What does your self talk sound like? You know what I mean; we all do it. We have tiny vignettes playing in our head all the time. Some voices have been present with us for a long time; that voice that first popped up during an event in your life of perceived failure. We all have places in our narrative where these new, powerful voices began to rise up. Anne Lamott calls them “banshees and drunken monkeys”. They are not kind. They are severe. They are cruel. And we give them pause. We give them power. And often, they are so powerful that they bring us to a halt. We stop. We cease the important work that we’re meant to put out into the world. We make space for shame. We make it feel at home as we let it spread out and take residence.
I want to speak specifically to women here. I’ve had to untangle some of the shame messages I’ve received from men in my life. Most of them I love and are well meaning. And I’ve had to do the work of receiving the truth into my soul that their seemingly benign comments were really about them and not about me. Brene Brown says the “antidote to shame is empathy”. When I began to learn how to be kind to myself, as I would a dear friend, I began to heal.
An important man in my life supported my desire to return to school as an adult learner in my 30’s. As part of my art major coursework, I spent a lot of time in the woodshop. I loved every minute of it and have since set up my own woodshop in my home studio. I have had a woodshop now for seven years. It includes three different saws and an air compressor for power tools. It’s the bare minimum, but I have everything I need for the work that I do. I build all my own painting panels, cradles and frames.
I remember at least three separate instances in the last seven years in which the fact that I have a woodshop and what I make in the woodshop came up in casual conversation with different men. I remember having a pretty detailed conversation with each of these men about what equipment, the process, and the products that were involved in my process. A short amount of time went by after these conversations and they seemed to have been forgotten. Each one offered their help to me in building frames or making panels or something that I had already told them that I do myself. Perhaps they forgot about our previous interaction? Or perhaps they didn’t believe me? Or perhaps they felt insecure in more of an equal role with a woman and needed to diminish me in some way to soothe that insecurity? I don’t know. I know how it initially made me feel when I experienced it. I did feel diminished, like an outsider or someone who didn’t belong and had no business touching a saw. I’ve had other similar experiences when I’m under the hood fixing my own car (that’s for another blog!).
Those voices that want to tamp down are often loud. I share these experiences with you because they’re relatively innocuous and quiet voices in my head, but only because I’ve done the work of empathy around them. I belong in the woodshop. I really love being in the woodshop, the smell of fresh cut pine all around me as I make beautiful things. It brings a lot of joy to me. These particular interactions have not shut me down. There are always other stories and experiences that want to shut me down and that is why empathy is needed. Can you name a person, place, event, or thing that is attempting to shut you down? What is the antidote? How can you give rise to the stronger, truer voice that is present in the core of who you are? The banshees and drunken monkeys are always there, but why do they get to drive the bus? Make space and time for the empath that also lives among the voices. How can you create more space for that particularly important voice?