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Below is the Transcript:
A life lived well is full of humanness; full of joys and pain and everything in between. Fear is a normal part of life, but for most humans, fear can hold us back in ways that are not helpful… until we open our eyes to it.
I have found myself, repeatedly, struggling as I unintentionally fight my fears. Breaking that down, I am not aware consciously that I am afraid, even if I have an inkling and my tense neck and shoulders are screaming at me, my stomach is in knots, and I am in a reactionary state. This comes from my human brain’s wiring to protect me.
Like so many struggles we have, these are automatic responses of our brains which are wired as they are for a reason. Once we understand the wiring, we can recognize these patterns, and then, even when we are living a human experience, we can start to pay attention to what’s going on and not stay in unhelpful reactions to our lives. Recognize that I said not “Stay” because the reality is that we will all end up there. When we accept this we stop moralizing the ways our brains behave and as a result, our brains will slowly stop resisting being human and we can find growth in all of it that help our brains to less often believe that life is hopeless.
One thing that holds us back is our tendency to think that we are failing if we don’t have a sort of robotic or stoic response to circumstances in our lives. We are not robots, and being robotic is not being perfect. We need the messiness of emotion and our human brains to be human, and to experience the deliciousness of life, which also includes a lot of not as tasty bits.
One of the things I have been struggling with for a long time, and for a long time also was not facing, was the cultural beliefs that have been pushed on me my whole life about aging. Our culture is terrified about aging, as though to succumb to the laws of nature is to sin and fall short. Shame steps in here yet again in order to keep us focused on fear and keep us lonely and not on what we are here to do. This can in many ways be especially painful for people socialized as women, and yet that’s not to dismiss the pain of the other arbitrary body expectations placed on humans socialized otherwise.
I struggle with perfectionism, which you likely have picked up on with the name of this podcast or if you’ve been a listener for a while. For a long time, I wore that as a badge of honor. And then when I realized how it hurt me, how it wasn’t actually a strength, my human brain then used it to shame me. But as time has progressed, and I have gone up and down with my journey of growth and healing, I have learned that so much of what is programmed in my brain was not consciously chosen by me, this person that is me who is experiencing this life. Much of the painfully unbearable expectations that are placed in the way of my true deepest desires and goals were unconsciously agreed upon as a result of the domestication with the culture that I have experienced.
We all can have overlapping experiences and then we also bring to the table our own unique life experiences and the ways that our brains interpreted these experiences in our lives. Our brains have been working since childhood to make meaning and rules to protect us, and for that we can be so grateful. But these same brains do not know when a rule or meaning that was once made to protect us is not actually in our favor and or no longer is serving to protect us or help us in any way.
I say all of this to lay a foundation for an underlying theme that has tortured me for years. The idea is that my value is in an object and the object is not even my own body. My value, according to this theme, or group of lies, has to do with an idealized version of a human body that is not real, that is ever-changing, and in no way resembles my body. It is an unattainable, inhuman body and it is a distraction.
The truth is, my body is not an object. It’s a vessel. I will not allow this blessing of a vessel to be reduced and oversimplified to the point that it is only here for comparison and judgment anymore. And I say anymore because I have been so well programmed, as so many people are, by society with this idea that I have wasted energy, time, and focus on what Kara Loewenthiel calls a perfectionist fantasy. There is no changing of my body into an object of perfection that would actually meet the standard and or that would actually change how I feel about myself. The only thing that changes how I feel about myself is my thoughts.
Even though my thoughts have not all intentionally been chosen by me throughout my life, I get to choose which ones I practice with intention and I get to learn to notice them and not get wrapped up in how even this makes me a failure. You’ll know what I mean when I say this…. In the society we live in today, we are both supposed to look beautiful and try to be beautiful according to a standard that continues to change and is often physically unattainable AND not care about our looks or we are vain. We are judged for having stretch marks, wrinkles, cellulite, bags under our eyes, AND for being perfect mothers, homemakers, wives, girlfriends, and boss moms (or fill in the blank with your circumstances). We are supposed to respond to our babies’ needs and sacrifice ourselves for them, AND do this on no sleep, WHILE ALSO not LETTING OURSELVES GO… In translation, you’re not allowed to age and yet you need to do all of the things that will take more time and energy than you actually have. You will be judged one way or another, and it won’t even always be direct judgments from the outside, but our own inner critic who has taken over the job of condemning us for our humanness. The pain we experience from the judgment is from our own domestication, from the voice that has been programmed inside of us to keep us in this impossible race.
It’s a really hard loop to be in and it can feel impossible to get out of.
I have been listening to a book intermittently called Face by Justine Bateman and have loved the shift it’s caused in my brain on this topic. She specifically speaks to the brainwashing those socialized as women face when it comes to our aging and her experience and the experience of women she has encountered and interviewed in her fields. Even though the individuals she has interviewed are not necessarily the average women, meaning I believe they are predominantly white actresses and models and other women in related fields, the self-torture they experience is so relatable.
