Justine Musk's Blog, page 5

one of the best pieces of creative advice I ever got

I like this quote from soul-poet David Whyte:

“All good work should have an edge of life and death to it. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.”

One of the best pieces of creative advice I ever got was in relation to the question of why you start a project at all, especially something as time-intensive and soul-consuming as a novel. “Will writing this book change your life?” the teacher asked me. “If the answer is no, then that’s not your real baby.”

Note that he was referring to the process, not the end product. He didn’t mean change-your-life in the way of accolades and Oprah and movie rights (although that wouldn’t suck). He meant what David meant: it should have an edge of life and death.

Which sounds dramatic, but here, the death is symbolic. (One hopes.)

I once had a dream in which I was beheaded – too many episodes of THE TUDORS – and as the blade went painlessly through my neck I felt myself leap into a different state of being. It’s the only dream I can remember that had me die, and the message seemed clear: I was entering a time of transformation. I would throw off one life, one identity, and be reborn into another.

The creative process changes you. Even as you’re making the thing, the thing is making – or remaking – you, and not just because it’s turning you into the kind of artist who is capable of making that thing in the first place. The creative process hijacks your brain in the most wonderful way and takes you to flow, where you can suddenly access new parts of yourself.

You go into the dark.

What you find isn’t likely to be nice, or polite, or pretty (your flow-brain doesn’t care), or else you would never have exiled it there in the first place. But by bringing it up into consciousness, and working with it — you reclaim it. It becomes part of your daylight self. It expands you. Do this everyday, over months or years, and at the end of the process you are not who you were at the beginning. You walked the blade. You opened yourself up to it. You were willing to bleed.

Art involves a blood sacrifice.

You need to create out of what scares you, what hurts, what makes you ache with longing, what makes you cry; I don’t know why it has to be this way, but if you can’t move yourself, if you can’t shake your own soul to pieces, how can you expect to connect with the inner lives of others?

But if I write from the depth of myself, aren’t I being narcissistic? (Women ask this, not men. It’s the way we’ve been trained.) Is anybody really going to care? (Depends on your craft and technique.) What will my friends/parents/kids think? (Wrong question.)

We live, for the most part, behind masks. The great paradox of modern life: we want to stay concealed and safe, but also to be seen, recognized, and truly known. We want our freedom, but also to connect. We want to be individuals, but also to lose ourselves in something bigger, greater.

The most powerful creatives speak to the life behind the mask. They illuminate and reveal. Looking or watching or listening or reading is a private and solitary activity that allows us to touch the minds of others. Our lives weave together into one; our faces are different, yet the same.

Then the masks go back on; everyday life resumes: the normal, quotidian, workaday world that we find so many little ways to numb ourselves against. But the edge is there, waiting for us to go back out on it. It forces us to be alive to the moment, see the world around us, and create from a place of vulnerability. It gives us revelations and gifts. We turn around and pass them to others.

finding the edges in creativity + life

Creativity comes from limits, not freedom. — Jon Stewart

1

Just recently, in a writing workshop led by Dani Shapiro in Positano (as in Amalfi Coast, Italy — it didn’t suck — ) we had a conversation about edges.

Dani was talking about defining a creative project – in this particular case, a memoir. When you can write about anything and everything, you need to find a space in-between: the points where your project begins and ends.

In the case of Dani’s memoir SLOW MOTION, she decided to write about one particular year in her life. Everything she wanted to communicate, she pulled through that period of time narrated in her memoir. If the material didn’t fit inside those edges, it got cut. By making the conscious decision to focus on that year, she took a massive amount of potential material and found the shape and meaning inside it. Otherwise she would have been left with a sprawling amorphous mass that not only would have lacked structure, but also a point (not to mention a publisher).

When she chose her edges, she framed her project. She knew what to put in – and just as importantly, what to take or leave out.

There are many different ways a memoirist can find her edges. She can focus on a theme (her struggle with alcoholism) – or a place (Paris, where she moved after she quit her soul-killing corporate job in New York) – or a character (her gifted and self-destructive best friend, disfigured after childhood cancer took part of her jaw).

But one way or another, she has to locate those limits.

She has to decide what the story is not. And then subtract accordingly.

2

I’m fascinated with concepts like minimalism, essentialism, the nature of elegance itself. When you carve away excess, you are left with the truth of what the thing actually is, what it does, who it serves. The meaning becomes very clear.

There is no place to hide.

Which is maybe why we’re so much more comfortable adding things instead of taking things away. You can barricade yourself inside the excess; you can fling that excess around and confuse people with it and act like you know what you’re talking about when you actually have no idea. You can remain vague. There’s a certain comfort in vagueness, in blurred edges, in everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. It feels like you’re keeping options open. You don’t have to commit, or work out the kind of clarity about identity and purpose that elegance requires. You can keep your closet as cluttered as you like – after all, just because you’ve never worn that purple leisure suit doesn’t mean you won’t need it later. (Besides, it was expensive!).

Living like this feels easy, and safe, and maybe it is. (If you don’t have edges, you don’t have to worry about falling off of them.)

But it’s not art.

It’s just a mess.

3

Making a clear, conscious, deliberate choice about something….is hard work. You have to sort through and prioritize and evaluate, decide what to keep and what to throw out, and then live out the consequences of those decisions. You have to trust yourself.

There’s that anecdote about Michelangelo and his block of marble. He looked at that shapeless mass and saw – inside it – the edges of David. He didn’t carve David so much as carve away everything that wasn’t David. He revealed the meaning by subtracting what had none.

We use the power of choice to sculpt our lives. We look at the raw material we have to work with, see the art of the possible, and enact a series of decisions to slowly reveal that meaning, that beauty. We locate our edges….and respect them, and honor them, and in so doing force others to honor them. Our tools include the word no, and the concept of healthy boundaries.

Without those tools – without feeling like we have the right to use them – the essence of who we are and what we’re capable of becoming remains obscured. When we don’t know where our edges are, everything is equally important, and equally unimportant.

We feel like we have to do everything and please everybody.

Or we withdraw into lethargy and paralysis.

Either way, we lose ourselves inside the overwhelm.

“When we forget our ability to choose,” writes Greg McKeown , “we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices – or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose…

….[and] when we surrender our power to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.”

4

The irony is, that once we carve out form and structure, we also find our creative freedom.

When you see your edges, you know where you are.

You can walk out to the edge of your edge – and then beyond.

kintsukuroi: stories in the scars, beauty in the broken places

“I love those kintsukuroi pieces, as I love the scarred and mended humans. They are my people.” — Natasha Wozniak

1

Maybe you’re familiar with the idea of kintsukuroi. It’s a Japanese word that refers to the act of repairing broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold.

Instead of trying to hide the damage, kintsukuroi illuminates it.

You do this, because you understand that mending is an art.

You do this, because you understand that there is beauty in the broken places.

Behind every scar is a story.

(We are made of stories.)

2

Maybe you’re familiar with the Significant Objects experiment.

Two guys named Josh and Rob wanted to see if the power of narrative could take insignificant objects and make them…more significant.

They got some writers together. They assigned each writer an object purchased from a garage sale or a thrift store. The writer made up a story about the object. Josh and Rob put the objects for sale on Ebay, showing pictures of each item alongside its tailormade story (listed instead of a factual description.) They made it clear to the viewer that these stories were fiction. As in, made-up. As in, untrue. (The goal of the experiment was not to pull a hoax on Ebay customers.)

