On being a defective woman

Okay, I need you to be honest with me here. Dig deep if you have to. Have you ever done something, said something, felt something that made you feel like you were somehow transgressing on your gender? As if somehow, whatever you did made you that you were *less* of a woman or *less* of a man?

A couple of months ago one of my male friends jokingly asked me if I’d do some ironing for him. I laughed at him, and my amusement was twofold: first of all, it’s laughable that he’d ask me to do this for him. (Guess he hadn’t seen me: sporting my awesome, bright green “Please pass the Gender Equity” t-shirt? Sitting on the UNL Chancellor’s Commission for the Status of Women for two years? Critically analyzing gender messages in every effing commercial, ever, because I can’t/won’t turn “feminist brain” off?) Second, I’m terrible at ironing. I use the “wrinkle release” setting on my clothes dryer rather than iron my stuff.

So I laugh at this friend, but what do I say to him? Well, first I chide him for asking and tell him to do his own damn ironing. I ask why he didn’t ask one of the other boys to do his bidding. The next thing out of my mouth: “Anyway, I can’t iron. I guess I’m a defective woman.” And we all laughed and it was all sunshine and rainbows over cocktails, and it was a joke, but in hindsight…was it a bonafide anxiety slipping out of my mouth, albeit couched in sarcasm?

You see, bias (which would include racism and sexism, among other things) has a funny way of being implicit, which is cognitive psychology jargon for “so deeply ingrained into our minds that we don’t even have control over it.” Explicitly, I most definitely strive for equality and attempt to battle oppression across multiple domains. However, those firmly implanted nasty little implicit prejudices come tumbling out of my psyche sometimes, unwelcome as they might be. (Think you’re above racism, sexism, religious bias? I encourage you to go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html , try some of the tests, and see how they come out. Very few of us are immune to implicit -isms.)

Gender-wise, this implicit stuff really bites me in the ass sometimes. As in when I feel that the disorganization of our home reflects that I am some kind of organic snafu of a woman, some aberration of nature. (This is demoralizing to admit. I cringe as I write this.) As in when I internally feel like an utter failure when I think about all of the domestic stuff that my mom and my grandma were able to do that I really suck at. As in how awful I sometimes feel in acknowledging that I have little aspiration to be a stay-at-home mom because I love my work and enjoy having a professional identity. Explicitly, I can self-soothe by reminding myself that there’s no right or wrong way to be a woman, that I’m not defective, and that I can be whatever kind of woman that I want to be and she will be great. Implicitly…shades of self-loathing and guilt rage on. Damn you, generations of societal brainwashing.

I think I’m on the winning end of this, though. I’m well aware of some of those ugly, embarrassing implicit beliefs that run so counter to the beliefs that I explicitly hold dear, and knowing is half of the battle (thanks for the wisdom, GI Joe). And I’m not going to stand for them. I’m going to continue to stand up to them, to make conscious and concerted efforts to transcend them. So take that, brain. And by the way, screw you, social convention. This woman is too awesome to be defective.

Making my declaration

This week marks the beginning of my summer of endings. Yeah, yeah, I know it's also a "summer of beginnings" and all of that. Those who know me best know that I play the Pollyanna/silver lining card just about as often as I can get away with it. Yet in this instance I'm resisting the urge to make it "all okay," to blunt my pain with trite aphorisms about doors opening and opportunities abounding, blah blah blah. It's not that I'm being fatalistic-- I do believe that there is some pretty cool stuff on my horizon. It's just that I also need some time to bleed, to process all that's happening without a fake smile on my face. I need to grieve before I go blithely smiling into tomorrow.