It reminds me of many of the things I have gone through on my journey with learning to love my body and yet even though aging is still in the subject of my body in general and might seem like an obvious overlap, for me, it’s felt like a whole new ballgame. I have worked on loving my body post having children. The changes I have experienced with weight fluctuation and loving the parts of my body that I always sought to change… but aging is still newer territory for me.
I have found myself hyper-focused sometimes on how my skin has aged relative to other women. I see the sagging in the middle of my neck and find my brain telling me I am too young to have that and telling me that by having that I have failed. I see the wrinkles under my eyes or the acne on my chin and scarring next to the red and I hear the thoughts that try to keep my attention and sometimes win. I see the ways that my skin sags when it was once tight and my breasts hang flatter and lower and vainier than before. I see the light hitting the sun-damaged skin on my legs and the cellulite that seems to draw my leg skin down like a magnet and the shading hitting the wrinkles around my face. My brain has started to focus on aging as though it’s a sin… a failure, a permanent scarlet letter for all the world to see.
I notice that I tend to want to dumb myself down to nonthinking tasks so I can numb the streams of thoughts that are relentless sometimes because my brain tells me that if I face these fears and thoughts about my aging, I will be surrendering to aging and in that way I will be failing. In that way I will be letting something win and admitting a sort of failure that does not lead to learning but just shame??? But if I am losing then what is this metaphorical identity that is winning?
As I have been admitting these thoughts now, they are losing power. In admitting them, I can see that they are total bullshit. The more I admit them, the more I notice them. The more I almost audibly hear the thoughts that are in line with this brainwashed thinking. I have also been noticing the thoughts that my brain uses to judge my thoughts, also called meta thinking or meta thoughts. My brain tells me shaming thoughts for thinking about my body so much. It tells me that I am vain or that I am shallow for focusing on these things. And now that I am aware of this I am both gentle with myself and angry. I am angry that I have been tortured for so long by thoughts about my value that I didn’t consciously choose to believe and I am not afraid of my own anger any more so my brain is not succeeding in shaming me for those thoughts.
I am going deep into my thinking here because sometimes its when someone shares the intricacies of their insecurities that I feel the most comfort, not in their pain, but in my own because it shows that I am not flawed in being human with a human brain that does this to me… but that I am rather a part of something big. I am part of humans who love and judge and are just trying to survive. I am part of people waking up to what their brains are doing and what ways their thinking is hurting them. I actually feel a sense of belonging with humans in the world working toward awakening themselves in these ways.
I share these struggles because it’s easy to think that you’re alone… and perfectionism wants to keep us stuck, spiraling and trying to earn worthiness that’s always been ours.
You are not failing for aging, you are succeeding. If you have wrinkles, stretch marks, moles, scars and sagging, congratulations… you are human and you belong! That simple truth is changing my thoughts about my body in this way fundamentally. I have friends who are older than me and who have less traditional signs of aging than me, and I reject the idea that I have failed in any way for this being true. My brain tries to tell me all the reasons I have aged the way I have (or as society likes to say “not aged gracefully”) and to that I say, I have enjoyed the sun, I have enjoyed laughing and wiping the tears off of my eyes. I have enjoyed making funny faces. But I also say, I have survived a lot. I survived motherhood when I was still at odds with myself in many ways for years. I have survived some very painful experiences that kept me up at night and coping in ways that I am glad were there at the time even if my coping has changed. I am grateful for the path I have taken and I am not an object. I am not a thing. Just because I have a vessel to experience my human life with, does not discount me to a set of expectations I have to meet relative to this body.
This human body is a blessing and it does not need changing. My body needs loving and nurturing. My body needs space, and I am still learning to trust my body. I believe that in trusting my body both with food and aging and resting, I am changing the world because there need to be examples of this in the world for other people to wake up to their thoughts and start to see their human bodies as good enough as well. This is still an area I am struggling with and yet in my sharing it here with you, I hope that you can see your body in a new light today. Not to see aging as a failure or sin, or your body as an object, but to see your body as evidence of belonging to the beautifully diverse community of human beings in the world who have a real body. One that moves, and aches; one that communicates with you what it needs and that helps you to love your family and friends, and that person that lives inside of the unique physique that you experience life with. It helps people to recognize you and love you, and yet isn’t your source of worth, but simply a beloved home for your soul. Think of this in whatever way is actually helpful for you my friend. Your body is not failing you; your body is succeeding beautifully at the job of the human experience. Even that very human brain of yours. I encourage you this week to pay attention to any thoughts that you have that judge your body in any way shape or form but notice them without making noticing them or having them mean anything. And even if your brain tries to shame you, try to notice that shame as a human response to a thought you’re having that you didn’t necessarily choose. You are already enough and it has never had anything to do with your body, and your body is damn incredible. Just the act of noticing these thoughts and allowing them to be reminders of your belonging to the human experience will create a shift, and that’s worth celebrating. Let’s change the script for the generations that follow. This matters that much.