Being brave is about telling your truths and story despite trolls and ridicule.
It’s Be Brave Friday today and truth is that so many people are being brave every damn day.
Being brave is about continuing after massive loss.
Being brave is about living in a world that might be pressing you down.
Being brave is going after your dreams.
Being brave is about being who you are — open, vulnerable, flawed, and shiny.
Being brave is about telling your truths and story despite trolls and ridicule.
Being brave is sometimes dealing with just an annoying email that makes your heart sink.
I hope we can all hold each other up, grab each other’s hands and make something good.
If you’ve read my Be Brave Friday posts before, you know I have a hard time sharing my art because … parents. It always makes me feel so vulnerable.
Anyway, this is a painting that I’m making prints of and sending some out to my patrons who help me out and read my unpublished stories on Patreon. I hope you like it okay. I know it’s not a lot of color.
And I hope you might hang out with Shaun and I for a bit tonight (7 p.m. EST) on LOVING THE STRANGE (on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter).
I should really make it’s own reminder post, but I’m not feeling super brave about that. Put your brave on my friends. We’ve got this, right?
Daily Cuteness
Every weekday on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, I share insight/thoughts/inspiration from our two dogs and three cats. If you want to follow me on any of those places? It’d be great.
Here’s today’s, courtesy of Sparty Dog.
Whatever you used to be, used to think?
That doesn’t need to matter anymore.
Carve out who you want to be right now.
Create the story you want to live.
The future is still out there, ready for you to soar into it.
And choose love & treats. Always.
xo
Sparty Dog
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Have you ever felt like you’re riding a bike really hard, but you’re not getting anywhere? Like all your effort and work and energy hasn’t moved you at all. Then you look down and remember you’re on a stationary bike. Your tires are just spinning. But you aren’t going anywhere. You aren’t moving forward.
And your inner critic is saying, “You suck. You must be an idiot to think you can do anything, be anything, that you matter at all. You don’t. Nothing you do is good enough. You aren’t good enough.”
So basically your inner critic is Morrissey or Nick Kershaw or any alt 1980s singer from the U.K.
You’ve got to get Morrisey to shut the hell up.
We spend our days communicating with other people and with ourselves. We can get away from other people pretty easily, but it’s a lot harder to get away from ourselves.
A New Zealand study reports that people have over 60,000 thoughts every day. Not all of those thoughts are “I have to poo” or “Uh-oh. I just let one rip.” A lot of those thoughts are negative. Too many.
According to a 2005 study by the National Science Foundation, “Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.”
Then there’s this—
A Cornell University study in 2005 found that only 15% of what we worry about actually happens and a good 79% of the people they studied realized that they could absolutely handle whatever it was that happened.
They decided that 97 % “are baseless.” Those thoughts are just us being pessimistic, negative Eeyores.
So the question becomes how do you manage your own mind, keep it from spending all that time in the negative spiral?
According to the tlex institute, “The secret is in our Breath. Through breathing techniques validated by modern science, we effortlessly quiet, empty and calm the mind, at the same time increase attention and focus. This state of relaxed-awareness is the Flow state, when we are our most creative, effective and happy.
Say something positive to yourself the moment you wake up. Go all Stuart Smalley on your day. Say, “Today is going to rock.”
You know all those people who #soblessed, #countingblessing, #graitutude? They are onto something. Focusing on even the tiniest of good things helps you deal with the crap things. Say some buttface passes you on the double yellow lines and gives you the finger? You can think, “Hey, at least that buttface won’t rear end me now.”
When things suck, crack jokes. Find the light in the darkness. Find the funny in the horrible.
When you start talking whack at yourself, turn it around. Instead of thinking, “Yeah, I never shut the drawers because I suck,” think “I am just super efficient and left that drawer open because I knew I’d have to go right back there.” Think this even after you slam your hip into the drawer.
Don’t think about the past. Don’t worry too much about the future. Think about you right now. Right this second. Live in the now.
When you fail at something, be chill. Pull out your inner Elmo and think about how you can learn from this and still get hugged. Most things aren’t end of the world.
Surround yourself with people who aren’t assholes. Seriously. If everyone around you is an Eeyore or a cannibal or a backstabber, it’s going to get to you. Positive people help make you more positive.
Live like an optimist especially if you’re a writer.
A lot of writers go around saying that they can’t find anything to write about.
Ideas are everywhere; I promise.
Just this week there was a headline on theslate.com that read, “Two ‘masked bandits’ raid California bank, and they didn’t want money, officials say.”
The masked bandits were actually raccoons who broke into Redwood City Bank though it was closed.
