Justine Musk's Blog, page 11

how to get free of the trap of miswanting ( + find your life)

I used to shop at Neiman Marcus (known to some as Needless Markup). If you’ve ever wondered who the hell would pay a couple of thousand dollars for a pair of suede thigh-high Christian Louboutin boots, that younger me would have had to sheepishly raise her hand.

I would shop because I had a legitimate need to put clothes on my body, but also because I bought into all that Sex-and-the-City, retail-therapy crap.

I shopped to feel better.

One day I stood in my closet and no longer saw fabulosity — but money that could have gone to Apple stock, or building a girls’ school in Cambodia. “If you ever see me going down this path again,” I said to my assistant, “please shoot me.” She agreed.

What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that there is a difference between a want and a yearning. When we confuse the two, as we often do, we engage in something that positive psychologists call miswanting. Even when we get what we think we want (the new Gucci bag, the promotion at work, the hot guy/girl, the trip to Fiji) we’re still dissatisfied, because of a deeper yearning that remains unmet.

Wants are for specific things (a new dress, a meal at Per Se, a date with Ryan Gosling), but yearnings are deep and universal. As Dr. Wright points out in her book TRANSFORMED!, we all yearn for the same things. These are

To matter

To love and be loved

To be seen

To contribute

To connect

To belong

To achieve mastery

To be affirmed

To connect with the Creator/a higher power/nature/the divine

Wants and yearnings activate different parts of the brain. When we anticipate or indulge our wants, the brain releases dopamine to give us that fun, addictive buzz. But it’s only when we meet our deeper needs – our yearnings – that the brain releases opiods, which provide the deep full feelings of soul-satisfaction that can actually sustain us.

We yearn to feed our soul.

But it’s so easy to confuse stimulation with satisfaction …and chase that dopamine high…and plunge into a spiral of wanting, wanting, wanting, without ever experiencing the fulfillment that only the opiate-generating part of the brain can give us.

When we try to fulfill our yearnings with surface wants, we fail.

So we start to miswant something else – or find ways to escape, or numb out – except none of this works either.

It’s like trying to live off cotton candy, while telling ourselves that it’s a healthy and nourishing meal.

Eventually we sicken and spiritually die.

In the end, shopping never did that much for me. After the buzz of a new purchase disappeared (within hours), I was right back where I started, except with less money in the bank and more clutter in my closet. I ended up giving away or donating a lot of the clothes. (I kept the boots.)

Once I started connecting with what I truly yearned for (and it’s an ongoing process), my desire to shop, which had festered into what is known as a “soft addiction”, steadily faded. I haven’t stepped inside Neiman Marcus in years. The thought of the place gives me a bleak, knotted feeling in my chest, because I associate it (and shopping in general) with an unhappy time in my life.

We live in a consumerist culture that steeps and surrounds us with what’s known as “anxiety marketing”: marketing that uses cutting-edge psychology to rip open little holes in our psyche to keep us insecure and offbalance, to put us into states of distress so that the marketers can swoop in and pretend-rescue us with their products. Even the most fortunate of us will live high on pleasure and low on soul-satisfaction: we crash, and the cycle repeats itself, and the culture carries on. It takes effort in the face of constant temptation to tune out the clamor of wants and false promises. It takes skill – and it is a skill – to tune into your deeper self, and live day-to-day with the awareness and engagement that she requires.

I understand, now, why I can meet people who have everything – jetset lifestyles, dinners with movie stars, thrilling careers – and still get moody or depressed (and go on anti-depressants); or how the man on his fourth trophy wife and the woman going yet again to the plastic surgeon to try to be, or remain, or compete with the trophy wife are easy to mock but, in the end, simply trying to love and be loved, to be seen, to belong. Aren’t we all? We use the tools and the knowledge that this culture gives us. They don’t work. We try again.

The good news is that at any given moment you can start asking yourself the questions –

Why do I really want those $250 jeans?

Because they make me feel cool and my ass looks great in them.

Why do I care about that?

Because I want to be hip and sexy.

Why do I want to be hip and sexy?

Because I want people to notice me.

Why do I want people to notice me?

Because I want to know that I matter.

– that peel back the onion layers of wanting until you get to the yearning at the core. You know you’ve found the yearning when there are no more Whys to ask, no more layers.

Why do I want so badly to publish my novel?

Because I want to be successful.

Why do I want to be successful?



Because I want people to listen to me.

Why do I want people to listen to me?

Because I want to have something to say.

Why do I want to have something to say?

Because I want to contribute.

When you connect with that yearning, you can then think of a way right then and there to fulfill it. Instead of spending money you don’t have on jeans you don’t need, you might call that friend you’ve been thinking about but haven’t talked to in months. Instead of obsessing over whether your editor is reading your manuscript, you might volunteer to feed the homeless, or go above and beyond at work (and surprise the hell out of your boss), or speak out on an issue that’s important to you by writing a letter to an editor or perhaps a blog (ahem).

This is the cool thing: as you identify your yearnings and find ways to move toward them, you become more and more of who you really are.

Because it’s not about fixing yourself, or trying to improve yourself.

It’s about discovering who you truly are in the first place. click to tweet

Carl Jung refers to a process called individuation, which is the process of claiming and reclaiming the different parts of yourself to become whole. This happens when you move away from the collective belief systems we’ve all absorbed or inherited – from our families, our various subcultures, the culture at large – and start walking a path that’s unique and true to you. To follow this path is to go beyond your cravings (which are wants-generated) and pay attention to your urges (which are yearnings-generated); to listen to the “still small voice” that knows what you need and how to slowly but steadily get there.

This is when you begin to find your destiny.

Otherwise known as living an authentic life.

the art of finding your passion in your woundedness ( + discovering the work of your soul)

“You can, you should, + if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” – Stephen King

1

At the age of 12, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery.

She survived a decade of rape and torture. She saw her best friend killed in front of her.

Eventually she managed to escape.

She became an anti-trafficking activist.

Since then, she has orchestrated raids on brothels. She has rescued sex workers as young as five and six. Through her organization, The Somaly Mam Foundation, she has built shelters, started schools and saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. She has been honored as a CNN hero. She was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009. She has a book out called THE ROAD OF LOST INNOCENCE (and you should totally read it).

It’s safe to say she has a passion for her work.

