Justine Musk's Blog, page 18

the problem with pink (or: “i am woman, i am badass, hear me roar”)

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. — Maya Angelou

1

I bought a girl pen.

I was curious. I was on a pen-buying binge, on Amazon, when I came across this purple thing with Swarovski crystals that purported to be just for me, because I’m a wo-wo-woman, which I guess means that all the other pens, including the pens I’ve been using all this time, are for men. Good to know.

The pen arrived two days later. I had forgotten I’d ordered it – I forget, it’s what I do — so my first thought upon opening it: What the hell is this?

My second thought: If you saw someone using a pen like this – whipping it out, say, at a boardroom meeting, or a book signing, or a conference – how could you take her seriously? Perhaps she keeps it by her Barbie dolls, her Unicorn posters, her pastel pink notebooks decorated with fairy stickers.

It’s a girly pen. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with girly – except I happen to be a 40 year old woman. The pen’s price tag (34.00) and the description (“The feminine slender body is filled with 160 sparkling crystals, creating magnificent light reflections as you write. It is delivered in a stylish velvet pouch…) would seem to indicate that the pen is not being marketed to my (non-existent) teenage daughter, but to me.

Someone somewhere thought that this pen would resonate with my sense of who I am as a female.

More than that. Marketers don’t try to appeal to who you are, but who you want to be (or who they think you want to be). The product is a promise: by purchasing it, you close the gap between the real and the ideal, the norm and the aspiration.

(…feminine slender body….creating magnificent light reflections…a stylish velvet pouch….)

This pen strikes me as an attempt to take ‘girly’ and upgrade it.

Because apparently that’s what a woman is: a girl with more money to spend on a more sophisticated version of a glitter pen.

Because the symbols we seem to have for femininity – butterflies, fairies, princesses, unicorns, glitter, pink – those symbols for marketers to try and use in their attempt to turn unisex products into ‘for her’ — isn’t for femininity so much as for girlhood.

What kind of symbols could suggest an adult femininity?

An apron? A Porsche? A briefcase? Animal prints? A baby stroller?

2

And many of us never really identified with girl culture in the first place.

I never did. I grew up thinking I had a strong masculine streak – even though I wasn’t a tomboy, even though I was very comfortable in my girlskin, even though, as I got older, I developed a rich, deep, sensual sense of being female that happened to be steeped in books instead of Barbies, black instead of pink, jeans and boots and leather jackets instead of dresses, writing fiction instead of socializing, ambition instead of caretaking, wanderlust instead of baby hunger (the baby hunger came later), hard dance music instead of sensitive singer-songwriters, thrillers instead of chick flicks.

I learned to take a certain pride in this. I learned to distance myself from anything that smacked of the girly-girl, to speak mockingly of mani-pedis and gossip magazines and Lifetime movies and butterfly tattoos and, yes, pink, because these things were weak. To be disdainful of them was to be not weak.

Only when I woke up to what I was doing – buying into a misogynistic contempt for the feminine that remains at the heart of our culture – did I start to look at things differently.

There are so many different ways to express the feminine; the struggle is to not get locked into the limited range of options with which we’re presented. There are so many different shades of pink – including hot pink, which I like to think of as a bold, in-your-face, fuck-you kind of pink — the kind of pink that works for me.

There are so many different shades of meaning. When my website guy presented me with a butterfly (….a butterfly!…) design as my logo, I tamped down my initial resistance and went online to research the symbolism.

Instead of being fluffy, flighty, weak, the butterfly turns out to represent profound changes of the soul. Transformation, metamorphosis, resurrection. A butterfly is fragile yet fierce – Monarchs migrate thousands of miles through all kinds of weather, including ferocious electrical storms, every year. I also started noticing how freaking beautiful they are, how fascinating in their variations. I went from scorning butterfly tattoos to thinking about getting one of my own, tribal and edgy.

And I realized that by turning certain symbols into symbols of girlhood, these butterflies and fairies and unicorns, we’ve drained them of their original mythological power, we’ve made them cute and cuddly, as harmless (and about as interesting) as a watery pastel. We’ve turned them into things you can’t take seriously, because we have a history of refusing to take girls and women seriously. Less than a hundred years ago, women were taken so unseriously that they were not allowed – allowed – to vote. Femininity was regarded as inherently childish.

But beneath that flighty, fluffy, pastel-pink version of ‘femininity’, there’s something much deeper, richer, complex, bold, fierce. I’ll take my shades of meaning from the femininity of the goddess Athena, who stood for justice and wisdom and achievement. Or from Persephone, who overcame the trauma of rape to become the freaking Queen of the Underworld and a guide of lost souls. Or – skipping over to another culture – from Kali, who represents life and death, truth and transcendence, an ability to cut through the bull.

