Читать книгу We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere - Gillian Anderson, Gillian Anderson - Страница 25

Getting Real

‘To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.’

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Honesty is the guide that leads us home. It returns us to our true selves and enables us to live authentically, courageously and congruently.

Most of us do our best to tell the truth. We might tell the occasional white lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or exaggerate a story for the sake of effect, but aside from that we try to be honest.

And yet, there is one person we lie to on a regular basis, perhaps even without realizing it – ourselves.

We all do it. We tell ourselves we’re OK when we’re not. We tell ourselves we don’t mind when we do and that we can’t when we can. We say yes when we mean no and no when we want to say yes. We override our instinct in the name of being practical or polite. We bury our dreams and then help others fulfil theirs. We disguise, shave and shape ourselves to conform to an artificial feminine ideal only to suffer the consequences: depression, relationship problems, anger issues, addiction and despair.

WE’s First Principle takes us inwards. It involves digging down beneath the surface of who we think we are, in order to reclaim our true selves.

It’s a process that involves discovering and discarding the lies and myths we’ve accumulated over the years, which have resulted in us becoming estranged from ourselves. It requires courage, commitment and self-care.

Most of us are called to this journey when we hit an obstacle in life – a relationship that’s ended badly, a betrayal or disappointment, or when one of the distractions or addictions we use to cope stops working. When our lives are ticking along and appear to be functioning, it’s easier to ignore that niggle deep in our soul, pleading for our attention.

But wherever you are in your life, and whatever is happening, WE’s First Principle will bring an enormous sense of relief and freedom. There is nothing quite like being able to say, ‘This is who I really am,’ and to feel truly glad about it.

Losing ourselves

‘Severe separations in early life leave emotional scars on the brain because they assault the essential human connection: the [parent–child] bond, which teaches us that we are lovable.’

JUDITH VIORST

From early childhood most of us start to lose touch with our authentic self.

Our instinctive need to be loved, feel safe and belong leads us to adapt. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, we shift in response to our parents’, teachers’ and peers’ perceptions of who we are and what we should be. And in the process we naturally abandon parts of ourselves.

The extent to which each of us does this largely depends on how well we are cared for in our early years. We rely on the world we’re born into to reflect back to us who we are. If the message we receive as babies and toddlers is that we’re loved and ‘enough’ just as we are, we’ll have a much greater chance of developing a resilient sense of self. The less secure we are during those early years, the more we adapt ourselves to try to get that missing approval.

We create false selves to ensure our emotional and sometimes physical survival – sub-personalities that are almost us but not quite. They help us to get our needs met at a time when we are too young and dependent to have any other choices. The problem comes when we continue to rely on them long after they’ve fulfilled their useful purpose. Often they become so habitual that we no longer realize they’re not who we really are.

EXERCISE 1: Would the Real Me Please Stand Up

This exercise will help you begin to reconnect with your authentic self.

Pause for a moment and think about which false selves you may have developed over your lifetime. Remember that each one of them came into existence to keep you safe. They’re not bad, they’ve just outlived their purpose and they prevent you from living authentically. Take out your journal. Close your eyes and allow yourself to slide backwards along the timeline of your life. Be as honest as you’re able about the sub-personalities you’ve developed.

For example, perhaps as a girl you relieved household tensions by making people laugh, so as an adult you continue to clown your way through life – never showing your tears and keeping everyone else smiling at your own expense. Or maybe you were the ‘good’ girl who was rewarded for working hard, and now you’re at the top of a career ladder and you have no idea why you climbed it.

Perhaps you gained your sense of worth by care-taking an alcoholic or otherwise sick parent and now continue to give more than you have and wonder why you are always running on empty. Or maybe you grew up in an environment where there was nobody you could rely on and so you developed a mask of independence that leaves you seemingly invincible but horribly alone.

It may be difficult to draw sharp distinctions between the characters you’ve played, whose boundaries may conflict and overlap. Were you Mummy’s little helper or Daddy’s princess? Were you the intellectual or the dropout? Were you the peacemaker or the truth-teller (or both)? Were you a people-pleaser, a party-girl, a loner or a saint? Were you Miss Perfect, a rebel or a critic who sat on the sidelines? Or were you invisible? Write down every sub-personality you find.

