And just to add — I searched stock images for ‘powerful woman’ and ‘powerful womanhood’ and was depressed and dismayed at what came up. Apparently being a powerful woman means wearing a manly business suit, pretending to box, pretending to box while nearly naked, holding a gun, or standing alone. Lame. Incredibly lame. If you can find something better, please send it to me.

1. DO tune into your inner knowing/still small voice/intuition/north star/ whatever you want to call it. It’s a powerful form of nonverbal intelligence and keeps you tethered to what is really going on outside your head. The head and the gut should work together. DON’T get so trapped in your head that you ignore what your body is telling you.

2. DON’T get hung up on command-and-control definitions of power. DO redefine it. Think of it as power-to (inspire, lead for change and do cool epic shit) rather than power-over others.

3. DO develop your passions. If you don’t have any passions yet, settle for developing some “deep interests”. Or even just “interests”. If you keep following and following up on what intrigues you, those interests might develop into deep passions, or passionate interests, and wouldn’t that be groovy.

4. DO make it a point to regularly expose yourself to cool new experiences. The brain craves novelty, and without it you won’t be as happy or creative or inspired as you could be. And that would suck. You also need cool new experiences in order to discover your interests and passions (see #3).

5. DO live with intention. DON’T do something because society expects it or that’s how it “should” be done or things are “supposed” to turn out a certain way. That way lies doom. And many bad marriages. DO shape and define your own life, instead of having it defined for you.

6. DO cultivate a laser focus. DO stimulate, nurture and direct your awesome mind so that it can throw off cool unique ideas that go beyond what others are doing in your field. DO seek a way to synthesize your diverse interests, talents and experiences so you can apply your attention to one specific area. You can burn through steel that way. DO develop a body of significant achievement in one area. DON’T remain a “diamond in the rough” (lots of little achievements in different areas, or spending your energy and intelligence supporting the visions of others) — unless of course that is truly what you want and makes you satisfied.

7. DON’T secretly nurture a “rescue fantasy”: that the perfect job/man/lottery ticket is going to come along and take you away from all this. Give away your power to anyone or for any reason, and it will come back to bite you in the ass. Always. DO believe this.

8. DO realize that a woman’s career/accomplishment journey is often different from a man’s. Our culture celebrates young achievers, but many women don’t come into their true personal power until their 40s. If that’s you, DON’T dismiss yourself as second-tier or fail to take yourself seriously just because you’re following your own rhythm, not the culture’s.

9. DO master the game – so that you know how and where and when to break the rules. DO be brilliantly and strategically disruptive.

10. DO learn how to take the heat. We are forged in fire. Stand up to controversy, criticism and conflict. People will shout us down because they rely on us being polite and turning away. Surprise them.

11. DO seek out mentors, guides, coaches and role models. DO ask for help.

12. DO turn around and mentor others.

13. DO embrace the struggle. Those are our defining moments.

14. DO discover your purpose, which will allow you to find purpose in power. When we learn how to get personal satisfaction out of using power for positive change, we can overcome our ambivalence toward it – and maybe even have some fun with it.

15. DO learn how to talk money. I know. Ugh. (At least for me.) But DON’T stick your head in the financial sand or allow yourself to walk through life in a financial fog. It’s chipping away at your self-esteem and you know it.

16. DO be aware that if you take yourself out of the work world for any reason, you put yourself and your future at risk. Poverty rates tend to be highest for elderly women. DO decide that, come what may (death or divorce), you won’t ever end up in that group. And DO realize that the person in a relationship who makes more income (usually) has more power – and does less housework. DO learn to negotiate for yourself, even (or especially) at home.

17. DO speak first. That’s the person who frames the conversation and sets the terms for the debate. He – or she — who controls the frame, controls the conversation, and who controls the conversation always wins. DO remember that sometimes conversation is actually not about communication – it’s about who has power over whom.

18. If you don’t speak first, then DO be aware of how the other person is framing and controlling the conversation, especially if they’re doing it from a one-up position. Because you DON’T have to go along with it: you can walk away, laugh it off, or smile charmingly and call them on it.

19. DO have good clean fights. When it’s over, it’s over. Take what you learned and carry on.

20. DO learn your history as a woman who believes in equality between the genders (whether or not you consider yourself a feminist). Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. We want to move forward, not back.

21. DON’T wait to be chosen.

22. DON’T wait for permission.

23. DO embrace your ‘womaninity’. As Anne Doyle put it, “Our gender is a strength to be embraced and developed rather than an obstacle to be overcome.” DO be yourself, your whole self. DO relax in your skin. DO think like a woman and act like a woman.

24. DO travel. Get out of your own reality, so you can deepen and enrich your perspective on the world.

25. DO “drink at dangerous waters”, to quote Anne Doyle again. Take calculated risks (if you’re not comfortable with risk, you can practice by taking really small ones.) Get out into the world. Become socially multilingual. Seek a diversity of perspectives. Work and collaborate with rivals. Live on your “ragged edge” so that you are constantly expanding your comfort zone.

26. DO have a vision for yourself and others that excites and compels you. DO communicate that vision to others, especially if it’s altruistic in nature – people will come forward to help you.

27. DO support the sisterhood (even if you think it sounds corny or have issues with the word ‘sisterhood’). We are not the squabbling backbiting creatures from reality TV or the mean girls from high school. We are stronger together. No one gets anywhere alone. Men know this – and we should too. Pass it forward.

You can become someone to be reckoned with by developing your deep interests and fusing them into a Molotov cocktail.

You could change the game that way.

You can become not only the best at what you do – but the only one who does the special voodoo that you do (and anybody else would come off as a cheap imitator).

Not so long ago I wrote a post about how to find your passion(s). One of the books I referenced was Andrew Halfacre’s FIRST, KNOW WHAT YOU WANT and in the comments section Andrew himself pointed out that

the search for a single overriding passion can be unhelpful – often its a patchwork of passions which you stitch together to keep you warm.

(Cal Newport thinks the word ‘passion’ has become overplayed and overrated, so he refers to “deep interests” instead.)

This reminds me of when Steve Jobs famously urged us to “connect the dots”.

Creativity is about combining and recombining different ideas. Creativity expert Michael Michalko calls it “conceptual blending” and points out that

Creativity in all domains, including science, technology, medicine, the arts, and day-to-day living, emerges from the basic mental operation of conceptually blending dissimilar subjects.

You take two remotely different things and force a connection between them. When your imagination finds a way to fill in the gaps – to connect the dots – to blend — that’s when you come up with the unpredictable idea.

(The good news is that the mind strives to do this anyway. The best way to shake up an old pattern of thinking is to throw in a new, seemingly unrelated element. The mind will work overtime trying to fit it into that pattern — until it alters the pattern. I did this with my novel-in-progress when I tossed an image of butterflies on my storyboard. My mind found a way to weave that image into the story and the story is richer for it.)

It’s the kind of idea that doesn’t just slightly improve something, but provides a whole new level of insight, a radically altered way of thinking, about a subject, category or genre.

It takes a ho-hum mp3 player and turns it into the iPod.

It takes an adult sex doll popular in Germany and turns it into Barbie.

It takes chick lit and dark fantasy and blends them into vampire fiction.

It takes literary realism and B-movie horror and blends them into Stephen King.

It takes modern art and African masks and blends them into Picasso.

It takes spiritual principles, business principles, and a dash of maverick poetry and blends them into Danielle LaPorte.

You see where I’m going with this.

Guy Kawasaki observed that “interesting stuff happens out on the edges” – where one material meets up with something different.

One force collides with an opposing force and they don’t just connect – they transform.

What are your edges? Have you found them yet?

click to tweet: get freaky. think radical. play your edges. change the game.

Stripped of those associations, it still resonates.