Here’s a little bit about Kali:

“Kali’s fierce form is strewed with awesome symbols. Her black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing and transcendental nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: “Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her”. Her nudity is primeval, fundamental, and transparent like Nature — the earth, sea, and sky. Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or “false consciousness.” Kali’s garland of fifty human heads that stands for the fifty letters in the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes infinite knowledge.

Her girdle of severed human hands signifies work and liberation from the cycle of karma. Her white teeth show her inner purity, and her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature — “her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world’s ‘flavors’.” Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness and the eight bonds that bind us.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali (‘Kala’ in Sanskrit means time)….

Kali’s proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or “Pancha Mahabhuta” come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. The reclined Shiva lying prostrate under the feet of Kali suggests that without the power of Kali (Shakti), Shiva is inert.”

Without the power of Kali/Shakti, the great god Shiva is inert.

Uh-huh.

Slap some pink on that.

3

This reminds me of something my therapist once told me, which I didn’t really understand at the time. I was about to turn 40. She told me that I was someone who was going to “be a woman”; she meant this as a high compliment.

“In this culture,” she said, “every female gets to be a girl. But not every girl gets to become a woman.”

This might be because, according to the bulk of pop culture, most of the female species seems to mdisappear around this time, whisked off to the faraway land of wrinkle cream and mom jeans. When it comes to a woman’s aesthetic sensibility, a woman’s sense of who she can be or still wants to become (other than a good wife and mother) the culture shows a distinct lack of imagination.

So the powers-that-be take a pen, or a car, and turn it pink, and offer it to us as some essential sign of who we are. That’s how they see us, regardless of how we see ourselves.

My own brand of femininity includes pink – hot pink – but also black and midnight blue and deep purple. It includes tigers and disco balls and snake rings (which I collect), tribal butterfly tattoos, empathy and wisdom and the power to inspire. It includes lots and lots of books. It recognizes the strength and stamina inherent in all women, the ability to, as Liz Taylor once put it, “pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.”

So I would say to those marketers who think they know me, who think I want to spend thirty five dollars for a glitter pen with a “feminine, slender body”:

You know who I want to be? A fucking badass. A very…womanly…badass.

Market to that.

happy halloween: a soul cake for you

Two of my favorite words are ‘soul’ and ‘cake’, so imagine my delight when I was reading about Halloween (*cough*procrastination*cough*) and came across the concept of soul cakes.

Once upon a time, boys and girls, on the night known as Hallowe’en, people handed out soul cakes – or, more simply, ‘souls’ – to children and the poor who went from door to door, singing songs and making prayers for the dead.

When you ate a cake, you saved a soul.

You released it from Purgatory.

Halloween is all about doors swinging open that under normal circumstances remain firmly shut. The doors of strangers; the doors of Purgatory; the doors between the living and the dead.

The rules of life are suspended.

Small lords and ladies of misrule prowl the streets as ninjas and wizards and robots and vampires. It’s a time to shrug off old identities and try on something new, even forbidden, and maybe in that space between the old and the new, what is permitted and what is taboo –

– you can let something go. You can release it.

After three years in a romantic relationship with a very lovely man, I am single again. I am slipping back into the skin of a single person.

The entity that used to be Us is peacefully deceased, and I’ve been in mourning.

When something in your life comes to an end, the challenge is to face forward. Give the past the respect it deserves, yes, honor and cherish it. But stay too long — reliving memories, getting tangled in what-ifs — and you’re caught in a Purgatory of your own design.

Maybe if I’ve learned anything in the last three or four years, it’s the importance of letting…things…go. What you hold onto, keep trapped inside you, turns against you: a healthy anger turns to poison, a lost love becomes demonic. Only when you let the experience rise through you – and let yourself feel every fucking feeling that attends it – can you then purge that energy from your system, release into the world, for nature to recycle into something fresh.

And in its wake, you create a sacred emptiness: so that some new beauty may enter, some new thing may begin.

Halloween celebrates that liminal place, the in-between: you stand on a threshold between worlds. We celebrate the dead, which is also to celebrate the living — being alive — this life, right here right now.

We look into the dark, we find what’s lost, we let go.

We let go.

Here. Have a cake.

The soul you free might be your own.

Jane Goodall, too many choices + the art of giving yourself permission (…to be a badass)

“We don’t get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.”

― Kami Garcia

1

I love how feminism is often blamed for giving women too many choices.

