Two Cents
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Thursday, October 23, 2014
How FCKH8 is Misrepresenting my Notion of Feminism
Recently, I did something I don’t usually do: I ranted on
Facebook.
Ugh, yes, unfortunately this happened. And while I’m not
proud of my inability to keep the social media monster tamed, I am absolutely
not ashamed for what I had to say.
I saw this video quite a while ago (it’s older than people think) but I was hoping its
sails wouldn’t catch wind in the sea of social media. Produced by FCKH8.com, it consists of several
young girls, donned in princess costumes, denouncing the many inequalities
women still have in today’s world by means of throwing out the F-bomb every few
sentences. The idea apparently was to draw attention to why the word “feminism”
is nearly considered a curse word as far as women’s rights. Much to my dismay,
I began seeing many of my Facebook friends (some of them actual friends, you know, like
the old days of real life) posting this video.
I tried to hold back, I really did.
But the monster inside me won out, and I posted this novel
of a status online:
Since over the course of writing that post, my Facebook
ranting alter-ego calmed down a little bit, I decided to use my blog as a means
of elaborating on my sudden outburst.
I grew up enjoying the entertainment of a lot of comedians,
most of whom I usually watched with my mom. Humor has always been an important
factor in my family.
My mom would always say that the best comedians were the
ones that didn’t need curse words to make them funnier. She would say that the
funniest ones were always funny enough on their own, and that they didn’t need
the shock value of dropping F-bombs and such to entertain their audience. Their
talent was enough.
By creating a video of cursing 8-year-old girls, we are
devaluing our cause. Feminism, true feminism, shouldn’t need a shock-value to
resonate with people – our cause is powerful enough on its own. By feeding
people this notion that we have to curse to matter, it takes away the very
meaning behind our message.
We want to be valued as women who are equal to men. We
strive to make these changes in our society and yet, we are victimizing ourselves
with this very type of propaganda.
Yes, perhaps using the F-word is empowering. But you know
what’s even more empowering? NOT
using the F-word. I’m telling you, being diplomatic and using reason to further
your argument goes a whole lot further than cursing in someone’s face. If
anything, this video is indeed proving that it’s easy to get hot-headed, throw a
tantrum, curse, spew out anything without a filter… those things are easy to
do. Women have not ever, and will not ever, have the luxury of easiness. Why
start now? We are strong enough to remain cool, calm, and collected; we are
intelligent enough to prove our point eloquently; we are determined enough to
maintain composure in the face of injustice.
Here’s a small memo to the FCKH8 campaign managers for
future reference. From a communication student who works closely with those in
marketing and advertising, let me tell you, at FCKH8, why this particular
campaign is a disappointment to me as a woman who identifies with feminism.
There were many, many other ways this could have been done cleverly without a
little girl speaking your vulgar script. Even I, who admittedly has not a
single creative bone in my body, can think of several different approaches this
method could have taken with the same message, same clever idea, but with a
much more positive channel. It pains me to see a campaign with my same motives
so lazily throw together something without thinking of the implications. Real
feminism, true feminism, has been revitalized by hard-working, determined,
passionately diplomatic men and women; it’s very sad to me that you think you
can just get away with a flimsy replicate of what those people have achieved.
How very un-feminist of you.
This our real fight
against inequality – not our fight against clean language. This movement may
have fooled many people into thinking its helping men and women be on equal standards,
but it’s really just a cop-out for a campaign to go the easy
route.
Demand more out of our social movements – they should be leading the way
for positive lasting change rather than demeaning the very cause they fight
for.
No idea who this is but it's kind of how I felt after this post.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Confessions of an Anxiety Attack: An Open-Ended Narrative
Got away can’t sense stop feel panic panic panic look away
get out help.
This is what my thoughts sound like when I’m going through a
panic attack.
Before I start, here’s some PR control for you. As I've said before, I’m not a
licensed therapist or a doctor and I don’t pretend to be – but I am someone who
has dealt with anxiety and it’s symptoms for over eight years now. I can’t tell
you how many panic attacks I’ve had, but I can tell you that I’ve had the good
fortune of thinking ahead of time to track what they feel like. You see, before
I ever wanted to be a journalist I first wanted to be a scientist, and even
though I sadly found out that I suck at math and can’t remember what the chemical
equation of photosynthesis is for the life of me, I still have this inner sense
of objectivity and curiosity about the world around me. Because of this, I have
always been determined to self-observe my own anxiety in hopes of finding a way
I, myself, can cope with it. Just as there are a million different forms of the
cold virus, there are a million different ways of both suffering from and
coping with anxiety – so what I tell you works for me, most certainly will not
work for everyone. This is just my story.