They were reported when a guy using an ATM said he saw a stuffed animal moving around inside the bank. Humane society officials were called and the raccoons played tag for about ten minutes before letting the humans catch them.
They think the raccoons gained entry via a tree, then some airducts. Then they broke out some ceiling tiles, messed up some of the man’s papers and tipped over a computer. They did not get hurt. They did not take any money. Maybe they took a wall calendar or a you just opened a new checking account gift, but we aren’t sure.
So, you know that this is definitely a picture book or an early reader, right?
“We take ideas from other people, people we’ve learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That’s really where innovation happens. And that means we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right?”
In another TedTalk, writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how ancient Greeks believed that creativity didn’t come from us humans, but from daemons, “divine attendant spirits.” Socrates was really into that. And the Romans, she says, called these spirits “genius.”
Ideas are genius.
Ideas were separate from us and we weren’t responsible for them. Imagine if we believed that now.
You don’t need to stress about your process is the point. Your ideas will come. You can ask them to show up. And you don’t need to be afraid of those ideas coming or going. You just have to write, paint, sing, and allow your brain, your genius, your daemon to do the work. It can only do that if you show up to do the work, too.
“The innovative drive lives in every human brain, and the resulting war against the repetitive is what powers the colossal changes that distinguish one generation from the next, one decade from the next, one year from the next. The drive to create the new is part of our biological makeup. We build cultures by the hundreds and new stories by the millions. We surround ourselves with things that have never existed before, while pigs and llamas and goldfish do not.”
They go on to say,
“Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than 400 years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.” Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.””
How cool is that? Creativity is about altering and twisting memory.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Stop being so damn afraid. When ideas come, grab them. Just say yes.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Our biggest internal issue is living in fear. Go balls to the walls. Smell everything. Wag your tail. Lick things (with consent). Live.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Sometimes the treasure is not worth the hunt . . . .
When a little boy goes missing on a large Maine island, the community is horrified especially almost-lovers Rosie Jones and Sergeant Seamus Kelley. The duo’s dealt with two gruesome serial killers during their short time together and are finally ready to focus on their romance despite their past history of murders and torment.
Things seem like they’ve gone terribly wrong. Again. Rosie wakes up in the middle of the woods. Is she sleepwalking or is something more sinister going on?
What at first seems like a fun treasure hunt soon turns into something much more terrifying . . . and they learn that things are not yet safe on their island or in their world. If they want to keep more people from going missing, Rosie and Seamus have to crack the puzzle before it’s too late.
To buy it, click here, and let me know! I might send you something!
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
But, you know what? Prior to COVID, and I am sure that it will be the same after, there were millions of people whose everyday existence was not far off from what mainstream society has been so truly shaken by this past year. Remember this!
On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990s.
An adorable Florida man who moved to Maine
Some days are not like the others. Some days are days you never really thought that you would have to live out. Carrie and I got our first round of COVID vaccination today and I don’t think that we are going to post about it on social media, we are just not that kind of people.
Getting the vaccine is exciting in a way, but mostly just having a sense of security that if we do get COVID, you know ten or more days after our second dose, that it may not be that bad and most likely won’t kill us.
However, I must say that it was really a great experience and the hospital running the setup at the Cross Insurance Arena in Bangor, Maine really has it down. We were there a total of 45 minutes and 15 of that was waiting for the doors to open because we were the first appointments of the day. So, a big shout out to all of those professionals and volunteers making that happen!
Basically we had a good morning. Then this afternoon we had to go see our tax man.
Bummer dude!
I think this particular visit fits under both categories, days not like the others and days you never really thought that you would have to live out. I shall say no more other than we are fine and really, we are truly lucky that we owe Uncle Sam so much money. We are lucky that we are not having to choose between food or rent this month. We are lucky that we have friends to talk to on Zoom meetings once or twice a week. We are lucky to have another human being in our house to say, “thank you, I appreciate you and I love you” to us and for us to say the same to them!
It has been a very strange year and hopefully we are coming up on an incredible turning point.
People need a break! People need to work, go to school, get out of the house, travel and just be able to socialize like before COVID.
But, you know what? Prior to COVID, and I am sure that it will be the same after, there were millions of people whose everyday existence was not far off from what mainstream society has been so truly shaken by this past year. Remember this!
Remember that there are people who need you to say hi and smile at them for no reason.
There are people who need to socialize and have friends.
There are people who need to feel loved.
I truly believe that if every single person would take the opportunity to say hello and say one thing nice to a stranger every day, the world would be a much better place!