It is, for example, a great rallying cry for the creative badass.

It reminds me of what Harriet Rubin in her book THE PRINCESSA refers to as the lover-warrior. This she says, is what a woman must be if she is to get all she wants (love, meaning, power, freedom, creative fulfillment, social change, wealth, success…).

She must be strategic and brilliantly disruptive, governed not by laws but by principle. She must change the nature of the game.

“The princessa,” Rubin states, “came to this earth to rearrange it.”

2

There is power in combining opposites, transferring skills and knowledge from one domain to the other.

There is a difference between fighting out of fear — and fighting for what you believe in.

You can be fierce and gentle. Formidable and vulnerable.

The creative badass fights for the right to be extreme, to ignite his inner freak, to defy easy categorization, to be a radical thinker, to express her true nature. To have love and power, in a culture that states you must sacrifice one for the other (so women seek love and men seek power).

3

Great ideas are disturbing. They overturn whatever body of knowledge they are connected to.

The creative badass seeks to be disturbed (and disturb the world in turn).

This takes moxie.

(And as a friend of mine recently put it: “You can fake orgasms, but you can’t fake moxie.”)

4

Psychologist Linda Austin observes that “the achieving woman must…separate and individuate from socially determined gender norms, which to this day decree that a woman is good, not great. At every step along her path she is challenged to draw upon her courage to assert her individuality.”

To be a creative badass – to pursue ambition and impact, self-expression and mastery — eventually requires a woman to redefine her sense of gender.

But I think this is true for men as well.

Recently I posted on my Facebook page a mouthwatering photo of actor Johnny Depp.

Let’s just say that a lot of women liked it. They liked it a lot.

Amid the comments, a man snorted, “Used to be the Marlboro Man. Now it’s mascara bandit.”

If you’re familiar with the Marlboro Man, you know that the powers of advertising invented him to transform Marlboros, in the collective public mind, from a woman’s cigarette to a man’s cigarette. It wasn’t about inciting female desire. It wasn’t about women at all. It was the culture’s big statement about what ‘macho’ is, what manhood means, just as limited and crippling in its own way as any passive, wide-eyed, thinking-hurts-my-brain, gosh-I-like-kittens sense of what it is to be a girl.

The Marlboro Man wasn’t off exploring his feelings, or reading pansy literature, or expressing his creativity. He wasn’t communing with nature. He was conquering it. He ate feelings for breakfast. Then he had a smoke. And if a ‘real man’ was going to write a story or paint a painting – much less pursue a career doing either – then by god, he would do manly things like hunting or brawling or binge drinking or drug taking to compensate, even if he killed himself.

(He might just kill himself, period.)

The Marlboro Man is no longer in fashion – and the actor who played him is dead of lung cancer – but we’re not so many years removed from that. There are forces in this country that would like to move us back to that, who see the rejection of the Marlboro Man ideal as some hideous ‘feminization’ of the culture. Who would seek to put the ‘feminine’ in its place.

5

The creative badass fights for the right to speak in his or her real voice, which is an authentic voice, and thus a visionary one.

The creative badass understands that sometimes you have to seem like a contradiction in order to be whole.

And when a creative badass manages to break free, to be as eccentric as he or she wants to be and still meet with incredible mainstream success – Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie – we love them because they had the power to do it their own way.

She wasn’t afraid to take risks, to offend people, to be wild and sexual and bold.

He wasn’t afraid of a little eyeliner.

And the fact that these are two of the most intensely desired individuals in our culture would seem to indicate that what is ‘masculine’ and what is ‘feminine’ is more complicated – and interesting – than traditional definitions would allow.

The creative badass understands this.

Even when the culture doesn’t.

1

A friend of mine was on a panel with Joyce Carol Oates. My friend is – as I am – a huge fan of JCO, so this was no small thing.

My friend was there to discuss ‘self-esteem’; Oates was there to discuss ‘self-promotion’.

(I forgot to ask the theme of the panel, but I guess it was self-centered.)

Someone in the audience asked the venerable Ms Oates what she would do today, if she had to launch a writing career all over again.

She said

(drum roll please)

“I would blog.”

She said

(I am paraphrasing)

“I would blog before I wrote a book. I would create a voice that connects, and I would build an audience online, and then I would write a book in that voice.”

Someone from the audience asked, So you would consider self-publishing?

“Yes! Of course!” In today’s publishing climate, she added, publishers won’t do anything to promote you “….until you’re…well…until you’re me.” However you’re published, the job is the same: finding and developing your audience. Breaking free from anonymity.

Someone from the audience asked, So you would abandon traditional publishing?

“No. Why not take advantage, when you can, of what they do best? But first, I would create a voice that connects with people. I would blog.”

2

Blogging is a form of marketing, yes. But the nature of marketing has changed. It is no longer about trumpeting a one-dimensional message to hordes of people who will then roll their eyes, ignore you and get on with their busy, busy lives.

It is about, as Marie Forleo – one of the most brilliant marketers I’ve ever come across – recently put it

Making an emotional connection with the people whom you’re meant to serve.

Entertainment is also about providing a well-crafted emotional experience for people.

And art seeks to move people on an emotional as well as intellectual level

– since the only way you can change people is to make them feel as well as think –

and I have yet to meet an artist who will say (with any conviction): Yes, when people engage with my stuff, I want them to feel absolutely nothing! I want to move them as little as possible! I want to leave their souls completely untouched!

3

It’s not that I think you should put the cart before the horse. But perhaps the cart has become a living part of the horse, like in some weird genetics experiment.

(See what happens when you mess with science.)

There’s a book called BAKED IN that talks about how, today, the best marketing is baked in to the product itself: the product is so relevant and compelling that it doesn’t need to manufacture ‘buzz’, it genuinely inspires conversation.

It creates an experience, it shifts your perspective in an unexpected way, it gives you what you didn’t know you wanted. And needed. It ‘gets’ you.

And it’s not born out of focus groups, elaborate theorizing, incremental improvements. It’s born out of observation, intuition, innovation, experimentation, practice. It has a spirit, a fearlessness, a sense of meaning, a story. It has balls (or ladyballs, as the case may be). It breaks with the past. It redefines the category.

There’s a movement within entrepreneurialism that refers to the lean startup (also the name of a book by Eric Ries). The basic gist is that you come up with an idea, make the most minimum, stripped-down version of that idea, do it quickly, and put it out there. You get feedback based on what people actually do with it (or don’t). You revise your product based on that feedback, do it quickly, and put it out there. You get feedback. You revise your product based on that feedback, do it quickly, and….You see where I’m going with this.

You iterate and reiterate and reiterate your MVP (minimum viable product) until you hit gold; you keep your expenses as lean as possible to make your resources last as long as possible so that you can reiterate as many times as you need. And it isn’t that you pander to the market so much as have this ongoing conversation with it: about what you have, and what you want to make and do, and where you and the market plug into each other. That’s when you find yourself electric.

Substitute ‘audience’ for ‘market’, and I think a blog is an artist’s lean startup – especially a writer’s lean startup. Like a startup, it requires an incredible investment of resources (time, energy, effort, blood, tears, guts, your firstborn child) with no guarantee of when or if you’ll turn a profit.

In this case it’s not a product but a voice* that you’re developing.

Your ‘voice’ isn’t just how you write but what you write about: the influences that you take from the world; the themes, obsessions, ideas that bend and shape your worldview. You keep going in the direction of what works. You revise or abandon what doesn’t. Each blog post is another piece of deliberate practice, another chance for feedback.

You are not compromising your vision or selling out to an audience (which you might not even have yet). You are discovering your places of relevance. You are locating those points where you connect, and resonate, and inspire conversation.

You throw down roots. You take nourishment. You grow.

