Justine Musk's Blog, page 8

the hidden reasons why you might not like yourself

You have to see it to be it. — Billie Jean King

1

In the upcoming book, What Will It Take To Make a Woman President?, Maya Angelou says this:

If you have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is to convince yourself that the person is subhuman and won’t mind the enslavement.

The second thing you must do is convince your allies that the person is subhuman, so that you have some support.

But the third and the unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is not quite a first-class citizen. When the complete job has been done, the initiator can go back years later and ask, “Why don’t you people like yourselves more?”

2

How we see ourselves reflected in our environment shapes our sense of who we are — and by extension, what we’re worth.

In 1981, a Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer performed a study on two groups of men. Each group spent a week in isolation at a New Hampshire monastery that time-traveled them back to the 1950s.

The first group was told to pretend that they were young men again, living in 1959.

The second group was told to simply compare memories and talk about that era.

As this article reports:

Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Lifemagazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters.

There was entertainment (a screening of the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder with Jimmy Stewart) and spirited discussions of such 1950s sports greats as Mickey Mantle and Floyd Patterson. One night, the men sat glued to the radio, listening as Royal Orbit won the 1959 Preakness. For the second group it brought back a flood of memories; for the other group, it was a race being run for the first time.

…. [The results] surprised even her own team of researchers.

Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis. But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.

….. “Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow,” she told an audience of nearly 400 at a recent lecture. Her results, she knows, can push the limits of credibility, but she revels in that space: “At the end of the [monastery] study, I was playing football—touch, but still football—with these men, some of whom gave up their canes,” she tells the audience.

“It is not our physical state that limits us,” she explains—it is our mindset about our own limits, our perceptions, that draws the lines in the sand.

3

In a recent blog post, Heather Plett asks: Am I really ready to trust the feminine, or will the plane crash?:

She is referring to an anecdote about Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

It goes something like this: Tutu gets on a plane and sees that the pilots have the same color skin as his own. My people are flying the plane, he thinks with triumph. We’re making progress!

Then, in the air, they hit a wave of turbulence. As the Archbishop feels the ragged drop and lurch, he suddenly wonders if these pilots are worthy of the task; if they’re about to crash the plane.

Plett recognizes the same kind of conditioning in her secret doubt about the feminine. She admits she feels more validated when the person praising her work is a man:



Though I’ve been a feminist for almost as long as I’ve known the definition of the word, I serve on the board of a feminist organization, I’ve fought my way through the glass ceiling to senior leadership positions, and I write and teach a lot about women’s leadership, there still remain some instinctual, deep-rooted beliefs that I am not fully worthy because I am a woman.

Or… Let me correct that… It’s not simply an unworthiness of me as a woman (because I’ve gotten quite used to women in power, have been in positions of power myself, and don’t think I have any deep-seated issues that I need to excavate in that regard). It’s more of a sense that the feminine (whether it appears in women or men) is not quite worthy of power.

Is this so surprising?

Walk through a day, any day, with a scientist’s eyes. Observe and listen. Pretend this culture is a giant gender experiment, much like the one by Ellen Langer that reshaped the experience of aging through the power of suggestion alone.

How are we, as the participants in this experiment, cued to think about men?

How are we cued to think about women?

4

Some people will argue that the differences between men and women are biologically rooted, and I believe that up to a point.

The problem is how we can know, exactly, where biology leaves off and the environment kicks in. When nature itself favors diversity (so people will be wildly different even from girl to girl and boy to boy), and the environment influences the mind so strongly that the body physically changes as a result.

It would be fun to alter the experiment a bit.

Pretend that all those scantily clad, provocatively posed young women that you see in ads, billboards, movies, magazines and music videos were being celebrated for courage, strength, accomplishment, and daring.

Pretend that all those blockbuster summer movies centered around the girlfriend, which would mean that she was no longer the girlfriend but the protagonist, maybe even a hero.

Pretend that any American history class paid almost as much attention to Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth as it does to Martin Luther King.

Pretend that women as powerful as Janet Reno or Hillary Clinton were treated with respect and even reverence in the media – or at least without verbal abuse.

Pretend that a traditionally female profession such as teaching was just as prestigious and lucrative as a traditionally male profession such as law.

Pretend that the major religions showed people a God equally recognized as feminine and masculine, Mother as well as Father.

Pretend that the word ‘cunt’ actually wasn’t an insult that both genders hurl not just at women but also men (whereas I have yet to hear a woman accused of being a dick, or some other representative of male genitalia.)

Pretend that women were just as encouraged to fulfill their creative and professional ambitions as they are to ‘opt out’ and stay at home, and that men were just as encouraged to take paternity leave and bond with their infants and young children.

Pretend that Jonathan Franzen was openly thrilled when Oprah chose his novel THE CORRECTIONS for her Book Club, because American housewives were respected as an intelligent audience.

Pretend that the hard and gifted work of motherhood was recognized financially, and not just given lip service.

The results could be very interesting.

5

I wrote a blog post entitled: What if girls were rewarded for being authentic instead of being thin?

In the comments section, a smart and sassy young woman said:

The designer in me that’s sat through lots of branding meetings makes me think we either need a new word; or that “feminine” needs a good re-branding. I’ve never liked the word much. Practically by definition it means small, delicate, (delicate i.e.: breakable). I prefer the word “womanly” myself. Seems to have a bit more weight and power with it.

What she was asking strikes me as another version of this: Am I really ready to trust the feminine or will the plane crash?

I will leave you with my response:

This culture is built on a contempt for the feminine, which means it needs to perceive the feminine as exactly how you described: weak, frivolous, girly, etc.

We could switch to another word (womanliness is a good one) but it still doesn’t change this idea that feminine = weak, and so long as that idea is still out there, the damage will continue to be done.

Even women (some women) learn to distance themselves from ‘the feminine’ — to mock it, to disdain it, all those bad jokes about Lifetime movies – in order to align themselves with power or identify themselves as powerful. Which, when you think about it, is a rather neat mindfuck….to be a woman who is essentially disowning her own womanhood.