Not only do such actions make the receiver feel better, they most definitely help the giver feel better as well. I challenge you to try this every time that you are out in public or have contact with someone whom you do not see on a daily basis for a week, or a month if you don’t get out much, and see how much of a difference you can make.
Thank you for reading my feel good post, which I really do believe in, and I hope you will give it a go.
As always, Love Your Way Through It!
Shaun
almost dead book by carrie jones
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
We don’t need to be in love or to even feel love in order to make another feel loved or cared about, we simply need to remember that the most powerful love is the love that we give to another, without expectation of obligation or return.
This morning I realized that it has been exactly one year since we traveled as a family.
This week is a school break week here in Maine and last year at this time Carrie, myself and our youngest daughter, Kittiey, drove to Georgia to see our oldest daughter, Emily, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Benning at the time.
After spending a couple of days with Emily we drove to Florida to spend the remainder of our vacation and see my family.
Shortly after returning from that trip, Carrie and I managed to spend a weekend in Portland Maine for her birthday. Since then, none of the three of us (Emily is currently isolated at Tuck University getting her MBA.) have traveled more than forty miles away from our house.
Both of those trips out of the house were for specialized dentist appointments and other than those joyous trips to the dentist, none of us has gone more than twenty miles away from the house and all of these trips are for curbside grocery pickup at the nearest Walmart. Curse you for this involuntary hermitic existence COVID-19!
While it may seem as though I am complaining, and I am a little bit because we all love to travel and see new people and places, complaining is not what this blog is about.
It is about love, the miraculous fact that while we are in constant contact with each other (Kittiey is 100 percent remote learning), we all still love each other and nothing has drastically changed in how we feel about each other, unless it is a deeper understanding of patience.
To me, that is a testament to the power of love!
After all, love is the mother of all things good; kindness, empathy, compassion and understanding. Honestly, I am a little surprised by our success in continued friendship through this last year and I am supremely happy about the results!
For those of you who may have suffered far more than anyone should ever have to, I offer my greatest condolences and wishes for better times.
Even without COVID-19 the world faces a myriad of disasters every day and somehow humans have always managed to survive the unthinkable forces working against us.
Why?
Because we are capable of loving one another.
We are capable of being compassionate and empathetic to one another. We are capable of respecting one another.
We don’t need to be in love or to even feel love in order to make another feel loved or cared about, we simply need to remember that the most powerful love is the love that we give to another, without expectation of obligation or return.
We must simply remember and realize that love is the greatest gift and the greatest investment! Always, love your way through it.
Shaun
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Loving yourself and loving your way through it has a lot to do with forgiveness, but it’s okay to sometimes struggle with the concept of forgiveness, whether it’s about forgiving yourself or other people.
My husband is a tall, rugged white man. People look at him and assume that he played football, not just in high school, but college. Sometimes they assume he was pro.
Those assumptions don’t stigmatize him, but that’s because he’s pretty lucky.
We aren’t all that lucky all the time.
But it’s important to look beyond people’s outsides and not make assumptions or to give advice like it’s absolute edicts. We all live in slightly different bubbles with different backgrounds and sometimes those worlds aren’t going to jive or mesh or even make sense.
When I was talking to him about some editing work I was doing on a self-help book, he looked at me and asked, “It must be nice for these people to be able to have the time and money to run off to a yoga or meditation retreat for three weeks.”
“I know, right?”
“Does this person think everyone can do this?”
“Kind of.”
Both of us come from poor even though we aren’t poor now. Our parents were hard-working and our mothers were mostly single, but they didn’t have the ability to move beyond their economic brackets. His mom was derailed by lupus. Mine was derailed by diabetes and some bad decisions.
The point is that both of them would have loved to have spa days and meditation and yoga retreats, chances to pamper their minds and bodies. But they were too busy surviving to find the money to spend on that.
There are a lot of people posting Medium articles and blogs about how to balance work and life. They are often written by single guys in their late twenties. And it seems like they have it all figured out.
And I hope that they do because that would be wonderful for them.
But here’s the thing: Nobody else’s journey and circumstances are going to 100 percent work for you.
Here’s another thing: Even your own methods and journey aren’t going to work for you 100 percent of the time.
That’s okay.
There’s no one path to love, to happiness, to success, or even to publishing a book, let alone writing it. There’s no one way that we are supposed to be. You’ve got to embrace that, embrace who you are and persevere.
Loving yourself and loving your way through it has a lot to do with forgiveness, but it’s okay to sometimes struggle with the concept of forgiveness, whether it’s about forgiving yourself or other people.