Imagine yourself, sitting on a bed watching a movie. Maybe
you’re with a friend or a significant other or something like that. All of a
sudden, there’s a loud high-pitched noise from the movie and your heart starts
to beat harder. The first sign some *ish* is about to go down is irritability.
Suddenly, the sound of someone breathing is enough to make you want to punch
them in the face. Nothing is sacred.
Why? What the heck? What just happened? Why are my ears
burning?
Your heart is going to explode. You know what’s about to
happen, and it only makes the pounding faster. The symptoms begin to start uncontrollably,
like trying to hold onto sand as it slips through your fingers.
You glance at your hands quickly so that your boyfriend won’t
notice. They’re shaking slightly and your palms are starting to sweat. Your
heart keeps pounding. You can imagine the blood coursing through your body
starting to speed up; maybe it will go so fast your veins will burst and you’ll
bleed to death. Images like this start to flood your brain, and you can feel
your breathing intensifying. That’s because your lungs are next.
Your breathing becomes labored, as if someone has slid their
hands through your ribcage and grasped your esophagus like the end of a rope. You
can feel your lungs tightening, which in turn, sends chemicals to your brain
telling you that you are dying. This is called “fight-or-flight” mode and I’ll
explain more of that in a second.
Next are your thoughts. This is the part I hate the most. They
begin to jumble; picture someone taking a scrabble board with letters neatly
organized on it and then just table-flipping the hell out of that thing. You try
frantically to put sentences together but no matter what you do they don’t make
any sense. This makes verbalizing what’s going on to your boyfriend nearly
impossible. Of course, whoever is with you when you reach this far is freaking
out because all of a sudden, out of nowhere, their girlfriend is shaking,
sweating, and saying things like “Got away can’t sense stop feel panic panic
panic look away get out help.”
Naturally, they’re kind of concerned.
But you can’t tell them what’s happening because just like
if you were to get down on all fours over those scrabble pieces and flipped
table, you just can’t put sentences together fast enough to explain. And the
more you franticly try, the worse it gets.
Your eyes begin to glaze –things are fuzzy, dreamlike
almost. Motion seems to be slowing down, then rapidly speeding up again. All
the while your body is going into hyperventilation and you have your boyfriend
about ready to call an ambulance. As your body shakes, sweats, and tenses, your
mind is slowly reaching a cusp where the water is about to come pouring out
over the edges. Suddenly, you and all those scrabble pieces on the floor are
floating in zero-gravity for a split second, before abruptly erupting into
earthquake chaos around you. Your thoughts explode. You can’t keep up with the
millions of questions and confusion spinning around your mind.
Depending on the severity, it has probably been about 5
minutes of this. Sometimes it can be 30 seconds, sometimes hours.
At this point, I am usually sobbing through heavy breaths,
wildly looking around for a place of sanctuary that won’t appear for me,
desperately wanting to escape my own body. When these attacks started, I didn’t
know what to do. I didn’t know what was going on. I legitimately thought I had
just had a mental break, and ventured to the crazy side of consciousness. Through
my own research, I self-diagnosed myself with mild anxiety. I know I don’t have
the authority to do that, but I don’t care. It is what it is, they happen the
same whether I give it a name or not.
Now that I have given a very general sense of what it feels
like for me personally when I go through one of these “attacks,” let me share a
bit about how I’ve been able to cope with them.
You should know right off the bat that my personal approach
to this is probably unconventional. I don’t like taking pills, not because I’m
a conspiracy-theorist junkie but simply because there are two things that are
part of my fundamental beliefs: self-reliance and nature, and I believe they
coincide with each other nicely for this. I’m not condoning people who take
medication, it’s just not for me.
So, with that being said, let me explain a little about the “fight-or-flight”
mode I mentioned earlier. Long ago, when humans depended on instincts and
biological traits to keep us alive, we developed a “sixth-sense” if you will,
that kept our race from being eaten to extinction. Animals have it too so we’re
not necessarily unique. This sense has been commonly referred to as the “fight-or-flight”
mode by laymen like myself. Your body is chemically engineered to go into a “fight-or-flight”
mode, otherwise known as panic, so that it can stay alive. Biologically this
makes sense for us, but sometimes the body goes into this panic mode when there’s
no real danger present, hence known as panic attacks. It therefore becomes a
vicious cycle; the more responsive your body is to the panic, the more you
panic, and the more your body responds.
