Thoughts I've been thinking in my thirties
Life has a theme lately.
Well, life has a theme all the time. It's just that the theme changes quite often.
The dominant theme of my life for the past year or so, it seems, has been my sense of myself as a woman and my relationship with the world based on my gender. And everything else that is encompassed in that theme, which is a lot of crap.
I have often felt like a teenager again over the past couple of years. I've lost so much of my surety, so much of my confidence. My brain feels like a squirrel caught in a wire trap, running frantically and hitting barriers far too soon.
But.
But. That lack of surety, that lack of absolute confidence in myself, has forced me to step back from what I thought I knew. It's forced me to reevaluate everything about myself, my relationships with others, and how I view the world. I feel like I'm going through this growth spurt, very similar to what I went through when I was in my teens. The world is a tumultuous place, shifting and cracking and throwing me off my feet, and I kind of love it.
An interesting effect of this has been a resurgence of fear. My lack of surety has led to this fear that I've been suppressing for a very long time worming its way to the surface. The first time I can remember feeling it again was this summer, after tripping on mushrooms and falling down a giant, gaping hole that I'd had no idea existed. After that, I started getting random little panic attacks. It's a very familiar kind of fear. I don't know how, exactly, to explain it. But it has something to do with looking down under your surface and seeing the foundation you thought was holding you up rotting. I felt this way often when I was young, because I was living a lie. I was in a religion I didn't believe in, I was caught up in the tight ropes of a loving family who needed me to be a certain person, and I was completely fucking miserable. But only under the surface. On top, I was light and peace and joy.
Now my foundations I tried to build are cracking again. It's not a bad thing. I'm a fan of moving. Change is terrifying, to the point that I allow myself to get to the point of panic attacks before I implement it. But once I'm committed, everything is ok. I need to move on to the next stage. I can actively direct, to a certain extent, actively look for what's going to be healthy for me. But I also have to let go and let it happen. Cathartic release.
Anyways.
These changes. I'm grateful for them. I genuinely look forward to seeing who I'm becoming. Even the fear, as awful as it can be, is cathartic. It forces me to look instead of hide, because I can't hide when I'm afraid. It forces me to see inside myself, because I don't want to feel this way anymore. I want to change, and without the fear driving me, I don't know that I would.
And causes that used to just be theoretical fluff to me have suddenly become very real, very pertinent to my life. They're manifesting in odd little ways.
I'm a part of a steering committee at work. There's a part of me that still hangs its head and shakes it in shame at that thought. A fucking steering committee. It's called Women and Supporters. It's focused on developing women in leadership, and I'm running focus groups in Portland and Seattle to see what kind of initiatives people are looking for.
In some ways, it really is a bunch of hooey. This company doesn't give a shit about the fact that it has a dismal number of women in executive leadership. It cares that somebody pointed it out to them, and it created this group to make it seem like it was doing something about it. It's shmarmy political correctness at it's best.
And yet. I'm kind of loving it. I'm using it to do what I want to do. I'm using it to reach out to the people I work with and talk to them about things I think are important. Like standing up for yourself, and not feeling like you have to backstab and gossip in order to be competitive. And to help me figure out the relationships between men and women. My mind is going a million miles a minute when I'm in these meetings, watching people interact, listening to what they have to say. And it rarely has anything to do with "What can the company do to make you, as a woman, comfortable in your job (placate and suffocate, we mean)."
The company sent me up to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to run a series of focus groups up there, and it was eye opening. It certainly highlighted how spoiled we are in Portland. They were so much more uptight and corporate up there. And yet... once we sat down and got to talking, I got people to really, truly open up. The atmosphere of camraderie and trust that I wanted so badly created itself through the willingness of these women to be vulnerable. And very honest. Regardless of what was said, positive or negative, people left the meetings talking to each other. And still thinking about them weeks later. I just got an email from one of the women, recommending a book and talking about how it affected her.