2

We use the word passion to refer to enjoyment, excitement, or flow: we regard passion as whatever lights us up. Gurus say to “follow your passion” and we translate that to “follow what’s fun and makes you feel good” , hoping this will guide us into a career so perfectly tailored to our whims that we’ll never “work” a day in our lives.

We forget – if we were ever even fully aware — that passion is rooted in suffering. As Todd Henry points out in his excellent book DIE EMPTY: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, the word ‘passion’ stems from the Latin word pati which means “to suffer or endure”. Our culture’s distorted understanding has created what Henry calls “the passion fallacy” and “a false notion of what it means to engage in gratifying work.”

So perhaps — when we try to find the great work of our soul and build out an epic life — we’re asking ourselves the wrong question.

The question shouldn’t be: “What would bring me enjoyment?”

(Dancing at raves, on tables and in cages at Burning Man brought me a lot of enjoyment in my twenties, but failed to develop into my life’s work. Dammit.)

A better question: “What work am I willing to suffer for today?”



In your epic life, you are doing great work, the work of your soul: you are suffering for something beyond yourself. You shape your life around a mission and use yourself up every day in service of something bigger that fulfills, inspires and sustains you. You are on a meaningful journey, and you’re taking others with you.

You are living with passion.

This kind of passion is focused on others, not self; on what you can give, not get. You think about the world in terms of how you can best and uniquely contribute to making it a better place, instead of how it can fulfill your own needs.

This kind of passion is fueled by what Henry identifies as “compassionate anger” (the word ‘compassion’ means ‘to suffer with’). He asks:

Where do you see dynamics in the marketplace or the world at large that cause you to feel a desire to step in on behalf of those who are suffering in order to bear part of their burden or rectify a wrong?



It doesn’t have to be a social evil. It could be, as Henry points out, “an underserved market or a group of people who are not being given an adequate platform or the tools they need to do their work.”

What fires you up? What gets under your skin? What would – if you truly let it – urge you to act, and act now?

Where does your mental and emotional energy go (or want to go)?

If you want to address something that feels “small” to you, go ahead – and don’t worry about the size. Small things have a way of opening into other small things that accumulate into bigger things that connect and connect into something world-changing.

3

And if you’re completely drawing a blank, let me suggest something: instead of thinking what you’re willing to suffer for, think of how in your life you have suffered.

I don’t like to dwell in the past, particularly the less-pleasant parts of it. (I went for years without talking about my childhood.) I know that I am not my past. At the same time, I’ve come to understand the story of your past as a useful tool with which you can deliberately create your own future. Your backstory may not be who you are, but it holds some fascinating keys as to who you can be.

Suffering changes us. It forces us to grow. Whether it’s extreme suffering, like Somaly Mam’s in the example above, or comes in a much lesser form, it sends us down into the underground. We’re forced to find the knowledge and tools, and develop the abilities and strategies, that get us through to the other side.

A lot of your ‘onlyness’, as Nilofer Merchant calls it, shapes itself according to the whorls and grooves of these experiences, as unique to you as a fingerprint.

When you come up from the underground, you can take this knowledge, this deepened awareness, these skills and strategies, and find a way to apply them in the world. You identify the problem or need with which you feel a special resonance: the call of the times that reverberates through your personality, that echoes in your life.

Often we choose what we do in order to fix or heal ourselves, the wounds from the past that distort the present until we resolve them – and grow from them.

Often it’s this personal connection to the issue – the way the issue has woven itself in your lifestory — that grants you credibility and authority in the eyes of others. You become a symbol of your big, defining idea.

Somaly Mam is a powerful advocate for trafficked girls and sex workers because she used to be one of them.

Todd Henry’s background as a working musician connects him to creativity, which helps him serve his target market of “overworked, undervalued creative professionals”.

Your experience and hardwon knowledge allow you to be not just the hero in your own hero’s journey, but the mentor in someone else’s.

4

There’s that saying: Heal yourself, and then heal others.



(I’m reminded of this every time I meet a personal trainer who has overcome food addiction or an eating disorder. There seem to be a lot of them out there.)

I find, however, that it’s not so straight-forward. It flows both ways. We may learn to love others through the act of loving ourselves, but we learn to love ourselves through the act of loving others. We work to heal others – and continue to heal ourselves. We teach to discover what we most need to learn.

That’s the power of connectedness.

Passion takes the workings of your life, and your inner life, and finds ways to manifest them in the world.

Suffering transforms into vision and meaning that pulls the world forward.

It’s the ultimate alchemy.

It requires self-knowledge and the willingness to dig deep and work hard – even when you don’t want to, and even when it’s not fun. What separates those who work with passion from those who don’t is that passionate people know exactly what they’re doing all the hard work, and all the gruntwork, for — and they believe in it, enough to sacrifice their time and energy, blood and sweat and tears.

For a life to be epic, there must be sacrifice. An epic life demands nothing less than everything you’ve got to give it. As human beings, we’re wired for this kind of striving, struggle and achievement, even as ancient survival instincts keep pulling us to the comfort zone and the couch. (That gap between the need to self-actualize and the need to stay safe has many names, including ‘depression’.)

There’s a great quote by Albert Einstein: “The greatness of an artist lies in the building of an inner world + the ability to reconcile this inner world with the outer.”

What’s your ultimate work of art, if not your life? click to tweet

photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg via photopin cc

the epic feminine: welcome to the epic story of your life ( + how to make it a good one)

“I haven’t a clue as to how my story will end. But that’s all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, you don’t conclude that the road has vanished. And how else could we discover the stars?” – Nancy Willard

I wrote a personal essay that was published in Marie Claire magazine a couple of years ago (an editor there discovered me through my Livejournal and commissioned the piece). It was about, very roughly speaking, the fall of my marriage and the rise of my sense of self.

The night after I submitted it, I got up at 3 a.m. to email the editor and ask if I could take it back. Before the magazine came out, I remember being so terrified that I curled up against my boyfriend in the middle of the afternoon and asked him what the hell had I done (as if he could answer that) and cried.

What I hadn’t realized is how many women would read that story and see themselves reflected in it; if it was about me, it was also about them.

I know this, because some of them sent me emails that would start to transform my approach to writing and storytelling. As they related their experience to my experience, and we saw the commonality, my perspective opened up. I could see some of the forces at work — of culture and history and economics — influencing the dynamic that formed between my ex-husband and me. Although we were responsible for that dynamic, it was also about something bigger than us. A woman approached me who said she had worked as a personal assistant for a famous actor and gotten a close look at the kind of power imbalance that can end up sacrificing the needs and identity of the weaker partner.