Thing is, if you look at depictions of femininity before patriarchy whitewashed and downsized it, you can see that it was actually pretty badass (as represented by goddess figures like Inanna. She rocked it.) I’d like to see it not rebranded so much as reclaimed, filled out, made whole. Imagine what it would be like if ‘feminine’ was a concept that inspired you and made you proud — what that might do to your sense of self.

Now that would be a revolution.

let go before it poisons you

Let go before it poisons you

+ turns your blood to bitters

(you have swallowed the enemy)

let go before it skewers your heart

+ takes it apart

(nothing in the chambers but dust)

let go before you’re stuck

in the rewind

raising your hands to push against nothing

contorting your mouth to speak

against nothing

let go because the marks

they stamped into your body

will fade to scars + stories

(the things they said were never true anyway)

let go before the green life

gets bored + wanders off

(it can’t enter you unless you’re empty)

let go because that ledge

is crumbling

it’s time to learn

what waits to deliver you

when you fall.

what if girls were rewarded for being authentic instead of being thin?

Stop the presses. Kim Kardashian lost the baby weight and has her hot body back!

Give a typical teenage girl the choice between learning about Kim’s dramatic weight loss, or the new female CEO of General Motors, I think I know which story she would pick.

Girls aren’t stupid. They know what’s relevant to how they themselves get judged everyday. Mary Barra’s rise to power is all very well, but does she look good in a bikini?

There’s an anecdote that another female corporate giant, Sheryl Sandberg, likes to tell. She was doing a Q+A with Facebook employees and informed them that she would take two more questions.

Later, a young woman informed her: “After you took those two final questions, I put my hand down and all the other women put their hands down. A bunch of men kept their hands up and then you took more questions.”

Sandberg admits that she hadn’t even noticed.*

Sandberg reminds me of a teacher in a classroom who favors the boys without realizing. Boys feel entitled to the teacher’s attention. They call out the answers. They raise their hands even when they’re wrong because they know the teacher will correct them and they will learn the answer anyway. The girls raise their hands only when they are one hundred percent convinced that their answer is the right answer. For them, there is no room for error. The risk of social humiliation – the deep brutal wrongness of being wrong – is too great.**

But this isn’t just an issue of who raises their hand – or leans in – and who doesn’t.

Recognition is power.

Recognition is currency.

Recognition is a limited resource.

When you translate recognition into those kinds of terms – power and wealth –- you see the real lesson in the classroom (unless the teacher makes a conscious, concerted effort to call on boys and girls equally).

The boys scramble for power – and are rewarded.

The girls keep quiet – because they don’t want to speak out of turn (and be considered rude or obnoxious), because they don’t want to be wrong (and therefore less than perfect), because they don’t want to compete with the boys (and risk not being liked or desired).

Good girls don’t chase power.

Power isn’t feminine.

Many of these girls grow into women who equate being quiet and small, being polite — being good — with being safe. But if this was true, violence against girls and women would not be such a global epidemic. It would only be safe to be powerless if the powerless were always protected.

And if keeping yourself small was the essence of femininity, if turning away from power was a natural feminine state, the constant online conversation about women’s desire to play a bigger game wouldn’t exist.

What if we could offer girls a version of femininity that allowed them to be just as outspoken as they wanted to be – as outspoken as any boy? That celebrated their messy, glorious, imperfect selves? That rewarded them for being bold, for playing big, for taking risks, for making mistakes, for coloring outside the lines, for living off the very edge of their comfort zone – and expanding it?

What if being feminine meant being entitled to pleasure, to appetite, to sexual satisfaction?

What if it meant choosing instead of being chosen?

What if popular culture rewarded girls and women for being authentic instead of being thin?

What if the appointment of a female CEO happened often enough that the ‘female’ part was no longer considered newsworthy?

If we allowed feminine to be synonymous with badass – so that you wouldn’t have to single out a woman for being a ‘strong woman’ (implying that the average woman is not) or a ‘powerful woman’ (implying that the average woman is not) — so that a woman like me would never think of writing a blog post like this – what would happen?

Would power reinvent women?

Or would women reinvent power?

* see the book KNOWING YOUR VALUE by Mika Brezezinski

** see the book SCHOOLGIRLS by Peggy Orenstein

the art of the deep yes (my TedxOlympicBlvdWomen talk)

(On Dec 5, I spoke at one of the 220 independent TEDXWomen events that were organized around the world. I plan to blog about the day — it was an amazing day! — but in the meantime, here is the transcript of my talk.)

I have a confession to make.

When I was a little girl I would write obnoxious things in my diary.

Things like: “Life is so exciting when you’re someone like me, good at school and writing and sports!!!!”

Or: “When I grow up I’m going to be a world-famous novelist.”

Or: “One day I’ll rule the world.”

Actually I never wrote down that I wanted to “rule the world.”

But I thought it. I was that kind of kid.

I wanted to be great.

(Or a career as a soap opera actress. But I would settle for greatness.)

Then, a few years later – when I was maybe 12 – I came across that same diary when I was cleaning out the drawers beneath my waterbed. (This was the era of waterbeds.) I saw those scrawled words of my younger self, and felt…

…mortified.

I couldn’t believe how egocentric and deluded I had been. I felt the need to destroy the evidence. I tossed the diary into a big black garbage bag with the rest of my junk, and never saw it again.

Recently I came across a quote by singer Edith Piaf:

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

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

Modesty, after all, is a feminine virtue.

One thing I’ve noticed in my conversations about women, reading books and magazines about women, listening to other people talk about women, is that the culture seems to take it as a given that women as a group have low self-esteem.

A lot of this is attributed to the fact that, bombarded as we are by an insane beauty standard, most of us don’t look like supermodels. But Edith Piaf didn’t consider herself beautiful either. She said:

I’m ugly. I’m not Venus. I’ve got sagging breasts, a low-slung ass, and little drooping buttocks….But I can still get men.

I love that remark, because it demonstrates what I have come to think of as “the deep yes.”