I've been thinking of this era as an early mid-life crisis. I even threw myself an evening on the town with dear and trusted friends to commemorate this, and to epitomize this. At the time that I planned this gathering, I thought, "Okay, so I'll have this night, go a little crazy, and then the crisis will be over and I'll move on with my life! Problem solved!" Ah, my naiveté alarms even me sometimes. The truth is that the name (say it with me now...it's okay...CRISIS) fits, still. It's still happening. It come in waves. I don't lay around bemoaning my life and getting cookie crumbs in my bed and drinking myself into oblivion night after night. I haven't ran out and bought a hot car or signed myself up for plastic surgery.  I'm actually living my life pretty similarly to my pre-crisis life-- my family, my friends, my research job, my therapy job, my dissertation, my books, and--yes--Facebook. But I feel different. I introspect a great deal-- sometimes I'm so in my head that my body literally becomes a mobile receptacle which has the sole purpose of transporting my head from place to place. I think about the past. I think about the future. I think about the present. I think about my life and how it ties to other lives, and what it all means. I think about the choices I have made, am making, will make. Part of this is because I have the luxury of time for all of this introspection. And part of this is because I feel like I just have to do this right now.

I'm trying to find helpful ways to cope. Sometimes it feels more like grasping, but once in awhile, I grasp onto something good. Writing has been one of these incidental good discoveries of late. Writing and I, we go way back. I got my first diary when I was about 8 and became a semi-regular writer by the age of 10. In my tweenhood, I developed a habit of writing stories that depicted myself in lives that I wished I were living, rather than the one I was actually living. As a teen, I wrote letters to folks who I was mad at, or who I secretly loved, or felt some other strong emotion for-- with no intention of sending the letters. From my teenage years on out I've kept a sporadic journal. I used to chide myself on not being disciplined enough to write daily; now I see, however, that I write when I'm moved to write, and that's okay. My writing has to be inspired by some emotion per sé, or some event that I found to be meaningful (which of course evokes a powerful emotion), or some big idea (also imbued with emotion). Thus as I look back, I can see that I've always used writing as an outlet for emotion-- AKA, to cope. Yet in the mounds of required papers about theory and therapy and ethics and research methods, writing became a chore-- and it's now so easy to see why. Scholarly and technical writing--with the exception of special projects (such as reflection papers)-- are by their very nature devoid of emotion. Emotion isn't even really allowed. And while I can certainly write from a very intellectualized, "objective" position, I'm learning that it isn't my favorite. And anyway, that's work. This writing, the writing I've been spending hours and hours of my free time on lately, is for me. And that's love. It's coping in the best way that I know how. Sometimes I struggle in being true to my emotions in face-to-face situations. But I rarely if ever sugarcoat or minimize in the written word, the writing that's for me, nosiree. For me, it's a big deal to have a place to do that.

Something else that has been helpful-- reaching out. The times when I sought the solace, validation, and the loving arms of my family and friends have been among the most healing of my experiences.  I'm not gonna lie-- this whole reaching out thing actually isn't easy for me. I like to be able to do things myself; I've always been like that. Do you want to know why? When I ask for help, when I share my struggle, when I'm really, really honest with what's going on with me, then someone else gets to see how messed up and imperfect I really am. Though I like to (delusionally?) think I've come a long with in my battle with perfectionism, I am still really not down with people glimpsing what I perceive as the less desirable pieces of me. Sure, I'm now a little more okay with some of those external bits-- as in I am more okay with my personal appearance, house, office space, other outward expressions of myself being seen in their natural state (which is often in disarray!).  But the internal stuff? The confused, unsure, unhappy pieces on my inside that eat at me? The place I default to is: How dare I let that slip out. How dare I think about letting someone know that this crap exists in me. Everyone will know that I don't have it all together.

So, what I'm trying to achieve here is a marriage of the two coping skills that seem to have worked the best for me: writing, and reaching out. I need to use my writing to be honest with myself about all of this shit. And I need for you to see it, too, and do with it what you will. I guess I just need to let it all hang out, for better or for worse. 

As I sit here, I take a deep breath, just as someone who is about to make a big, loud announcement would. And now I'm channeling the spirit of Michael Scott as I say: "I....DECLARE....LIFE CRISIS!"