*Let me stress that I am talking about developing a voice. I am not talking about publicly creating a character or writing a novel online or posting excerpts of fiction or throwing up trunk stories, which probably won’t translate well to blog form anyway.

In an interview with Jonathan Fields, while “sing-songing her way through a longer answer to a question [he’d] posed about her success”, Danielle LaPorte said something intriguing:

“I decided to stop selling and start radiating.”

Jonathan, sharp tack that he is, jumped on this statement and got her to elaborate:

Which led to a whole conversation about the immense power of working from a place not of force, but of ease. Of building a sense of integrity, authenticity, alignment, confidence and raised energy that literally draws people to you like moths to a light. One that attracts them by standing in your truth so fiercely and publicly, you begin to radiate…and others want to know how…and do it themselves.

Several things stand out to me about that paragraph:

“…you begin to radiate…”

Instead of pushing out her message – “Buy my book!” “Like my page!” “Read my blog!” – Danielle put in the time, study and life experience to develop a strong and captivating point of view — and a voice that’s unlike any blogger I’ve ever read (although imitated by many). She “radiated” it out through her blog White Hot Truth, and people liked it, and shared it with others, who also liked it, and shared it with others. (I found her through talented blogger Kelly Diels and passed her link on to several friends. Because Danielle’s stuff inspires you to do that.)

When you create light and heat online, people notice. This is what John Hagel calls the power of pull. Instead of interrupting people’s attention and shoving your message down their throats, you attract and seduce with the power of a unique, helpful and relevant point of view. It cuts through the clutter like light from a lighthouse: people orient to it, and use it to navigate their way in to shore.

Because that’s what we’re looking for, at least on some level. Yes, we want solutions to problems. Yes, we want to be educated and entertained. But we also seek a bright light to align ourselves with, so that we feel like we’re traveling to some better, higher place (aka ‘self-actualization’).

Danielle understands that. She provides tips for business and life that are actionable and concrete — while also gesturing at an overriding philosophy, a way of being in the world. It’s appealing. It doesn’t just help you figure out how to solve, or at least approach, a specific problem. It suggests to you the kind of you that you can and want to be. She offers an elevation of self.

And she’s very, very good at it.

“….standing in your truth….”

You stand in your truth when you speak from your soul. In Greek, the word for ‘soul’ is psyche. As Carol Gillian explains in her book THE BIRTH OF PLEASURE:

This ancient word carries the wisdom that we are more than our genetic makeup, more than our life histories, more than our cultural heritage. Whether conceived as a divine spark or as part of the natural wonder of the human being, the soul is the wellspring of our minds and our hearts, our voice and our capacity for resistance.

When Gillian says resistance she is referring to societal forces that would carve up your psyche and march you into line with conventional norms. You learn to silence your inner knowing in order to ‘know’ (and ‘not know’) what external forces dictate you should in order to be loved (and not risk social exile). As one woman says to Gilligan in a study: “Do you want to know what I think….Or do you want to know what I really think?”

Speaking up, and out, comes at a cost. It feels risky. It feels like you’re putting yourself out there – and you are. You’ll get criticized. Some people will disagree with your ideas and despise what you stand for (and it’s hard not to take that personally). But Danielle LaPorte recognizes that when you start to live, work and speak authentically:

The various parts of your life start to groove…Mighty or discreet, authenticity is the muscle that helps you shake up beliefs, policies and restraints, and gives you the strength to do the things some say can’t be done. Being genuine is the foundation of integrity – often inconvenient and not always painless – but the only way to go if you’re here to really, truly, fully live. (from her book THE FIRESTARTER SESSIONS)

“….so fiercely and publicly….”

Just because you know and speak your truth – a great act in itself, don’t get me wrong –doesn’t mean that the rest of us will pay attention. To speak fiercely requires a compelling voice and the ability to amplify it.

Your voice is your perspective, your worldview, your signature style. Your voice is a projection of who you are. Other people absorb it, construct their mental sense of you around it. It’s what you say and how you say it. It’s your form and your function, your message and your medium.

Your voice makes you original (or not). Other people can teach what Danielle teaches – and they do. They can read the same books, source the same pools of wisdom. But it’s the way those ideas get filtered through Danielle’s voice, how they combine with her sensibility and life experience, that makes Danielle irreplaceable. Accept no substitutes, because there are none.

As Austin Kleon points out in his book STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST:

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

Copying, he is quick to point out, is about practice, not plagiarism (which is when you try to pass off someone’s work as your own) . You don’t want to steal the style so much as “the thinking behind the style”, in order to “internalize their way of looking at the world”.

At some point you’ll move from imitation (copying) to emulation (breaking through to your own thing). Kleon points out that, because we’re human, we’re incapable of a perfect copy. Kleon quotes Conan O’Brien:

“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”

For example. I like personal style (which is not the same as fashion), and I have always liked Kate Moss’s style, and when I was in my twenties I tried to copy it. But I have a different body type than Kate, so what looks good on her doesn’t necessarily look good on me (and vice versa). So I took elements of Kate’s style and adapted them to my growing sense of how to dress in a way that flatters my proportions. In that gap between trying to be Kate, and failing to be Kate, I developed my own style.

You find those areas where you fall short of your ideal, those reasons why you can’t be your ideal, and in that space you find yourself. You exploit those differences. You explore them. You build on them. And, eventually, people will be imitating you.

“…and others want to know how…”

A compelling voice is a relevant voice. You center yourself in that place where your reader’s concerns overlap with your own. It’s not enough just to speak; you have to speak in a way that creates value for others, that provides insight, solutions to problems, education, escape, entertainment. Everybody’s so busy. It’s not enough for them to know that you exist; they have to know why they should care that you exist.

“…and do it themselves….”

Because, as many motivational gurus have pointed out (which doesn’t make it any less true): the way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. One way to do that is to walk your talk; to resonate; to be an example.

To radiate.

Also known as being authentic.

Because when you tell your story, you give other people permission to tell theirs.

There’s that saying – “you have to see it to be it.” Even if it’s just in your own mind. No one thought that a human being could run a mile in less than four minutes – until people saw someone actually do it. Then lots of people could do it. (I cannot. I’d rather eat cupcakes.)

Stepping out on your own can feel, sometimes, like stepping into the void – but when you’re relevant and compelling, when you’re speaking from your soul, you’ll find that other people start to join you there. And the great thing is, because you’re being authentic, they are responding to the real you and not to some mask that you’re wearing.

because you’re a creative badass

because you’re an intellectual outlaw

because you’re in the wisdom business

because we are what we make

because the world is your stomping ground

because the decisions you make out of fear
are the decisions you know you’ll regret

because you never believed those old stories anyway

because there has got to be another path
and you’ll forge it yourself if you have to
(goddammit)

because there is joy when you master the tough stuff

because you live off your ragged edge

because you don’t shy away from the uncomfortable conversations

because those so-called failures only taught
you what you didn’t know you needed to know
(nor did anyone else)

because mistakes can be an art in themselves

because freedom is sweet

because everything connects
and it’s so easy to forget this

because what you learn you can turn around and share with others

because when you heal yourself you can turn around and heal others

because it’s time to get the party started

because when you find your audience
you find yourself
and vice versa

because small things add up to big things
and big things add up to a world

because you will kick out the broken paradigm
and find the gorgeous alternative
even if you’re not sure yet exactly how

because you refuse to live divided inside yourself

because it hurts to do it

because it hurts more not to do it

because sometimes pain is just a sign your soul is changing

because you have the right to invent yourself

because you have the right to reinvent yourself

because no one has the right to tell you who you are

because you shouldn’t have to choose between being honest and being loved
(and when you find your tribe, you don’t have to)

because you live in that squeeze-space of creative tension
and it’s groovy

because you press the collective soul-nerve

because you crave impact

because you deserve to have a say

because the universe is infinite
and we are not.

tweet me (click to tweet): because you’re a creative badass

I had the chance to go to Chernobyl, so I took it.