Each of us will have developed a number of selves to ensure our survival. Normally you’ll find five or six dominant ones that are still with you in adult life.

Now take every one that you’ve found and visualize her as a separate person. Greet her and thank her for the protection she has given you. Each of them has helped to keep you safe.

When you’ve worked through your list take five deep breaths in and out and congratulate yourself. This is an important step you’ve taken. Even though these sub-personalities will emerge and sometimes still be useful, from now on you will see them for what they are – masks that you’ve needed to wear – and you will not mistake them for yourself. Who you truly are lies beneath and beyond them, and you are now on your journey to meet her.

As you go through your day try to notice when you slip into one of your sub-personalities. Practising honesty will enable you to identify them and then let them gently drop away, in the same way that a husk drops from a seed.

When I told the school careers advisor that I wanted to be a secretary at the BBC (I didn’t dare tell her that I wanted to be a reporter because I didn’t think it would ever be possible), she laughed at me and said, ‘Don’t you think every girl wants to do that? Why don’t you be a bit more realistic and work at the insurance company? They’re always looking for typists.’ When, years later, I found myself reporting for the BBC, I always carried a sense that I should be in the typing pool rather than on air. While the men around me had a sense of entitlement and clearly planned their career progression, I always felt as if I was begging to be allowed to do what I loved rather than claiming my rightful place at the table.

JN

Other people’s stuff

‘When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.’

BETTY FRIEDAN

How we are seen by others and society as a whole informs how we see ourselves. The messages we’re given as women about what it is and isn’t OK for us to do, feel, look like or want, get absorbed.

Whether the message is that we need to be passive and wait to be chosen or that we should try to have it all – children and the seat in the boardroom – the complex truth of who we are gets obscured. Our sense of what is possible is limited and we bury parts of ourselves, fearing we won’t fit into the world as it is.

Similarly our perception of our physical self gets distorted by the constant messages we receive about what we should and shouldn’t wear, weigh and eat, and how we should or shouldn’t look. No matter how hard we try, it’s difficult not to be affected. They’re all around us in what we read and hear, and in the images we see on a daily basis. Whether it’s scantily clad, airbrushed models staring down at us from billboards or magazine covers, or images on social media, the message is the same: it’s not OK to be who we are.

The price of social media

The stress that social media is causing young women is heavily implicated in a dramatic rise in mental illness. Levels of self-harm, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic mental illness are all on the increase.⁶ A quarter of 16–24-year-old women have anxiety, depression, panic disorders, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder according to UK government-funded research.⁷ And the proportion of young women self-harming has trebled between 2007 and 2014.

At this stage of WE’s journey your goal is to discover and know your true self. Becoming conscious of those messages is the first stage to escaping their toxic power.

When I was broadcasting I felt obliged to don the ‘uniform’ – power suit and heels – that my news editors and the industry expected. I was very conscious that I was perpetuating the stereotypes I hoped my work would dispel, but I felt trapped. If I didn’t look the part I wouldn’t get to play the part. And I desperately wanted the part. So I dressed up and pretended to be someone I was not in order to get the chance to tell the truth – one of the many acts of hypocrisy that I engaged in to become ‘successful’. I became part of the problem that I was hoping to solve and each time I put on my work suits I felt myself getting more and more estranged from my real self and my levels of internal self-hatred grew.

JN

I agreed to participate in photoshoots when I was younger that I would advise myself against in retrospect, where my desire to be liked or found attractive overrode that small voice that wanted to say, ‘I’m not OK with this’. Whether it was not wanting to upset the male photographer or letting my ego get caught up in the attention, I hadn’t yet found that part of my brain. Not just the part that could stand up for myself and say I will not participate in an act that feels shameful because it is exposing too much of myself for a stranger’s gaze, but the part that might recognize that what I was participating in was a bigger issue and that by agreeing to do the shoot I was colluding in a far darker message about women and our objectification.