The same kind of panic happens when you start to hyperventilate,
so for example, if you’re running on the treadmill a little too fast and your
body beings to hyperventilate, you will suddenly feel that panicky feeling
because your throat is closing up. That
feeling of panic is the chemical signal to your brain to tell your body it’s
time for “flight,” thus causing your body’s physical reactions. Unfortunately,
if you can’t break this cycle with eliminating the “eminent danger,” (or basically
calming yourself down) then you would actually die – it’s not a joke, people have
done it before doing stupid dares or YouTube trends. This is how humans, and other animals, have managed to evade
predators all these years, so it should be no surprise that we have continued
to carry on this trait despite our lesser need for it in the modern age. But
what about disorders? What about these “attacks”? Why am I going into “fight-or-flight”
mode simply from hearing a loud, annoying noise on a TV screen?
There’s almost no telling what will set off my panic
attacks. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but at first it
seemed impossible to pin-point when, where, and how a panic attack would start.
Often times, doctors advise patients who are struggling with eating disorders
to keep a food journal of what they eat every day, so that they can become
aware of their habits and discover patterns. Documenting each attack seemed the
only logical way to study what might be causing them – so I started keeping a
Panic Journal.
Totally.
Every time I had an attack, I made conscious effort to remember
what happened before, what I had eaten that day, how much exercise I had
gotten, what my schedule was like, what symptoms I experienced, how long the
attack went for, and most importantly, what seemed to make it go away. Every
detail I could remember, I wrote down. I hoped that by documenting these
variables, I could look back on my Panic Journal and discover some kind of
constant that I could control. Over the course of several years, I finally
began seeing patterns and finding “triggers” that I could count on to set me
off. I also began discovering temporary solutions to snapping me out of the
attacks – and even though they weren’t permanent, they were sufficient in the
moment.
Here’s what I learned about myself and I’m hoping if you’re
reading this and thinking of your own experiences, maybe it will help you too.
Reoccurring triggers for me went like this:
·
Lack of protein in morning and midday meals
·
Extreme heat
·
Loud, high-pitched, sudden noises
·
High caffeine intake
·
Sitting for long periods of time
·
A stressful schedule (of course)
·
Going for days without a break or someone to “vent”
to (as for many people)
The worst things to have happen during one of the triggers that
can supplement the attack go like this:
·
Someone attempting to converse with me
·
The loud noise continuing to happen
·
Someone attempting to vent to me
·
Being asked to do something
·
Someone demanding to know what’s wrong
·
Groups of people
·
No escape from the physical heat
The difference between these and the triggers is that these
things don’t necessarily start an attack – in fact, if you’re a normal person
these things happen quite often on their own. They just make it a lot harder to
control when an attack is about to happen. Triggers, also, aren’t always 100%
bound to make me react. They are just reoccurring things to be aware of for me.
To combat some of these triggers, I have a list of “weapons”
(really? Am I using that word?) that I use to help control the attack:
·
Cold water
·
Being alone
·
Having someone squeeze me (not kidding – a bear
hug from someone who quietly knows what’s going on is like the best thing ever
for me)
·
Outdoors
·
Protein foods like turkey or peanut butter
·
Gently touching my forearm
·
Silence
·
A place I can write down a list
·
Deep, controlled breathing
All of these things have proven to be fantastic remedies for
me when encountering the panic feeling. However, without a doubt, my most
utilized tool to snap myself out of an attack, or even in preventing one, is my
mind. Yes, you heard me, we’re totally taking a trip down hippy-dippy lane.
The cure to anxiety attacks: just think of Fraulein Maria and the von Trapp children's "Favorite Things" song and BAM - easy as that. Just kidding, it's a little more complicated and there's less strudel involved.
No but seriously, I firmly believe that our minds are a lot
stronger than we think they are, and they can be a powerful asset in maintaining
control over your own body. In this modern age where we have a pill to solve
your problem for you, it seems almost foolish to depend on your mind during an
attack where your mind is part of the problem. I don’t know if you remember
your sophomore year history class, but some of the best armies of the past defeated
their enemies by using their opponent’s tactics against them. If you want to
control your mind, use it against itself. It’s that powerful.
Ultimately, my brain is the one freaking out the rest of my
body with this “fight-or-flight” stuff. In past blog posts, I wrote about personal mantras that help me be a better
athlete. A similar concept can be used to calm yourself out of a panic attack.