Like this is a bad thing.

Men, it should be noted, have rather as many career options as women, and yet you don’t see Kevin or Brandon or Ted throwing up his hands and saying, Damn you, patriarchy! So many choices! Shoot me now!

(Men, it should also be noted, still don’t have to ‘choose’ between family and a high-powered career in the same way women do.)

I’m not denying the paradox of choice, wherein too many choices = overwhelm = paralysis (and no choice at all, which in itself is a kind of choice, but nevermind).

I’m just wondering if the problem isn’t something else entirely: a failure to give yourself permission

(and men, it should be said, deal with this too).

I was struck by an example from the book UNDECIDED, which theorizes that the young women of today can’t commit to a single career path because they’re too afraid of making the wrong choice (and forever dooming themselves). The book discusses the plight of Hannah, who bounced in and out of the fashion industry. But here’s the thing: one of the first things we learn about Hannah is that

“Travel is all she’s ever wanted to do – especially after spending her entire junior year of college abroad. But back then, she says, ‘I didn’t think there was any possible way that it could be a career…My parents are conservative; me and my sister were raised, like, you find a good job – you have one job after college, and that’s all you do.’”

After she quits her first career in fashion – her heart and soul weren’t in it – she starts exploring job possibilities in ecotourism, voluntourism, cultural exchange programs. Which is probably what she should have been doing in the beginning –

– if only she had given herself permission to do it.

2

I don’t believe that we – and this holds true for both genders – have as many choices as we seem to like to think.

We are born into a particular place and time with a particular set of gifts and limitations.

The challenge isn’t to pluck the best career out of the air, but to learn yourself from the inside out: to know your gifts and accept your limitations and shape your life accordingly.

The challenge is to ask yourself, How can I best serve the world, create value? And then, through time and experience, work out your answer –

while staring down all those voices you’ve internalized from childhood about who you are (and aren’t) and what you should (and should not) be doing.

Chances are the answers to the questions you’re asking yourself – what am I good at, what are my interests – manifested themselves in childhood. They just weren’t recognized as such. You might have been swayed away from them – you can’t make a career out of a passion for travel! – and trained to dismiss them as indulgences, childhood fancies, wastes of time.

3

Jane, what are you doing in the chicken coop again? What kind of girl spends hours hunkered down just to watch a hen lay an egg? You’ll never find a real career that way – or, more importantly, a husband! For crying out loud, learn to type!

Except this is not what her mother told Jane Goodall upon discovering Jane’s fascination with nature and her ability to observe it. Jane’s mother probably couldn’t have known that Jane would make her name studying animals in the wild and revolutionizing the way we think about them. But she identified what it was that made Jane special. She also reflected it back to her so that Jane could see it for what it was, and explore how and where it intersected with the world. This enabled her to develop mastery and build a career.

More than a career: a calling.

As a result, I doubt that Jane Goodall ever had to ask permission to be uniquely who she was, doing uniquely what it is that she can do.

What is it that you’re not doing – in your work, in your life – because you feel you need permission? If someone had given you that permission as a youngster, what do you think you’d be doing now?

Who do you think you would be?

Do you think it’s too late?

why ambition + motherhood go hand-in-hand

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Once, some years ago, I was driving home with my then-mother-in-law when I opened up to her about my dreams as a writer, the books I felt I had in me.

Later, it filtered back to me that she had gone to my then-husband and expressed concern about my ability to be a mother.

“Justine is too ambitious,” she said.

What I find interesting – looking back on this now – is that, in fact, I was not at my best: I was a bit lost, a bit broken, and in need of some help (which I got). But when it came to my ability to be fully present for my five kids (twins and triplets), my mother-in-law didn’t think in terms of postpartum depression, or the wear and tear on a body that had been through a series of IVF treatments, three C-sections, and abdominal surgery to repair a massive hernia.

She didn’t question the nonstop whirlwind lifestyle, or the kind of stress my then-husband might be bringing home from his dayjob of running two companies and the impact this might have on the marriage, or the impact that a deteriorating marriage might have on me.

She didn’t wonder about the psychological overwhelm of finding yourself the mother of five children in less than five years.

Nor did she seem to think about the death of my first child – at ten weeks from SIDS when I was 29 – and how the trauma of that experience, as well as the grievous struggle to make some sense of it, might impact my relationships with the children I have now.

The problem, as she saw it, was my ambition.

I don’t write this to take aim at the woman. She was only reflecting a belief in the culture-at-large: that you can nurture your ambition, or your children, but not both.

