complicated – Pop Fiction Women

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.

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!!