The deep yes is the right to dream your dreams and live an authentic life as the hero of your own unfolding epic. It’s a yes to all your imperfections and the knowledge that you’re fabulous anyway.

Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 13, I misplaced mine.

Somewhere along the line, my Yes got drowned out by other voices, external voices, that told me I was too much. I thought too much. I read too much. I used too many big words.

Boys told me I was too competitive – when I didn’t even know that we were in a competition. Or what we were competing for.

Now I know that when people tell you you’re ‘too much’ of anything, it can serve as a sign of your strengths. In my case, I was a budding young thinker and writer who hungered for the world. I was rewarded for this in some ways.

But I also learned to hold myself back and play myself down.

Modesty is a feminine virtue.

I once told my therapist, proudly, that I had never been the type of girl to ‘play dumb” in order to make herself more appealing. I will never forget her response. She said, Playing yourself down — undercutting your own abilities — is a form of playing dumb.



And we have a way of becoming what we think we’re only pretending to be.

We have a way of rising or sinking to the level of expectation the culture holds for us. We like to claim that we’re not influenced by the world around us, but truth is we’re hardwired to adapt to the herd. As a girlchild in a small town in the early-to-mid 1980s, I wasn’t expected to like math. So I stopped liking math.

I wanted to be the star of my own epic life. But even as some people told me that I could be anything I wanted to be, I grew up absorbing a different kind of message.

Women are not the heroes of Big Stories. We are, instead, the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses, the muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else’s Big Story. This someone else is usually a dude. Even the smart, feisty, bookish girl (if she’s not careful) gets cast as the Hermione to someone else’s Harry Potter.

There’s that saying: You have to see it to be it. So if you look into the culture, and you don’t see how you’re entitled to your own Big Story, you might just wake up one day, and smile, and say:

That’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll stay here and organize the snack committee. After all, somebody has to.

But to define yourself as a supporting player, to live your life in the shadow of someone else, is a precarious position.

Divorce happens. So does widowhood. Kids grow up. Odds are good that any woman will spend a significant period of her life alone. Ask twentysomething women about the possibility of being single at 40, or 50, and chances are they’ll gasp in horror. But if we don’t see single life as a real alternative, we remain just as controlled by marriage as any previous generation.

And if you can’t say No to something, you can’t truly say Yes to it either.

I was married to a man who became extremely successful. And as I watched him rise, I noticed two things: he worked very hard – much harder than the average bear – and he said No a lot. He said No to people who wanted his time, his energy, his attention. He said No in a way that protected his very limited resources so that he could channel them toward his own goals.

I realized that behind every No is a deeper Yes to whatever it is that you do want. No is a bright line that, when used properly, marks off where you end and others begin.

We learn this young. I have kids, and when they want to assert their own power and individuality, they say: No! But when you lose the deep Yes, you also lose your bright No. How can you say No to protect what you want if you don’t know what you want?

I started wondering if maybe the reason I had trouble saying No to people was because I didn’t think I was worth a Yes to protect.

This could have cost me my life.

When I was in my mid-thirties, I was in a car accident. I managed to total an obscenely expensive car while going 8 miles an hour. I made a right turn at the wrong time and got hit by a car that knocked my car into another car. But the real problem was my exhaustion. I was meeting a friend when I should not have been driving at all.

(I should have said No.)

There was something else. After the sickening crunch of impact, when I realized that – bam – I had just been in an accident, my first thought wasn’t: Thank God I’m alive.



It wasn’t: Thank God nobody’s hurt.

It was: My husband is going to kill me because I wrecked the car.

Sitting on the curb, trembling, drinking bottled water that a police officer gave me, I started to realize that this was more than an accident. It was a wake-up call.

How had I gotten to this point, more concerned about my husband’s disapproval than the fact that I could have killed myself or someone else?

In the days that followed, I remembered that moment when I found my childhood diary. And I realized something. The day I threw it out was the day I made a bad decision. I decided not to trust the voice that filled those pages: the unfiltered voice of my deep Yes, my own high opinion of myself.

Instead, I put my trust in other voices, external voices, that let me know in a dozen subtle ways that I should remember my place.

Because modesty is a feminine virtue.

I learned to look outside myself for the kind of validation and authority that can only be found deep within.

I am calling it the Deep Yes, but other people call it self-worth.



In the novel THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker, a character writes letters to a friend named God, but she is also writing to the strength within herself. I’ve heard it referred to as your inner GPS. In my blog I sometimes describe it as the voice of your soul.

You might think of it as your Higher Self.

It is a creative force that is constantly driving us toward wholeness. We ignore it – or allow other voices to override it — at our peril. To deny it is to deny your true nature, and also to alienate yourself from the love of self that enables you to receive love from others.

The deep Yes is an innately creative act. I believe that the way to reconnect with it, and to free your inner voice, is through creative expression. There is a saying: Show me who you love, and I’ll show you who you are. But I also believe: We are what we make.

In my case, it was my writing and blogging that led me back to myself. My writing reminds me who I am – and who I want to be.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for Marie Claire magazine. I told a story – my story – in which I was no longer the Hermione to someone else’s Harry Potter.

Before the piece came out, I was terrified. I sent my editor an email at 3 am asking her if I could take it back. (She said no.)

But when the issue came out, I learned something else: when you move into your own deep yes, you inspire other people to move into theirs.

The emails, comments and responses I got were telling. What they told me was this: women want to play a bigger game. Women want permission to pursue dreams and goals and greatness of our own. And when I say permission I mean a story that supports us, a story that manifests in the kind of social, economic and political structures that make female greatness possible. You shouldn’t have to feel like you might sacrifice some or all of your womanhood. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’ll get massacred for admitting, out loud, that you have some greatness in you. You just need the time and space and energy to bring it out (– and someone else can get the snacks).

Women want, I think, a grand and inspiring call to adventure that points the way to a bigger, deeper life, even if it’s still unclear – in the year 2013! – what that kind of badass womanly life is supposed to look like.

But the call to action is there. It is waiting. We only have to get very quiet – on a day to day basis — and listen to the voice that lives within. We have to trust it enough to act on it. This is, of course, much easier said than done. But it can be done.