As this blogger puts it, struggling to reconcile the side of her that loves to mother with the side of her that yearns for achievement:

“It’s not about trying to ‘have it all’. As a grown-up, I am aware that I cannot be a writer, teacher, Solid Gold dancer, actress, shop owner and the kind of mother I want to be, all at the same time.

“But I can acknowledge the two different sides of me in whatever way feels right, right now…

“I don’t have to apologize for being equally drawn to baking cookies and building my blog. I don’t have to pretend that I work to escape diaper changes and dishes, or only because ‘I have to.’ It’s perfectly OK to be fulfilled both by motherhood and by outside work.”



Notice that this blogger isn’t talking about the practical, everyday struggle of combining work and parenting. She’s talking about the struggle to combine motherhood with the fact that she wants to work….without feeling the need to apologize for it, as if she’s somehow defective as a woman.

I was reading PERFECT MADNESS: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety when the author, Judith Warner, referenced another woman, an anthropologist named Sarah Hrdy who wrote a book called MOTHER NATURE.

Hrdy wanted to know if maternity and ambition were naturally intended to be so….separate.

Hrdy noticed that our female primate relatives manage to provide for their offspring and nurture them with hands-on care. Our female ancestors in the Pleistocene era carried their babies as they foraged or gathered firewood. For them, work and mothering seemed to come together naturally.

And what Hardy realized was this:

“High-status female primates ate. Low-status female primates were eaten. Or were chased away from food. Or saw their babies eaten by other females. And so primate mothers, in order to keep their children alive, had to be ambitious. They had to secure ‘status’ for themselves and their offspring so that they’d have access to fought-over resources like food and shelter.”

A female’s ambitious nature, Hrdy saw, helped her children survive and as a result

“was the ultimate form of mother care.”



Today, we’re still struggling for limited resources, whether it’s money or daycare or the right organic foods or the right preschools. We’re still hardwired to provide for our kids – acquiring the status and resources that will enable them to survive and thrive. Warner writes:

“Which means that ‘natural’ motherhood today should know no conflict between providing for our children (i.e. ‘working’) and nurturing them (i.e. ‘being a mom’). Both are part of our evolutionary heritage; both are equally ‘child-centered’ imperatives….

“By putting the two in conflict – by insisting on the incompatibility of work and motherhood – our culture does violence to mothers, splitting them, unnaturally, within themselves….

“’The conflict…is not between maternity and ambition,’” Hrdy writes, “’but between the needs of infants and the way a woman’s ambition plays out in modern workplaces.’”

In other words, the culture doesn’t insist on a separation of maternity and ambition because that is the natural order of things. We’re trained to believe — or feel on a visceral level — that maternity and ambition must be separate only because the culture has structured it that way. And this damages us.

Interesting.

the art of being an ambitious female — + a mother

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Once, some years ago, I was driving home with my then-mother-in-law when I opened up to her about my dreams as a writer, the books I felt I had in me.

Later, it filtered back to me that she had gone to my then-husband and expressed concern about my ability to be a mother.

“Justine is too ambitious,” she said.

What I find interesting – looking back on this now – is that, in fact, I was not at my best: I was a bit lost, a bit broken, and in need of some help (which I got). But when it came to my ability to be fully present for my five kids (twins and triplets), my mother-in-law didn’t think in terms of postpartum depression, or the wear and tear on a body that had been through a series of IVF treatments, three C-sections, and abdominal surgery to repair a massive hernia.

She didn’t question the nonstop whirlwind lifestyle, or the kind of stress my then-husband might be bringing home from his dayjob of running two companies and the impact this might have on the marriage, or the impact that a deteriorating marriage might have on me.

She didn’t wonder about the psychological overwhelm of finding yourself the mother of five children in less than five years.

Nor did she seem to think about the death of my first child – at ten weeks from SIDS when I was 29 – and how the trauma of that experience, as well as the grievous struggle to make some sense of it, might impact my relationships with the children I have now.

The problem, as she saw it, was my ambition.

I don’t write this to take aim at the woman. She was only reflecting a belief in the culture-at-large: that you can nurture your ambition, or your children, but not both.

As this blogger puts it, struggling to reconcile the side of her that loves to mother with the side of her that yearns for achievement:

“It’s not about trying to ‘have it all’. As a grown-up, I am aware that I cannot be a writer, teacher, Solid Gold dancer, actress, shop owner and the kind of mother I want to be, all at the same time.