“I’m glad someone finally told it like it is,” she said.

That had never been my intention.

I thought my experience was mine alone. Through the act of putting it into story, and then putting it out there, I had tapped into something much more universal, and my eyes opened wider as a result.

To live an epic life is to find ways to connect your seemingly small existence to some bigger truth, some deeper meaning. It’s to use your life as a door that opens onto the human condition; to understand that what plagues you, plagues others. What brings you joy, brings joy to others.

Sounds obvious, maybe, but we tend to forget this. When we hurt, we contract ourselves around the hurting. We turn inward. We isolate. We feel shame. We disconnect from community because we fear the community won’t accept us.

But when we tell our stories, all this changes. We see how the themes of our respective lives link up with each other and say something about the culture at large. My tiny individual consciousness merges with your individual consciousness; as a result, our consciousness expands.

(Those circles where people sit around and share their stories, whether it was housewives in the 1960s or recovering alcoholics and addicts today? They don’t call them consciousness-raising groups for nothing.)

Telling your story is a transformative act. As Margaret Atwood once observed, “Powerlessness and silence go hand-in-hand.” To deny someone a voice is to render them invisible. History is written by the victors, as the saying goes, but what it forgets to add is how, if left unchecked, the conquerors write over the conquered who then get cannibalized, pushed to the margins, turned into stereotypes, degraded, devalued.

To speak up is to speak with an intention to prevent that from happening.

To live out your life as an epic story is to live with intention. Part of that intention includes opening up to other people and bringing them into your story, and mingling your story with theirs.

An epic story is a big story. It requires, among other things, a large cast of characters.

Maybe you don’t think you’re that kind of person: too shy and introverted to be the subject, the hero, of an epic, even if that epic is your own life. But for a story to be a story, someone has to want something, and then confront and overcome a series of obstacles in order to become the kind of person who can achieve it. The meaning of the story is in that struggle: how it transforms the protagonist, and in how the protagonist tells it after the events have come to an end.

As Donald Miller points out, an epic story involves an epic journey, and an epic journey demands an epic goal.

To start living out your life as an epic requires that you set an epic goal (even if the first part of that goal is “to figure out an epic goal”). You don’t have to feel like you’re “enough” in order to start out on that journey; you’re not supposed to be.

It’s the journey that makes you. click to tweet

It’s the journey that forces you to learn and stretch and grow and accumulate confidence and self-esteem as you meet one challenge after the other, as you learn from your so-called failures and adjust and adapt. So when you think about what you want, it’s just as important to think about who you want to become — the version of yourself you’re willing to suffer for in order to become.

(Yes, I know, suffering sucks, but chances are you’re going to suffer anyway. Life is pretty much wired that way. So you might as well put that suffering to a higher purpose.)

You don’t live out an epic because you’re an epic person.

You’re an epic person because you’re living out an epic.

And that makes for one hell of a story.

the secret power of receiving, connecting + being authentic

The other day I complimented a man on his ass. He is a close friend, we’d been talking about objectifying women versus objectifying men, I was feeling cheeky (no pun intended), and so as he turned away I said, sincerely, “You have a nice ass.”

“I know,” he said, without missing a beat.

I was surprised. I’d expected him to deflect the remark in some way, either by questioning (“You really think so?”) or negating (“You must be looking at somebody else”) or minimizing (“This silly old thing? I just found it in the closet this morning”).

Then I realized – putting aside the, ahem, possible inappropriateness of my comment – that I’d been expecting him to react the way women react to compliments in general.

We’re so awkward with praise that popular spiritual guru Gabrielle Bernstein did a HuffPo vlog on how to take a compliment.

Then again, a lot of compliments deserve to be negated or deflected or otherwise dismissed as empty, manipulative flattery. We can sense when someone is trying to maneuver us, even if we pretend to play along. We can seem accommodating even as our guard goes up. But does it have to be up all the time? Has it become that much of a kneejerk reaction, especially if we know the compliment is deserved?

When we practice false modesty, we’re not being authentic. And when we’re not being authentic (as men or as women), we’re disconnecting from other people and ourselves.

A genuine compliment, given freely and without agenda, is a gift. A gift is a powerful thing. It invokes the Law of Reciprocity. As Seth Godin points out, a gift is different from a transaction, because in a transaction we exchange equal value: I give you this, you give me that, we go our separate ways and don’t think twice.

When you give me a gift, you’re giving me more value than I’ve given you, which creates an imbalance between us. This leaves me with a nagging open loop, a sense of being in your debt (and in your power) — until I redress the imbalance by giving you something back. This could be as simple as an acknowledgement, a smile and a “thank you”.

Here’s the thing. Gift-giving feels good. It creates warm fuzzies all around: I see you, I recognize you, I validate you, I care.



So as we complete that loop of giving and receiving, we strengthen the bond of trust between us. This is the kind of goodwill that can create a friendship, a community, an entire economy. As Godin writes:

When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn’t a gift, it’s marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

We think of the act of receiving as a passive one, but it’s not. To receive is to open yourself up. You become like a vessel that catches the flow of energy – and shapes it, and redirects it (or kills it dead). Opening up to anything makes you vulnerable, which is why – as adults – we’re reluctant to do it. We have to trust that the energy coming at us is well-intended.

We also have to trust ourselves: our sense of judgment, yes, but also our sense of worth. If we don’t feel worthy to receive – because we’re (in our own minds) not thin enough or educated enough or rich enough or successful enough or smart enough or any other not-enough that preys on us and eats us up from inside – then we’ll not only close ourselves off, we won’t recognize the incredible things flowing toward us.

But if we can’t receive, if we can’t fill ourselves up – then we can’t give, either.

We can’t give what we don’t have. We can’t run for very long when we’re on empty.

I was recently at a Beyonce concert and then, not long after, the World Domination Summit hosted by Chris Guillebeau. Beyonce and Chris dwell within very different contexts, but there was a moment when Chris reminded me of Beyonce (even if she had about twenty remarkable costume changes and he, well, did not). At the end of their respective performances, both Beyonce and Chris were showered with applause, respect, appreciation, adoration (otherwise known as a standing ovation). Each of them stood there, onstage, and opened themselves up to the audience. They connected. They received. It was in the way they stood, chin lifted, arms relaxed, taking it in, taking us in, and the air crackled electric. I can’t imagine the moment would have been half so satisfying if they had waved us off, or run off the stage, or gone into hiding.