When people found out about my destination, there came the inevitable jokes – because, you know, nothing is so hilarious as nuclear radioactivity. (Black humor, remember, is a valuable coping mechanism.) I was informed that a “young lady” like me would “find herself with a lovely glow” , that the two-headed cows were considered a delicacy. I retorted that I hoped to come back with a superpower.

I started thinking about death.

It would be that kind of trip.

2

I was thinking about a blog post entitled Top 5 Regrets of the Dying. Written by an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, the post hit a collective soul-nerve, went viral, and landed her a book deal.

The most common regret, writes Bonnie, is

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

She writes:

….When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

But what does it mean, exactly, to live a life that is “true to yourself”? I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit like telling people to “be remarkable!” Great concept, vague concept, so what does it mean in a practical, nuts-and-bolts sense?

To live a life that is true and authentic to who you are — to have the opportunity to do that — is to turn life itself into a work of art. Art is about the making of meaning. And as Seth Godin points out, “all artists are self-taught”. This doesn’t mean that you should commit to a life of pseudo-striving, or that you can avoid in any sense the blood, sweat, tears and turmoil, the ambiguity and uncertainty, the years of deliberate practice that go into the making of any artist.

But the meaning you create is your own, and how you convey that meaning to others depends on your unique voice and skillset.

3

My boyfriend and I spent a night in Kiev, then a guide and driver drove us out to meet up with the study tour. We ended up walking down a long road into a ‘zone one’ area, where a village had been evacuated shortly after Chernobyl. The houses had all collapsed. You saw remains of foundations, gaping holes in the ground where cellars had been.

We ran into some locals who were on a pilgrimage to the nearby cemetery. They told us – through a translator – how it had unfolded for them. They read about the Chernobyl “incident” in a newspaper – a couple of lines that referred to an accident at the plant. They began to realize it was serious when government buses appeared to take away the children, and then the adults, for what they were told would be a “three-day stay” at a nearby camp. The entire village was relocated.

We visited families in other villages who told us about the impact of Chernobyl on their lives, their health, their children’s health. Green Cross International was providing access to medical care and in some cases microfinancing family businesses. One family showed us their rabbit-breeding business, taking visible delight in the creatures, picking them up and fondling them and inviting us to hold them.

I wanted to know if these people were angry. To be kicked out of their homes. Watching their children grow up on contaminated soil, constantly sick, missing school.

The answer came back:

No. It is life in the Ukraine.

Back at the hotel, my boyfriend and I learned that, despite our late addition to the group, we had been granted permission to travel with them to “the forbidden zone” the next day and see the abandoned city of Pripyat. In a surprise twist, we were also going to see the nuclear reactor itself.

I’m not much of a drinker, but that night a man from Moscow showed me how to shoot spiced vodka – followed by a quick bite of pork and bread – and I proved an apt pupil.

4

Thinking about death can be beneficial. One psychologist writes about a study in which depressed people thought about death for a week, and became less depressed:

…because it also increased their interest in intrinsic motivations (relationships, self-growth, helping others), which stand in contrast to extrinsic motivations (fame, wealth, physical appearance).

…. psychotherapist Irvin Yalom has argued that people naturally avoid thinking about death because it hurts. But over time, such a heightened increased awareness that life could end causes an “awakening,” which leads people to adjust their values and time commitments. Specifically, people no longer are concerned with impressing others, or looking good, or even that new promotion. Instead, they are focused on doing what they enjoy, and living a free, authentic life.

There it is again: that idea of a free, authentic life.

“A life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

We’re not a culture that’s comfortable thinking about death; our initial impulse is to work or drink or have sex or spend money instead. We seek distraction and stimulation, and excel at finding both. At what price, though, to us and to others?

Could that be the difference between asking How can I get rich and famous and afford that new Mercedes and What can I create today that has resonance and meaning for me [and thus hopefully for others]?

5

To get to Chernobyl you get on a train that takes you out into a very pretty countryside. The nuclear reactor looms along the horizon like some prehistoric creature raising itself against the sky. To enter the plant we had to show our passports to guards at the gate, who matched them to the pre-approved names on their lists: I couldn’t help being reminded, in a bizarre and unsettling way, of getting into velvet-rope nightclubs when I was younger.

We were put on a bus and basically told not to take photographs of anything except the Chernobyl memorial.

Here is the memorial:

And then we visited the city of Pripyat, the former home of Chernobyl workers, now a ghost city in the Alienation Zone. We were told – again – not to step off the pavement, to avoid any contact with the vegetation. We were told not to enter any of the buildings. We saw what used to be a hotel, what used to be an arts center, what used to be an amusement park. Nature was reclaiming it all, spreading moss across the pavement and growing pine trees in the windows, profoundly indifferent to the absence of human life.

Later, we attended a memorial service in the city of Slavutich, which was hurriedly constructed to replace Pripyat and house a dispossessed population of roughly 50,000. It was midnight. I was standing and shivering in the middle of an open plaza. A crowd had gathered, shadowy figures in the near-dark, clutching votive candles and flowers. Ceremonial music began to play. A line of young people wound their way down through the square, carrying candlelit globes of a radiant fuchsia that picked out their progress in the darkness. They formed a human corridor and the rest of us began to drift along inside it, toward the front of the square where a shrine had been erected and dedicated to those who had died in the accident. The music stopped. The young people dropped to their knees. There was silence, and then the sound of sirens. A row of people dressed as Chernobyl workers took up position along the front of the shrine. The music began again, and Matt and I moved through the shrine and set down our flowers amid the candles, the photographs.

I was thinking about Chernobyl. I was thinking about 9/11, images of the towers, falling. I was thinking about the death of my ten-week-old son, from SIDS. I sensed the vast and collective nature of loss, of grief and trauma and suffering; we think we suffer alone, but we are mistaken. There are always others with us, moving slowly in the dark.

6

I saw a foreign movie once, years ago, in which a character proclaimed, “Life wants to live,” and it does. It will crawl through the cracks and grow in the windows. It will break through the ceilings so the sunlight gets in.

We live in relationship to each other, and to the earth itself. We forget this at our peril. We make art to remind ourselves of this: to illuminate — and question and challenge — those relationships. We take the truths of life that science can’t capture and put them into stories so that others may learn the lessons of conflict, struggle and disaster. If we can’t connect through these experiences, I don’t think there’s much hope for us.

To live a free and authentic life is to find a way to honor that still small voice within you, deeply personal and yet somehow universal. It is to stay connected to yourself, and through yourself to the human community. It is to create meaning from your experiences. I can no longer buy into the romantic drama of the isolated artist because art itself is connective. Without it, life becomes a ghost town, an Alienation Zone of one’s own.

Why we, especially as incredibly privileged Westerners, need the presence of death to wake us up to this –

We seem to need to deepen the darkness in order to find the light.

tweetable (click to tweet): we deepen the darkness in order to find the light

1

When Jen Louden invited me to blog about creative joy, I couldn’t help thinking about how we have yet to put creativity — as a value, as a practice –at the center of our lives, our families, our culture.

We’re trained to be productive. We have to put food on the table. Who can afford the time and money to be creative, especially with all that daydreaming involved, that pointless wandering around? We’re coming out of an Industrial Age that trained us to be factory workers, sensible professionals, linear thinkers. Creativity had little to do with any of this. It was banished to the sidelines otherwise known as Bohemia, not exactly known for a flourishing economy.

But now, as we enter this post-consumer era where we differentiate ourselves not through our factories, but our ideas, the question has flipped upside over. As we step into The Creative Age, who can afford not to be creative?

Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to old problems, to make something new from what is. To see new patterns beyond the existing ones. To rethink one or more aspects of what is given. — from the book WELCOME TO THE CREATIVE AGE by Mark Earls

Whether the problem is personal (finding a job, juggling work and family, losing weight, getting out of debt) or global (fighting poverty, fighting human trafficking, fighting the oppression of girls and women, fighting climate change), the ability to find new solutions seems, shall we say, damn crucial.

One could even say that our survival as a species depends on it.

2

I consider myself a fan — and a friend — of Silicon Valley whizkid Ben Casnocha, who just came out with a book called THE START-UP OF YOU. The book suggests that in a world like ours, laughing hysterically at the very notion of a five-year plan, we are all entrepreneurs now: of our own lives, innovating and creating and co-creating as we go.

I like the analogy.

A startup isn’t a company so much as a loose organization in search of a business model that will make it a company. It has to figure out what it does best (as opposed to what it thinks it does best), how it can solve a problem or fulfill a need in the real world (and not just in theory); it has to stay open and flexible and quick on its feet, absorbing what doesn’t work and leaning into what does. It starts out with Plan A, comes into new information (the kind that less-entrepreneurial types might perceive as ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’), and pivots to Plan B. Or Plan M or Q or Z. It observes, tests itself against the world, learns, tests itself some more, learns more, and through a series of calculated risks — small experiments and little bets — moves toward that sweetspot where what it is and what it does intersects with what the world needs. And everyone is better off.

Successfully navigating a world of constant change, where things are one way one moment and another way the next, is a deeply creative act.

After all, the only way to stay ahead of the future is to invent it.

(Before your resources run out.)

I think about this when I look at my sons, now five and a half and eight years old. How to prepare them for a future when you don’t even know what the future is going to look like? How to prepare them for careers that could become obsolete or don’t exist yet? What if preparing them now means equipping them with the skills and tools to invent and create? To combine ideas, reframe problems and solve them in new ways?

Am I doing that? Am I cultivating their creativity, their curiosity?

Am I setting an example?

3

I am no photographer by any means — my digital camera defeats me — but dude, do I love Instagram for Android. I love to compose shots, or crop and edit existing shots; I love to run them through the different filters and see what results. I started playing with Instagram while waiting for a website to load (my Internet was having a very slow night) and then, when I looked up, two hours had passed.

My initial response was to berate myself for wasting time. It’s not like those two hours had advanced my life in any obvious or clearcut way. I had done something just for the doing of it. The creative joy.

(It deepens and rounds out your day. It’s like disappearing into the moment and touching some mystical ground, then surfacing, restored. I felt a calm that I would take into the ‘real’ work of my writing or my interactions with my kids.)

And yet. I know that you don’t live your life in neat little compartments. The brain is wired to seek patterns and meaning, and what it learns in one domain it transfers to another. I am developing my eye, my aesthetic, and I am learning about the self that reflects back from the images I make. I am also learning about how you change ‘reality’ just by the angle or the light, or a shift in perspective. There’s no telling how this will influence other areas of my life, but I know that it will; how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Just because something doesn’t seem relevant now, doesn’t mean it won’t prove relevant later, as various authors point out in the book JUST START:

When you’re operating in the unknown…It is not always clear beforehand which pieces of information, or which potential assets, are worth paying attention to and which are not. This means everything is potentially important, at least initially. It is only later (or after the fact) that we know which things were critical and which were superfluous.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college so (ironically) he could just go to the classes that interested him. One involved calligraphy, an ancient art form not exactly in demand in the workaday world. But it helped Jobs develop a formidable sense for beauty and design that, ten years later, he would build into a company called Apple. (“Taste,” Jobs once said, “is trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”)

Jobs’ interest in calligraphy was a dot that connected up with other dots. It became relevant. In hindsight, the connection of those dots seems logical. Back then, people no doubt thought he was nuts, a dilettante, drifting and wasting time.

4

It turns out that emotion is not divorced from reason. Emotion enables reason. Emotion acts as a kind of mental GPS, leading us toward what helps and away from what hurts. Emotion enables us to assign things their proper weight and make decisions accordingly. Without it, saving a child from a burning building would imprint itself on your brain with the same importance, or unimportance, as tripping over your shoelace. It isn’t emotional people but unemotional people who make decisions that strike others as irrational — or who can’t make them at all.

In the book HOW WE DECIDE, Jonah Lehrer points out that

…emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells which are constantly adjusting their connections to reflect reality. Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Emotions are profoundly smart and constantly learning, they are not simply animal instincts that must be tamed.

Creative joy, then, is an arrow pointing us toward what helps. It evolved as part of a system of emotions that mapped out our survival. Creative joy reveals our interests and hints at our abilities. It demonstrates our strengths. It shows us who we are. As Andrew Halfacre points out, often it’s not a single overriding passion that defines you but “a patchwork of passions which you stitch together to keep you warm”: not one dot, but many.

Creative joy — if you’re willing to listen to it — is the unifying thread that leads you from one dot to the other to the other until you can connect them or “stitch together” into a greater whole. It’s not a quick process. It might take twenty years. So maybe nature instilled a more immediate reward to keep us involved and on track: the joy of the act itself. Turning our backs on that — dismissing it as a frivolous or “selfish” use of time — could mean rejecting life itself.

And wouldn’t that be tragic.

tweetable: “creative joy is an arrow that points us to meaning” click to tweet

Check out the Creative Joy Retreat led by some favorites of mine: Jennifer Louden, Marianne Elliot and Susannah Conway.

Early in our relationship, when my boyfriend and I still considered ourselves frovers – a cross between friends and lovers, not boyfriend-girlfriend but more than friends with benefits (I was not a ‘Rules’ girl) – he asked me, “So what do you want to do with your life?”

I talked for a bit, and he was thoughtful.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“I’m just impressed,” he said, “that you were able to answer the question. Most women can’t.”

I thought of this when I read this post, which asks the very reasonable question: How can you go after what you want when you have no idea what you want? You can’t know what you want if you’re not sure who you are, and since we’re all works-in-progress, I would say that even those of us who know what we want, might not always remember what we want, or find ourselves clinging to outdated notions of what we want, or wake up one morning to realize that we’ve wanted all the wrong things. So I think the question, much like the line of breath in meditation, is something you have to keep returning to: keep remembering to ask, and to listen for the answers.

GET OPEN

To get open is, as Russell Simmons puts it, “to always be as open, creative and fluid as possible, and never become rigid, old, or tight. The freedom you experience when you’re open is where all the positive change in your life will emanate from.”

Change is what happens in the space between things: the force of you meets the force of something else, whether it’s a person, place, or an experience, and your paradigm alters. Opening yourself up to that is to allow in new information about who you are and what you’re capable of.

Once, when I was a kid, I raced around the track during gym and flung myself in the grass to recover. The teacher came up to me and asked if I was going to try out for the track team. “No,” I panted. When she asked why not, I said, “Because I can’t run.”

She said, in her best I’m-going-to-pretend-you’re-not-an-idiot tone, “But I just saw you run.”

I had been walking over a mile home from school every afternoon. I’d built up stamina and gotten in shape without realizing. But I was resistant to this new information. I refused to ‘get open’. And I wasn’t some old, rigid, jaded adult: I was twelve.

If ‘getting open’ was our natural state, people like Russell Simmons wouldn’t have to instruct us to do it.

WRITE IT OUT UNTIL YOUR EYEBALLS BLEED

Steve Pavlina has a good post about how to find your purpose in life. He advises you to sit down with pad and pen and keep writing out your answers to the question, “What is my purpose in life?” until you get that magical choked-up feeling, that chill, that urge to cry, that signals you’ve found it. It won’t happen with your first answer. It won’t happen with your twentieth. Or your fifty-first. Those will be your obvious answers, your stock, superficial answers, the surface crap your brain has to clear out before it can get to the juice.