“But I can acknowledge the two different sides of me in whatever way feels right, right now…

“I don’t have to apologize for being equally drawn to baking cookies and building my blog. I don’t have to pretend that I work to escape diaper changes and dishes, or only because ‘I have to.’ It’s perfectly OK to be fulfilled both by motherhood and by outside work.”



Notice that this blogger isn’t talking about the practical, everyday struggle of combining work and parenting. She’s talking about the struggle to combine motherhood with the fact that she wants to work….without feeling the need to apologize for it, as if she’s somehow defective as a woman.

I was reading PERFECT MADNESS: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety when the author, Judith Warner, referenced another woman, an anthropologist named Sarah Hrdy who wrote a book called MOTHER NATURE.

Hrdy wanted to know if maternity and ambition were naturally intended to be so….separate.

Hrdy noticed that our female primate relatives manage to provide for their offspring and nurture them with hands-on care. Our female ancestors in the Pleistocene era carried their babies as they foraged or gathered firewood. For them, work and mothering seemed to come together naturally.

And what Hardy realized was this:

“High-status female primates ate. Low-status female primates were eaten. Or were chased away from food. Or saw their babies eaten by other females. And so primate mothers, in order to keep their children alive, had to be ambitious. They had to secure ‘status’ for themselves and their offspring so that they’d have access to fought-over resources like food and shelter.”

A female’s ambitious nature, Hrdy saw, helped her children survive and as a result

“was the ultimate form of mother care.”



Today, we’re still struggling for limited resources, whether it’s money or daycare or the right organic foods or the right preschools. We’re still hardwired to provide for our kids – acquiring the status and resources that will enable them to survive and thrive. Warner writes:

“Which means that ‘natural’ motherhood today should know no conflict between providing for our children (i.e. ‘working’) and nurturing them (i.e. ‘being a mom’). Both are part of our evolutionary heritage; both are equally ‘child-centered’ imperatives….

“By putting the two in conflict – by insisting on the incompatibility of work and motherhood – our culture does violence to mothers, splitting them, unnaturally, within themselves….

“’The conflict…is not between maternity and ambition,’” Hrdy writes, “’but between the needs of infants and the way a woman’s ambition plays out in modern workplaces.’”

In other words, the culture doesn’t insist on a separation of maternity and ambition because that is the natural order of things. We’re trained to believe — or feel on a visceral level — that maternity and ambition must be separate only because the culture has structured it that way. And this damages us.

Interesting.

the art of being an ambitious female — and a mother

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Once, some years ago, I was driving home with my then-mother-in-law when I opened up to her about my dreams as a writer, the books I felt I had in me.

Later, it filtered back to me that she had gone to my then-husband and expressed concern about my ability to be a mother.

“Justine is too ambitious,” she said.

What I find interesting – looking back on this now – is that, in fact, I was not at my best: I was a bit lost, a bit broken, and in need of some help (which I got). But when it came to my ability to be fully present for my five kids (twins and triplets), my mother-in-law didn’t think in terms of postpartum depression, or the wear and tear on a body that had been through a series of IVF treatments, three C-sections, and abdominal surgery to repair a massive hernia.

She didn’t question the nonstop whirlwind lifestyle, or the kind of stress my then-husband might be bringing home from his dayjob of running two companies and the impact this might have on the marriage, or the impact that a deteriorating marriage might have on me.

She didn’t wonder about the psychological overwhelm of finding yourself the mother of five children in less than five years.

Nor did she seem to think about the death of my first child – at ten weeks from SIDS when I was 29 – and how the trauma of that experience, as well as the grievous struggle to make some sense of it, might impact my relationships with the children I have now.

The problem, as she saw it, was my ambition.

I don’t write this to take aim at the woman. She was only reflecting a belief in the culture-at-large: that you can nurture your ambition, or your children, but not both.

As this blogger puts it, struggling to reconcile the side of her that loves to mother with the side of her that yearns for achievement:

“It’s not about trying to ‘have it all’. As a grown-up, I am aware that I cannot be a writer, teacher, Solid Gold dancer, actress, shop owner and the kind of mother I want to be, all at the same time.

“But I can acknowledge the two different sides of me in whatever way feels right, right now…

“I don’t have to apologize for being equally drawn to baking cookies and building my blog. I don’t have to pretend that I work to escape diaper changes and dishes, or only because ‘I have to.’ It’s perfectly OK to be fulfilled both by motherhood and by outside work.”



Notice that this blogger isn’t talking about the practical, everyday struggle of combining work and motherhood. She’s talking about the struggle to combine motherhood with the fact that she wants to work….without feeling the need to apologize for it, as if she’s somehow defective as a woman.