The last thing I would like to leave you with is this:

When we have only ourselves to find the way, make the way or lead the way –

We need to trust the deep Yes, so that we can trust ourselves.

We need to trust the deep Yes, so that we can trust each other.

Thank you.

the art of becoming beautiful

After I’d taken my kids trick-or-treating, and negotiated what they could eat and when, a close male friend and I drove through the streets of a Santa Monica neighborhood.

This neighborhood is amazing on Hallowe’en night. It comes complete with a haunted mansion on the corner. The mansion hands out little stuffed animals to kids before sending them through a shrieking flickering maze where hands reach for you in the dark. (And I, the oh-so-jaded adult, emerged from the gate, and assumed I was free and clear, when one of the characters jumped out from behind me and yelled “Boo!”. Basic, yet effective.) It’s become such a popular trick-or-treating destination that police block off the streets for safety purposes. By the end of the night, the people pouring from door to door have numbered in the thousands.

(And parking becomes hella difficult.)

“Think how much this night must suck,” said my manny, “if you live here and you’re totally not into Halloween.”

My manny is a ripped, playful, twentysomething Crossfit addict who shaved off his purple mohawk when he interviewed for the job. I hired him on the condition that he grow it back.

“Isn’t that Ben Affleck?” he asked, as the kids bounced around and compared their growing bounty. I was watching a chainsaw-wielding maniac lumber down the middle of the street.

(I myself was decked out as Cleopatra, although the top of my headpiece had snapped off against the roof of my car when I got in without remembering to remove it. My snake no longer possessed a head. This was sad, but I forged on regardless.)

For a moment I thought he meant someone had dressed up as Ben Affleck, but no. He was talking about the man himself. Ben and Jennifer, dressed in normal gear, were taking their kids from door to door like any other nuclear family. That was wealthy and famous and supernaturally attractive. That people – obeying the unspoken LA protocol of How To Deal With Famous Folk – were discreetly stealing glances at while giving them their space and pretending not to care.

Ben was tall and stylish and smoking hot. I made brazen, wanton eye contact — or at least imagined I did — as we passed each other. It pretty much made my night. Because I can be shallow like that.

Afterward, I went for a drive with my aforementioned friend. The next shift had started: the young kids packed off to bath and bed (“Mom, can’t I have another piece of candy? Can’t I? Then when can I? Tomorrow?”) while the young adults took over the sidewalks and checked out the freaky front-lawn landscapes.

I saw four young women walking together, all dressed the same. I noticed what they were wearing.

Oversized white men’s buttondowns, shirttails flapping around bare thighs. I shivered with a kind of sympathetic cold (it was not a balmy night).

They caught the gaze of my male friend — how could they not? — who then glanced at me sidelong and make a sheepish crack about being “a dirty old man”.

“I remember being that age, doing stuff like that,” I said. “Playing the identity game. Trying on sexual power – this idea of sexual power — to see how it fits.”

The girls did not look like they felt powerful at all; their walk was hurried and self-conscious. They clustered together, as if depending on the pack to protect them.

Certain men, bless their hopelessly heterosexual hearts, often don’t seem to get – at least in my experience – that when women dress in a sensual or provocative manner, it’s not necessarily for them. We put ourselves on display for all kinds of reasons. It’s a mash-up of fashion, self-expression, edgy/cool, fantasies of identity, self-invention, self-reinvention, an aesthetic you might be experimenting with (I went through a period of black tops and dresses that were austere except for plunging V-necks. I liked the contrast and drama. I wasn’t showing off my cleavage – always less than impressive – but my collarbone.) You dress to make yourself feel good, or confident, or powerful. Sometimes you dress for other women (“I love your boots,” a woman said to me in an elevator, back in the day when I would subject myself to stiletto heels, “those are Gucci, right?” “Yes,” I trilled, in a moment of instant bonding, while her man and my man stared blankly at each other.) You dress for fun. (And sexy can be great fun.)

You dress to be seen a certain way.

You dress to be seen.

I don’t believe those four girls wore that costume with the intention of turning on a middle-aged man, not even one as handsome as my friend (I can imagine them wrinkling their noses and saying, “Oh, gross.”) They wanted to be daring, they wanted to rebel — they wanted to be visible — and this is the way that girls learn to do it. When I was their age, we had options: we could be prep, or punk, or post-punk, or grunge, or goth, or riot grrl, or sporty, or indifferent. But the culture has swept up those identities and channeled them all in the same narrow direction: being hot.

If those teenage girls are stepping into visibility, there are women fighting not to fade out of it. When I first moved to LA, and Beverly Hills became – for a while – one of my stomping grounds, I would see them sitting in a dermatologist’s office or shopping at Barney’s or crossing the street to Whole Foods. They’d have young clothes (often, at least back then, the kind that had JUICY stamped along some body part), young hair, young women walking beside them who were presumably their daughters. They had tight faces, plump lips, thin bodies. But they didn’t look young; they looked odd. They looked brittle and overly manicured. And if teenage girls don’t want to be leered at by men the same age as their fathers, I doubt these women want to be regarded by women like me, thinking: Note to self, don’t ever, ever become that.

I have moved in and out of visibility myself. I went through postpartum periods where I was neither ‘hot’ nor adorably (and then freakishly) pregnant. It was like I’d stepped off some bright stage into a dimly lit hallway where strangers were no longer friendly. They wouldn’t smile at me or banter with me or make small, helpful gestures for seemingly no reason. When a stylist came to our house to deal with my then-husband’s wardrobe malfunctions, he breezed past without acknowledging me in any way. (Later, he apologized profusely and explained, “I thought you were the nanny.”)

One morning I woke up and went for a haircut. I got my eyebrows plucked and shaped. I started paying attention to what I was wearing.

The world got warmer and brighter and friendlier again.

It was a subtle shift, and yet on some level it wasn’t subtle at all.