GA

It’s easy to forget how relatively recently women – even in the developed Western hemisphere – won basic legal rights. A hundred years ago, women in the US and UK weren’t allowed to vote and it wasn’t until 1920 and 1928 respectively that women gained voting parity with men. And until the 1990s our husbands could legally rape us. For the bulk of legal history we’ve been treated as inferior and the legacy of centuries of inequality continues to exact its toll on our sense of who we are.

Leading female scientists, politicians and commentators still find that if they speak publicly, their looks and clothes are dissected in ways that simply don’t happen to men, reinforcing the sense that beneath the talk of equality we remain objects to be lusted over, dominated and possessed, rather than equals.

To get a snapshot of the extent to which equality is still resisted take a look at the comments that women who write about equality generate online – threats of sexual assault and even death are commonplace. As a result, whatever strides the world is making towards equality, the mirror we’re reflected back in is distorted and, in turn, can corrupt and limit how we perceive ourselves.

Under cover

Too often we can feel we have to disguise our real physical self to match artificial notions of femininity that have largely been created by men. Whether we’re forcing our feet into heels so high they damage our backs or suppressing what we think or feel in order not to upset our other half, we’re often left feeling worse about ourselves.

The rise of porn has compounded the problem, giving both genders warped perceptions of what is normal. Young men expect girls to look and behave like porn stars, and girls find themselves under pressure to oblige. Plastic surgeons have seen a surge in the number of women seeking labiaplasty – a painful procedure that can permanently damage nerve endings – as women try to conform to damaging cosmetic norms perpetuated by the porn industry to make themselves desirable.

Of course, changing our outside appearance doesn’t get us any nearer to being loved and wanted for who we authentically are. Applying WE’s principles enables us to know our identity from the inside out rather than the outside in. We realize that who we are lies beyond what we do, how we look and what we own.

When you are clear about who you are and who you are not it’s a lot easier to be clearer with the outside world. If you adopt rigorous self-honesty as a way of life, the false-selves and labels that have disguised your true self will gradually start to fall away.

‘Curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves.’

ELIZABETH GILBERT

As children we’re all emotionally super-porous. In addition to the messages we receive from our families, peers and society at large, we also absorb our caregivers’ fears, frustrations and beliefs, and mistake them for our own. We start receiving most of them before we’re old enough to be able to scrutinize and reject those that don’t serve us or belong to us. This will especially be the case if you come from a family in which there are secrets or traumatic events. You may not know the facts, but you’ll still absorb the feelings. It’s possible to carry emotions like shame, fear and sadness for decades, even though they have nothing to do with you.

I’ve always lived with a fear of catastrophe and could never define what that ‘terrible’ thing I feared might be. As a girl I’d squirrel away my pocket money so that I’d be ready for whatever it was that was going to happen to us. It was only years later, when I discovered my father’s secret past, that my behaviour made sense and my fear started to evaporate. When my father was a child, he’d fled from the Nazis during the Second World War and, wanting to protect us from anti-Semitism, never told us that he was Jewish. But it turned out he inadvertently left me a different kind of legacy: a sense of impending catastrophe and a fear of saying who I really was.

JN

Genes with memories

The new and fast-evolving field of epigenetics research suggests that trauma can be inherited genetically. In one study, male mice that were taught to fear a smell passed that fear on to their offspring – which in turn would bequeath the same sensitivity to their offspring.⁸

Another study found that baby rats that received insufficient nurturing from their mothers matured to be more prone to disease and anxiety than their well-groomed counterparts, and then passed on that predisposition to their descendants.⁹

We can live our whole lives with a particular sensitivity, fear or trait that doesn’t belong to us – that’s been internalized from the outside world. Now we can start challenging the assumptions we’ve made about ourselves and ask, ‘Is this mine? Do I own this? Is it part of me? Is it serving me?’ or ‘Can I let it go?’

EXERCISE 2: Getting Beneath the Surface

This exercise is to help you discard the ideas about yourself that no longer serve you. Think about the labels you’d use to describe yourself. They might be about your job, how you look, your race, your background, your sexual orientation.

Now think of the messages about yourself that you were given growing up. It doesn’t matter whether they were good or bad – we internalize them when we’re young and impressionable, and as we get older they can be hard to shake.