I see you. I recognize you. I validate you. I care.

It was a beautiful thing.

an empire of her own: the heroine’s journey ( + a woman’s quest for her own thing)

Alas for those that never sing,

But die with all their music in them. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

I’m at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon, an annual conference for creatives, the brainchild of Chris Guillebeau.

I got up this morning to a newsletter from Chris Brogan about building online empires.

Dominating the world.

Building empires.

Both Chris and Chris are using these terms in a playful way. Still, what would the world look like, I wonder, what kind of world could we make, if girls grew up talking with this level of confidence and ambition? Shoot for the moon, you might catch the stars. Girls and women achieve, no question, but we have this habit of doing it in a good-girl kind of way: we try to be perfect instead of truly great.

We talk about leaning in, about sitting at the table, about finding that mythical work/life balance. We talk about fitting ourselves into a masculine model of success that wasn’t built for the rhythms of motherhood (or parenthood in general, although you don’t see quite so many articles about men downscaling their goals and aspirations). We talk about staying in the game. We don’t talk about triumph or greatness and what that might look like for women, not just as professionals but creatives and artists and educators and healers and rising young entrepreneurs.

We don’t talk about how we could manage to “have it all” over the course of a life — if we stop buying into this apparent belief that life ends at 40 or 50 or when the kids go off to college. As if there aren’t a lot of years left over. As if a woman doesn’t yearn to create her own thing, whatever that might be, whatever money she might earn from it.

Meanwhile the culture feeds us stories about female politicos and CEOs as unnatural castrating he-women; about brilliant but loveless female artists who become obsessed with the men who won’t have them (because they go home to traditional wives) and throw themselves off bridges or stick their heads in ovens or wander aimlessly in the rain until they’re carted off to insane asylums; about female entrepreneurs as mompreneurs (where are the dadpreneurs?)

Stories like these – that get inside our heads, under our skin, and into our subconscious the way only stories can do – not only play down the power of women, they teach women to play down their lives.

I was telling a woman about my last blog post, how pleased I was when Rosario Dawson retweeted it as a “call to greatness”.

“Radiance?” the woman said.

“No,” I said. “Greatness.”

#calltogreatness! @justinemusk the art of thinking highly of yourself (w/o being a totally obnoxious narcissist…) http://t.co/ArTzDVigdu

— Rosario Dawson (@rosariodawson) July 6, 2013

“I thought you said call to radiance. I like that much better.”

I like that phrase too – call to radiance – there’s a touch of the poetic about it.

“Because greatness is –“ The woman grimaced. “But with radiance you just –“ And she made a gesture as if light beams were shining from her head.

“Greatness is a bit of a male word,” I said, as if in agreement, but then I thought: Why? Because it implies ambition, and ambition is nasty and distasteful and so very unladylike?

When you radiate, you just are. You can, as they say, “be yourself.” Even if a lot of work goes into that, it can seem natural and effortless, as if you fell out of bed and rose up beaming.

Greatness requires action, sacrifice, dogged perseverance, focus and selfishness: you can’t become great at anything when you’re doing everything for everybody else. When you go after greatness, you do it openly; people see you investing all that effort in your own apparent agenda and for your own apparent interests. Which is why we’re maybe not so comfortable applying the concept to ourselves instead of the men in our lives (or we want in our lives).

Except then we get frustrated and restless with our own perceived smallness. We talk about the need to play a bigger game. We buy books and courses that promise to show us how to do that.

How can we play a bigger game if we don’t have the words for what that bigger game is or could be?

There is so much conversation about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, built into the culture like a road for people to follow. Recently I learned that there is a heroine’s journey as well: Campbell, probably because he’s not a woman, wasn’t interested in exploring it. Instead of questing for her own self-actualization, a woman was, to Campbell, the goal or prize for the hero: his damsel in distress, his arrival point (or fatal temptation).

The heroine’s journey – which you see in what one blogger refers to as girl underground stories — involves sacrifice, descent, the confrontation with darkness that ends in death and rebirth. No rainbows or unicorns or Disney songs here. There is, instead, an encounter with the Dark Goddess, so the heroine can absorb her knowledge and power and return, fully integrated, to the everyday world.

It’s an initiation into a wiser state of being, and it doesn’t happen once but many times within a heroine’s lifetime.

When you feel lost or depressed — when the ground shifts beneath your feet — when you pull down into the depths of yourself to face the demons there, you are the heroine gone underground. It might take days or weeks or months or years but eventually you rise, stronger for the broken places.

(Just as women can be heroes, men can be heroines. Both genders embark on both types of journeys.)

The original heroine was the goddess Inanna. She didn’t descend underground because she wanted to radiate — she radiated as a matter of course. She went to claim a throne. She was after greatness — and she got it. She wasn’t perfect. No one who knew her would describe her as a good girl. She was sex and love and beauty – over time and a few civilizations and conquests, she evolved into the goddess Aphrodite – but she was also learning, knowledge, achievement, power.

She’s a mythical figure, an archetype, deeply patterned into our collective unconscious. And when someone like that lives somewhere in your head, don’t you think you’re going to hear — every now and then — your own call to greatness, to self-actualization? As the heroine’s journey differs from the hero’s, a woman’s life has its own movements and rhythms, and this applies to achievement as much as anything else. Just because we might not have accomplished our dreams by 30 or 40 – or lost our way for a bit, or stayed home with the kids, or gone underground – doesn’t mean that meaningful accomplishment is no longer possible. Our dreams have a way of evolving as we do.

We like to say – and I believe – that it’s about the journey, not just the destination. It’s not the goal but the person you become en route to the goal; it’s how the goal forces you to change and stretch and grow.

An epic goal makes for an epic journey; an epic journey makes for an epic life.

So many of us want that.

That’s why we come, men and women both, to conferences with audacious names like the World Domination Summit. We are looking for something in our lives, and ourselves, that’s mythic. That glimmer you see in the distance? That’s your personal greatness, calling you onward, alight with a radiance of its own.

an empire of her own (+ the quest for a bigger game)

Alas for those that never sing,

But die with all their music in them. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

I’m at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon, an annual conference for creatives, the brainchild of Chris Guillebeau.

I got up this morning to a newsletter from Chris Brogan about building online empires.

Dominating the world.

Building empires.