Each winning bidder received the object with a printout of the matching narrative.

Josh and Rob write:

The results of our experiment? If an increase in the thrift-store objects’ “value in trade” can be accepted as objective evidence of an increase in the objects’ significance, then our hypothesis was 100% correct. We sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.51, all of which went to [the] contributing writers.

3

Maybe you’re familiar with the Persephone myth.

A brief recap: carefree maiden is at play in the fields. She goes to pick a flower. The earth opens up beneath her feet and Hades, the ultimate bad boy, comes roaring up out of the underworld on his motorcycle – I mean, in his chariot – and kidnaps the girl, takes her deep below, and forces her to be his wife.

Persephone’s mother, Demeter, searches for her and campaigns the all-powerful Zeus for her return home. Zeus agrees – not least because Demeter, in her grief and anger, has plunged the world into an endless winter – and tells Hades to give up the girl. Hades is less than impressed, but Zeus is alpha and Hades must respect that.

Before Persephone gets free, however, she eats half a pomegranate: this binds her to the Underworld forever.

The gods work out a deal: Persephone will spend half the year in the underground (fall and winter), and half the year aboveground (spring and summer).

She makes her peace with Hades, becomes a proper and formidable Queen, and guides lost souls to their next destination.

It’s easy to read this story and dismiss Persephone as helpless victim (what was she doing all alone in those fields in the first place? Couldn’t she have taken some self-defense classes or something?) and kind of stupid (really, Perseph? You’re one night away from total freedom and you just had to eat that pomegranate?). It’s easy to prefer the lesser-known descent-into-the-underground story about goddess Inanna, who is proactive and daring and an all-around female badass.

But there are a lot of us who, like Persephone, at some point find ourselves traumatized, victimized, broken. We got into the wrong car or trusted the wrong person. (We’re only human, and that still doesn’t make it our fault.) We lost someone important. We were born into the wrong family. However it happened, we tasted the underground – and what you learn there, you cannot unlearn. That knowledge becomes a part of you. It’s a question of how you carry it – or allow it to carry you.

A queen, or a slave?

4

I once heard trauma described as the stuff you leave out of the story. You can’t speak it. You can’t even look at it. You exile it to the darkest edges of your life — but that’s exactly where it grows a story all its own, a secret and festering history that pulls you off-course and divides you inside yourself.

It’s only when you find the strength – and a safe inner space — to process those experiences, and weave them into your daylight life narrative, that you gain any real power over them. You put stories to the scars. What kind of story you tell is up to you. You can’t change the past, and you can’t change the facts – but story is the stuff you put around the facts in order to relate them and charge them with meaning.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the artisans mend the cracks with gold: gold suggests luminosity, the energy of consciousness itself. When we mend, we make meaning from the raw materials of our lives and create ourselves in lines of illumination that show where the stories are.

We take our wounds and turn them to light.

That is the healing, and the art.

Behind every scar is a story. (We are made of stories.) click to tweet

the power of the selfie ( + the female identity project)

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ― Anaïs Nin

I arrived in Positano for a writing workshop with Dani Shapiro. I was jetlagged, hungry and unprepared. I needed to sleep, eat, unpack and read through the manuscripts my group was about to critique.

So of course the first thing I did…

…was take a selfie.

To listen to some, you would think that the selfie is a Pandora’s box that we innocently (or not so innocently) opened to unleash evil, sickness and despair into the world. If you’re been known to take a selfie from time to time – or twenty selfies immediately deleted from your camera for every portrait of yourself you don’t hate – are you a narcissist?

“Am I narcissist?” I once asked my therapist.

“If you were a narcissist,” she replied promptly, “you would not be sitting here in my office asking me if I thought you were a narcissist.”

If selfie-taking made you a narcissist, more women then men would be narcissists, since more women take selfies (up to 4.6 x more women, according to this study of self-portrait taking). Yet narcissistic personality disorder is “more prevalent” in men (8 percent of men develop NPD, as opposed to 5 percent of women).

And yet:

“Vanity, thy name is woman!” exclaimed Shakespeare, at least according to a popular cultural meme.

The interesting thing is that Shakespeare never said that – the actual line is “Frailty, thy name is woman,” assigned to Hamlet when he is castigating his mother for remarrying so soon after his father’s death. That the quote mutated the way it did – and has been widely accepted as correct — reflects an interesting cultural attitude about women.

When Elizabeth Gilbert hit the big time with her memoir EAT, PRAY, LOVE – a woman’s version of ON THE ROAD – the inevitable success-backlash accused her of being a narcissist.

I don’t recall Jack Kerouac having that experience.

Then again, women are held to a standard of selflessness and self-sacrifice that men are not. Perhaps a woman like Gilbert wasn’t being penalized for what she was doing (pursuing her own agenda) so much as what she wasn’t doing (putting the needs of others before her own, being a good wife and mother).

This idea of women as inherently vain never made a lot of sense to me.

For nearly two thousand years of Western history, women didn’t even have the power to vote. She was expected to seek lifelong security on the arm of an appropriate male who would help care for and protect her offspring.

It is no secret that men are relentlessly visual creatures who value attractiveness in a mate. If a woman’s future depended upon catching a dude, then a heavy investment in appearance seems less like vanity and more like a survival strategy. Even today, in 2014, the culture transmits the message to girls and women that there’s a direct correlation between looking good and being loved – or at least not being openly mocked.

For women, self-presentation is both a skillset and an art form..where the point is to seem naturally, effortlessly, even carelessly beautiful. (The paradox of female beauty is that you’re supposed to have it without looking like you’re trying to have it or even know that you have it.)

If women are read and judged according to how they look – and they are – then there’s a tight link between appearance and identity that maybe doesn’t exist for men, or at least not to the same degree. When a woman puts herself together, she is in part shaping and navigating the relationship between self and world.

In the recent Disney movie FROZEN, one of the main female characters – the older sister Elsa – escapes her royal, stultified, good-girl upbringing by fleeing into the woods and unleashing the powers that she has dutifully repressed. She undergoes a magical makeover. The mythic power of the makeover – whether in tales like Cinderella or a movie like Pretty Woman or a (highly disturbing) reality show like The Swan or even a J Lo video (in which she starts out weighed down by bling, and ends up cavorting, natural and free, in the water)– hinges on this idea that the woman’s newfound outer beauty is a revelation of inner beauty. It’s not just a different outfit. It’s her true self.

Thus, women all over the world go to the mall.

We are what we wear.

This is why we’ll often signal a dramatic change in our ongoing life story (such as divorce) with an equally dramatic haircut.Women understand that transformation often happens from the outside in: change your appearance, and you change the way the world perceives you, and treats you, which changes the way you perceive yourself, which changes the way you think and act.

Identity is never static.

It is a work-in-progress, constantly mirrored back to you in the eyes and words of others.

It is the play between your true self, whatever that is, and your multiple possible future selves: who will I be today? she wonders as she stands inside her closet.