I have to admit, I tried this exercise but didn’t stick with it. Pavlina warns that at some point you will want to get up and leave, you will feel the Resistance, and you should resist it. I did not. I went for chocolate. I am weak like that. But the next day, while I was driving, an answer came into my brain that sent a shiver down my spine and made me cry out, it felt so right and real and raw.

Steve might be onto something.

ASK A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT QUESTION

Andrew Halfacre points out that you can find clues to what you want by paying attention to what you don’t want.

There are two kinds of people in the world. (People who make statements like “there are two kinds of people in the world” and…Kidding. Sort of.) Halfacre calls them “toward” people and “away” people. When you know which you are, you can figure out how best to motivate yourself.

Psychologists have discovered that we can be motivated by the pleasure of gain (what we’re moving toward) or the fear of loss or pain (what we’re moving away from). If you’re losing weight, for example, you can move towards the image of you fit, healthy, running around with your kids, confident in your jeans or on the beach. Or you can move away from the discomfort of clothes that don’t fit right, the way you huff and puff when you go up the stairs, the fear of dying from a heart attack and not being there for your kids as they grow up.

‘Toward’ people love goals. Goals give them something to aim at. They get energized by them. They’re the perky, positive, go-go-go people attending Anthony Robbins seminars.

‘Away’ people, on the other hand, need something to avoid. Their communication tends to slant negative: what will happen if you don’t do this, the unhappy consequences if you do that. They are motivated by thoughts of certain pain. Something has to hit a level of crisis to motivate them to do something about it, and that motivation lessens as the pain lessens as they move away from whatever it is that they want to avoid.

Generally we’re a mix. I, for example, move towards some things (the pleasure and satisfaction of a completed manuscript) and away from others (the pain of total disorganization and chaos). Because I’m not as motivated to organize as I am to write blog posts, I have a history of letting things fall apart and pile up before the pain is bad enough for me to need to move away. In high school I was motivated toward excelling in English and history (which resulted in high grades) and away from flunking math and science (which resulted in barely passing grades).

You can increase your motivation by using both ‘toward’ and ‘away’. I quit smoking in order to move away from cancer, death, wrinkles and bad smells, but it didn’t truly stick until I also moved toward the pleasure and freedom of being a nonsmoker. (Blogging about nonsmoking gives me an added pain to move away from: the humiliation of smoking after stating so publicly that I’m nonsmoking.) To finish my novel, I joined Stickk.com and pledged to donate a thousand dollars to a cause that I despise should I fail to meet my self-imposed deadline. This gives me a whole new level of pain to move away from.

But overall, we tend to be more one type than another. And if you recognize yourself as an ‘away’ type, the question, What do you want? is more difficult for you because you focus instead on what you don’t want. So Halfacre advises you to ask: What do you want…instead?

It’s a neat trick. I tried it on myself. (If I don’t want to feel messy, overwhelmed, and inconvenienced, what do I want…instead? I want to feel streamlined, clear, and in control of my time.) The answer to the question gives your mind a new focus, a new sense of what might make you happy.

When you catch yourself, or anybody else, grumbling or complaining, give it a shot. If you don’t want to work in a cubicle, what do you want…instead? If you don’t want to die alone in an apartment with only your twenty cats to miss you, what do you want…instead?

YOU ARE WHAT YOU’RE ATTRACTED TO

Danielle LaPorte said this, or something similar to this, and I’ve always been intrigued by it. It’s human nature to project ourselves onto the world, so that “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” (a quote which has been attributed to both Anais Nin and the Qur’an, so take your pick). When we bitch and complain about people, we’re really remarking on qualities we don’t like about ourselves (but we consciously won’t own up to). When we admire people, we’re really noticing qualities we like or that lie latent in ourselves (but we consciously won’t own up to).

Business coach Sinclair once asked me to name two people who fascinate me, and I spoke off the top of my head: Kate Moss and David Bowie. Why? she asked, and I spoke about style, creativity, iconoclasm, rebellion, the ability to be yourself when it cuts against conventional wisdom, to reinvent yourself, to rise from the ashes when you need to, to be at the throbbing heart of the culture, to say what you need to say (or refuse to say anything) and not give a damn, to change the game. I remember enjoying Simon Cowell for his shameless, brazen honesty, his ability to say what other people wouldn’t. Recently I’ve developed a mild fascination with Russell Simmons, the way he blends entrepreneurship, spirituality/wisdom and lifestyle. I might have to take a deeper look at what that says about me and where I want to go next.

LaPorte said at a conference last year that when she asked this question to her private clients – mostly women – the person they mentioned most was (wait for it) Angelina Jolie. “They admire her boldness,” she said. That’s an interesting thing to think about: what we, as a gender, might need to own up to.

(Of course, if you take this question very literally, you get a different sort of answer. I would appear to be a red velvet cupcake. Or Keanu Reeves.)

FOLLOW YOUR STRENGTHS

Your strengths are not necessarily the things that you’re good at. Sometimes you have to be wary about getting stuck in the things that you’re good at (you might be good at accounting, even though it makes you suicidal).

Your strengths are found in those moments when you feel most alive, fully present, revitalized: when you feel yourself being you at your best, highest self. The trick is to identity those moments and recognize what you’re doing when you experience them.

Then do more of those things.

Eventually you can figure out a way to, as Steve Jobs put it, “connect the dots”: put those strengths together in a way that is unique to you and serves the world.

We don’t recognize our own strengths because they come so naturally and easily to us. Like breathing. We take them for granted. Doesn’t everybody have the ability to breathe? (It took me thirty-six years to figure out that my ability to ingest information and put ideas together is not the norm, that there’s something called ideation. Good to know.)

Which is why it’s a good idea to

ASK A FRIEND

or a family member (preferably one who doesn’t have it in for you).

There are things about ourselves that we can see, and that others can see.

There are things about ourselves that we can see, and that others can’t see.

There are things about ourselves that we can’t see, and that others can’t see.

There are things about ourselves that we can’t see….and that others can see.

To learn who you are, to learn your purpose in life, ask those who know you (and whom you trust to have your best interests in mind), what they think your purpose in life is. And then ask again. And then keep asking. Their first answers will be stock, superficial answers: the crap their brains need to clear out before they get to the juice. But as Simon Sinek puts it in his great book START WITH WHY, eventually they’ll stop talking about you, and start talking about how they feel when they’re around you (unless they’re so annoyed that they smack you instead). You make them feel inspired. Or understood. Or more deeply connected to the world. Or more appreciative of their lives. Or organized and clear. Or spiritual. You see what I’m getting at. And when you feel that inward shiver of recognition, like someone’s put their finger directly on your soul-nerve, you’ll know that that’s the information that can help you.

LOOK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD

It’s common to advise people to look at the things they enjoyed doing as a child, and then examine why they enjoyed doing those things. When I was a kid, I enjoyed gymnastics, which wouldn’t seem to help me that much as a woman in her late thirties who is five foot nine to boot. But when I look at why I enjoyed the sport – watching it as well as doing it – I can see that I liked the grace of movement, the choreography, the levels of mastery, the performance factor. I liked competing and being on stage. That information is helpful to me.

It’s less common to advise people to look at the things that shamed and traumatized them. As children we develop incredible coping strategies in order to navigate our personal worlds, and to get the attention that isn’t an entitlement but a basic survival need. I touched on this subject in this post, in which I referenced a book called THE BIG LEAP by Gay Hendricks. Hendricks advises you to take your ‘obvious’ talent, whatever you do best, and drill down and drill down until you find your unique ability, your superpower, which is nestled deep inside the center of that talent like the tiniest of Russian dolls.