I met yesterday with the local Seattle/Portland bigwig about how we were going to move forward with implementing what people asked for in the focus groups. And in some ways it was incredibly depressing. Fucking corporate hack. Talking about how to alleviate peoples stress, without talking about the reason for the stress having to do with being driven into the ground. But in some ways it was very satisfying. He came over to my cube and asked if he could take me to lunch. And a part of me was very aware that everyone could hear him, and that it gave me a certain cache. Ah, cache. I understand its power. I understand that, in order to accomplish ANYTHING positive, you have to have a level of power and autonomy. It's not being management, it's being untouchable because you say you're untouchable. It's manipulating peoples perceptions of everything you do, and building a base that allows you much more freedom than anybody ever assumes they'll have. I'm very good at it.
And that's kind of terrifying. It's terrifying to think that I'm taking this mediocre bullshit job and turning it into a petty power high. There are parts of it that I love, but when it comes down to it, this job is just ridiculously pointless. I don't care that I'm the only woman in a team of 30 people. I don't care that I'm on a team with 3 well known, important men. These men have made work their lives. I do not want to be like these men. I do not care to have my sense of importance falsely inflated by allowing myself to engage in meaningless politics and drinking the corporate kool-aid.
People see what I'm doing with the focus groups, and assume I'm working my way up the ladder. I've had many of my coworkers come over and comment on it, congratulate me on what they see as my movement forward. It makes me squirm, and it makes me feel good. Of course it does. I understand the allure. It's a social system like any other, and it's natural to find our place inside of it. But why am I wasting my time finding myself inside a structure that I don't believe in?
Yes, I'm learning valuable lessons about my strengths and weaknesses. But can't I learn these lessons doing something I value?
It's a double edged sword. The more money I make at this job, the more money I spend on forgetting about this job. I've barely managed to save anything, and most it has been spent of business trips. Living paycheck to paycheck is a trap. It allows you to live luxuriosly in the moment, and keeps you stuck in that well padded moment. I love living well, buying expensive food and alcohol, treating my friends, doing whatever I want.
But I love being happy and healthy more. I want to just quit, honestly, but I do NOT deal well with lack of surety when it comes to money. Makes me sick, quite literally. So, I want to move on to another stable way of sustaining myself. But then I get resentful of my own need for a parachute and think of it as a weakness...
Fuck you, brain. Either figure your shit out, or let me do what I know will make me happy.
Well, life has a theme all the time. It's just that the theme changes quite often.
The dominant theme of my life for the past year or so, it seems, has been my sense of myself as a woman and my relationship with the world based on my gender. And everything else that is encompassed in that theme, which is a lot of crap.
I have often felt like a teenager again over the past couple of years. I've lost so much of my surety, so much of my confidence. My brain feels like a squirrel caught in a wire trap, running frantically and hitting barriers far too soon.
But.
But. That lack of surety, that lack of absolute confidence in myself, has forced me to step back from what I thought I knew. It's forced me to reevaluate everything about myself, my relationships with others, and how I view the world. I feel like I'm going through this growth spurt, very similar to what I went through when I was in my teens. The world is a tumultuous place, shifting and cracking and throwing me off my feet, and I kind of love it.
An interesting effect of this has been a resurgence of fear. My lack of surety has led to this fear that I've been suppressing for a very long time worming its way to the surface. The first time I can remember feeling it again was this summer, after tripping on mushrooms and falling down a giant, gaping hole that I'd had no idea existed. After that, I started getting random little panic attacks. It's a very familiar kind of fear. I don't know how, exactly, to explain it. But it has something to do with looking down under your surface and seeing the foundation you thought was holding you up rotting. I felt this way often when I was young, because I was living a lie. I was in a religion I didn't believe in, I was caught up in the tight ropes of a loving family who needed me to be a certain person, and I was completely fucking miserable. But only under the surface. On top, I was light and peace and joy.
Now my foundations I tried to build are cracking again. It's not a bad thing. I'm a fan of moving. Change is terrifying, to the point that I allow myself to get to the point of panic attacks before I implement it. But once I'm committed, everything is ok. I need to move on to the next stage. I can actively direct, to a certain extent, actively look for what's going to be healthy for me. But I also have to let go and let it happen. Cathartic release.
Anyways.
These changes. I'm grateful for them. I genuinely look forward to seeing who I'm becoming. Even the fear, as awful as it can be, is cathartic. It forces me to look instead of hide, because I can't hide when I'm afraid. It forces me to see inside myself, because I don't want to feel this way anymore. I want to change, and without the fear driving me, I don't know that I would.