Both Chris and Chris are using these terms in a playful way. Still, what would the world look like, I wonder, what kind of world could we make, if girls grew up talking with this level of confidence and ambition? Shoot for the moon, you might catch the stars. Girls and women achieve, no question, but we have this habit of doing it in a good-girl kind of way: we try to be perfect instead of truly great.

We talk about leaning in, about sitting at the table, about finding that mythical work/life balance. We talk about fitting ourselves into a masculine model of success that wasn’t built for the rhythms of motherhood (or parenthood in general, although you don’t see quite so many articles about men downscaling their goals and aspirations). We talk about staying in the game. We don’t talk about triumph or greatness and what that might look like for women, not just as professionals but creatives and artists and educators and healers and rising young entrepreneurs.

We don’t talk about how we could manage to “have it all” over the course of a life — if we stop buying into this apparent belief that life ends at 40 or 50 or when the kids go off to college. As if there aren’t a lot of years left over. As if a woman doesn’t yearn to create her own thing, whatever that might be, whatever money she might earn from it.

Meanwhile the culture feeds us stories about female politicos and CEOs as unnatural castrating he-women; about brilliant but loveless female artists who become obsessed with the men who won’t have them (because they go home to traditional wives) and throw themselves off bridges or stick their heads in ovens or wander aimlessly in the rain until they’re carted off to insane asylums; about female entrepreneurs as mompreneurs (where are the dadpreneurs?)

Stories like these – that get inside our heads, under our skin, and into our subconscious the way only stories can do – not only play down the power of women, they teach women to play down their lives.

I was telling a woman about my last blog post, how pleased I was when Rosario Dawson retweeted it as a “call to greatness”.

“Radiance?” the woman said.

“No,” I said. “Greatness.”

#calltogreatness! @justinemusk the art of thinking highly of yourself (w/o being a totally obnoxious narcissist…) http://t.co/ArTzDVigdu

— Rosario Dawson (@rosariodawson) July 6, 2013

“I thought you said call to radiance. I like that much better.”

I like that phrase too – call to radiance – there’s a touch of the poetic about it.

“Because greatness is –“ The woman grimaced. “But with radiance you just –“ And she made a gesture as if light beams were shining from her head.

“Greatness is a bit of a male word,” I said, as if in agreement, but then I thought: Why? Because it implies ambition, and ambition is nasty and distasteful and so very unladylike?

When you radiate, you just are. You can, as they say, “be yourself.” Even if a lot of work goes into that, it can seem natural and effortless, as if you fell out of bed and rose up beaming.

Greatness requires action, sacrifice, dogged perseverance, focus and selfishness: you can’t become great at anything when you’re doing everything for everybody else. When you go after greatness, you do it openly; people see you investing all that effort in your own apparent agenda and for your own apparent interests. Which is why we’re maybe not so comfortable applying the concept to ourselves instead of the men in our lives (or we want in our lives).

Except then we get frustrated and restless with our own perceived smallness. We talk about the need to play a bigger game. We buy books and courses that promise to show us how to do that.

How can we play a bigger game if we don’t have the words for what that bigger game is or could be?

There is so much conversation about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, built into the culture like a road for people to follow. Recently I learned that there is a heroine’s journey as well: Campbell, probably because he’s not a woman, wasn’t interested in exploring it. Instead of questing for her own self-actualization, a woman was, to Campbell, the goal or prize for the hero: his damsel in distress, his arrival point (or fatal temptation).

The heroine’s journey – which you see in what one blogger refers to as girl underground stories — involves sacrifice, descent, the confrontation with darkness that ends in death and rebirth. No rainbows or unicorns or Disney songs here. There is, instead, an encounter with the Dark Goddess, so the heroine can absorb her knowledge and power and return, fully integrated, to the everyday world.

It’s an initiation into a wiser state of being, and it doesn’t happen once but many times within a heroine’s lifetime.

When you feel lost or depressed — when the ground shifts beneath your feet — when you feel yourself pulling down into the depths of yourself to face the demons there, you are the heroine gone underground. It might take days or weeks or months or years but eventually you rise, stronger for the broken places.

(Just as women can be heroes, men can be heroines. Both genders embark on both types of journeys.)

The original heroine was the goddess Inanna. She didn’t descend underground because she wanted to radiate — she radiated as a matter of course. She went to claim a throne. She was after greatness — and she got it. She wasn’t perfect. No one who knew her would describe her as a good girl. She was sex and love and beauty – over time and a few civilizations and conquests, she evolved into the goddess Aphrodite – but she was also learning, knowledge, achievement, power.

She’s a mythical figure, an archetype, deeply patterned into our collective unconscious. And when someone like that lives somewhere in your head, don’t you think you’re going to hear — every now and then — your own call to greatness, to self-actualization? As the heroine’s journey differs from the hero’s, a woman’s life has its own movements and rhythms, and this applies to achievement as much as anything else. Just because we might not have accomplished our dreams by 30 or 40 – or lost our way for a bit, or stayed home with the kids, or gone underground – doesn’t mean that meaningful accomplishment is no longer possible. Our dreams have a way of evolving as we do.

We like to say – and I believe – that it’s about the journey, not just the destination. It’s not the goal but the person you become en route to the goal; it’s how the goal forces you to change and stretch and grow.

An epic goal makes for an epic journey; an epic journey makes for an epic life.

So many of us want that.

That’s why we come, men and women both, to conferences with audacious names like the World Domination Summit. We are looking for something in our lives, and ourselves, that’s mythic. That glimmer you see in the distance? That’s your personal greatness, calling you onward, alight with a radiance of its own.

the art of thinking highly of yourself (without being a totally obnoxious narcissist or something)

1

Confession. When I was a little girl (age 8) I would write obnoxious things in my diary. Things like:

Life is so great and exciting, especially when you’re someone like me, good at writing and school and sports!!!!!

One day (age 13) I came across that diary when I was cleaning out my bedroom, and felt absolutely mortified by my obviously egocentric and insanely deluded younger self. I threw the diary into a big black garbage bag with the other junk and never saw it again.

Recently (age 40) I came across a quote by singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963):

I had a very high opinion of myself. Perhaps with good reason.

That kind of blew me away. For a woman to not just think and believe such a thing, but to say it out loud? Dude. That takes ladyballs.