Female selfie-taking peaks in the early to mid twenties. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a woman’s twenties are when she is still figuring out her adult self and experimenting with identity (“who will I be today?”). Likewise, selfie-taking drops off dramatically for women over 40 – an age when women tend to know who they are (and even revel in that grounded, comfortable-in-your-skin kind of knowledge). I don’t buy that every time a young woman (or an older woman) posts a selfie, she is seeking external validation and approval because she’s so insecure. She is telling a story about who she is – I’m the kind of woman who goes to Positano – and in this very act of declaiming her identity, she continues to create it.

Selfies speak to the social and self-constructed nature of the identity project itself.

If selfies are filtered and edited to present a slightly idealized version of the self, that isn’t about being fake. Playing up your best features while minimizing or disguising your worst — as you present yourself to the world in the way that you want to be seen – has a word, and that word is style.

I take selfies like I take my red wine: in moderation. I take selfies because I don’t consider myself photogenic and selfies – unlike well-meaning but slightly misguided friends who happen to be wielding cameras – allow me total control over my own representation of self. I’m not just posting a picture of me; I’m showing myself as the way that I truly see myself (or want to see myself). There’s a difference. The latter may be more manipulated, but is no less revealing.

The implications of this get interesting when you’re no longer talking about someone like me (absurdly privileged blondish blue-eyed white woman) but other kinds of women, women who can and do use selfies to subvert the stories the larger culture tells about them (if the culture tells stories at all). Writes this blogger:

“The autobiographical nature of the selfie gives us access to reconfiguring how we are actually seen, also known as subverting dominant assumptions or “truths.” We can directly challenge stereotypes and imposed invisibility with the click of a button. This alone may not cause empires to crumble, but it is an act of defiance and a potential space for decolonization. Above all, it is a self-made visibility that proudly proclaims ‘I am here. I am mine. Look at me.’”

And so, my dear reader, it’s been fun, but time to end. I’m about to take part in a group reading, and I still have to figure out what to wear.

I shall leave you with a music video that presents a profound philosophical investigation of this topic.

Enjoy.

“but first, let me take a selfie”

I arrived in Positano for a writing workshop with Dani Shapiro. I was jetlagged, hungry and unprepared. I needed to sleep, eat, unpack and read through the manuscripts my group was about to critique.

So of course the first thing I did…

…was take a selfie.

To listen to some, you would think that the selfie is like Pandora’s box that we innocently (or not so innocently) opened to unleash evil, sickness and despair into the world. If you’re been known to take a selfie from time to time – or twenty selfies immediately deleted from your camera for every portrait of yourself you don’t hate – are you a narcissist?

“Am I narcissist?” I once asked my therapist.

“If you were a narcissist,” she replied promptly, “you would not be sitting here in my office asking me if I thought you were a narcissist.”

If selfie-taking made you a narcissist, more women then men would be narcissists, since more women take selfies (up to 4.6 x more women, according to this study of self-portrait taking). Yet narcissistic personality disorder is “more prevalent” in men (8 percent of men develop NPD, as opposed to 5 percent of women).

And yet:

“Vanity, thy name is woman!” exclaimed Shakespeare, at least according to a popular cultural meme.

The interesting thing is that Shakespeare never said that – the actual line is “Frailty, thy name is woman,” assigned to Hamlet when he is castigating his mother for remarrying so soon after his father’s death. That the quote mutated the way it did – and has been widely accepted as correct — reflects an interesting cultural attitude about women.

When Elizabeth Gilbert hit the big time with her memoir EAT, PRAY, LOVE – a woman’s version of ON THE ROAD – the inevitable success-backlash accused her of being a narcissist.

I don’t recall Jack Kerouac having that experience.

Then again, women are held to a standard of selflessness and self-sacrifice that men are not. Perhaps a woman like Gilbert wasn’t being penalized for what she was doing (pursuing her own agenda) so much as what she wasn’t doing (putting the needs of others before her own, being a good wife and mother).

This idea of women as inherently vain never made a lot of sense to me.

Through nearly two thousand years of Western history, men ruled the world while women didn’t even have the power to vote. A woman was expected to seek and find lifelong on the arm of an appropriate male who would also help care for and protect her offspring.

It is no secret that men are relentlessly visual creatures who value attractiveness in a mate. If a woman’s future depended upon catching a dude, then a heavy investment in appearance seems less like vanity and more like a survival strategy. Even today, in 2014, the culture still transmits the message to girls and women that there’s a direct correlation between looking good and being loved – or at least not being openly mocked.

So when self-presentation has been the one form of ‘power’ allowed to women, women quite naturally made it into an art form that’s not supposed to seem like an art because the point is to seem naturally, effortlessly, even carelessly beautiful. (The paradox of female beauty is that you’re supposed to have it without looking like you’re trying to have it or even know that you have it.)

If women are read and judged according to how they look – and they are – then there’s a tight link between appearance and identity that maybe doesn’t exist for men, or at least not to the same degree.

In the recent Disney movie FROZEN, one of the main female characters – the older sister Elsa – escapes her royal, stultified, good-girl upbringing by fleeing into the woods and unleashing the powers that she has dutifully repressed. She also has a magical makeover. The mythic power of the makeover – whether in tales like Cinderella or a movie like Pretty Woman or a (highly disturbing) reality show like The Swan or even a J Lo video (in which she starts out weighed down by bling, and ends up cavorting, natural and free, in the water)– hinges on this idea that the woman’s newfound outer beauty is a revelation of inner beauty. It’s not just a different outfit. It’s her true self.

Thus, women all over the world go to the mall.

We are what we wear.

This is why we’ll often signal a dramatic change in our ongoing life story (such as divorce) with an equally dramatic haircut. (I did.) Women understand that transformation often happens from the outside in: change your appearance, and you change the way the world perceives you, and treats you, which changes the way you perceive yourself, which changes the way you think and act.

Identity is never static.

It is a work-in-progress, constantly mirrored back to you in the eyes and words of others.

It is the play between your true self, whatever that is, and your multiple possible future selves: who will I be today? she wonders as she stands inside her closet.

Female selfie-taking peaks in the early to mid twenties. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a woman’s twenties are when she is still figuring out her adult self. Likewise, selfie-taking drops off dramatically for women over 40 – an age when women tend to know who they are (and even revel in that grounded, comfortable-in-your-skin kind of self-knowledge). I don’t buy that every time a young woman (or even an older woman) posts a selfie, she is seeking external validation and approval because she’s so insecure. She is telling a story about who she is – I’m the kind of woman who hangs out in Positano – and in this very act of declaiming her identity, she is also creating it.

Selfies speak to the social and self-constructed nature of the identity project itself.

If selfies are filtered and edited to present a slightly idealized version of the self, that isn’t about being fake. Playing up your best features while minimizing or disguising your worst — as you present yourself to the world in the way that you want to be seen – has a word, and that word is style.

I take selfies like I take red wine: in moderation. I take selfies because I don’t consider myself photogenic and selfies – unlike well-meaning but misguided friends who happen to be wielding cameras – allow me total control over my own representation of self. I’m not just posting a picture of me; I’m showing myself as the way that I actually see myself (or want to see myself). There’s a difference. The latter may be more manipulated, but is no less revealing.