It’s really good to try not to force other people to prescribe to your timetables about forgiveness. We all move at different speeds. That’s okay. We need to give ourselves and other people the space to determine their own damn pace.
It’s important for us all to remember that our advice might not work for everyone and give space to our assumptions that it will. Not everyone who looks like a football player was a football player. Not everyone can practice self-care via a three-week meditation retreat. It’s okay. We are all okay.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
Compassion and empathy makes you stronger. You don’t need to walk through this world with a big stick, scream from a bully pulpit or sermonize with fear. Empathy and kindness for even those who hurt you—or those who try to hurt you—only makes you stronger.
It’s really easy to get all wrapped up in status and ambition, to fall into the syndrome where you think the grass is always greener everywhere except your lawn, to be jealous at other people’s accolades or family’s or looks or luck.
Shakespeare said that comparisons are odious. And that long-dead white guy was right.
Comparisons make you feel like poop.
I know that a lot of people try to make themselves feel better by comparing themself to others and find the others lesser.
I’ve had people do it to me all my life. I bet you have, too.
My husband before Shaun was a hospital CEO in a small, local hospital. I was volunteering to decorate for one of the hospital’s two annual fundraisers. I was up on a ladder wearing my favorite Snoopy shoes and jeans, hardly hospital CEO wife clothes, but good stuff for climbing ladders, hauling tables and putting out poinsettias.
My hair was its natural color and in a lopsided ponytail. I had no make-up on.
I’ll never forget these two wealthy ladies about two decades older than me loudly saying, “What does he see in her?”
I tottered on the ladder a bit and the person helping me knew that I heard. It would have been impossible not to hear.
“Don’t listen to them. They have miserable small lives and they’re jealous. Just jealous shrews,” the helper said.
She might have been right, but it didn’t matter right that second.
I heard their words and for a moment they hurt me, but then I just felt so sad for them. How lonely their lives must be if they had to say that about me. How sad.
All I could do was love them when I thought about the hurt that they must have had inside of their hearts.
Neither of those women probably even remember that moment, but I do, and I also remember that I made a choice.
I could have luxuriated in that hurt instead of acknowledging it, seeing it, and then letting it pass through me.
I could have lashed out at them and matched their pettiness with my own.
But instead I chose empathy. I had the luxury and safety of doing that because I’m secretly pretty secure in who I am. I love myself even when I suck. I chose to love them when they sucked, too.
A translation of Dhammapada verse 223 makes it so that Buddha once roughly said, “Silence the angry man with love. Silence the ill-natured man with kindness. Silence the miser with generosity. Silence the liar with truth.”
Some translations use ‘overpower’ rather than ‘silence.’
Overpower the angry man with love.
Love your way through it.
Compassion and empathy makes you stronger. You don’t need to walk through this world with a big stick, scream from a bully pulpit or sermonize with fear. Empathy and kindness for even those who hurt you—or those who try to hurt you—only makes you stronger.
I was born way after Martin Luther King Jr was killed.
But when I was a kid, a holiday in his honor was signed into law by Ronald Regan, who was pretty much forced into it by a veto-proof Congressional backing. (338 – 90 in the House; 78 – 22 in the Senate)
That was in 1983.
In 1986 it became an official holiday.
But not everywhere. Not in New Hampshire where I was growing up.
N.H. tried VERY hard to not observe the holiday. So did other states. When I was a kid, I was part of the Martin Luther King Day Coalition.
The goal of the group was to have N.H. recognize the holiday. We had a lot of potlucks, a lot of lobbying, a lot of information collated. I licked a lot of envelopes.
It seemed ridiculous that in the 1980s people had to work so hard to get some states to do what was right: to recognize the contributions towards civil rights and human rights that one man gave his life for.
But they eventually did it.
South Carolina even eventually did it in 2000.
And people are still working really hard towards civil rights and human rights even during a pandemic. People out there are working, thinking, learning, exploring. People are confronting bigotries in themselves and in their workplaces or families or books.
And some aren’t.
Martin Luther King Jr. did a heck of a lot to make this country a better place, a place where one day, hopefully, race or nationality or gender or religion or sexuality won’t determine a person’s worth, won’t determine a person’s wage, won’t determine a person’s rights.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that in certain things we’ve come a long way. We still have such a way to go, but … that man, the people who worked with him, the people who worked with those same goals and who do work with those same goals in 2021, they are all my heroes.
One day to honor that sacrifice, that drive, that push towards equity and fairness isn’t much. One day is tiny compared to what they did and what some people are doing right now.
My thanks goes out to all of them. And if you’re reading this? My thanks goes out to you, too.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for existing. I hope you have the space and safety to fill your lives (and others) with hope and love.