For me, thinking things like “control,” or “calm,” or “focus” are all signals I
use to keep my brain in check. Unlike the mantras I use for volleyball that are
longer sentences, it is more helpful in this case to use single words because,
if you can remember my description earlier about the scrabble-table-flip, it’s
nearly impossible to think in sentences during an attack. Single words carry
just as much gravity.
I hope that if any of this has related to you, it has helped
you in some way start to grasp your own struggle with anxiety. Even if you don’t
have that going on, which I hope you don’t, perhaps now you feel more aware of
what a friend or loved one who has anxiety goes through. I hesitated in writing
this post because I was hoping you wouldn’t see me as a victim – I even hate
using the word “suffered” for me because, well, I don’t suffer from it. It
doesn’t run my life and it certainly never will. It has, however, become a part
of me, and for those of you who don’t agree with me accepting that, that’s
fine. I know who I am and I know what I am capable of. It’s all a part of
playing the cards you get, and doing so well enough that you can get through
the whole game. Everyone’s got something goin’ on!
Carry on friends! Take a deep breath and keep on keepin’ on.
Learning about what makes us who we are is exactly what keeps us so wonderful.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Living in the Present and Revaluating Checklists
When I became a Resident Assistant for my university’s
freshman dorm, I created a list of quirky things about me that hung in our hall
to help my residents get to know me better. It included categories like my
favorite things, my least favorite things, fun facts, and so on. One of the categories
was “Things I want to learn” and the list looked like this:
·
How to spin a basketball on one finger
·
How to rock climb (like real rock climbing, none
of this rec-center crap I did when I was 10)
·
Survival camping
·
Lock picking
·
A magicians secrets
·
How to speak sign language
·
How to use a sewing machine
·
Typing computer code
Don’t ask me why some of these things appeal to me, they
just do.
Anyways, this is very typical me. Not necessarily the
content of my list, while yes those are very me as well of course, but the list
itself. My last post talked about one of my other habits of self-doubt – well,
my next life habit is somehow making everything in my life a list. Everything.
This list above is the perfect example; I’ve literally taken
my hopes and dreams and compacted them into a “to-do” list I can check off. It’s
been a habit of mine from childhood and it’s proved to be both beneficial and
damaging in all aspects of my life. On one hand, it makes me organized and
reliable; I will actually get everything done in a timely manner and I will not
forget a thing. I have gained a lot of success this way because it allows me to
organize my thoughts into very realistic patterns that in turn, allow me to
complete the tasks at hand. But that’s kind of the reason this habit sucks too –
life becomes a task I can check off my to-do list.
For the longest time, I didn’t realize that this sort of
mindset was actually making me quite miserable. I mean, I knew I was sad and I knew
something was off, but I didn’t know why or how I could stop feeling that way.
It felt like I always had something impending hanging over my head – like a
boulder out of a child’s cartoon with the rope slowly snapping till it’s merely
a thread. No matter what I did, no matter what context I was in, I always felt
this boulder waiting to drop on my head and smash my skull in. And for the life
of me, I couldn’t understand why I felt this way.
It took me many years of feeling like this for me to finally
develop a theory on why this boulder existed for me. There was a common theme
running throughout how I would go about my day, my week, my month, my year.
With every moment I was given, I would turn it into a list. Let me give you an
example, because I realize that this concept is bizarre.
I wake up in the morning, and immediately there is a list in
my head of what I must complete in the next [insert time sequence here] for me
to accomplish what needs to be done for the day. Wash face, brush teeth, put on
clothes (that I most likely already laid out the night before), makeup, hair,
grab backpack (also previously prepared), double check everything, leave.
Then, onto the bigger list. Breakfast for 15 minutes, walk
to class takes 5 minutes, class, meeting at 10:30, lunch for half an hour,
class, break for 1 hour, meeting, meeting, dinner for half an hour, meeting,
back to the dorm. And inside this list is another list to accomplish; I often
keep it written in my phone so that I can’t forget them. It’s the real “to-do”
list. Like, visit abroad office to get USB stick, drop off papers at iPulse,
send email to John about pitch… and so on for about ten other things depending
on the time of year.
This is a vague description of what’s going on in my head. Throughout
the day, this list is constantly being checked off, re-arranged, and modified
to fit what’s going on.
It becomes like a challenge every day to complete the list
and as many “to-do” items as possible. Only then, am I allowed to sleep.
