to lie to the newer and happier version of our life to maintain some façade we concocted, and nothing good happens there either. Not at all.
I think we need to start by telling our stories without self-judgment. Perhaps if we can unapologetically relay the events and places and people and things that made us who we are, then we will find a way to be kinder and more generous to each other. I imagine it will take some time, because this shit is deeply ingrained, but I honestly can’t think of a better way to move forward.
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