Tag: carinn jade

Categories
What is a complicated woman?

Is The Untamed Woman Tolerable?

We recently recorded our episode on Glennon Doyle’s bestselling memoir, Untamed. She calls all women to shed the conditioning that teaches us to please others, to make ourselves smaller, to suppress our desires, and instead, she wants us to get untamed. 

The first time I read the book, my reaction was, “this is how I live my life and no one likes me.” Ok, that might be a) slight exaggeration and/or b) my own fault, unrelated to my untamed nature. 

On my second reading I found the undeniable value in Glennon’s work. Asking women to be untamed, showing them how to untame themselves with the four keys and highlighting reactions that come from our conditioning is important. The goal of becoming untamed is aspirational.

And then I thought about the work we do here at Pop Fiction Women. At the end of every episode we encourage women to Stay Complicated! Maybe being complicated is a way to bridge the gap from here to untamed?

Writer and director Leslye Headland has expressed her theory of why sometimes studio executives or audiences don’t “get” some of her characters, which I’m adapting to explain the reason this podcast is so important: we as a society lack the training to tolerate complicated women. 

We have trouble tolerating them because we don’t understand them. We don’t know them intimately. We hold them at arms’ length, out of fear that their complicated nature is contagious or maybe because we think holding them away will keep us safe, that it won’t ignite the feelings we know we have bubbling right beneath the surface. But that’s the work we do here. 

We discuss different types of women, with different damage, different struggles, different backgrounds, different attitudes, and different stages of their growth. We dig into them without fear. We bring our judgments because we are human, but we also bring our curiosity and intelligence and empathy and Kate and I each bring a different point of view. 

We do this in service of one singular goal: that all women feel free. Free from judgment, preconceived notions, shoulds and supposed tos. Free from the constraints of our culture, our families, men, other women, even — or maybe especially, free from our own beliefs that keep us caged and small.

This podcast’s primary focus on fiction allows people — men and women alike — to take a step back and say, look at these characters that we’re talking about, let’s analyze them, let’s look at what they’re doing and why? What is working for them? What isn’t? We unpack all of the preconceived notions that we bring to the table, and we dig into the women creators behind the scenes because that’s what they’re doing too. Embracing their complications. This analysis puts a step between you, the listener and the doer.

You don’t have to be Fleabag. In fact Phoebe Waller-Bridge said she wrote Fleabag because she didn’t want to become Fleabag. She created her and then we talk about her. Through this exercise, maybe other people can understand these complicated women a little bit better. And then by understanding them, we aren’t as afraid. We aren’t as judgmental. We’re willing to just let people live and do whatever they need to do, and we can also be free for ourselves. We are bridging the gap from caged to complicated to untamed. 

This is a big job, but we can handle it.

Stay complicated with us.

Categories
What is a complicated woman?

The Best Way To Have An Uncomplicated Life? Be A Complicated Person.

The Best Way To Have An Uncomplicated Life? Be A Complicated Person. No, that’s not backwards. You read it right.

When your podcast centers around “complicated women” you think a lot about complicated. I started noticing that complicated people often have uncomplicated lives, contrary to first impressions. And that uncomplicated people have complicated lives. Is there a correlation? 

Kate and I discussed productivity vs. busy-ness on our Untamed episode where I likened myself to a large breed dog. My brain needs a lot of stimulation, the equivalent of a forty-mile walk for Rover, every single day. If I don’t get that mental energy out before bed, I can’t fall asleep. I end up doing the human brain equivalent of gnawing on the floorboards and eating your shoes. In the dark, I unfairly pick apart things in my life that are imperfectly wonderful (nothing is perfect, after all) out of boredom. This is not a good situation. But it happened all the time when I was trying to force myself into the life I had planned. 

I blew up that life in phases, and slowly rebuilt the one I really wanted but was too afraid to go after, or not trusting enough to follow. In that process, I learned that it’s better for me to spend my days embracing my own complications.

That means I sit in my closet with my ragtag “altar” and say my own made-up “prayer” or “mantra” — and I also scream and curse when something doesn’t go as expected. I’m a zen hot-head. That means I get equally lost in the bliss of my financial budget and my novel. I’m left-brained and right-brained.

I’m loud and shy. I like to be the center of attention and I’m an introvert. And as my favorite mug proclaims, “I am small and sensitive, but also fight me” under a drawing of a cute cat holding a switchblade. That one’s pretty self-explanatory. The point is, I never force myself to be one thing. I am complicated. 