As a child, were you told you were lazy, smart or a show-off? Were you criticized or praised for how you looked – told you were too fat, too skinny, too tall, too short? Or maybe you were ignored and grew up with the belief that you were worth nothing at all.

Write a list of the ten most prominent messages about yourself that come to your mind – from your past and your present. Look at each label on your list. Really ponder it. Is it true? Does it really represent who you are inside?

Now make sure you are comfortable and have time to sit for a few moments. Close your eyes. Breathe in and out five times, letting your out-breath last for five counts and your in-breath for four. Imagine you are in a boat that is floating far out at sea and that you take the labels you have written and scatter them onto the surface of the ocean. Watch the words floating there, bobbing up and down on the waves. Now imagine diving into the water so you’re beneath them. As you look back up at them, you see that the paper is wet and the writing is starting to smudge so you can no longer read the words.

Dive deeper and look back up again. The paper is dissolving into the ocean and now it is gone. As you swim deeper you find yourself resting on the seabed. It is calm and peaceful and still down here. No turbulence, no waves. Any notion of who you are or are not is just a distant memory left on the surface. Inhale and exhale. You are free. Deep down, beneath the words, beneath the ideas and judgements of yourself and others, you are perfect and whole just as you are. Allow yourself to really embrace what that feels like. To be truly free, to be truly yourself.

When you are ready, slowly float up to the surface and open your eyes.

Take your list and scrunch it up. If you’d like, you can throw it in the trash or even burn it and scatter the ashes. You don’t need those labels any more. Your true self – the part of you that dived into the water – exists beyond and beneath all words. When you reside in her, you will feel utterly safe and loved.

This is a great exercise for when you’re feeling off balance or upset. It’s not necessary to repeat all of it, just imagine yourself diving deep down into your own internal ocean and resting there for a while until you feel restored. You can even add this calming imagery to your daily meditation practice.

Finding ourselves

Now that you have started to shed who and what you are not, the really exciting work of discovering who you really are can begin in earnest.

‘My true identity goes beyond the outer roles I play … there is an Authentic “I” within … a divine spark within the soul.’

SUE MONK KIDD

It’s time to get curious – about yourself. Forget all those messages you may have been given as a girl about not being nosy or not asking too many questions. Give yourself permission to question everything, assume nothing and be ready to be amazed.

In my working life I was dedicated to uncovering the truth in the world around me – first as a barrister, then as an investigative journalist – but it was a whole new journey when I was told to start asking myself the questions that I’d normally throw at others. I realised there were all sorts of truths in my own life I didn’t want to get too honest about for fear of unravelling. Eventually I did, and that’s when I discovered a new level of emotional freedom.

JN

This is not a straightforward, linear process. You’ll find false leads and dead ends. You’ll have surprises and tough choices.

Think of yourself as an archaeologist in your own life. Let curiosity be the tool you dig with. Ask yourself questions as you would someone you were studying. When was the last time you were really happy in your life? Why was that? What music did you love in your teens and do you ever allow yourself to listen to it now? What is your favourite food? What do you hate about your life and what do you love? Write down your answers in your journal.

Sometimes we simply don’t know. We’ve dulled our longings and our wants out of necessity. They’ve become what often feels like a painful luxury. But the truth is they are the nerve endings we need to bring back to life. So listen out for the stirrings of what you love and what you want and then expose and explore them.

There are no rules, and there’s nothing that says what you discover has to be coherent or logical. Whoever said we had to make sense? We are all complex and multifaceted.

Born in the US, I lived in London from the age of two. I naturally spoke with a British accent and felt British but was teased in school for being a ‘Yank’. I wanted to fit in but was confused about where my loyalties lay because my parents were American and I loved the US – where the sun always seemed to shine and I was plied with candy. When I was 11, we moved to Michigan. I was so excited at the prospect of living in the land of milkshakes and hamburgers. But the reality was, I was still the kid with the ‘funny’ accent. I eventually modulated my speech to fit in, but I still felt like the outsider and I deeply missed my other home.