I was reading PERFECT MADNESS: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety when the author, Judith Warner, referenced another woman, an anthropologist named Sarah Hrdy who wrote a book called MOTHER NATURE.

Hrdy wanted to know if maternity and ambition were naturally intended to be so….separate.

Hrdy noticed that our female primate relatives manage to provide for their offspring and nurture them with hands-on care. Our female ancestors in the Pleistocene era carried their babies as they foraged or gathered firewood. For them, work and mothering seemed to come together naturally.

And what Hardy realized was this:

“High-status female primates ate. Low-status female primates were eaten. Or were chased away from food. Or saw their babies eaten by other females. And so primate mothers, in order to keep their children alive, had to be ambitious. They had to secure ‘status’ for themselves and their offspring so that they’d have access to fought-over resources like food and shelter.”

A female’s ambition, Hrdy saw, helped her children survive and as a result

“was the ultimate form of mother care.”



Today, we’re still struggling for limited resources, whether it’s money or daycare or the right organic foods or the right preschools. We’re still hardwired to provide for our kids – acquiring the status and resources that will enable them to survive and thrive. Warner writes:

“Which means that ‘natural’ motherhood today should know no conflict between providing for our children (i.e. ‘working’) and nurturing them (i.e. ‘being a mom’). Both are part of our evolutionary heritage; both are equally ‘child-centered’ imperatives….

“By putting the two in conflict – by insisting on the incompatibility of work and motherhood – our culture does violence to mothers, splitting them, unnaturally, within themselves….

“’The conflict…is not between maternity and ambition,’” Hrdy writes, “’but between the needs of infants and the way a woman’s ambition plays out in modern workplaces.’”

In other words, the culture doesn’t insist on a separation of maternity and ambition because that is the natural order of things. We’re trained to believe — or feel on a visceral level — that maternity and ambition must be separate only because the culture has structured it that way. And this damages us.

Interesting.

25 Badass Ways to Say No (Poster)

Download the printable poster here.

Download the printable poster here.

one cool way to figure out what your badass life is about

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dream of meeting your heart’s longing. — Oriah

1

Here’s a neat little exercise to help you state your life purpose.

It’s called, wittily enough, the Purpose Statement.

Although it’s always been important for us humans — pattern-seeking creatures that we are — to use purpose to put meaning into our lives, it’s increasingly important for us to use purpose just to keep our damn sanity.

We lead fragmented lives. We belong not just to one tribe, but many; we cycle through different roles in the course of a day; our identity is a bright, shifting, quicksilver thing. We contain multitudes. We try on different careers. We develop portfolio careers. We build distinct personal brands –

(did you just roll your eyes at that?)

– through a synthesis of skills and interests that sets us apart. As writers and other creative types we have to figure out how to market ourselves in a way we can tolerate and maybe even enjoy. We have to create a platform along with the work, that supports and illuminates the work — but also provides value in itself.

That’s a lot to hold together.

And if the center cannot hold, all we get is disconnection and chaos.

And the world comes at us like fans mobbing a celebrity: beeping and honking and yanking on us, pulling us this way and that, thrusting stuff in our faces to look at or sign or buy or buy into or tweet or reinvent or evangelize or watch or download or answer or believe. Our attention is as limited as our time. Everybody wants a piece. It’s so easy to spend it so carelessly, it streams out through cupped hands like melting snow. It’s so easy to spin around looking at all these different directions only to take no direction at all.

Let’s not do that.

Uncovering your purpose statement – you don’t write it so much as unearth it – is like locating your north star. It’s the sign with an arrow pointing THIS WAY. The people you meet, the choices you face, the options you consider: you can hold them up to the light of that statement, see who is going in your direction and what will help you get there.

It’s the magic thread that sews your life together.

It’s the oomph that gets you out of bed in the morning (or afternoon or night, depending on the hours you keep). It’s the superhero x-ray glasses that allow you to see through all the mundane daily stuff to a deeper, richer vision.

It’s the lemon zest of your freakin’ soul.

2

I took this from the book TRAIN YOUR BRAIN FOR SUCCESS by Roger Seip who took it in turn from a guy named Kevin McCarthy. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks question that seems simpler than it is. You might want to take a tip from Steve Pavlina and keep answering and answering and answering the question until you hit on the thing that sends shivers down your spine and a fat YES from your heart.

The first blank gets a verb.

The second blank gets a noun. Or possibly an adjective.

The only rules are:

It must make sense to you.

It must inspire you.

It should not depend on anyone other than you; your purpose should remain your purpose no matter what anyone else does or doesn’t do.