Throughout history, women have been dismissed as frivolous and vain. This isn’t about being either. From childhood on, both males and females learn to do whatever we need to do to get the attention we need to survive. We fashion ourselves accordingly. And then, should that attention ever go away, it’s only natural to do the same things we’ve always done, rely on what we’ve always relied on, in order to make it come back.

The problem, I think, is that girls aren’t always taught the difference between attention and recognition.

It’s different for men. We stared at Ben Affleck that night, yes, but it had more to do with his achievement as an actor and director – the thrill of saying, Hey, is that Ben Affleck? – than the fact that he was working some drop-dead gorgeous menswear and looked, as I may have already mentioned, smoking hot.

I remember an interview wherein he discussed his own experience with invisibility: as a broke, unemployed actor. Still tall, still handsome, but he felt “like a leper” for all the attention that he didn’t get.

Attention isn’t really earned. It’s invoked, it’s manipulated, it can be heady and make you feel powerful but it isn’t something you accomplish; you get it or you don’t. You learn to see yourself from the outside-in: through the eyes of whomever you are relying on to provide it; through the culture that rewards or punishes you for being a certain way.

So when a culture values women primarily for youth and sexuality, women learn to see themselves accordingly. The problem is that when you see yourself outside-in, you’re always looking to external sources for validation. Sometimes you get it. Sometimes you don’t. Since you never know for certain when or if it’s coming, you’re insecure, on your toes, trying to please.

Recognition happens – at least for some – when you do something exceptionally well, when you do what others can’t, when you solve a problem or create something from nothing or perform a difficult skill or educate or enlighten or improve the lives of others or even just make them laugh (repeatedly).

Recognition happens when you see yourself from the inside-out: as someone who can make an impact on the world, instead of navigating the impact the world has on you.

I’ve noticed that women who pursue recognition rather than attention have a different relationship with aging. They’re not dropping tens of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery. When they have to choose between looking older – or looking odd – they’ll go with older. When age and experience mean that you are becoming more masterful at whatever it is that you do, chances are that you’re not becoming invisible. If anything, your retirement from the beauty race allows you to be seen in new ways. The intrinsic satisfaction that you get from your work – the sense of self-esteem – probably means that you stopped relying on your looks (if you ever did) a long time ago.

“It’s one of the best things that can happen to you,” M. explained to me. M. is highly accomplished, highly intelligent, and, at 68, has a charming and sensual presence that fascinates me. “It might not feel that way at the time. But when you no longer have to deal with being seen as T + A, you start interfacing with the world on this whole other level. You realize just how much – “ she waved her hands around “—static that the other stuff created around you.”

She added, “When I walk into a room, I just assume that people notice. I know that people are paying attention. Because I am quite the package.”

I like that.

I am quite the package.

This is what I wish for those four shivering girls in their white buttondown shirts: that they enjoy their years of youthful beauty and take them for all they are worth. May they learn that being looked at is not the same as being looked up to; and there’s a difference between someone listening to you because they want to have sex with you later, and someone listening to you because they think you have something to say. May they realize that you can come to the table on the arm of someone else, or earn your place through your own lifelong pursuit of excellence (and it’s never too late to start pursuing). The latter position puts ground beneath you. The former, not so much.

As they lose in skin elasticity, may they gain in skill and wisdom and style.

There’s a French term – jolie-laide – which I love. It means beautiful-ugly, and refers to a woman who is not conventionally beautiful but becomes beautiful through the mesmerizing way she presents herself.

I am quite the package.

That’s what I wish for those girls: that they embark on the glorious, lifelong journey of beauty from the inside-out.

every goal has four dimensions

Every goal has four dimensions.*

Mind, heart, body, soul.

They’re all interconnected. Although one dimension is usually dominant – maybe you’re trying to solve a problem or come up with a plan (mental), or find a mate or bond with your teenager (emotional), or run a marathon or declutter your house (physical), or ascend to a higher state of mind or connect to some cause or movement bigger than yourself (spiritual) – the successful achievement of this goal involves the other dimensions as well.

For example.

I am preparing a talk to give at TEDXWomen in Los Angeles on Dec 5 – which is coming up maybe faster than I would like.

I want to crush it.

The big goal (crushing it) chunks up into smaller goals, each involving one of the dimensions.

Mind: I outline, write, and then revise the talk for maximum impact. I think about my big idea, my supporting ideas, and the intellectual shift I’d like to create within the collective mind of my audience.

Heart: I touch base with the organizers of the event (Dana and Kristan), who keep tabs on how the talk is progressing. (TED controls the brand pretty tightly.) I practice my talk on friends and family and any other innocent spectator unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. I receive coaching and suggestions.

I think about the kind of connection I want to form with the audience. I aim for a certain kind of emotional impact and structure my talk accordingly.

Body: I practice – over and over – giving the talk. When the day comes I haul myself to the appropriate location, deal with my nerves, hope I wore the right outfit, act like I’m more confident than I am. If I’ve rehearsed enough, the talk will be trained so deeply into my body that it will take over once I am onstage, no matter how nervous I am.

Soul: I seek a connected and creative state of mind. I want to walk away from this experience feeling like I’ve both grown from it, and contributed to the growth of others. (That would be incredibly cool.) I am part of a community.

We get in trouble, I think, when the different parts of ourselves are not aligned. Instead of building on each other towards a single point, they are in conflict. They pull us in different directions. They disrupt our focus and scatter our energy.

The mind urges you in one direction, but the body rebels and suddenly it’s difficult to get yourself out of bed.

The heart yearns and gnaws on itself and spins you off into distraction, loneliness and daydream.

The soul feels ignored and starts closing in on itself: you descend into a state of resentment, bitterness, alienation.

Mind, heart, body, soul.

Every goal has four dimensions.

mind, heart, body, soul: every goal has 4 dimensions. click to tweet

* Inspired by the book STEALING FIRE FROM THE GODS by James Bonnet

how to be gifted ( + why your gift is not always obvious)

1

You have a gift. If you’re lucky, you already know what it is because someone helped you identify it at a young age.

When we think of gifts we think of obvious things – painting, music, sports, math – and it’s as if they get delivered alongside the baby, like a toy tucked into her bassinet or one of those HELLO MY NAME IS stickers taped to her breastbone.