When I did this exercise, I took the obvious thing – my writing – and drilled down to find, as my therapist once put it, “the ability to resonate with other people, with the culture, with the world at large”. I was a deeply lonely kid, a social misfit, bullied and ostracized, so it makes sense that I would have developed an alternative strategy to get the sense of connection that I craved. It’s also, interestingly enough, a strategy that allows me to be intimate and distant at the same time.

FIND YOUR SOUL-HOME

If you’re a square peg in a round hole, get out of the damn hole. Go find a square one. They’re out there. Part of learning who you are is learning the environment you need to be at your best. (The “what do you want…instead?” question can be very helpful with this.) Some of us are lucky enough to, as the saying goes, bloom where we’re planted. Many of us are not. We often grow up with a sense of being defective, of something’s wrong with us, so we need to chop and trim ourselves and twist our selves inside out to fit our surrounding reality. This rarely turns out well. Better to search out the reality – or, if necessary, to bring it into being – that fits you.

This, by the way, applies to relationships. We look to other people to reflect a sense of who we are. Toxic people reflect you in ways that magnify your faults, drain your confidence and deplete your self-esteem. Healthy people reflect you in ways that celebrate your great points and coax forth your best self. The strategy here is easy to say (and often challenging to do). Run away, away, away, from the toxic people. Run toward, toward, toward the healthy people. You can recognize if someone is good for you by paying attention to how your body feels. If you get clenched, stressed, and knotted up inside just thinking about the person, then I urge you to re-evaluate that relationship and whether you want it in your life. The body doesn’t lie.

GO FOR MASTERY

We tend to enjoy doing the things that we’re good at. But we’re generally not good at anything – even the things we have natural talents for (you might have a talent for the piano, but you still need to learn how to play) – until we put in the time, sweat and deliberate practice required.

You might think passion comes first, and mastery second – but what if it’s the other way around?

You might feel drawn to something but drop it as soon as it gets difficult or tedious or boring or unpleasant. You take this as a sign that you don’t have any passion for it. But what if passion comes after you’ve closed the creative gap (or at least worked your way partway through it)?

After all, being a beginner at anything – snowboarding, blogging, learning a language, painting, building a company – really sucks. You feel awkward and fumbling and you know your work is crap. (It is supposed to be crap! You are a beginner!) We don’t bound out of bed in the morning thinking, Today I get to go be crap! Progress is long and hard, breakthrough moments so infrequent that you need to learn to love the plateau. Most people can’t. Most people quit. And most people don’t know what their so-called ‘passion’ is. I sense a connection here.

Sometimes you have to choose – and commit – based on little more than instinct and faith: instinct that somewhere deep inside you, perhaps very very deep, is the ability to be good at this, and faith that the passion will grow with your ability. When you get good at something, you enjoy it more, which means you do it more, which means you get better at it, which means you enjoy it more, which means you do it more, which means you get better at it….You see where I’m going with this.

When I look at my own life, I see that I became passionate about writing and storytelling when I was fourteen (the novel MISERY, by Stephen King, was a game-changer for me). But I had been writing stories on my own, for no reason other than the attention it got me (see earlier bit about developing childhood survival strategies) since fourth grade. It’s similar with blogging. I have a passion for it now, but it took a lot of doing before I developed it.

I would like to develop a passion for yoga. I am drawn to it. But I’ve been lazy and undisciplined and haven’t managed to develop a daily practice. I find it kind of boring. I could conclude that I lack passion – or I could perceive feeling ‘bored’ as a type of Resistance that I should push through. I know that my body, health and mind would thank me.

It’s no surprise, then, that the top indicator of success isn’t IQ or natural talent or the level of your parents’ income, but grit.

If it’s true that we don’t know who we are until we know what we can do – and I think it is – then learning who we are is about experimenting with our abilities, trying new things, pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone, living off the edge of our limits. And if you don’t know what you want until you know who you are – and vice versa – then learning who you are/what you want is hard – damn – work – that nobody tells us about or prepares us for. Instead, we look to external things for a sense of identity, whether it’s an expensive lifestyle, or a high-status job, or a relationship. We go after the job or the relationship first, and then try to figure out who we are, when in reality it should be the other way around. Because we could lose the lifestyle, or the job, or the relationship – and no longer know who we are, or what we want, or where to go next. We’re in crisis.

When my boyfriend asked me that question – What do you want to do with your life? – I could come up with an answer. I’m still figuring it out, of course, but identity is not a static thing. The brain keeps reshaping itself according to the experiences you provide it. We contain the potential for multitudes. Still, I do believe in a core voice, a set of abilities and instincts, an inner knowing that will guide you this way instead of that way so long as you have the patience and courage to listen.

What I didn’t tell my boyfriend – at the time – was by that point I had been through several years of therapy, of emotional pain and personal crisis. I could sink or swim. I could find the beauty in the breakdown – and break through — or I could just break down. For me, the beauty was in reconnecting to that core voice. My sense of self could bloom from there. Everything else can follow.

Because what we want, in the end, is to know who we are and what our purpose is (and, maybe, who to love). If we can break ourselves open to new information, if we can look for that information not just within ourselves but in the spaces and interactions between ourselves and others, if we can find who we are in what we do, not just for ourselves, but for the world: that seems a worthy quest in itself.

1

When I read the “women hate me because I’m beautiful” article by Samantha Brick, I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. Samantha seemed a victim of what I think of as Pretty Girl Syndrome, which involves a confusion of your identity with your appearance. (“People don’t like me/my looks, thus they must be jealous of me/my looks.”)

Samantha is also buying into one of the favorite stories that our culture likes to tell itself about women: that we’re vain frivolous creatures at each others’ throats as we compete for male attention.

Pretty Girl Syndrome happens partly because of the way a girl gets used to seeing herself reflected back by the people around her. If people in general find you attractive, you tend to know, because they tell you (not all of them, but enough to get the point across). What you think of your looks can be beside the point: nobody can be beautiful to anybody all of the time, particularly ourselves to ourselves.

Beauty, including your own, isn’t static. It ranges along an octave or three. You have some great moments helped along by perfect lighting, and then there’s the rest of the time. Beauty is relative: someone who’s grown up stunning in a small, Midwestern town might barely make the grade in New York or LA. (In Los Angeles, people will distinguish between being “hot” and “LA-hot” with the tacit understanding that “LA-hot” is superior.) There’s also a difference between being what Tyra Banks once termed “street-fine” and “model-fine”. Someone who is drop-dead in real life might not transfer well to photographs – which demand a precise and technical kind of beauty — whereas models tend to look better in photographs than in reality (which is why meeting them in person can be kind of fascinating).

In her photographs, as has been widely and enthusiastically noted, Samantha Brick does not appear to be beautiful enough to justify her claims that women dislike her because she is beautiful. This doesn’t mean that, in real life, she isn’t (or wasn’t) exceptionally attractive in her own right.

It just points up how ridiculous her claims are.

Samantha believes that women hate her because this is the lesson she absorbed from a culture that loves to show women fighting, backstabbing and sniping at each other. Saying “she’s just jealous” is an easy fallback position – one which the culture encourages, not to mention sympathetic friends — instead of, say, a hard and brutal look at who you are and how you interact with others. And since nobody – but nobody – is liked by everybody all of the time (except for Oprah), there are enough opportunities over the years to practice the “she’s just jealous” mantra until it’s grooved in your brain.

But if women truly hated beautiful women, then women’s magazines wouldn’t be so populated with them. Beautiful women wouldn’t be used in the advertising – pitched to women — that those magazines depend upon for their existence. At least some beautiful women still manage to make – and keep – close girlfriends, which has a lot more to do with your ability to be interesting, trustworthy and cool to hang out with, than whether or not you look good in leather pants.

