If You People Please, You're Likely Expecting Others to Do the Same for YOU

I’m thinking a ton lately about issues of race and gender/sex/identity and how it’s all intertwined and how it affects my work and how I should/can change my work as I know and understand more. And I understand so very little, when it comes right down to it.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know shit, right?

As I’m thinking about these things especially intensely over the last few weeks, I try to very gently enter into conversations that are about these topics and ask questions. For a while, it just seemed I couldn’t ask anything right or in the right way. I kept getting, well, yelled at in a variety of ways. No one was super mean but I was definitely getting my hand slapped, and I was getting more and more frustrated.

How can I learn if I can’t ask?

Then I had a private discussion with someone who lives these questions and who cares for me and was willing to kinda hand hold and be patient though very direct (which I respond well to). Thank GOD for this person.

But you might be surprised to find out what I learned or maybe you won’t be surprised at all because you’re further ahead on this curve than me and you’ve already been muttering to yourself as you read this.

I learned that, really, I WAS the problem. Or my approach was anyway. Even though I approached with love and good intentions and care, I was still expecting too much.

I was still expecting the person who is suffering to do the work for me. I was still expecting them to do heavy emotional lifting for me.

Here’s what I was extra surprised by: this was happening because I do this FAR TOO MUCH FOR OTHER PEOPLE in my own work and world.

People who have brains and can do research come to me with basic questions about trauma. I use my precious time and brain energy giving them all of the information on a platter. When they could just as easily go get that information for themselves, do the basic thinking for themselves, and come back later when they’re ready to have a genuine discussion with me as two equal humans struggling.

I hand hold people like crazy on the regular, thinking I “should” or maybe people won’t “like me.”

See that people pleaser woman shit right there?

So then when *I* am the asker, of course, I enter into the scenario with the same messed up expectations for the person I perceive as the “expert.”

Whoa…

What a crap ton of codependent shit right there. Can you see it?

I’m off to order a bunch of books about racism, white fragility, and the intersection of racism and sexism (because hello, constitution, written FOR AND BY white men).

I’m gonna go do my homework and I’m asking that you do yours too, okay?

Because I’m also gonna be recovering from all that people pleasing.

Embodied Revolution

I shared a study recently on Facebook that showed TOO MANY young people would rather get infected with Covid19 than GAIN WEIGHT. (A study done by the Missouri University Center for Body Image Research and Policy.)

We KNOW that this culture HATES BODIES. Period. Notice I didn't say "bigger bodies."

It extra hates bigger bodies. The stories it constructs about productivity and worthiness around larger bodies are some of the worst and most destructive.

But it hates bodies, period. American culture is born of a Protestant disdain for the human form and a belief that only in death can we attain any “holiness.”

Every body is TOO -- too fat, too skinny, too curvy, too straight, too hairy, too bald, too sexy, too fem, too masculine, too sexual, too androgynous, too muscled, too flabby, too soft, too hard, too brown, too pale, too too too too too too too...

We are, one way or another, taught to HATE OUR BODIES. PERIOD.

Why?

Yes... you probably guessed part of it... because people who hate their bodies will buy products.

But deeper than that -- people who hate their bodies will bow to the will of anything outside of themselves that promises they might eventually, some day, maybe sorta feel okay about themselves.

In the meantime, people who hate their bodies enact violence on themselves and then that extends beyond their individual body to the larger bodies of family, community, earth.

One way or another, each of us projects our body hate onto someone/something else, and it's how this whole system in which we live works.

So when I say the work we do to EMBODY is SUBVERSIVE and REVOLUTIONARY, I MEAN IT.

When we embody in a loving way, we then act from love and we project LOVE into the world.

Love is already complete. It needs nothing. And it shares all things.

See how that could destroy power structures?

I'm not here, I'm not doing this work, so you can dance a little and feel some dopamine...

I'm here and I'm doing this work SO WE CAN CHANGE THIS FUCKING WORLD.