Some people are uncomplicated and live uncomplicated lives. We love those people! Don’t ever change! But more people ARE complicated, and have been taught to repress or reconcile the traits that make them complicated. In turn, that inner dimension comes out sideways: in their outer lives. They cannot sit comfortably with their own depths and dualities, their own complications, so they make their lives complicated. They meddle in other people’s drama. They engage in self-destructive behavior just to have a mess to clean up. Sometimes this dysfunction even parades as “responsibility.” The family daily planners of these people look like color-coded chaos to me now. They fill their every free moment with busy-ness or achievement. I once was that way too.

Magically, when I allowed myself to become complicated, when I embraced all my contradictions, when I stopped looking outside myself for someone to tell me which of my behaviors were harming me and which were good for me, my life became proportionately uncomplicated. I knew who I loved and what I loved to do, what I was passionate about and what challenges were worth the struggle.

Kate and I were preparing to record a new outro for our podcast episodes. At the end of our old one, Kate says, “keep it complicated.” Then we realized all our show notes say “stay complicated.” At first I wasn’t sure which one should stand as our tagline. I liked the alliteration of keep it complicated, but the truth is, I don’t want anyone to keep it complicated. Don’t complicate your life with so much doing that you forget how to be you. All of you, without hiding, ignoring, or fixing any of it. You aren’t broken, you are human. So stay complicated!!

Categories
Little Fires Everywhere Uncategorized

Am I The Bird Or Am I The Cage?

We build these cages around ourselves because we have to do it. We need shelter. We need basic structure and security. Cages are necessary and good. But this is the gut-punch of life: those cages can become overgrown. Overgrown with resentment, with unexpressed disappointments, with repressed dreams, with opportunities never even entertained. Material manifestations of emotional waste. 

Life’s choices are often binary. We take the job or we don’t. We leave the marriage or we don’t. We have kids or we don’t. It’s not the result that can alter our lives. Instead the real power comes in making those choices honestly and openly. I’m afraid this is the part people miss. The value of the process. 

It doesn’t really matter if you stay or go, if you do or don’t. It matters whether you are willing to get really still to think about it. It matters whether you are willing to be painfully honest about the good and the bad sides of both options. It matters that you SAY IT ALL. Out loud. To another human being. Instead we believe we weigh it in our mind. We think we already know.  

My mother would be so disappointed

I don’t have a right to walk away

My sister needs me to be this way

My kids will be ruined

My family will suffer with less

My life is good

So many people would want the things I have

This is what I wanted (ok, but what do you want now?)

It’s overwhelming, I know. We can start by exploring the sometimes subtle differences between suffocation and dissatisfaction. One can be cured with a massive gulp of fresh air and gratitude. The other is holding you back. It is causing long-term damage. If you are dissatisfied, smaller changes can make a big difference. If you are suffocating, out is the only way. There is no security in a house that’s burning down.

Don’t stay out of fear of what’s outside.

Don’t run away either. 

Just because you can see the door doesn’t mean you should bolt without looking back.

I’ve been in the place where it feels horrible. Where you all of a sudden know that your life is going to be completely different when you walk out that door. But I left, and I survived and I made myself a promise. I would never get there again. So everything that makes me comfortable? I periodically dismantle it. I take my life apart to inspect it for cracks and leaks. I make sure it’s all still working. And as I reassemble it, I look at each piece and say do I still need this?

I choose my life. I choose my husband all the time. I choose my job all the time. I choose my kids all the time — I look at them and say what can I do to help them become this or that, and I look at myself and say how can I accept them more exactly as they are?

This work is not for the faint of heart. To say it can be really really hard is an understatement. But when I broke free of the expectations that set me on auto-pilot, I vowed to build a life, and to break it down. 

This is my reward for all those hard times: I will never, ever, ever be in a cage.

And freedom is more beautiful and exhilarating and gratifying than all of that pain. 

I know not everybody gets a new life. It takes courage to start over again. It takes time to make it feel worth it. Not everyone even finds the door. But if you see it, and you can promise you will build it up, break it down, build it up, then you deserve to try.

But am I the cage or am I the bird?

In the cage it feels like everything is broken and everything needs to be fixed. Even things that truly aren’t broken, but maybe are simply mid-assembly. In the cage, doing this work sounds exhausting and horrible. Once you are free you realize that so many times NOTHING needs to be fixed. You only need to take it all apart to see that you are not the cage, even though you may have come to identify with it so much that you can’t see the bars. You are not the cage. You are the bird.

“You can fly away too, that’s on you.”

*That last line in quotations is from the Ingrid Michaelson song, Build It Up, which was written for the finale of Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu. The themes in this essay were inspired by that episode, and Kate and I explore them on our recap episode, but you don’t have to have watched or listened to relate to these ideas.