The implications of this get interesting when you’re no longer talking about someone like me (absurdly privileged blondish blue-eyed white woman) but other kinds of women, women who can use the storytelling nature of selfies to subvert the stories the larger culture tells about them (if the culture tells stories at all). Writes this blogger:

“The autobiographical nature of the selfie gives us access to reconfiguring how we are actually seen, also known as subverting dominant assumptions or “truths.” We can directly challenge stereotypes and imposed invisibility with the click of a button. This alone may not cause empires to crumble, but it is an act of defiance and a potential space for decolonization. Above all, it is a self-made visibility that proudly proclaims ‘I am here. I am mine. Look at me.’”

And so, my dear reader, it’s been fun, but time to end. I’m about to take part in a group reading, and I still have to figure out what to wear.

I shall leave you with a music video that presents a profound philosophical investigation of this topic.

Enjoy.

this is the start of your second life

for G

“We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one.” ― Tom Hiddleston

I learned that someone I deeply respect might have less than a year to live.

This is not a proven fact, he was careful to say, and he doesn’t necessarily believe it. He’s been in this position before, in his twenties, when a difficult medical procedure saved his life. That could happen again — if certain circumstances fall into place. That is not impossible.

But when he thinks about the future now, he said, his voice rueful and matter-of-fact, he no longer sees himself in it. He just doesn’t see himself in it.

What he then said to me (and others), I want to remember for the rest of my life. I want to tattoo in blazing neon on the inside of my eyelids to read every time I close my eyes:

The human heart pumps on average about 72 times a minute….Stop what you’re doing, stand perfectly still, and listen to the beat of your heart…Know that 72 times every minute, it is telling you this: You are still alive…You are still alive…You are still alive…

We have a way of forgetting this.

We have a way of losing perspective, not to mention ourselves, in the wrong things, the wrong activities, the wrong priorities.

In order to survive and thrive, nature hardwired us to

a) focus on the negative

and

b) numb out.

Negative thinking is actually very helpful, as much as this culture loves to pooh-pooh it. Being “productively paranoid” and obsessing on the holes in our lives compel us to pay attention, prepare for worst-case scenarios and seek out the people and resources we need (or think we need) to thrive.

Numbing out to whatever is constant and familiar also serves an evolutionary purpose. We can only be alert to so many things. We are primed to pay attention not to the pattern of our days so much as whatever breaks or disrupts it.

What is familiar, reasons a deepset, ancient part of our brain, must be safe, since it hasn’t killed us so far. (That this sets the bar rather low is entirely beside the point.)

In contrast, whatever is new, is different, could be a threat we must defend against or an opportunity we should pursue. The familiar fades into the background, and novelty, or the craving for novelty, snags and preoccupies.

This might be the part where you expect me to talk about living your passion or finding your purpose, or to quote Mary Oliver’s line about your one wild and precious life, but that’s not quite what I’m getting at.

The fact that I am here, now, sitting cross-legged on this couch in this hotel room, writing this to you, dear Reader, as the seaside town beyond my balcony shades to dark. The fact that you are here, now, reading this. The miracle of being alive, as well as the future remaining to each of us – which might be, which just might be, less than we think.

(Then again, maybe I’ll live to be over 100. Maybe you will. I intend to.)

We numb out – we are programmed to numb out – to the familiar everyday knowledge that just to be alive, to be able to take the future for granted, is this amazing fucking thing.

We like to think of life as a gift, but it is not.

One day you will have to give it back.

One day you will have to account to your soul for how you spent it and what you regret.

We forget this, until something – like an announcement from a dying friend – intrudes into our awareness, shocks us into remembering, and appreciating.

Then we forget it again.

So I have decided to start going for walks in cemeteries.

I want to be aware of death, so that I may realize my life.

So I have decided to start a gratitude practice.

I want to train my negative mind to see the beauty through the familiar.

It’s probably not a coincidence that both these activities – contemplating death, and cultivating appreciation – have been scientifically proven to create wellbeing. Make them habits and they will lift your level of happiness.

Thinking about death makes you appreciate your life.

Imagining yourself on your deathbed — looking back on the past still in your future — has a way of streamlining your priorities, signaling what’s important.

Forcing your mind to notice everyday pleasures counters its natural, obsessive pull toward problems that – if your plane suddenly aimed toward the ground – might not seem so problematic after all.

So stop what you’re doing. Stand perfectly still. Listen to the message in the beat of your heart:

You are still alive.

You are still alive.

When I look into the future I can see myself in it. It is my sacred task, now, to bring a piece of my friend with me. This piece of him lives in my heart. It might be small, but it has a strong voice, echoing through the chambers to a dark organic beat:

This is the start

of your second life.

don’t lose the snake: creativity, difference + the bold point of view

This is the transcript for a talk I just gave at The Instigator Experience held in Los Angeles. Note: I went onstage carrying a snake.

So you might be wondering who I’m wearing. [The snake's] name is Felix…

I bought my first snake ring about ten years ago, at the jewelry department at Barney’s. Then when my divorce became final I bought myself a bling bling divorce ring, also in the shape of a snake curling up my finger. Last year I posed for a photo session with a yellow ball python, wearing black leather pants and little else. One of those photos is the cover photo in my blog.

I liked the snake rings because I thought they were cool, and maybe because they reminded me of Cleopatra, and Cleo was my girl. Except for the part where she killed off family members. I think killing off family members should be avoided generally, that kind of thing tends to ruin the holidays. When I was in college, my boyfriend at the time called me Eve, because he said I resembled her in some famous painting he could never remember the name of or the artist who painted it.

Not long ago I became interested in the history of the symbolism of the snake and its relationship with the feminine principle. That’s a whole other talk but to me, a woman with a snake suggests a story not of temptation but rebellion and defiance. That means a lot to me. The feminine badass.

Recently I was having dinner with my girlfriend Jackie and telling her about how a mutual friend of ours Jade – who is here in the audience, hi Jade — had styled me for a recent TEDX talk, and how she urged me to makeover my closet and wear a lot more color and a lot less black. Jackie looked at me direct and told me not to change my style too much. She then said, with this very serious expression, and I quote, “Don’t lose the snake.” Which made me realize that the snake has become part of my personal mythology and part of my quote unquote brand, at least among my friends.

Myths and symbols are powerful because they reach us on a deep level, representing truths that are kind of visceral and complicated and overcharged with meaning that our conscious minds can’t fully wrap themselves around. We use them – some of us more than others — as meanings to steer by as we navigate our lives. I was thinking about this because for all the talk we do in the business world about the importance of storytelling, we tend to approach it in a very left-brain, rational, linear kind of way. Very connect the dots and paint by numbers kind of way. I want to remind you that there’s an art to it, and so much of art is born beneath the surface of the mind: so much of creativity is intuitive and subterranean. In order to tell the kinds of stories that truly rule in the marketplace, we need to be willing to open ourselves up to our unconscious, our shadow selves, to feel ourselves guided by that inner voice that works beyond language: that comes to us in images, gut feelings, dreams, symbols, hunches.

And while it’s one thing to just be yourself, it’s another thing to project a strong sense of identity into the world, a compelling story about who you are and what you stand for. That, too, is a bit of an art.

I’m Justine Musk. My topic is how to create your artistic signature and stand out in a

crowded marketplace…so, no pressure there.