(Hello, My Name is Emma! I am gifted at VIOLIN. Worship me!)

In truth, our natural talents are things that come so easily to us that we don’t think anything of them. We assume that everybody can do “it”, if we recognize “it” as an ability at all.

I have a friend who has a talent for bringing people together. She throws dinner parties and dance parties. She hosts events in her home for artists and filmmakers. Not only that, but people just tend to gather around her, whether it’s the deck of her house in Los Angeles or the condo she rents for a weekend in San Francisco. And she doesn’t think anything of it. When I first pointed this out to her – years ago – she laughed it off. “Oh, that stuff is easy,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“For you,” I said.

I have another friend who is one of the most gifted organizers that I’ve ever seen. Whenever I bring this up in conversation with her – usually along the lines of You should start your own event-planning company — she will dismiss or downplay it. “Oh, that’s nothing.” “That’a nothing special.” “Everybody can do that.”

“I can’t,” I said.

(And every single person who knows me would agree.)

I had my own experience with this when I took the STRENGTHSFINDER test and discovered that my number one strength is something called Input.

To quote from the book and website:

“People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more…

Driven by your talents, you yearn to increase your knowledge by being kept in the information loop. This explains why you gravitate to people who converse about ideas at a deeper and more thoughtful level than most individuals are capable of doing. “Making small talk” — that is, engaging in idle conversation — probably seems like a waste of time to you.

By nature, you are comfortable offering suggestions to people who regularly seek your counsel — that is, recommendations about a decision or course of action they are considering. These individuals usually feel deep affection for you. You are likely to spend time together socializing as well as working or studying…”



That, I thought, is a talent? I knew I could obsess more and drill deeper than the average bear, reading every book and article on whatever intrigues me at the time, and I definitely like to put ideas together and tell people what they should – I mean, offer people gentle suggestions as to their general life direction, but –

That stuff is easy.

It’s nothing.

I thought my talent, should I have one, was for writing. Because I was one of the lucky ones: parents and teachers picked up on what I was doing for fun at six, eight, ten years old. They rewarded and encouraged me until the pleasure and process of writing became motivation in itself. By the time I graduated high school, I was so self-identified as a writer that nobody could talk any sense into me.

What I’ve since realized: a ‘gift’ has different dimensions, not one strength but many realized over time as you become more self-aware (click to tweet) and figure out how to relate or combine them so that they build on each other. I can take my talent for input and fold it into my writing – not just as a blogger, but a fiction writer. I can thoroughly research my subject matter, my storyworlds. I can lead readers through them in a way that educates as well as entertains.

A gift is also composed of elements that are both innate and practiced. Maybe I never had to ‘work’ at Input – I have it the way I have blue eyes, or fair skin that burns easily and never tans at all. But I have to work my ass off at my writing, and the need for that kind of effort and practice never stops unless I do.

2

Often what we think of as giftedness turns out to be a certain kind of precociousness. A lot of child prodigies come to mind. They can do amazing stuff very early and very well, but that kind of gift fades out over time as more people catch up to them and if they don’t find an effective way to apply their intelligence in the world in a way that serves people.

Which is another element of giftedness that we don’t talk much about. A gift not only has to be identified, developed and mastered, it has to be put to use in the world. While your gift may be timeless and universal, it has to answer a call of your time and place. click to tweet

When these things come together in spectacular fashion, we think of this person as a genius: gifted enough to leave a deep soulprint on the world.

(I’m sure a lot of people are just as bright and innovative as Steve Jobs, with a similar range of interests. But Jobs could focus and apply his abilities in a way that served other people. A lot of other people. )

If anything, child prodigies might have a real disadvantage here. What they learn growing up – what all children learn – is how to please the people in their lives in order to get what they need to survive.

But pleasing people isn’t the same thing as serving them. You please people in order to get what you need (attention; approval). You serve people in order to give them what they need – whether or not they even know that they need it. You can do this because you’ve mastered your gift so well that you’ve transcended both knowledge and technique; they’ve become an extension of you, the Force to your Jedi Knight; you’re no longer imitating what’s already out there but manifesting some aspect of your soul. You are creating something new, whether it’s a company, a solution or a work of art.

You solve a problem.

You show people something new.

(Or reframe something old so that it’s new again.)

You open up the world. You educate, entertain, enlighten.

You create an experience. You move people to awe.

3

What we often think of as an independent unit, a gift, is actually a bundle of things: a convergence of certain traits, qualities, abilities, and knowledge, innate and learned, natural and practiced, present at birth and acquired slowly over time. It is then fitted to the world like a key into a lock.

You have to find the key.

And then you have to find the lock.

tell what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about

So the little self-published book I wrote a foreword for (The Art of Being Unmistakable by Srinivas Raos) has grown up to be a bestseller.

Here’s what happened. Glenn Beck – yes, Glenn Beck – fell in wild and irrevocable love with the book, with the message, and had the author – “a surfer from Berkeley” — flown to Texas to appear on his show.

(I know what you might be mumbling to yourself. Glenn the hell Beck? But it goes to show that some things truly do reach beyond the political divide. Or abyss, as the case may be.)

At one point, Glenn and Srini discuss the power of telling your truth. The full, unedited, scary truth. Which reminds me of this quote by Natalie Goldberg:

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

Srini likes to say he wrote the book “by committing career suicide one Facebook status update at a time”. (The rough draft of the book first appeared as a series of lengthy Facebook updates.) Glenn mentioned that the day he started telling his truth on air was the day he thought his career was over: “instead, it was really just beginning.”

If you want to create something great, you have to put yourself out there to bleed a little. click to tweet

When you look at the things we fear the most, they include exposure, ridicule, and social exile (or worse). We learn that to risk these things is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to be weak — in a culture where only the strong survive.

We hide behind social masks and lists of best practices: taking our cues from what has already worked for the people who have gone before us, and shaping ourselves accordingly.