I’m not trying to sound like a sociopath with no feelings, a
work-laden laborer who just can’t catch a break, a person struggling with OCD, or
anything like that. I’m definitely not. I have tons of fun things inserted into
those schedules and lists that keep me from remembering the boulder hanging
over my head and that have gotten me to the happy person I am today. Ask anyone
I know and they will tell you I constantly have a smile on. Again, not in a
sociopathic way.
What I am trying to say is this: I, like millions of other
students and people in general, live life as a check list. I literally live to get the next thing done. I focus
so intently on accomplishing as many things as possible on my self-made
checklist that my subconscious actually creates a non-existent boulder hanging
over my head so that my conscious self feels enough drive to finally check off
that non-reachable “last item.” My motivation? I have an innate feeling that
once that “last item” is crossed off, I will finally be at peace because there
will be no more checklist. Deceiving right? A checklist meant to get you to no
more checklists.
It’s no wonder why I have battled anxiety attacks for the
last few years – I have created an imaginary elusive goal that I can never
attain so that I will never stop striving. It’s a normal thing for our minds to
do since it helps me function and maintain sanity. But the primitive mind most
times lacks the awareness of our spiritual needs for non-survival things like
love, relationships, and ultimately happiness. It’s looking out for our
physical survival, not our emotional well-being. That’s where the rest of our
brain comes in and says “You’re working way too hard, here, take a seat and
enjoy that wonderfully fattening caramel Frappuccino for a sec.”
Well, at least that’s what mine says.
Millions of people feel a similar way, and those same people
are the ones struggling with over-diagnosed illnesses such as anxiety and depression.
I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a licensed therapist but I believe that many of these types of illnesses are from similar feelings of unfinished business or meaningless existence.
We’ve figured out many times throughout human history that all of nature
seeks out peace. Even in science, the universe is constantly using up its
energy so that it can reach an ultimate level of silence and balance. Humans innately
seek the same thing inwardly, and the best of our kind have acknowledged it in
many ways, but perhaps my favorite of all comes from the Dalai Lama:
“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices
his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his
health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the
present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really
lived.”
This quote, along with another similar one I will post at
the bottom of this, quite simply flipped a switch in my head and made me revaluate
how I was cashing in the minutes of my life. I thought back to how I spent
every New Year’s celebration thinking of how remarkably fast the year had gone
by, and how sad I was that I had blinked and it was over. I remember one year I
even made it my New Year’s resolution to “slow down time” and I went about
finding out how best to do such a thing. My conclusion was this:
The more I focused on making every minute of the day a task
to accomplish, the faster life went by me.
It all started with the smallest unit – I would constantly
be working to “just get to 5:00” then from 5:00 it would be “just get to
Wednesday” which became “just get to Friday,” to “just get to December,” where I
inevitably found myself sitting on a bar stool at another New Year’s Eve
celebration with a melting drink in my hand and a deafening thought in my mind,
“This year was even faster than the last.”
At what point do I get to my 99th New Year’s Eve
party and think to myself, “I wish I had been happy all those years.” Which by
that time, it is sadly too late, and the one life I had given to me is wasted
constantly living for the future, only to regret the past and neglect the
present. This, truly, must be the meaning of non-existence.
So, have I made you cry yet? Perhaps question the meaning of
your life, sitting there staring at the computer screen in a dark room where
the only thing to keep you company is your morbid thoughts about death and the
afterlife? I’m so, so sorry for bringing you down buddy. Seriously, if I could
give you that Frappuccino I spoke of earlier, I totally would right now. So
sorry.
Fortunately, all is not lost. Questioning our existence,
making mistakes, reconfiguring our lives and our mentalities over and over
again is what life is about! René Descartes would even assure you that simply thinking this stuff means you’re living – Right.
Now.
Slurp on that Frappuccino my friend, for today we live!
Upshot: checklists are good in moderation. Just like
anything else, they can become a danger to our mentality and literally threaten
our existence. They’re fine for organizing and keeping things in line but be
careful that they don’t morph into your stream of consciousness, like they did
for me. Just as with anything else, even the most insignificant habit can snowball
into becoming a way of life. Living in the present is difficult, especially for
those of us that have been born into a culture where immediacy is worshiped.
The key to slowing down time and elongating your life, is to saturate it with
being present and choosing happiness in the moment. It may only be a moment,
but it can be a moment more of happiness than of stress. It’s okay to dream of
the future and it’s okay to remember the past, but it’s not okay to live in
either one. Give yourself a spiritual break and let go of the lists and schedules! It's okay to designate time to doing something that genuinely makes you happy, as hard as that may be. Practice, practice, practice.