Srini invited me to be on his show when it was still Blogcast FM a little over a year ago and I was a) really pleased + delighted and b) insecure. I thought, I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m not like these other people I hear him interviewing. In fact, Srini told me I was the first fiction writer who had ever been on the show. And I remember thinking, what could I possibly say that would be relevant to this particular audience? But then we did the show and it wasn’t a total disaster and in fact Srini invited me to do a special podcast on charisma with Danielle Laporte and James Altucher and then asked me to be a speaker here. And I realized that the same thing that I was self-conscious about was what made me unique and interesting, at least to some. I have a point of view that sets me apart in this arena, because it’s different, because I’m different.

But this is the paradox of difference. We want to be noticed. We want clients and audiences and sales and visibility. And we are hardwired on a primal level to notice what’s different, because to our ancestors a break in the pattern signaled a possible threat or a mating opportunity. And we do want to be different…so long as we still get to be like everybody else. It reminds me of that Monty Python bit where a guru is telling the crowd You are all individuals and they are chanting we are all individuals and then a lone voice pipes up, I’m not.

We are trained from childhood to fit in, to get along, to be appropriate. And if we were the kind of kid who didn’t fit in for whatever reason, we were bullied or ostracized. So we grew up learning to conform and compete, and conformity and competition go hand in hand – because you’re competing to see who can do what everybody else can do, better than anybody else can do it.

The problem though is that creativity is all about difference, about designing your own category of one that lives beyond comparison, beyond competition. So as we learn to fit in, we also learn to think of ourselves as not creative. This is a massive untruth. As human beings we are innately creative, creativity is our birthright. But creativity is also a practice, and a lot of us just stop practicing it. I’m no good. I don’t have any talents. My stuff sucks. Waste of time. Won’t put food on the table, won’t get me laid. Okay, maybe it will get me laid…if only I had the energy.

So as you execute your bold idea, find expression for it in the world, I want you to be aware that you’re probably inclined to imitate others – more specifically, the leaders in your field. Worked for them, so maybe it will work for us. Steve Jobs told us all to think different, so now we want to think like Steve. We are all individuals…I remember one blogger and brand strategist releasing a post in which she was practically begging female online entrepreneurs to stop talking and acting like Marie Forleo, because that job is taken.

This is the problem with best practices. Not to mention, things change so rapidly that what worked two years or one year or even six months ago might not work now, or at least not for you. We can and should learn from best practices, but ultimately we have to express our ideas in a way that is unique and authentic to us while still being compelling and relevant to others.

We have to own our shit.

One of the more intriguing lessons I’ve picked up in my life is how the source of our woundedness can also be the source of our strength. When we’re wounded in some way, we often need to develop a strategy to navigate it or work around it. Then as we grow older we naturally transfer that skill to other areas of life where we then excel.

Difference can be a source of woundedness because of how it sets us apart from other people, makes us feel vulnerable and alone. But it’s the story you create around your difference that can imbue it with meaning – not just for you, but for others. Story can be the bridge that connects you to other people. By allowing that difference to shape your point of view – to state your truth – you show who you are in a way that allows other people to recognize themselves in you: as they are now, or perhaps more importantly as they want to be.

That is the gift of a bold point of view. It can be like a beam of light flashing through the dark; other people can use it to help navigate or even co-create their own reality. By aligning themselves with your perspective, your story, they can claim it as their own and use it as a way of signaling their identity to others – especially online – as well as recognizing other members of their tribe. A bold point of view that recognizes something inside us, that shows us some new insight, or expresses something that we could not articulate for ourselves, can create emotional points of difference that make us feel more alive and less alone.

Here’s the thing. The most successful brands today – whether it’s Starbucks or Apple or Oprah or Lady Gaga – aren’t just different. They create difference. They don’t just reflect the culture or find ways to agree with the consumer, they actively shape the culture. They’re not afraid to challenge or provoke; hell, they maybe live for that stuff. They are cultural entrepreneurs. They take something familiar – coffee, a cell phone, daytime TV, pop music, – and find a way to reframe the experience around it that changes the way we look at and think about it, that transforms the way we make it a part of our lives. Through the intense projection of a bold and particular point of view, they rework the story, they create a new kind of cultural myth that draws us in until it becomes our myth too. They’re not necessarily making an innovative product so much as an innovative cultural viewpoint (that just happens to sell that particular product).

Getting back to myth again, what these brands do is put us through a kind of initiation. They uproot us from established beliefs and customs – like the idea that coffee shouldn’t cost more than a dollar a cup. They move us into a new world (where a coffee costs four dollars). Think of an Apple store, with its own unique layout and design and vocabulary (it doesn’t have a help desk, it has a genius bar). In this new world, the brand acts as mentor. It gives us a tool or a skill or an insight that helps us advance toward self-actualization. When we leave that world, and return to our ordinary world, we take that gift with us and apply it to changing our life in some small but notable way. Through word-of-mouth we share that boon with our community.

It might be worth asking yourself, what do you believe that nobody else believes? How can you express that belief through your product or service in a way that someone else might find relevant and even self-enhancing? Don’t just ask, who is your consumer – ask, who do you want your consumer to become? What kind of story can you tell around your product or service to help him become that? How can you build out the world of your story so that the consumer can find different ways of entering it and interacting with it — especially in this day and age of social media?

I don’t think in terms of platform anymore; your platform is your storyworld for the consumer to explore and get lost in.

Creativity builds on itself. You can only develop your purpose and clarity through active engagement with the world. We develop our point of view – and ourselves — through constant collisions and confrontations so that we’re forced to adapt and refine, refine, refine. You can’t get from A to Z without going through all the other letters in the alphabet, and you can’t do that just by sitting on your couch and analyzing your life. Sadly.

Think in terms of baby steps. Little bets. Experiments. One thing opens up into another into another in ways you can’t truly foresee until they happen, and each action generates a new field of possibilities. Things remain in flux. The important thing about a plan is that you go through the planning process, which is actually very important; but the plan itself often proves useless. And that’s ok, because the purpose of a Plan A is to provide the seeds for a better plan B.

I also want you to consider that as you are engaging with this process, this process is engaging with you. You are creating it, but it is also creating you. Through the nature of the creative act, we are constantly finding, creating, losing – and recreating – ourselves. We are what we make. You craft little experiments of identity, lean in to what works and discard what doesn’t. Over time this can take you in surprising directions. This is what it means to grow.

I started out as a horror novelist, because when I was a kid I decided that that’s what I wanted to be, and I am very stubborn. I sold three novels to major publishers and was contracted to do a fourth, a sequel to a sequel. And – I could not. I literally could not. I ended up canceling the contract. At the time I just assumed that I had been beaten bloody by the demons of procrastination and anxiety, but now I realize that my intuition was simply telling me – in no uncertain terms — that I was in the wrong genre and I had to get out now before I followed this road all the way down to its inevitable dead end.

It can be very unsettling to follow your intuition – I think of it as your soul-voice. We may care about things like prestige and money and convenience and what will my friends think, but the soul-voice does not. The soul-voice has one goal only: to keep driving us toward wholeness, and if it has to take us through hell in order to get us there, it will do so. This can be very annoying. But to ignore it is to pay a much higher price.