One thing I’ve noticed lately in my conversations about women, reading books and magazines about women, listening to other people talk about women, is that everybody seems to take it as a given that women as a group have low self-esteem. A lot of this seems to be attributed to the fact that, bombarded as we are by an insane beauty standard, most of us don’t look like supermodels – a.k.a. ‘genetic freaks’ – and don’t consider ourselves beautiful. Boo hoo.

(For the record, Edith Piaf didn’t consider herself beautiful either. “I’m ugly,” she stated flat-out. “I’m not Venus. I’ve got sagging breasts, a low-slung ass, and little drooping buttocks….But I can still get men.” Indeed. I was reading about her in a book called SEDUCTRESS, about the great seductresses and enchantresses of history, and Piaf could “get men” until the day she died.)

2

I have struggled with self-esteem issues since my teens, but it’s clear in my first long-ago diary that I didn’t start out that way. I acquired my low self-esteem. I learned it. I learned to play down the fact that I was smart, to bend over backwards so as not to “intimidate” people, to feel ashamed of the fact that I read so much and had an odd-for-my-age vocabulary (and mispronounced words), to feel ashamed for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint or articulate. What’s more, it was good to have low self-esteem; anything else was to risk having a big head, and who would like me then? Confidence did not endear me to my peers. Insecurity did.

Part of the problem had to do with my undiagnosed ADD, or the fact that I was growing up right-brained in a left-brained world. The right brain – holistic, intuitive, creative – has no sense of structure, details, or time. I could do things that other people couldn’t (write novels, ace certain subjects without bothering to attend class, get a black belt) and yet barely function on a day to day level. I was so disorganized and scattered that when a boyfriend once asked me, “Justine, how do you get through daily life?” I had no honest answer.

But I would say another, equally big part has to do with the innate human tendency to rise or sink to the level of expectations other people hold for you. We like to claim that we’re not influenced by the world around us, but truth is we’re hardwired to adapt to the herd (which is why choosing your herd is so important). As a girlchild in the early-to-mid 1980s, I wasn’t expected to like math. So I stopped liking math. As a young woman, I wasn’t expected to have high self-esteem. As an older woman, I’m not expected to have high self-esteem either, but I’ve learned to say a cheerful, Fuck that.

I can’t speak for men on this – I’m writing from a deeply female perspective – but I can say that, as women, we seem to police each other when there aren’t men around to do it for us (or the men don’t care, are oblivious, or even supportive and nurturing, as many men are.) Online superstar Danielle LaPorte recently talked about the backlash she received when her star was rising and she was pronounced, by some, to be “too big for her britches”. They might as well have picketed her with signs saying: Danielle! Get back in your place!

Which is not to say that narcissism is, you know, a good thing (although it would seem to have certain advantages, and high-functioning narcissists can do some very good things for society), or that people are wrong to be on guard against it. It just seems that the label is so quickly applied to women who dare to declare their self-confidence, their sense of worth, their own self-interest, that women as a group learn to defend themselves against it by swinging to the opposite extreme.

(If you’re a woman, what’s the one thing you can say online that will ensure you get absolutely massacred? “I’m beautiful.” Even supermodels, who make entire fortunes off their looks, aren’t stupid enough to say it, but will tell stories about what ugly ducklings they were growing up. Even Michelle Pfeiffer wouldn’t admit to it except in a roundabout way – “beautiful women get used a lot” – and complain instead about her bloodshot eyes, her mouth “like a duck”. That’s right. Put Ms Pfeiffer in the ugly corner.)

I don’t think it’s that difficult to distinguish between people with narcissistic disorders and people with high self-esteem. Narcissists – real narcissists – abuse and destroy the people closest to them (and those of you who know what I’m talking about, raise your hand). High self-esteem people, on the other hand, uplift, empower, inspire. They are the Oprahs of your world. They make you feel good about yourself, as if their own sense of worth is contagious.

3

If you’re a woman (or man) with high self-esteem, what would you do that you’re maybe not doing now?

I have an answer for that:

You would trust yourself.

You would take good care of your health, for one thing, because you value your body too much to trash it. You would honor your strengths and talents – and also your weaknesses, your limitations. Instead of feeling threatened by your imperfections (and other people who might point them out), you would learn how to work around them and form partnerships with people who complement you. You would feel the fear but do it anyway – because you would know, come hell or high water, that you can handle it. You would go after the goals that are worthy of you. You wouldn’t worry so much about what other people think. You wouldn’t confuse their voices with your north-star inner voice. You would say no. You would say yes. You would bring all of yourself to your work, to your life, because you would recognize that every so-called vice has a virtuous flipside, every shadow contains a glint of gold. You would honor your relationships. You would seek your place in the bigger picture. You would empower others. You would look in the mirror and see the cellulite on your thighs, the sag to your breasts, and recognize that you are still innately fascinating; you would recognize that you don’t have to be “born beautiful”, as Diana Vreeland put it, “to be wildly attractive.” (Edith Piaf would agree.)

You would trust yourself.

You would educate your intuition as best you can, and listen to it, and let it lead you, step by step, day by day, even and especially when it takes you into uncharted territory. You would become the ultimate explorer of you. You would tell your story to the world through how you live it, and how you own it.

And this, I would say, is where women are at a disadvantage. We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories, but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else’s Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude. Even the smart, feisty, bookish girl (if she’s not careful) gets cast as the Hermione to someone else’s Harry Potter.

There’s that saying: You have to see it to be it. If you don’t see how you’re entitled to your own Epic Story, your own Big Life, you might just smile and say, That’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll stay here and organize the snack committee. After all, somebody has to.

4

Here’s the thing. We, as women, want to be sexy and beautiful and loved; we want to support and nurture; we would die for our kids without thinking twice. We want to be lovers and mothers and wives and mistresses and some of us make damn fine personal assistants and snack committee organizers and recognize it as good, worthy work that fulfills us.

But kids grow up. Not every marriage works out. Sometimes lovers leave; sometimes we’re the ones doing the leaving. Not to mention that men have this annoying habit of dying before we do.

We want, we need, our own fucking stories.

We want the feminine, but we want the epic feminine. The heroic feminine. The badass feminine. We hear our own call to greatness, and by that I mean: the right to create, to cultivate our own gifts and talents, to pursue mastery, to carve out a place in the world, and lift up the global sisterhood while we’re at it. To taste power for ourselves. To redefine it.

Which is why I don’t think it’s enough to just pat women on the head and say, You’re beautiful just as you are! You’re amazing! You’re fabulous! You are YOU and that’s enough! We encourage women to be “selfish” but act as if that “selfishness” is about holding on to your sanity and taking better care of yourself (…so you can take better care of others).