Here it is:

I exist to serve by _________ing ____________.



Some real-life examples:

I exist to serve by bringing joy.

I exist to serve by teaching life’s lessons.

I exist to serve by being real.

I exist to serve by expanding horizons.



I’m still playing around with the exercise, but I came up with:

I exist to serve by delivering soul.

This works for me because of what ‘soul’ means to me: a mash-up of meaning, emotion, essence, empathy, inspiration, wisdom, transcendence, love, authenticity. Soul is transformative. As a fiction writer, I track the transformation of my characters and what that means to the story. As a blogger and perpetual student of life (and stuff), I’m interested in a different kind of transformation. Either way, I want to go there. Strip it bare. Get at the root. Explore the human condition in my own way, as deeply as I can, through story and language. I want to take the top of your head off and show you epic shit. I want to crack you open and throw you into the light – and sometimes it’s a dark light, for darkness has gifts of its own.

And you?

Share below!

one way to figure out what your badass life is about

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dream of meeting your heart’s longing. — Oriah

1

Here’s a neat little exercise to help you state your life purpose.

It’s called, wittily enough, the Purpose Statement.

Although it’s always been important for us humans, pattern-seeking creatures that we are, to use purpose to put meaning into our lives, it’s increasingly important for us to use purpose just to keep our damn sanity.

We lead fragmented lives. We belong not just to one tribe, but many; we cycle through different roles in the course of a day; our identity is a bright, shifting, quicksilver thing. We contain multitudes. We try on different careers. We develop portfolio careers. We build distinct personal brands –

(did you just roll your eyes at that?)

– through a synthesis of skills and interests that sets us apart. As writers and other creative types we have to figure out how to market ourselves in a way we can tolerate and maybe even enjoy. We have to create a platform along with the work, that supports and illuminates the work — but also provides value in itself.

That’s a lot to hold together.

And if the center cannot hold, all we get is disconnection and chaos.

And the world comes at us like fans mobbing a celebrity: beeping and honking and yanking on us, pulling us this way and that, thrusting stuff in our faces to look at or sign or buy or buy into or tweet or reinvent or evangelize or watch or record or answer or believe. Our attention is as limited and precious as our time. Everybody wants a piece. It’s so easy to spend it so carelessly, it streams out through cupped hands like melting snow. It’s so easy to spin around looking at all these different directions only to take no direction at all.

Let’s not do that.

Uncovering your purpose statement – you don’t write it so much as unearth it – is like locating your north star. It’s the sign with an arrow pointing THIS WAY. The people you meet, the choices you face, the options you consider: you can hold them up to the light of that statement, see who is going in your direction and what will help you get there.

It’s the magic thread that sews your life together.

It’s the oomph that gets you out of bed in the morning (or afternoon or night, depending on the hours you keep). It’s the superhero x-ray glasses that allow you to see through all the mundane daily stuff to a deeper, richer vision.

It’s the lemon zest of your freakin’ soul.

2

I took this from the book TRAIN YOUR BRAIN FOR SUCCESS by Roger Seip who took it in turn from a guy named Kevin McCarthy. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks question that seems a lot more simple than it is. You might want to take a tip from Steve Pavlina and keep answering and answering and answering the question until you hit on the thing that sends shivers down your spine and a fat YES up from your heart.

The first blank gets a verb.

The second blank gets a noun. Or possibly an adjective.

The only rules are:

It must make sense to you.

It must inspire you.

It should not depend on anyone other than you; your purpose should remain your purpose no matter what anyone else does or doesn’t do.

Here it is:

I exist to serve by _________ing ____________.



Some real-life examples:

I exist to serve by bringing joy.

I exist to serve by teaching life’s lessons.

I exist to serve by being real.

I exist to serve by expanding horizons.



I’m still playing around with the exercise, but I came up with:

I exist to serve by delivering soul.

This works for me because of what ‘soul’ means to me: a mash-up of meaning, emotion, essence, empathy, inspiration, wisdom, transcendence, love, authenticity. Soul is transformative. As a fiction writer, I track the transformation of my characters and what that means to the story. As a blogger and perpetual student of life (and stuff), I’m interested in a different kind of transformation. Either way, I want to go there. Strip it bare. Get at the root. Explore the human condition in my own way, as deeply as I can, through story and language. I want to take the top of your head off and show you epic shit. I want to crack you open and throw you into the light – and sometimes it’s a dark light, for darkness has gifts of its own.

And you?

Share below!

why the pursuit of your dream is your sacred obligation

Like the sun, like the light, like the flame

Like the storm I burn through everything

Like a bomb in the night, like a train

Thunder rings through the hills, let it rain

I’m a sinner, I like it that way.