My soul-voice pushed me – and it literally felt like I was being pushed, like there was a hand at the small of my back – online. Instead of getting another published novel under my belt – and being paid for it – I found myself compelled to learn about social media, platform building, blogging, branding and content marketing. I didn’t know what I was doing or where this was going, but I could not get enough of it, and I could not stop. Meanwhile, the publishing world went into total convulsions and the publishing landscape began to radically change. So do I regret not writing that fourth horror novel? Hell no.

Through my blogging, I discovered a richer, more authentic writing voice, and I developed a strong sense of connection to this really awesome group of people formerly known as the audience – which I had never experienced as a horror writer. I realize, now, that my soul-voice was not only pushing me to reinvent myself as a writer, but to redefine my sense of what it means to have a writing career in the 21st century.

And I developed an identity as a blogger. We may start out by copying others, but the trick is to notice where you can’t copy them, where you seem absolutely incapable of being like them at all – and then to lean in to those places. When I started blogging seriously, my role models were Danielle laporte and seth godin. I tried to be like both of them. I discovered that I am a much more personal, confessional writer than Danielle is – something drives me to open up my life and ‘go there’ in order to learn what I need to learn to make my emotional and intellectual argument. I also blog at much greater length than Seth Godin: depth and nuance turn out to be two of my defining characteristics.

You also need to pay attention to what others say about you. I read obsessively, and when I began blogging, I was constantly pulling in outside sources to borrow their authority as well as to back up my points. It’s the academic in me and I didn’t think anything of it; I just assumed everybody blogged like that. But that was not the case, people often remarked on it, and it became known as part of my style.

Notice also what people tell you that you are too much of. The source of weakness can also be a source of strength; take that intense quality of yours and find the upside. Find your edges, and live there. As a culture we don’t respect artists or entrepreneurs who go halfway, who always pull their punches.

Gather high-quality mental materials. Expose yourself to as much as possible. Ideas are made up of other ideas. Creativity is all about stealing borrowing and connecting things, and using metaphors to smash things together and transform them into something new. We mix and match and mash, and filter through our own deep personality. This is how we find our originality. So be curious. Be playful. Notice what draws you, what attracts you – let yourself be drawn. Make it a point to develop an aesthetic.

And – I can’t stress this enough — learn how to listen to your soul-voice. Understand that it’s your job to educate that voice as much as possible, through the knowledge that you feed it and the techniques and tools that you master — your chops –to allow you a much greater range and depth of self-expression. You’ll find that you become increasingly sensitive to how that soul voice, the voice of your own creative spirit, communicates with you. I’ve been doing this for years, and only recently I learned to pay closer attention to how that voice feels in my body. And what I mean by this is that I will actually feel an idea in my body – I will know when I’ve broken through a block and discovered a solution even when I don’t know what that solution is; it hasn’t yet travelled all the way to my conscious awareness. I’ve also learned to trust the feelings in my body when I’m working on a project – it’s like my body is a dog that will lose interest and wander off somewhere when I’m heading down a wrong direction. I will feel flat and suddenly uninterested in what I’m doing. I used to just push my way through that – or go watch Project Runway — but I’ve since learned to keep poking and experimenting and playing with the material until that rush of warmth and energy and keen, active interest returns to me. And then I will start moving forward again. It’s one of the best feelings in the world, and I wish that for you. I wish that for you on a very regular basis.

May you go forth and create difference in the world, even as you create and keep creating yourself. In the end, creativity is a journey of constant self-discovery, the ways we find and make meaning. The interesting thing is that creativity has a way of taking you all the way down through yourself to a point where you merge with other people, where you resonate together – and with the awe-inspiring, sacred shimmer of the human condition itself. I wish that for you also.

And please remember, no matter what happens or what anybody ever tells you –

never

ever

lose the snake.

Thank you.

mean girls, leadership + the problem with Sandberg’s ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign

So Sheryl Sandberg has launched the ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign. The idea is that boys who assert themselves are called ‘leaders’, while girls who do the same are dismissed as ‘bossy’. Quit telling a girl, any girl, that she’s ‘bossy’ and she will no longer be afraid to speak out in class. Thus, or so the reasoning goes, she will become a great world leader.

I can’t really relate to this.

Unlike Sandberg, I was never called bossy as a kid (or as an adult). That’s not my style, even when I am the boss. But I don’t think that anybody who knows me well would say I have a problem speaking out or declaring a passionate point of view.

In the tradition of highly creative kids in small towns all over the world, I didn’t fit in at the best of times. I was sensitive and dreamy and in my head. I read obsessively. I answered questions about Spot and Jane in reading group and then sat at my desk with my Agatha Christie novel and pondered good and evil.

The bullies found me early.

In first grade, it was an oversized, older kid named Phil. In fourth and fifth grades, it was the equally oversized Ross, who introduced some confusion into the matter when he asked me to go with him. That was our version of what was once known as going steady. A boy would send you a note that said WILL YOU GO WITH ME CHECK YES OR NO. Where boys and girls were actually going when they were going with each other was maybe not so glamorous — the Mac’s convenience store on the corner was a popular hangout for the wild ones, born too soon for Starbucks, with their swagger and rebel cries and ability to throw back shots of blue Slushie — but that seemed more or less beside the point.

From sixth grade on, my bullies were girls, the kind who didn’t look or seem like bullies at all. They were bright, socially sophisticated, popular with kids and liked by grown-ups. They made my day-to-day life so miserable I eventually begged my parents to transfer me to another school. The fact that they were sweet, middle-class white girls didn’t change the fact that they were also (at least to me) domineering and mean; if anything, it helped them get away with it.

Female aggression exists. Female bullying exists. ‘Bossy’ could be used as a catchword to describe either, and to ban the word would imply that girls are not capable of both — or that being called ‘bossy’ is always and automatically a bad thing.

One of my sons was a rather bossy kindergartener. I saw the potential for leadership in him, but I also saw that bossy energy as something to be transformed. Being bossy didn’t mean he could see beyond what’s good for him to what’s good for the group.

You are not a leader because you assert yourself, or even because you like to give orders.

You are a leader when people choose to follow you: because you stand for something bigger, because you’re taking them somewhere compelling, because you’re helping them become more of who and what they already are, because they see in you an embodiment of something they’d like to be. Leadership happens in the space between you and someone else. You can be a leader in some areas but not in others: context counts.

Bestselling author Daniel Pink writes about the crucial importance of something he calls perspective-taking. This, he says, is at the heart of moving others today (and what is leadership but the ability to move others to action)?

“Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in. Think of it as operating the dial on a radio. It’s the capacity to move up and down the band as circumstances demand, locking in on what’s being transmitted, even if those signals aren’t immediately clear or obvious.”



Perspective-taking is not the same as empathy. When you dominate someone, you impose, or try to impose, yourself on other people; when you’re empathic, you can lose yourself in other people. If empathy is about feeling, perspective-taking is its thinking cousin. You act from the head and not (just) the heart. You can meet the other person where they are (and with healthy boundaries firmly in place). You can “influence and persuade and change someone’s behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them.”

Here’s the thing: the more power that you feel you have, the less likely (and perhaps less able) you are to tune into someone else’s point of view. Or as researcher Adam Galinksy and his team of social scientists concluded after a series of experiments:

“…power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspectives.”

As Pink puts it, power can bump you off the dial and mess up your signals, distorting clear messages and overriding more subtle ones with static.