There are so many ways to never give up, to persist, to create change in yourself and in your community. For a lot of us writers, it’s really hard to keep writing in such a subjective field with so many gatekeepers everywhere, but it’s also really important to not give up. Not if you want to make change. Not if you want your story to be out there.
Don’t give up. Okay? Your stories need to be told.
Every week day on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I post something from my dogs (Gabby and Sparty) or my cats (Marsie, Cloud, and Koko).
I often wonder if there’s a point or if I’m just annoying everyone I know (and don’t) who follow me on social media.
I often think about how I give my thoughts and words to my dogs and cats because it’s the only way I can feel brave enough to say how I feel.
Every once in a while someone will get cranky with me about them, send me a private message and deride me because I still believe in love and goodness and hope.
“Who are you,” they’ll ask, “to believe such things. To share them with the world like you’re so smart or some sort of goody-goody.”
But every once in a while, someone will give me the most beautiful gift, an act of grace, a surprise, and I will cry because I am so stunned and lucky and grateful and relieved that there are so many good people out there.
Those reminders are so important especially when everything seems to be falling apart or actually is falling apart.
In just this past month, Cheryl Rainfield and Richard Small gave me those moments. And I felt so lucky.
This time it was Nora MacFarland who sent me this.
I cried when I saw it. I cried when I opened her cards. I cried when I sent her a thank you message.
I have cried a lot lately and if you’re the type of person who cries, I bet you have, too.
Last year we became full-time parents to a little person with oppositional defiance disorder and she always says after one of her big moments, “Why are people so nice to you?”
And I say, “I’m not sure, but I think it’s because I love people so much so I try to be kind to them.”
“Even people you don’t know?” she says, pretty skeptically honestly because this is hard for her to wrap her head around.
“Even people I don’t know and especially people I do know. Sometimes those people can actually be the hardest.”
I have been so lucky in this life because I do get to know people who go out of their way to give; people like Cheryl and Richard and Nora and so many more. People who offer pea soup because they know I love it. People who tell me I can rant when I need to. People who just read my books and support me on Patreon. People who I get to be a part of their literary and book journeys.
I know how lucky I am. I want you all to be lucky too.
Nora was so brave to send her amazing art to me, to make this, to share her genius. I hope you can be brave too. I know you can.
Loving your way through tough times, through big cultural hard times and personal horrors can feel almost impossible. But you can. And love and anger aren’t dichotomies that exist in separate spaces. It’s possible to rage and love and cry and hope all at once. But I hope that as you go through these days, you turn as often as you can to love.
Back before COVID-19, I went to a board meeting on a Monday night for a local non-profit.
The people sitting around the table are passing around a tube of lipstick. Full disclosure: I don’t wear lipstick. Ever. The last time I wore lipstick it was for a play. And someone else put it on me.
Anyways, there’s this piece of paper inside where the lipstick would go and it has the nonprofit’s helpline number and info on it.
The point is that a guy wouldn’t see it hidden in the lipstick, wouldn’t think to look for this kind of info in a woman’s lipstick if he were ransacking her things.
He might not be able to even get the lipstick open, they explained.
I’m not sure that’s terribly accurate in these times, but that was the point. The point was that a woman in danger would know what to do with that lipstick tube and a man wouldn’t.
So the faux lipstick gets to me and I can’t get the paper out. I turn it upside down. I stick in my finger and try to pull it out. Nothing works. Then I realize everyone is staring at me. The woman next to me takes it: Here, Carrie let me try.
She then twists the bottom, which is what you are supposed to do with lip stick!!!!!
I make this total OMG face and then cover my eyes.
People laugh.
She gets all apologetic and hands me the lipstick: Here.
Me:
Me (Hiding):
Me: Thank you.
People continue to laugh.
Then finally the one man in the room goes: I wouldn’t have known to do that either.
Me: Yes, but I’m a woman.
Sigh.
You can tell I’m more of a lip gloss girl.
But also, the point is that gender roles don’t always apply. And that’s okay. It’s okay if you’re a man who can figure out how to work a lipstick tube and that I’m a woman who can’t.
We make assumptions about people according to our demographics (race, religion, age, gender, sexuality, height, bodies, you name it) all the time.
But those assumptions aren’t always going to be right and they shouldn’t be. Our ability to comply (or not) to assumptions and culturally imposed norms doesn’t make us any more or less of who we are–cool human beings. That’s part of the beauty of difference and diversity and individualism.
I hope you find a lot of beauty today in these horrific times.
I hope you get to be the person you are.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