Women don’t resent beautiful women so much as the bullshit around beauty: the impossible standards fueled by retouched images of highly styled celebrities and models, the cost and effort of attaining and maintaining. Why does some loser passing you in the street have the power to “decide” if you’re hotornot – or where you rate on the scale from 1 to 10 — as if you’re supposed to care? And if you don’t care about being ‘hot’ in the conventional sense, where are the freaking alternatives? Aren’t there other ways, other options to choose from, when it comes to presenting yourself to the world?

What women want, in the end, isn’t airbrushed perfection. They want to feel comfortable in their skin, and to know that they are loved.

Two things that this culture doesn’t hand out in spades.

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To say that you’re goodlooking is to set yourself up for slaughter.

Samantha Brick’s real crime is not, as many would claim, that she’s not as gorgeous in real life as she is in her head. It’s that she had the temerity to admit she’s good-looking at all.

It’s a funny thing. Donald Trump can boast that he’s greater than Jesus and Elvis combined and aside from some eye-rolling and a few snide comments about his hair, we accept the Trumpster as part of the pop cultural landscape. Samantha says, I’m dreamy and blokes fancy me and you would think, from the vitriol this inspired, that she had gone all Hannibal Lector and made a meal out of somebody…with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I don’t think this is just about seeming arrogant or conceited. Overall, Samantha doesn’t strike me as a particularly confident woman (I could get all armchair-psychologist on her ass and suggest that the insecurity she senses in other women is her own, projected.)

You could argue that, well, Trump is obnoxious but he can back up his claims, more or less, while Samantha…?

But physical charisma is more complicated than what you might or might not see within the frozen moment of a photograph that might or might not be particularly flattering. Beauty and sex appeal are not synonymous with one another; you can have one without the other. And then there’s the eye-of-the-beholder thing. Nobody is beautiful to everybody; show me a supermodel and I’ll show you a forum in which her face and body are found decidedly lacking.

As in everything else, tastes vary.

One of my closest male friends had a longterm crush on the actress Helen Hunt. Hunt is charming, no question, but not necessarily the obvious choice for a twentysomething male to salivate over. My ex-husband has a taste for tall, thin, expensively attired blondes – but then (to my surprise and delight) developed a mild fascination with Rachael Ray, who is not these things.

Attraction comes in all shapes and sizes. Even when you think you have a ‘type’, someone can come along and surprise you. Sexual appeal is disruptive and subversive: it’s not confined to a particular class or group, it can’t be legislated, it’s not known for a considerate sense of timing, it has no respect for boundaries, it refuses to be as narrowly defined as the culture would have you think. It would have its wanton way with you and push you in any number of unexpected directions. It would hang you on the hook of your own longing.

I once saw an interview with Cher where she remarked that ‘sexy’ is a quality you have – or you don’t. If you have it, you know it. Charisma – that sense of presence that captures attention, intrigues, makes people want to come closer – requires a sense of confidence. A swagger. A coy look and an inviting grin. Sexy is a way of being in your skin: a body language, an attitude. It’s something you can turn up or turn down – or shut off.

There’s a well-known anecdote about Marilyn Monroe, in Norma Jean Baker mode, walking down a crowded street with a reporter. Nobody was paying attention to either of them. She turned to the reporter and said, “Do you want to see her…? Do you want to see Marilyn?” She walked ahead a few steps and her whole demeanor changed. She got into character. People immediately saw her, recognized her, and started flocking around her.

Marilyn was famous for being both sensual and childlike, as if she required the innocence of the latter to temper the carnal knowledge of the former. The idea that sexual appeal can be a conscious, deliberate performance cuts against the idea of the ingénue, who, as Peeta says about Katniss in the movie THE HUNGER GAMES, “has no idea of the effect she has.”

To be worldly, and aware of your seductive power, is to edge into the dangerous territory of the temptress. The femme fatale. The siren. These are characters who use their beauty and sex to exploit men and lure them to their doom, whether it’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or Matty and Ned in the movie BODY HEAT (good movie). Female sexuality and morality have a history of being conflated: purity of body equals purity of mind, and to lose that purity is to risk being referred to quite literally as trash. Abstinence educators inform their students that

Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it.

It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker.

You’re one step away from being a slut, or possibly a slut with ambition (ie: a golddigger). Which means you’re not even a person, just a “poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker’: garbage. Is there any group of people quite so openly despised and dismissed in this culture, as that of the so-called trophy wife? When a woman pairs up with a wealthy man, the default assumption is that it’s a transaction: her beauty for his wealth. Ergo, she’s a whore. If he’s not careful, she’ll take him for everything he’s worth. (The idea that he might be exploiting her somehow rarely comes up, even if he discards her. Boys will be boys.) The cultural belief running underneath this set of assumptions is that sexually confident women must be predatory and dangerous.

So women, particularly young women, find themselves in a tricky position in a hypersexualized, Girls Gone Wild culture that teaches them to lead with their sexuality — only to turn around and condemn them for it. The compromise seems to be that you can be sexy and goodlooking if you don’t really know that you’re sexy and goodlooking; if it’s a “who, me?” kind of accident, and you talk about how ugly you were as a child and/or how much you hate your thighs. What results is a failure to own your sexuality, to see it as an aspect of your identity that you can play up or play down as the situation warrants. You can’t control what you don’t admit to having in the first place.

In her book POWERING UP, Anne Doyle remarks on how women of the Millennial generation continue to shock their female elders by their failure to “dress for success”:

If I’ve heard that complaint once, I’ve heard it at least 100 times from mystified professional women who are astonished at the inappropriate ways legions of young women are dressing for work…[Young women] with leadership ambitions are underestimating the confusing signals they are sending, particularly to men, when they wear sexy clothing at work. [Older women] in particular, who struggled so mightily to emerge from the confining box that measured women first on their “physical assets”, are watching in stunned amazed at the way young women are boldly playing – some would say misplaying – the sex card….Women who aspire to leadership must be highly conscious about not sending mixed signals with their clothing.

If you don’t own your sexuality, the question becomes: who does? And to what end?

In a recent article in The Daily Beast, actress Ashley Judd writes:

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

She uses herself as an example:

When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising, and that weight gain shows in my face and arms, I am a “cow” and a “pig” and I “better watch out” because my husband “is looking for his second wife.” (Did you catch how this one engenders competition and fear between women? How it also suggests that my husband values me based only on my physical appearance? Classic sexism. We won’t even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as “fat.”)

But her conversation about The Conversation can just as easily apply these days to Kelly Clarkson or Jessica Simpson. The message being sent to these women is very clear. You don’t get to decide what looks good or feels good when it comes to your appearance. We do. Beauty isn’t something you generate within you; beauty has nothing to do with who you are as a person; your potential and accomplishments mean nothing. We dictate the standards. We give you beauty, and we can take it away.

Any attitude that openly conflicts with this – like, say, a profound sense of confidence in your own appeal, the declaration that “I am attractive whether or not you actually think so” – has to be shot down: not just to put the woman in her place, to “control and define” her, but as an example and a warning to others.

In her article, Ashley Judd is sharply aware of the fact that it’s often women doing this to other women:

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

Whenever a woman participates in this Conversation that denigrates someone like Ashley Judd or Jessica Simpson – or, for that matter, Samantha Brick – she is only strengthening the patriarchal frame that sets the terms for this dialogue and controls it. It doesn’t just frame the way women are discussed, but the way they are thought about and perceived, and the criteria by which all girls and women get judged. Are you hotornot. What are you on a scale of 1 to 10. You’re old, you’re a pig, watch out or you won’t keep your husband.

I, for one, would like to change the conversation.

Raise your hand or honk your horn if you agree.