And finally, to leave you with the quote that became my mantra
for practicing happiness; a sort of summary of what the Dalai Lama spoke of in
line with Buddhist teachings:
“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
-
Lao Tzu
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Failure as a Cornerstone
There are many things in my life that I have learned because
for the greater majority of my years I played competitive volleyball. You’re
probably thinking, “What the heck does volleyball have to do with anything?”
And that’s fair.
But if you’ve ever played a sport, coached a sport, or
perhaps even loved a sport, you know what I’m talking about. I learned more
about life in small microcosms on the court than I ever did in a classroom,
from teachers or from friends. In fact, it wouldn’t be untrue to say that
volleyball has shaped the person I am and my understanding of the world around
me in ways I never would have experienced if it weren’t for the people I met
and the trials I went through as an athlete.
Back home in Colorado, I was sort of a self-made millionaire
in the sport. I started from pretty much nothing, no connections, no raw
talent, nothing, and became one of the top players in my region and gained the
last spot on the number three team in the nation by my senior year. That’s a
little brag-ish but I can’t tell the story if I don’t boast a little of my
accomplishment, and hey, I’m damn proud of it.
Anyways, back to the story. When I was thirteen, I had my
first introduction to the volleyball world. I had never played before, but my
mom was always a star volleyball athlete in high school and college. With me as
her first born kid, she didn’t know much about the club world yet, but we had
to start somewhere. The only club she knew of was Front Range – the most elite
club in our region. But… we didn’t really understand the gravity of that.
So I, at the ripe age of thirteen, showed up at the Front Range
tryouts. I’m wearing yellow shorts with bows on the side, a t-shirt, and
sneakers. I walk into the gym with my mom – just in time for several giant
girls my age to walk past me decked out in the full enchilada: spandex, knee
pads, Mizuno volleyball shoes, ankle braces, and Front Range t-shirts. If you
can picture these badass thirteen year old girls walking in the doors in slow
motion with their glimmering gear and Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick”
playing as they strut past little dorky me in my yellow shorts… then you have a
good picture of that moment.
I’m assuming my mom realized how out of place I looked, but
I, in my thirteen year old mind, knew no better. I just wanted to play.
So I go through the tryout. Looking back I can only imagine
what I looked like. I clearly did not
fit in. At all. It was basically the equivalent of you just up and trying to
join the Miami Heat basketball team – showing up for tryouts like, “Oh hey
‘Bron, just thought I’d pop by for a quick game with you and the boys.” That
was me. Yellow bows on my shorts and all.
After the tryout, the head coach came up to me and my mom to
inform me, surprise surprise, I wasn’t going to be placed on a team. My mom and
I walked back to the car. I have this habit of getting my hopes up as if
everything is going to go the way I want it to no matter what. It makes dreams
coming true all the sweeter and dreams getting crushed all the more
devastating. Anyways, this was one of those moments – where you just kind of
think you’ll get lucky, no matter how far-fetched it was.
As my mom and I sat in the car, my mom waited for my
reaction. Just as she began to try and comfort me, I turned to her and said
these words:
“Someday, they’ll want me.”
Mom just looked at me, looked at the road, and drove us
home.
I cried in my room that night. As I buried my face in my
pillow, I remembered with embarrassment about how stupid I felt at the tryout
and how out-of-place I felt being told I didn’t make it. This is the thing – even
as a thirteen-year-old I demonstrated this vital life lesson right from the
start.
Failure has a way of polarizing everything we knew
beforehand and making it seem unreal. Because of this, we have a tendency to
feel the uncomfortable creep of doubt, wrapping its dark hands around our
confidence and giving it an anaconda squeeze.
But this was the lesson I learned from that experience: the biggest mistake we can make in facing
the adversity of failure, is to doubt ourselves.
Think back to the last time you messed up, you were wrong,
or you didn’t succeed at something you thought was a shoe-in. What was the
first thing you felt? I’m sure for the majority of you the first thing you felt
was doubt. It’s only natural – the minute we face failure we immediately look
for why it happened, and we throw ourselves under the bus wondering, “What did
I do wrong?” “Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was” or my personally most
used, “I don’t know why I ever thought I could do that in the first place.”
Well these thoughts are totally wrong. They’re the easy way
out – they’re the habit we’ve lived nearly our entire lives. Throughout our
lives we have gradually conditioned ourselves with the idea that if something
doesn’t work out, it’s because we did something wrong, or we shouldn’t have
done it in the first place. In retrospect, it leaves us constantly questioning
ourselves to a point where taking a risk to be wrong is no longer worth the
doubt failure brings. Eventually, we just stop taking risks all together.