Women don’t want to feel less-than, but we also don’t want empty lip service. Women want, I think, permission to pursue dreams and goals and greatness of our own, and when I say permission I mean a story that supports us, a story that manifests itself in the social and economic and political structures that makes greatness possible without feeling like you have to sacrifice some or all of your womanhood, or that you’ll get massacred for admitting, out loud, that you have some greatness in you, you just need the time and space and energy, the fierce commitment to your own damn self , in order to bring it out (– and someone else can get the snacks). Women want a grand and inspiring call to action that points the way to a bigger, deeper life, even if it’s still unclear – in the year 2013! – what that kind of badass womanly life is supposed to look like.

Which brings us back to that issue of high self-esteem: important when you have only yourself to find the way, make the way or lead the way.

We need to trust ourselves.

We need to trust each other.

you + your shadow: who is the “necessary opponent” in your life story?

If you don’t have any shadows, you’re not in the light. — Lady GaGa

1

I came across a phrase I liked in John Truby’s excellent THE ANATOMY OF STORY: necessary opponent.

Truby uses it in the context of storytelling, but you could also apply it to life.

In fiction, when you’re thinking up your protagonist, you can’t create him in a vacuum. She exists within – and is defined by – a web of other characters.

And no hero can be a hero without an antagonist.

I’m not exaggerating, writes Truby,

when I say that the trick to defining your hero and figuring out your story is to figure out your opponent. …This relationship determines how the entire drama builds…Structurally the opponent always holds the key, because your hero learns through his opponent. It is only because the opponent is attacking the hero’s great weakness that the hero is forced to deal with it and grow.

In other words, the main character is only as good as the force(s) she battles. Protagonist and antagonist drive each other to increasing levels of greatness.

So the opponent has to be necessary, in that she is the one person in the world who can zero in on the heroine’s weakness.

The heroine must overcome this weakness, learn from it, or be destroyed in some way (end the story at a lower point than when she began).

2

We exert so much energy avoiding conflict — but fiction is all about meaningful conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict, as any writing instructor will tell you. Why? Because meaningful conflict is the crucible that exposes character, boils out the essence and then transforms it. Conflict forces us to grow and change – or die trying (and what is stagnation except a death-in-life?).

And perhaps the reason why human beings have such a driving need for stories – why nature hardwired us this way – is because we look to them to show us how to deal with challenge and change. How to come of age, how to love, be moral, live well and, when the time comes, how to die well. In a conversation with Bill Moyers, the beloved scholar Joseph Campbell explained that all myths are about “the maturation of the individual”. We want to become contributing members to society; we want to grow past our small frightened selves and into a much larger picture. That’s how we find and make meaning. Stories point the way.

3

When I was a teenager I became fascinated with the Dark Knight Returns graphic novels, especially the relationship between Batman and the Joker, how they serve as dark reflections of the other. I always loved that movie cliché where, during the final battle, the bad guy tells the good guy some variation of, “You’re just like me.”

Jungian analysts say that in a dream, every character represents some part of the dreamer. In a story – the fictive dream – characters tend to represent some aspect of the protagonist: who she was, is, or could be.

When antagonist and protagonist compete for a goal that only one can win, it’s not just two individuals battling it out but two opposing sets of values, of living and being, that each represents. How the conflict resolves reflects the writer’s final overall message (otherwise known as a theme).

So, as Truby points out, a human antagonist must double the protagonist in some way. The antagonist is who the protagonist would be if she lost her moral vision. The antagonist is her Shadow: the buried, repressed parts of the personality that the protagonist has sent underground. By dealing with the antagonist, the protagonist is really dealing with the dark qualities of herself. A triumphant protagonist learns how to integrate those qualities, to take what she needs, apply them to her situation, and grow and evolve to higher consciousness.

In life, we are constantly creating, or co-creating, our ongoing life stories, based on how we choose to interpret the world around us, the weight and meaning we assign to events. We tell ourselves a story about who we are, and whatever doesn’t fit that self-definition gets cut off and cast out – and forms our Shadow.

Trapped by our blindspots, the limits of our self-preconceptions, we can’t see our own Shadow until someone else throws it back. They do this when they trigger us, often just by being who they are. We can’t see them clearly. We see instead the Shadow we’re projecting, the qualities in ourselves that we have disowned…but come surfacing back to us when we see them, or think we see them, in the other person.

So maybe that other person becomes our necessary opponent: necessary for us to learn from in order to learn about ourselves – and mature as human beings.

Perhaps the necessary opponent of your life isn’t one person but a series of people with certain traits in common, traits that always trigger you because you haven’t dealt with them in yourself.

Maybe when you learn to love your enemy, you’re learning how to love that shadow aspect of yourself: to find the gold in the darkness, the strength and the wisdom. Maybe that’s why forgiveness is so powerful. In the act of forgiving someone else, you’re forgiving a despised and neglected aspect of yourself. click to tweet

4

We learn to love ourselves through loving other people; we learn to love other people through loving ourselves.

We are tangled up in each other.

We are one.

who is the “necessary opponent” in your life story? ( + why you need her)

If you don’t have any shadows, you’re not in the light. — Lady GaGa

1

I came across a phrase I liked in John Truby’s excellent THE ANATOMY OF STORY: necessary opponent.

Truby uses it in the context of storytelling, but you could also apply it to life.

In fiction, when you’re thinking up your protagonist, you can’t create him in a vacuum. She exists within – and is defined by – a web of other characters.

And no hero can be a hero without an antagonist.

I’m not exaggerating, writes Truby,

when I say that the trick to defining your hero and figuring out your story is to figure out your opponent. …This relationship determines how the entire drama builds…Structurally the opponent always holds the key, because your hero learns through his opponent. It is only because the opponent is attacking the hero’s great weakness that the hero is forced to deal with it and grow.

In other words, the main character is only as good as the force(s) she battles. Protagonist and antagonist drive each other to increasing levels of greatness.

So the opponent has to be necessary, in that she is the one person in the world who can zero in on the heroine’s weakness.

The heroine must overcome this weakness, learn from it, or be destroyed in some way (end the story at a lower point than when she began).

2

We exert so much energy avoiding conflict — but fiction is all about meaningful conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict, as any writing instructor will tell you. Why? Because meaningful conflict is the crucible that exposes character, boils out the essence and then transforms it. Conflict forces us to grow and change – or die trying (and what is stagnation except a death-in-life?).