As human beings, though, we seem to have an obsessive hunger for what is authentic, for what is real. In a society as mediated as ours has become, maybe we can’t always describe what we mean by ‘authentic’ – which allows the word to become as overused and emptied of meaning as many accuse it of being. We know it when we see it. Or rather, we know it when we feel it…because it, whatever ‘it’ is, slips past our intellectual defenses and goes straight to the heart of who we are.

To the primal, emotional, nonverbal part of us.

It’s the place where we don’t think so much as pulse with the fierce recognition that your experience is also my experience: a part of myself kept safely hidden and unsaid. It’s like you got into my soul and said what I was thinking, or what I felt but didn’t know to say, or how to say, or couldn’t risk saying.

There comes a sense of relief and wonder: sometimes of shame lifting away, and often of illumination: I am not alone. I thought it was just me, but I’m part of something bigger. There are others of my kind.

To make something truly your own means to infuse it with your deep sensibility, to filter it through your unique worldview, to cast it in your signature voice. When you do this, you step out from behind the mask. You show your inner life.

You make yourself vulnerable.

Instead of saying what’s already been said, you explore a new aspect by saying what and how it is true for you. You update it, or reinvent it, or put a new spin on it, or veer off into new territory altogether.

Because it’s truly yours, it’s fresh and new.

Because it’s true, we pulse with it, resonate with you, and reward you with our time, our money, our attention, our love – and sometimes our hatred.

Truth gets under the skin. It shows up the places where we are the same — but also where we believe ourselves to be wildly different.

The courage to tell the truth includes the courage to be controversial. click to tweet

Truth – and truthtelling — are not for the faint-hearted.

the art of becoming your own rebellion

“The serpent was the best thing that ever happened to Eve.” — Danielle LaPorte

1

What kind of novel could Eve have written before she had the good sense to bite into the apple and get out into the world?

2

A young woman described the memoir she wanted to write.

The story gripped me: a bright and talented child struggling to assert herself against narcissistic parents and become the master of her own identity. Except every few minutes this writer would backtrack and say how her parents weren’t actually that bad, they had a lot of good qualities, she was grateful for the life they had given her…

When she talked like this, her body language became stiff and awkward, her voice a bit robotic.

It was like she was flipping between two personalities: the good daughter she had been trained to be, and the deeper, authentic self that was trying to break through.

The rebel daughter. The so-called ‘bad’ girl.

I heard myself say, “You need to write like the bad girl.”

If she could find a way to tell about her fight for the right to her own personhood — instead of being an extension of her parents — she could claim the truth of her life and herself. She would offer up a valuable story that could even guide others in similar situations.

If she wrote as the good daughter, I couldn’t help thinking, she was doomed.

3

I like bad girls.

I’m not talking about Paris or Lindsey or Britney: they’re too lost or damaged or attention-seeking. They want you to love them, or at least look at them, which to them is the same thing.

A true bad girl, to paraphrase Coco Chanel (who was wicked bad herself), has some style. She doesn’t give a damn. And by that I mean: she believes in her right to authentic self-expression, even when – or especially when – it cuts against the grain of a society that would have her be someone, something else. She holds to a bold point of view with such conviction that, over time, the world is forced to adjust to her instead of the other way round. She co-creates reality.

One of my favorite quotes is from Twyla Tharp. In her book THE CREATIVE HABIT, she talks about her decision to become a dancer and choreographer.

She says, “I became my own rebellion.”

I would turn this phrase over in my mind, thinking that it sounded good, but what did it mean, exactly? Why did it appeal to me so much, and seem necessary to anyone who wanted to be an artist (or entrepreneur or hacker or any other thing that demands stepping off the beaten path)?

Probably because of this: the statement is rooted in such spirit and defiance. It’s not just a challenge to the conventional ways of living, the accepted wisdom, the status quo, the established Establishment, etcetera…but a challenge to the self.

We are all born into ways of thinking that we take for granted. We are raised within certain belief systems. We take the dominating voices of the adults around us and internalize them until those perceptions of us become what we are to ourselves.

But when you become your own rebellion you start to question all of that.

And if you’ve been raised to be the good daughter (or the good son), you maybe start to think that what is ‘bad’ is in many ways ‘good’ and what is ‘good’…might be killing you slowly.

4

A good girl (or boy) does not defy.

She pleases. She listens. She serves. She supports.

She makes no demands. She has no natural sense of entitlement.

She doesn’t say anything that might offend, or make you dislike her.

She has some spirit, sure, but it’s contained. She is ‘fiesty’.

Which is just another quality that makes her so adorable.

And if she doesn’t have anything nice to say, she won’t say much at all.

This could be a problem if you want to be a creative.

5

When I read Elaine Showalter’s A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANNE BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX I was struck by all the stories — so frequent they became a kind of motif or refrain — of women writers who flourished intellectually as children (usually due to progressive fathers who believed in female education). They nutured artistic ambitions as outsized as any male’s, and achieved as adults the first golden apples of success — only to have those dreams choked off as soon as they inconvenienced their husbands and families, or endured the censure of a society that labeled them crazy, unfeminine, destructive, dangerous.

If they survived those hurdles, they were defeated by the sheer exhaustion of childrearing and housekeeping.

The great female writers who are studied in college classrooms today were spinsters (Jane Austen) or recluses (Emily Dickenson) or fallen women (Edith Wharton, who divorced her husband and wrote frankly about divorce in an age when ‘divorce’ was taboo, or George Eliot, who fell in love with a married man and shacked up with him to the horror and condemnation of her culture, or George Sand, who carried on affairs with men and women and disguised herself as a man in order to go to the places where women weren’t allowed).

To develop their potential and realize their ambitions, they had to find some way to escape the constrictions of a society that refused to allow women the ability that every artist needs and most men take for granted: the ability to be selfish.

Call a man ‘selfish’ and chances are he’ll shrug his shoulders; call a woman ‘selfish’ and she’ll feel so shamed and cut to the core she’ll twist herself inside out to prove otherwise.