This is a habit that can very swiftly take over your life,
and I encourage you to practice rejecting it. It’s not easy, in fact, it feels
very, very impossible. The next time you fail at something (not to sound like a
jerk here but if you’re human, it will happen again and very often) tell
yourself over and over statements of confidence. These are some that I use; a
lot of them are from my years of volleyball:
I am a champion.
I can, I must, and I
will.
I am a risk-taker.
It’s not about how
many times you fall, it’s about if you get up afterwards.
One more failure is
one step closer to success.
These are kind of cheesy to some; my favorite ones are
quotes that remind me I’m not alone in my failure. One of my favorite speakers
and author of “Eat, Pray, Love” Elizabeth Gilbert said in a TED Talks speech
that failure propels us into a darkness where we are put on the outside of
everything, and feel very alone in the process. The objective of many of my
statements of confidence are to remind me that failure doesn’t have the power
to keep me in the dark, and that if I feel alone being there, I’m far from it.
Back to my story – how does something like volleyball teach
me a life lesson about failure? Well, that night I learned an important lesson
I would keep with me all the way into adulthood. I would go on to work my rear
end off in volleyball, climb my way up the ladder, and of course, have many
many many failures in between. In
fact, I think it’s safe to say I had more failures than I did successes.
However, not a single one of them kept me from my goal, and it was all because
I kept that mentality from my try out at Front Range at thirteen years old. No
failure was going to make me feel unwanted, undeserving, or under par. I was
going to show them.
Over five years later, my senior year of club volleyball, I
received a call from that same head coach asking me to be the tenth player on
the extremely elite Front Range 18-Black team. Coveted by many, Front Range was
one of the top clubs in the nation and dominated the club volleyball scene. It
had been my dream to play on this team, with the players I had looked up to as
my idols for years. I said yes, and that year was the greatest year of
volleyball of my life. The success of playing for Front Range amongst my heroes
that year made every failure I had ever gone through completely worth it.
Over time, I had made myself an asset to the competitive
volleyball world. I had worked my way up, without connections, simply from hard
work and a competitive ethic. And it took countless failures to get there.
They finally wanted me.
Back to the lesson – ultimately, what did playing teach me?
It taught me that doubt is the enemy, not failure. It taught me that taking
long shots is what life is all about; that hard work is what gets you to the
stars even when you were shooting for the moon.
This is something that is not easily learned – I don’t know
if anyone truly masters it in their life. I know for me, I struggle with
failure on a mainstream level and it certainly has me doubting myself quite
often. Even after telling you this fantastic story of a Cinderella-esque
magnitude for my club volleyball career, I have failed as a collegiate athlete
for three years in a row since. I have failed to lead my team to a successful
season, and I have failed myself in becoming the team player I wanted to be.
But – I try as hard as I can not to doubt my essence. Who I
am is far more valuable than what I have not accomplished. It’s not to say that
failure is acceptable, because anyone who has done anything at a high level in
their life knows that it is something we do not expect, ever. However, failure
is not always failure. It’s the next step in a long, strenuous line leading you
to success, as long as you stick with it, have faith and confidence in
yourself, and believe in who you are.
I struggle with this ideology. I can’t tell you how many
losing seasons I’ve walked away from wondering, “What the hell is this all for?
What am I doing wrong? Why do I care so much about this anyways?”
I can’t tell you I’ve found an answer. I’ve often tried to
calm myself thinking, for those who say it’s just a game, that’s all it will
ever be to them. This sport is my life; I put passion, heart, time, effort,
money, everything into it – so I have a hard time hearing “it’s just a game.”
Athletics are just games, if you let them be just that. To
me though, they are a learning experience, teaching me at every moment about
myself, about others, and about the truths of the world I live in. It’s taught
me how to work hard, how to trust others, how to believe in myself, how to
function as a team, how to have discipline, how to make sense of questions you
have about life. If that’s just a game, then I’m all for it. It’s a game I want
to continue getting better at.
In the meantime, do your best to stay humble but confident.
That’s what I’m working on as well – although my bragging about my self-made
volleyball career during this means I need a little more humility than I
thought ;)
Continue to practice conquering failure’s aftermath, because
in the end, “we have nothing to fear but
fear itself.”