And causes that used to just be theoretical fluff to me have suddenly become very real, very pertinent to my life. They're manifesting in odd little ways.
I'm a part of a steering committee at work. There's a part of me that still hangs its head and shakes it in shame at that thought. A fucking steering committee. It's called Women and Supporters. It's focused on developing women in leadership, and I'm running focus groups in Portland and Seattle to see what kind of initiatives people are looking for.
In some ways, it really is a bunch of hooey. This company doesn't give a shit about the fact that it has a dismal number of women in executive leadership. It cares that somebody pointed it out to them, and it created this group to make it seem like it was doing something about it. It's shmarmy political correctness at it's best.
And yet. I'm kind of loving it. I'm using it to do what I want to do. I'm using it to reach out to the people I work with and talk to them about things I think are important. Like standing up for yourself, and not feeling like you have to backstab and gossip in order to be competitive. And to help me figure out the relationships between men and women. My mind is going a million miles a minute when I'm in these meetings, watching people interact, listening to what they have to say. And it rarely has anything to do with "What can the company do to make you, as a woman, comfortable in your job (placate and suffocate, we mean)."
The company sent me up to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to run a series of focus groups up there, and it was eye opening. It certainly highlighted how spoiled we are in Portland. They were so much more uptight and corporate up there. And yet... once we sat down and got to talking, I got people to really, truly open up. The atmosphere of camraderie and trust that I wanted so badly created itself through the willingness of these women to be vulnerable. And very honest. Regardless of what was said, positive or negative, people left the meetings talking to each other. And still thinking about them weeks later. I just got an email from one of the women, recommending a book and talking about how it affected her.
I met yesterday with the local Seattle/Portland bigwig about how we were going to move forward with implementing what people asked for in the focus groups. And in some ways it was incredibly depressing. Fucking corporate hack. Talking about how to alleviate peoples stress, without talking about the reason for the stress having to do with being driven into the ground. But in some ways it was very satisfying. He came over to my cube and asked if he could take me to lunch. And a part of me was very aware that everyone could hear him, and that it gave me a certain cache. Ah, cache. I understand its power. I understand that, in order to accomplish ANYTHING positive, you have to have a level of power and autonomy. It's not being management, it's being untouchable because you say you're untouchable. It's manipulating peoples perceptions of everything you do, and building a base that allows you much more freedom than anybody ever assumes they'll have. I'm very good at it.
And that's kind of terrifying. It's terrifying to think that I'm taking this mediocre bullshit job and turning it into a petty power high. There are parts of it that I love, but when it comes down to it, this job is just ridiculously pointless. I don't care that I'm the only woman in a team of 30 people. I don't care that I'm on a team with 3 well known, important men. These men have made work their lives. I do not want to be like these men. I do not care to have my sense of importance falsely inflated by allowing myself to engage in meaningless politics and drinking the corporate kool-aid.
People see what I'm doing with the focus groups, and assume I'm working my way up the ladder. I've had many of my coworkers come over and comment on it, congratulate me on what they see as my movement forward. It makes me squirm, and it makes me feel good. Of course it does. I understand the allure. It's a social system like any other, and it's natural to find our place inside of it. But why am I wasting my time finding myself inside a structure that I don't believe in?
Yes, I'm learning valuable lessons about my strengths and weaknesses. But can't I learn these lessons doing something I value?
It's a double edged sword. The more money I make at this job, the more money I spend on forgetting about this job. I've barely managed to save anything, and most it has been spent of business trips. Living paycheck to paycheck is a trap. It allows you to live luxuriosly in the moment, and keeps you stuck in that well padded moment. I love living well, buying expensive food and alcohol, treating my friends, doing whatever I want.
But I love being happy and healthy more. I want to just quit, honestly, but I do NOT deal well with lack of surety when it comes to money. Makes me sick, quite literally. So, I want to move on to another stable way of sustaining myself. But then I get resentful of my own need for a parachute and think of it as a weakness...
Fuck you, brain. Either figure your shit out, or let me do what I know will make me happy.
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