The ability to read people and tune into what they’re feeling is regarded as a feminine trait. But what if the female ability to empathize is less a matter of biological programming and more the natural consequence of being in a lesser-power position?

Research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California shows that

“those with lower status are keener perspective-takers. When you have fewer resources, Keltner explained in an interview, ‘you’re going to be more attuned to the context around you.’”



So much so, that Pink advises people to

“start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.”



Again, the point is not to submerge yourself in someone else’s feelings (or be a pushover in any way) but to get an accurate read on reality – so you can work with others to reshape it. This involves a level of listening and observing, an interest in other people, a sense of the bigger picture, and a serious dash of humility – in men as well as women.

Are girls and women unfairly accused of being bossy, for the same behaviors that are accepted in men? Absolutely. Are men and women held to different codes and standards? Yes. But take away the word ‘bossy’ and another word will rise to replace it. Better to examine the conditions that make girls and women so susceptible to this kind of criticism in the first place – while instilling in girls the ability to develop not bossiness (however you define it) but boundaries. This includes the ability to hold their own (even in the face of withering criticism) as well as recognize and respect the boundaries of others.

Instead of drawing focus to how girls don’t fit the traditional male model of leadership, maybe we should look at how the model of leadership is changing, as is the world around it. It might even be time to encourage certain boys to be less bossy, that the way to increase your power is to assume the mental vantage point of the least powerful person in the room. And just as we shouldn’t criticize girls for acting quote-unquote ‘masculine’ (“that bitch”) we shouldn’t criticize boys for acting quote-unquote ‘feminine’ (“that pussy”). It might help to recognize that the most powerful and beloved leaders can tune into the crowd and move it from the inside out, combining traits that are associated with both genders.

I respect Sandberg tremendously, but I have trouble believing that the answer lies in banning any word (although I myself would love to see ‘slut’ banished from human memory). The surface is a great place to start – and provoke – but let’s go deeper. Let’s get girls into a room and pretend we have lesser power than they do. Let’s take their perspective, and get into their heads, and truly hear what they have to say. Are they worried about being perceived as ‘bossy’? Or are they worried about messing up and being laughed at?

Let’s show them – not tell them, not preach at them, not act like we know them better than they do — that it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to be your messy gloriously imperfect authentic self, and that our bodies are sacred and beautiful even when the tiny jeans don’t fit. Let’s provide them with female mentors and role models. Let’s inspire them with our own achievements and the way we define success (instead of having success defined for us). You have to see it to be it. Let’s make sure they see it.

mean girls, leadership, + the problem with Sandberg’s ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign

So Sheryl Sandberg has launched the ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign. The idea is that boys who assert themselves are called ‘leaders’, while girls who do the same are dismissed as ‘bossy’. Quit telling a girl, any girl, that she’s ‘bossy’ and she will no longer be afraid to speak out in class. Thus, or so the reasoning goes, she will become a great world leader.

I can’t really relate to this.

Unlike Sandberg, I was never called bossy as a kid (or as an adult). That’s not my style, even when I am the boss. But I don’t think that anybody who knows me well would say I have a problem speaking out or declaring a passionate point of view.

In the tradition of highly creative kids in small towns all over the world, I didn’t fit in at the best of times. I was sensitive and dreamy and in my head. I read obsessively. I answered questions about Spot and Jane in reading group and then sat at my desk with my Agatha Christie novel and pondered good and evil.

The bullies found me early.

In first grade, it was an oversized, older kid named Phil. In fourth and fifth grades, it was the equally oversized Ross, who introduced some confusion into the matter when he asked me to go with him. That was our version of what was once known as going steady. A boy would send you a note that said WILL YOU GO WITH ME CHECK YES OR NO. Where boys and girls were actually going when they were going with each other was maybe not so glamorous — the Mac’s convenience store on the corner was a popular hangout for the wild ones, born too soon for Starbucks, with their swagger and rebel cries and ability to throw back shots of blue Slushie — but that seemed more or less beside the point.

From sixth grade on, my bullies were girls, the kind who didn’t look or seem like bullies at all. They were bright, socially sophisticated, popular with kids and liked by grown-ups. They made my day-to-day life so miserable I eventually begged my parents to transfer me to another school. The fact that they were sweet, middle-class white girls didn’t change the fact that they were also (at least to me) domineering and mean; if anything, it helped them get away with it.

Female aggression exists. Female bullying exists. ‘Bossy’ could be used as a catchword to describe either, and to ban the word would imply that girls are not capable of both — or even that being called ‘bossy’ is always and automatically a bad thing.

One of my sons was a rather bossy kindergartener. I saw the potential for leadership in him, but I also saw that bossy energy as something to be transformed. Being bossy didn’t mean he could see beyond what’s good for him to what’s good for the group.

You are not a leader because you assert yourself, or even because you like to give orders.

You are a leader when people choose to follow you: because you stand for something bigger, because you’re taking them somewhere compelling, because you’re helping them become more of who and what they already are, because they see in you an embodiment of something they’d like to be. Leadership happens in the space between you and someone else. You can be a leader in some areas but not in others: context counts.

Bestselling author Daniel Pink writes about the crucial importance of something he calls perspective-taking. This, he says, is at the heart of moving others today (and what is leadership but the ability to move others to action)?

“Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in. Think of it as operating the dial on a radio. It’s the capacity to move up and down the band as circumstances demand, locking in on what’s being transmitted, even if those signals aren’t immediately clear or obvious.”



Perspective-taking is not the same as empathy. When you dominate someone, you impose, or try to impose, yourself on other people; when you’re empathic, you can lose yourself in other people. If empathy is about feeling, perspective-taking is its thinking cousin. You act from the head and not (just) the heart. You can meet the other person where they are (and with healthy boundaries firmly in place). You can “influence and persuade and change someone’s behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them.”

Here’s the thing: the more power that you feel you have, the less likely (and perhaps less able) you are to tune into someone else’s point of view. Or as researcher Adam Galinksy and his team of social scientists concluded after a series of experiments:

“…power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspectives.”

As Pink puts it, power can bump you off the dial and mess up your signals, distorting clear messages and overriding more subtle ones with static.

The ability to read people and tune into what they’re feeling is regarded as a feminine trait. But what if the female ability to empathize is less a matter of biological programming and more the natural consequence of being in a lesser-power position?

Research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California shows that

“those with lower status are keener perspective-takers. When you have fewer resources, Keltner explained in an interview, ‘you’re going to be more attuned to the context around you.’”



So much so, that Pink advises people to

“start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.”



Again, the point is not to submerge yourself in someone else’s feelings (or be a pushover in any way) but to get an accurate read on reality – so you can work with it (and with them). This involves a level of listening and observing, an interest in other people and the bigger picture, and a serious dash of humility – in men as well as women.

Are girls and women unfairly accused of being bossy, for the same behaviors that are accepted in men? Absolutely. Are men and women held to different codes and standards? Yes. But take away the word ‘bossy’ and another word will arise in its place. Better to examine the conditions that make girls and women so susceptible to this kind of criticism in the first place – while instilling in girls the ability to develop not bossiness (however you define it) but boundaries. This includes the ability to hold their own (even in the face of withering criticism) as well as to recognize and respect those of others.