– from the song “I’m a Sinner” by Madonna

I saw Madonna in concert the other night at the Staples Center in downtown LA. At one point she did a strip tease for the audience and presented us with her elegantly sculpted backside.

Her body is ripped.

Due partly to her age – at 54, the woman is my hero – her body is a spectacle in and of itself. She held the pose, breathing hard from dancing, layered in a thin sheen of sweat, knowing she had the full collective gaze of a sold-out stadium. A wave of cameraphones lifted through the air snapping photos of her — and the name written in large black letters across her back:

MALALA.

Malala Yousafzai, the 14 year old girl in Pakistan who spoke out for the female right to an education. A representative of the Taliban stopped her school bus and got onboard. He asked for Malala. He singled her out from the other children. He shot her three times in the head and neck.

She’s in critical condition.

She was so dangerous that they felt they had to kill her.

I wish I could go back through my childhood and adolescence and erase every grumble, every whine, every complaint I ever made about homework, or deadlines, or getting up early to spend my day in summer school.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was doing something sacred: I was getting educated.

I am a mother, and I was a wife, but I also get to lay claim to an identity that both enfolds and goes beyond that: my personhood, my me-ness, my place in the world as Justine Musk.

My place in the world as a woman.



I can pursue my dreams knowing I don’t risk my life to do so.

Chances are, so can you.

As women, we eye ambition with distrust, we equate it with the advancement of self at the cost of those we care for, the relationships we nurture and support. To take time to do creative work, pursue mastery, fulfill a dream, chase self-actualization as a person and not just as wife and mother – so often all of that gets dumped at the wayside – selfish, selfish, selfish. As bright and educated as we may be, it’s still the role of the woman to support the dreams of the man, not so much vice versa.

And yet.

If you had the cure for cancer, would you keep it to yourself, or would you share it with the world?

Wouldn’t you feel obligated to share it? Wouldn’t you feel – even if you’re not religious – that you had a sacred obligation to do so?

I’m fascinated with the idea of dharma. Stephen Cope writes:

“Dharma means [for our purposes in this book] primarily ‘vocation’ or ‘sacred duty’. It means, most of all – and in all cases – truth. Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility – this dharma – and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.”

His own idiosyncratic dharma.

Or hers.

Your dharma involves identifying and cultivating your natural talents. It involves the pursuit of mastery, of deep and focused attention on one thing; in coming to know, truly know, that thing. For in penetrating the essential nature of it, you come to know the world.

It also involves locating that place where your gifts intersect with the times so that the world might benefit. Because your talents don’t belong to you. They belong in service of the world. You are merely the steward, to activate those gifts and provide them in whatever way the times call them forth.

In other words, it is selfish to keep your gifts to yourself: unknown, undeveloped, buried inside you. Your gift might not cure cancer, but somewhere, in some way, it eases a pain, or solves a problem, or brings light to darkness, or cracks open a false self, or exposes a lie, or generates hope.

What if the dream you harbor inside of yourself as some kind of selfish dirty ambition…was actually your sacred obligation, not to yourself but to the world?

This is how we change the world: not by turning inward to self and family, disconnecting from the larger picture to chase perfections that probably aren’t possible anyway, thinking that everything is our responsibility, our fault, up to us alone, rugged individuals that we are.

As we stand alone.

As we keep our voices and our stories and our selves – to ourselves.

Meanwhile the world gets crazier everyday. It also gets smaller, bringing that craziness closer and closer to our own backyards – if you haven’t found it there already.

What if it’s time to look up and outward, to reach out to other, to take seriously this idea of global sisterhood instead of rolling our eyes at it? What if it’s our sacred obligation to put our gifts to use in the world, to turn ourselves into dharma warriors, to recognize the right that every female has to an education, a dream, an identity of her goddamn own?

That’s not crazy. That’s not selfish. That’s not entitled.

It’s by bringing our full mastery of our talents to the world, through self-actualizing, that we transcend ourselves and fight for girls like Malala. It’s through what we do, the example we set, the way we shift power, redefine the nature of it. The power to motivate and inspire instead of the power of tyranny, of brutality, of assholes who board school buses and single out fourteen-year-old girls and shoot them in the head

– and do it in the name of God.

Take the time – make the time – to pursue your dream today, even if it’s just for fifteen minutes, even if it’s just one small action, even (or especially) if your dream is to come up with a dream that is truly of you and for you and belonging to you.

Do it for Malala. Because she can’t.