Today, I still feel torn – the UK has my heart and soul, but the US is in my genes. I’ve lived in London again now for 15 years and it is second nature to go back and forth with the accent depending on where I am and to whom I’m speaking. This has confused people along the way and the question of falseness has meant that I’ve had to look at it closely. It would be easy for me to attach a ‘bad’ label to my intentions or to judge myself as being disengenuous, but I’ve come to accept that adapting to my mixed cultural identity has been vital to my well-being, and despite the fact that it’s confusing and awkward sometimes, I have come to own the reality that they are both the authentic me.

GA

You may discover that you’ve abandoned your own desires and even your tastes for those of your family, friends or partner. Maybe it was easier that way or perhaps you never allowed yourself the space to develop your own likes and dislikes to begin with, and it was a relief to have a ready-made set of preferences handed to you. Or perhaps you never allowed yourself the chance to hope for what you really wanted because it seemed impossible to achieve.

Ask yourself: ‘Whose life am I currently living? What would my life look like if I could have anything, be anything, do anything?’

These can be really scary questions to answer truthfully. Don’t censor your answers or limit them with personal considerations. During this early stage, getting to know yourself can feel unsettling, daunting, even frightening. What if you’re overwhelmed by longings and hopes that you suppressed in childhood? What if you discover you’re married to the wrong person or that you hate what you do for a living? Or maybe you worry that you won’t be able to do anything about what you find. Change of this magnitude can feel terrifying, but see if you can start to take small steps to move towards where you want to be. Fears will inevitably surface, and they can at first seem paralysing or overwhelming. Do your best to move through them at your own pace. Trust, just as you would if you were pregnant, that within you is a living, breathing being whom you are absolutely going to love.

Allowing yourself to discover your true longings will reset your internal sat nav. You can’t even begin to get to where you’d love to be if you haven’t yet entered the real destination.

Noticing and naming

‘Seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.’

JANE AUSTEN, EMMA

Noticing and naming are two of WE’s most important tools. You’ll be using them for the rest of this journey and hopefully the rest of your life. The answers lie within each and every one of us, and noticing and naming provide the mechanics with which we start finding them. Your journal will continue to be a valuable tool throughout this whole process, so keep it close for all these new discoveries.

Noticing

Noticing is like a flashlight in the dark – it leads you to awareness. Allow yourself to notice what’s going on inside and around you. Don’t judge it or be impatient for answers. Just be curious. You can’t be honest about something you don’t know exists. Noticing will bring insight. You’ll spot contradictions, you’ll spot inconsistencies, and then over time you’ll start to spot what’s congruent with the real you and what isn’t.

Perhaps you don’t actually want the promotion you’ve applied for because it will leave you with even less time with your kids, but you’re scared to admit it lest you look like you’re giving up on your feminist ideals.

Or maybe deep down you know you don’t want children, but you pretend to be broody because you fear the dismay and pain coming clean will evoke in your parents or partner.

Remember ACT – Action Changes Things. Well, noticing is an action, so notice what you tell yourself, notice what you tell other people, notice how you feel, and allow yourself to become aware of what the reality of your life is.

Naming

Once you’ve noticed an uncomfortable reality, it can be easy to want to slip back into denial. If you spot buried and painful emotions or truths, it can be tempting to sweep what you’ve noticed right back under the carpet. Naming is how we stop denial from creeping back in.

Sometimes acknowledging what you’ve noticed feels like it will be enough, but it isn’t. Things become more real when you name them. Write it down in your journal so it’s there in black and white. If you have someone safe to talk to – a therapist, a non-judgemental friend, then say it aloud to her too.

Out the truth. Notice it and then name it – in writing and, if you can, out loud.

Of course, notice and name what brings you joy and peace too. Take nothing for granted. You are on a mission to chart your own internal territory. It is an eye-opening and profound experience being this honest. Do your best to embrace the process and enjoy the wonder of meeting yourself anew.

People-pleasing

It’s natural to want to be liked and to want to be kind. But people-pleasing – saying yes when you mean no or pretending you like something when you don’t – is a form of dishonesty. We all do it, but if we do it without noticing and naming it, sooner or later we lose sight of what we do actually want and need.