But to be selfish means to be concerned with one’s own interests , at least when the word applies to men. When the word applies to women, it seems to be synonymous with narcissistic. And this, of course, is bullshit. You can be concerned with your own interests, including your deep-seated need to make meaning from the materials of yourself and your life, to take part in the artistic traditions and contribute to the culture (and maybe, just maybe, even change the culture, at least in some small way) and still love and be good to your partner, your children, your colleagues and friends.

And to be a writer, or any artist, is to be inherently selfish. You must claim time for yourself, away from family and friends and jobs and so-called productive activity. You must claim that your art is important because it is important to you. You must make it a priority even though years will pass before you achieve anything that other people might recognize as ‘success’, assuming you achieve it at all.

You must allow yourself the dreamtime, the mental wandering, the internal stillness in which you can become acquainted with your inner voice and allow it to guide you. You must shut out the outside voices that tell you to zig when you know you must zag. You must figure out how to feel and think your way forward, into your work and into your life.

You must claim your right to knowledge, including self-knowledge, and experience, because what can any artist be without them?

6

If Adam had plucked the apple, he would have been a hero.

Instead it fell to Eve, one of the original Bad Girls. She had the artist’s drive for exploration, knowledge and experience.

The need to create isn’t about the desire to find meaning in the world, but to make meaning. If you have it, you know it; it’s lived inside you from a young age and will never leave. It will continue to call and nag and eat away at your soul until you start to do something about it. To deny it, to allow others to deny it, is to kill off a part of your personhood.

To paraphrase a popular saying: good girls stay in the garden.

Bad girls, on the other hand, get the world.

own your story + you own your life

1

Your voice is the connecting force between your inner and outer world. Your voice takes your inner life and makes it manifest: gives it shape and substance and meaning for others.

Says: Here it is.

Says: Here I am.

It tells a story.

Online, your voice is who you are. Readers take that voice and construct their sense of your identity around it. If you show your inner life and it connects with their inner lives, it creates emotional resonance (what we’re all hungry for), and they will follow you wherever you lead them.

2

On some level you have to feel entitled to speak: to stake your claim and take up space in the world with your opinions, the contents of your psyche. This is why voice can be a sign of privilege. Often it’s the person in the group with the most status and power who talks the most.

When I was much younger, I was involved with some people who had a man at the head of their clan whom I will call M. M was from a different generation, a different culture. This is maybe why the others didn’t call him on his (blatant) misogyny, but treated it more like an irritating quirk, like someone who stands too close to you at a party. “Women are like dogs and children,” he was reported to have said, “they should be seen and not heard.” This meant that at certain dinners, he and two other men would monopolize the conversation and treat us women and children as if we didn’t exist.

I would sit for well over an hour, maybe two, bored out of my skull.

One night I interrupted a conversation these three men were having about the demise of America as a world power. I don’t remember the point I was making. I just remember M. smoothly cutting me off, saying, “Now I think the point that Justine is really trying to make is that –”

“No,” I snapped, and he looked at me in surprise. Looked at me for what was possibly the first time that night. “You have no idea what I was going to say and absolutely no right to speak for me.” I said a few more things, the gist of which was that he had no respect for women and I was tired of it.

The table fell silent.

Then one of the younger men laughed and said, “She’s right.”

I learned something valuable that night, something I knew intellectually and had even discussed in post-colonial literature classes in college, but didn’t hit me on a visceral level, didn’t become the kind of knowledge I felt in my body, until that encounter with M.

It was simply this: silence is not a neutral position, whatever your intentions. Silence automatically supports the status quo. When you are a presence that lacks a voice, you create an empty space that another voice – a dominating voice that knows no boundaries – is only too happy to fill.

If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.

3

A voice is a story.

A story is a powerful thing.

You only have to look at politics. The war between the Republicans and the Democrats is a war between two conflicting stories of America.

Only one can win.

Stories don’t just explain who we are and where we’ve been, they set the course for our future. If our story denies climate crisis, then we’re not going to take action against it. If our story characterizes women as little more than overgrown children, as it used to, then giving them the vote would not just seem revolutionary, but laughable.

Change the story, and you change the culture.

This is true on a personal level as well. The past is the past, and it’s true that you can’t change it.

But you can change the way you interpret it.

You can view it through the lens of a different perspective and see things you overlooked before. You can make yourself out to be the victim of circumstance (and thus powerless to change anything). You can make yourself out as the star of your own hero or heroine’s journey, in which case everything that happens to you has a deeper purpose: to force you to change and grow, to become the person you need to be in order to meet your true destiny.

4

‘Finding your voice’ becomes a kind of code for finding yourself. Voice is what you say and how you say it; the two seamlessly weave together, the dancer and the dance.

Which means it’s not just something you find, but develop and practice.

You find it through paying attention to what attracts you, to what you’re drawn to: the ideas, people, subject matter, and also the medium. Maybe your true voice isn’t a spoken one; maybe its purest form comes through visual art, or sports or dance, or writing, or invention, or math, or multimedia, or music, or fashion. Sometimes your real voice doesn’t leap into being until you find your medium. It makes possible a conversation that you didn’t even know you could have.

Which is why it’s so important not to quit searching for it until you find it.



You develop your voice through practice, and also through mastering the tools you need to express it. When you can use those tools in a way that others can’t, you have a decided advantage. You can also move more deeply into yourself and the world, manifesting your inner life with greater depth and nuance.

Magic happens when you learn a technique so well that it becomes a part of you. You become more of what you are. You push past the boundaries, stop mimicking others and start truly creating yourself: your signature style, your voice.

When you get really good, you can draw other people into your story and make them a part of it.

This is known as creating a movement.

This is why, I think, there are so many people who feel pent-up, restless and yearning inside; they want to create but have the mistaken notion that they are “not creative”. Nobody wants to feel trapped and silent. We all have the innate human drive to express ourselves, to speak, to create meaning from the raw stuff of our lives.

To be heard.

To learn and know our story all the way down to the story bones. To tell it in a way that only we can.

The ultimate creative act is to invent (and reinvent) yourself.

Own your story, and you own your life. click to tweet

Somewhere out there is your audience. They are waiting for you, and always have been.