And perhaps the reason why human beings have such a driving need for stories – why nature hardwired us this way – is because we look to them to show us how to deal with challenge and change. How to come of age, how to love, be moral, live well and, when the time comes, how to die well. In a conversation with Bill Moyers, the beloved scholar Joseph Campbell explained that all myths are about “the maturation of the individual”. We want to become contributing members to society; we want to grow past our small frightened selves and into a much larger picture. That’s how we find and make meaning. Stories point the way.

3

When I was a teenager I became fascinated with the Dark Knight Returns graphic novels, especially the relationship between Batman and the Joker, how they serve as dark reflections of the other. I always loved that movie cliché where, during the final battle, the bad guy tells the good guy some variation of, “You’re just like me.”

Jungian analysts say that in a dream, every character represents some part of the dreamer. In a story – the fictive dream – characters tend to represent some aspect of the protagonist: who she was, is, or could be.

When antagonist and protagonist compete for a goal that only one can win, it’s not just two individuals battling it out but two opposing sets of values, of living and being, that each represents. (Because the characters are similar in so many ways – “you’re just like me” – the ways in which they differ become all the more pronounced.) How the conflict resolves reflects the writer’s final overall message (otherwise known as a theme).

So, as Truby points out, a human antagonist must double the protagonist in some way. Often the antagonist is who the protagonist would be, or still could become, if she lost her moral vision. The antagonist is her Shadow: the buried, repressed parts of the personality that the protagonist has sent underground. By dealing with the antagonist, the protagonist is really dealing with the dark qualities of herself. A triumphant protagonist learns how to integrate those qualities, to take what she needs, apply them to her situation, and grow and evolve to higher consciousness.

In life, we are constantly creating, or co-creating, our ongoing life stories, based on how we choose to interpret the world around us, the weight and meaning we assign to events. We tell ourselves a story about who we are, and whatever doesn’t fit that self-definition gets cut off and cast out – and forms our Shadow.

Trapped by our blindspots, the limits of our self-preconceptions, we can’t see our Shadow until someone else reflects it. They do this when they trigger us, push our buttons, sometimes just by being who they are. When we look at them we can’t see clearly. We see, instead, the Shadow we’re projecting, the qualities in ourselves that we have disowned…but come surfacing back when we see them, or think we see them, in the other person.

So maybe that other person becomes our necessary opponent: necessary for us to learn from in order to learn about ourselves – and mature as human beings.

Perhaps the necessary opponent of your life isn’t one person but a series of people with certain traits in common, traits that always trigger you because you haven’t dealt with them in yourself.

Maybe when you learn to love your enemy, you’re learning how to love that shadow aspect of yourself: to find the gold in the darkness, the strength and the wisdom. Maybe that’s why forgiveness is so powerful: through the act of forgiving someone else, you are forgiving some despised and neglected aspect of yourself.

4

We learn to love ourselves through loving other people; we learn to love other people through loving ourselves.

We are tangled up in each other.

We are one.

KITTENS (flash fiction)

“It’s raining kittens,” said Molly.

He didn’t believe her.

“Look out the window,” said Molly.

A kitten splatted against the glass.

“Holy shit,” said Derrick.

Kittens tumbled onto the driveway, the SUV, the yard, the surviving ones meowing and staggering in the grass. The sky was dark, the sun lost behind furry bodies. Derrick boarded up the windows.

“Must be the apocalypse,” he said.

“I would have expected something else,” Molly said. “Frogs. Locusts. Demons.”

“They might be demonic kittens.”

They listened to the kittens thumping on the roof.

“If it’s the end of the world,” Molly said, “then we should make love.”

He followed her into the bedroom.

Afterwards they watched the news. Kittens were falling on all the major cities. Nobody knew what it meant. Molly’s friend Kim dashed over from next door, holding a platter over her head. It caught three white kittens. Molly put down a dish of milk.

“Maybe it’s some kind of alien attack,” said Derrick.

He was pouring out shots of tequila. It seemed an appropriate response.

“Or terrorists,” Kim said. “It could be terrorists.”

Derrick looked Kim up and down.

They drank. Molly put on some music.

“If it’s the end of the world,” she said, “then we should dance.”

After a while Molly left the room.

Derek moved in. “I’ve always liked you,” he breathed in Kim’s ear.

“I know.”

“I think you’re totally gorgeous.”

“I am.”

He tried to kiss her. She pulled away, but not in time.

“What the hell?” Molly said from the doorway.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” Derrick said.

Kim said, “This is exactly what it looks like.”

“Kim,” Molly whispered.

The two women gazed at each other. An intensity gathered between them.

Molly said, “So which one of us do you want?”

“You.” Kim didn’t even hesitate. “I’ve always wanted you. You know that.”

“Wait a minute,” said Derrick.

“I’m sorry, honey.” Molly went to stand beside Kim. She took Kim’s hand. “I never meant to hurt you. I never intended for you to find out.”

“This is a joke,” said Derrick. “Right?”

Molly said, “The end of the world is no time for jokes.”

A sudden flurry of kittens rattled the windows. Derrick’s hands curled into fists. He forced himself to count to ten.

“And I want to spend the apocalypse with the person I truly love,” Molly added.

Kim beamed.

“Well then,” said Derrick, his eyes moving from one woman to the other. “Any, um, any chance for a threesome?”

Kim said to Molly, “I think it’s time to leave.”

Molly nodded and gathered her things. On their way out the door, Kim stopped in front of Derrick. Her expression was not unkind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not you. It’s me. I don’t find you remotely attractive.”

“Good bye, Derrick,” said Molly. “You were good to me, and I enjoyed having sex with you. I wish you the best.”

He stood by the door and watched them thrash their way through the falling bodies to the SUV. Doors opened and slammed. The vehicle backed out of the driveway, crunching across a carpet of kittens, then turned into the street.

They were gone.

Derrick felt a new aloneness settle over him. He found the other bottle of tequila and sat at the kitchen table. The three white kittens tottered around his feet and mewed for attention. Soon he would get up and check the Internet, search for theories and explanations, see what they were saying on Twitter. People wanted answers. You always wanted answers. But already, nudging the kittens away with his feet and swigging deeply from the bottle, Derek knew that there wouldn’t be any.

photo credit: pasotraspaso via photopin cc