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Rethinking Being a "Boss"
Recently, the video campaign against the word “bossy” exploded
across various social networking sites – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all
blowing up with the mantra, “Ban Bossy” as made viral per celebrity-status
women such as Beyoncé, Condoleezza Rice and Jane Lynch. The video, now
grossing over 2 million views on YouTube, promotes the idea of female
empowerment through discouraging the use of the word “bossy” and likewise synonyms
to describe powerful women. Thus, the statement from Beyoncé, “I’m not bossy, I’m
the boss” became idolized by millions as a means of standing up for women’s
roles in powerful positions.
For anyone who doesn’t know what video I’m talking about you
can find it here
When I first watched the video, I distinctly remember
commenting on my friends Facebook post with something along the exact line of, “Love
it!!! :D” And indeed…. I did love it.
Over the course of the next week, the video stirred in my
mind as I watched it several times and of course, shared it with my friends.
However, the more I watched it, the more something felt…. off. Something about
the video was bothering me, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet.
Finally, over the course of dinner with my boyfriend Adam,
who is usually the chosen victim of my unrelenting vent sessions, I realized why
the video had come to leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
I’m not bossy, but I’m not a boss. I’m a leader.
Let’s take the video a step further, shall we? I challenge
you to think outside the catchy, well-made popularized video that has caught
the attention of so many people, including myself, for just five minutes, and
think, really think, about what the word “boss” still entails.
To me, a boss is someone who knows what needs to be done and
isn’t afraid to tell people what that is. They order, direct, and take command
of others when things need to get done and they are the most qualified personnel
to do so. A boss walks into a room, sees things as they are, and knows they can
be better. So, they tell people how things should be.
This sounds great, right? This sounds exactly like what we
want from modern women who aren’t afraid to take charge and tell people how it
is. After all, a man can do the same thing and he is immediately respected as
the boss, whereas, and the video makes this connection seamlessly, women are
given the negative connotation of being bossy.
But what if I don’t want to be the boss? What if I don’t
want to tell people what to do, but would rather, tell people what to do and
then do it with them? This is the difference between being the boss and being
the leader. A boss stands behind others and tells them what to do. A leader
stands with others and works with them on what to do.
The video is absolutely right. Women who take charge are
immediately shot down, avoided and seen as “control-freaks” or “bitches.”
Because of this, girls from the youngest of ages turn down opportunities to
take charge because they would rather follow than be seen as one of the above. In
this way, I’m totally on board with the Ban Bossy campaign and discouraging
words that further this vicious cycle.
However, even the video itself states “words matter” and again, I can’t emphasize this enough, they’re absolutely right. Words DO matter. And the word “boss” still doesn’t encompass what we should encourage from our female population.
Let’s encourage women to be leaders. Let’s promote the idea
of being unafraid to tell people what to do, and then being as equally unafraid
of doing it with them. Let’s further the gender-equality goals of women by
using a negative-connotation-free word while also furthering a work ethic that
extends to all genders. Let’s love the idea of both women and men, acting as
leaders in the world through their actions and words.
Let me do a bit of restating here in case Beyoncé fans are
reading this, and I realize there’s a lot of you. I’m fine with this video and
this campaign. I love that the media is taking a role in trying to change the
stereotype of powerful women by utilizing fabulous celebrities. Of course the
communication major in me also loves the fact that people are taking time to
realize what words mean. It’s been said before by countless language-lovers:
there is no such thing as a synonym. We need to think about what a word means,
not just regurgitate what others feed us with open mouths and empty minds. I
myself already stated that I am completely guilty of doing this with this video
in particular. My immediate reaction of “Love it!!! :D” could not be any more
obvious of that. This happens with a lot of things – popular celebrities say a
word or an idea and we as the consumers eat it up, letting the word go in our
ears and directly out our mouths. Instead, I think those words, as
good-intentioned as they may be, should take a detour from our ears, to our
minds, where they can be processed and evaluated before exiting the mouth. It
would really save a lot of bad ideas from spreading. Cliché alert, but I posted
this Proverbs verse on social media a while back that seems appropriate, “A
fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”
With all that said, I’m
not trying to stop this campaign from gaining attention. It's awesome if you like this video; I still do. I’m just saying it
only went halfway in redefining a good role for women. Being a leader is
humbling, it’s about furthering our purpose as human beings to help others
through loving others. It’s not about being better than others so you now have
the entitlement of telling people what to do, it’s about truly being a better
person than you were yesterday, which makes you capable of achieving greatness
among others.
I challenge everyone and anyone who might be reading this to
think about what we see. Let’s all start thinking of ourselves as leaders, innovators,
doers, and workers. Go further, strive to be a leader, rather than a boss.
Words do matter, make them count.
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