Instead of drawing focus to how girls don’t fit the traditional male model of leadership, maybe we should look at how the model of leadership is changing, as is the world around it. It might even be time to encourage certain boys to be less bossy, that the way to increase your power is to assume the mental vantage point of the least powerful person in the room. And just as we shouldn’t criticize girls for acting quote-unquote ‘masculine’ (“that bitch”) we shouldn’t criticize boys for acting quote-unquote ‘feminine’ (“that pussy”). It might help to recognize that the most powerful and beloved leaders can tune into the crowd and move it from the inside out, combining traits that are associated with both genders.

I respect Sandberg tremendously, but I have trouble believing that the answer lies in banning any word (although I myself would love to see ‘slut’ banished from human memory). The surface is a great place to start – and provoke – but let’s go deeper. Let’s get girls into a room and pretend we have lesser power than they do. Let’s take their perspective, and get into their heads, and truly hear what they have to say. Are they worried about being perceived as ‘bossy’? Or are they worried about messing up and being laughed at?

Let’s show them – not tell them, not preach at them, not act like we know them better than they do — that it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to be your messy gloriously imperfect authentic self, and that our bodies are sacred and beautiful even when the tiny jeans don’t fit. Let’s provide them with female mentors and role models. Let’s inspire them with our own achievements and the way we define success (instead of having success defined for us). You have to see it to be it. Let’s make sure they see it.

“if you don’t have any shadows, you’re not in the light”

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

1

In a recent post on Positively Positive, Danielle LaPorte asks an excellent series of questions:

“Escaping? From what? Your Pain? Or your Power?”

She makes the point that

“Continually staring down your demons can be an act of avoidance all its own.”

Shadow work – at least as I understand it – isn’t about staring down your demons so much as giving them a name, a nod of recognition, and a place at the table that is otherwise known as your psyche. The very act of putting your attention on something – on bringing it out of your unconscious and into your conscious – transmutes it. It releases new energy.

Reclaiming some lost aspect of yourself gives you a bigger, deeper range of colors from which to create the day-to-day responses to your life.

There’s a gorgeous quote from Rilke:

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

But by insisting that the dragon is a dragon – by refusing to see it from a new angle, a different light, that might unlock growth or knowledge – we keep ourselves stuck in some unending confrontation with our own damn selves. It’s exhausting, but it’s comfortable. We don’t have to move through it and face the new. We can duck and hide from the sources of our own personal power, the shine of what Robert A Johnson calls our inner gold.

We can project that onto other people instead.

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Projection is a psychological defense mechanism: we take the repressed and unwanted qualities in ourselves, those shadow selves, and ‘see’ them in whatever person triggers an unusually strong response in us. It’s a way of taking internal material and making it external, so that we can feel threatened by it, repulsed by it – or deeply attracted to it.

Your shadow is in the shape of the person you learn not to be, disowning those parts of yourself that don’t fit the desired model handed down to you by others – or that simply don’t mesh with your idea of who you are. (“Me? A creative risk-taker? Surely not!”)

It’s not just the individual. Each family casts a shadow.

Society does as well.

Our culture takes what frightens or repels us and blows it up into larger-than-life cardboard figures – stereotypes – that we often feel the need to defend ourselves against (or against becoming).

One of the things our culture squashes is any real connection between femininity and power. We exile that to our collective shadow, where it rises – like Venus from the ocean — as certain kinds of women to be both ridiculed and feared: the ballbreaker, the castrating wife, the power-hungry bitch, Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno.

Add some compelling sexuality and you have the golddigger, the femme fatale, the adventuress: out to use her beauty and gender to exploit and ruin men. (Take away her intelligence and then you have the bimbo, who is so much easier to contain. This was the strategy Marilyn Monroe used, developing the ‘blonde clown’ role that defused her sexbomb persona and disguised the ambition that took her from abused foster kid to major icon.)

I was reminded of this all over again when I had a post of my own in Positively Positive. I described my idea of the creatrix as, among other things, a woman “not afraid to have her own agenda.” (I also stressed her ability to maintain strong relationships, to recognize the value of interdependence and interbeing.) It didn’t take long before one reader implied that such a woman would be self-centered and therefore suspect:

“…you make her sound so strongly powerful in her pursuit of HER OWN AGENDA. Personally I don’t celebrate me me me females – who selfishly steal husbands and think they are the most important in the universe….”



Nevermind that ‘her own agenda’ could be to build a healing community for raped and mutilated women in the Congo.

Or simply to develop her gifts and find ways to apply them in the world.

It had to be about – wait for it – husband stealing.

One way to respond to this is to shrug it off, ignore it, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never…etc. Yet we live in a world where reputation matters – and women, who grow up with words like slut and whore, or still live in places where one perceived sexual act can compromise your future, or even result in your death — perhaps know this best of all. What people say about you can impact your life: how you move about in the world (or at all), how people relate to you (or at all), whether you succeed at work (or even find work).

We also learn these lessons – what parts of ourselves to play up and what to suppress, what parts are acceptable and loveable and what parts are not – when we are too young to accept them as anything other than laws of nature. It’s the water we’re born into, and swim in, and don’t think to question until and unless we find our way to dry land. Then we can look around and realize that, hey, there’s an alternative. There’s another way of being.

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So when strength and power aren’t accepted as part of being feminine – so much so that we feel the need to single out ‘strong women’, or ‘empower’ women – a girl often feels compelled to make a choice. She makes it unconsciously, but she makes it. She can disown her power – or her femininity. Either way, she is cut off from some essential aspect of herself.

It’s those cut-off parts, those shadow parts, that we project onto others. She might develop a disdain for ‘girly-girls’ and ‘girliness’ and distance herself from both. Or –

There’s that line from SCARFACE:

“First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.”

Power is held out as an aphrodisiac. Women want so-called alpha males, the reasoning goes, because these men offer the best protection and the best resources for herself and her offspring.

But what if women respond to power in men as a ‘safe’ way of responding to the power in themselves, power that’s gone undeveloped and unexpressed?

Likewise, what if men respond to certain qualities in women as a way of acknowledging the empathy and vulnerability they had to repress in order to ‘be a man’?

There’s a reason why one of the most memorable lines of movie dialogue in recent years is “You complete me.” (Quick! Name the movie!) In that flush of romantic love, we don’t see the other person so much as an idealized version of ourselves, those latent traits we’ve been too afraid to claim as our own. We don’t want the responsibility that comes with them. We don’t want to change our lives, in the way that we know we would have to, if we remembered who we are. We don’t want to risk shining so brightly that we alienate friends and loved ones, or make other people feel bad.

When we talk about owning your power, or taking back your power, this is what we mean: recognizing the power you’ve invested in a lover or celebrity or guru or some other personal hero as your own inner gold.

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Before Lance Armstrong’s impressive fall from grace, it became popular to ask in any challenging situation, What would Lance do? (You can buy it on a t-shirt.) You can take any figure that you admire and pose a similar question. It’s a neat exercise. It shifts you into a different way of thinking: out of the water and onto dry land. And it does this not by drawing on that other person’s power, but your own, in a way that’s nonthreatening to your conscious mind (and even mildly humorous.)

It’s also a good question to ask your demons.

Instead of feeling victimized by them, or at war with them, you can strike up a conversation over the mental equivalent of coffee, or perhaps a few shots of tequila.

And then you can go party.