What Lights Me on FIRE!!!

There’s a few things in life that really IRK me! I’m sure you can understand because we’re all human and we all have tendencies to like and dislike things. So here’s my list:

Fire #1: Shushing.

I absolutely HATE being shushed. For the record, I’m a very quiet person. I don’t go out of my way to talk to people, I never call anyone on the phone, and I’m just not one to engage in ‘polite’ surface-level conversation at parties…I just don’t. I’m quiet. So the lesson here is that IF I actually am talking, then you better believe it’s really important to me.

So when someone shushes me I feel very disrespected and degraded. But, I had a realization awhile ago, about why I’m so triggered about shushing. I think it’s because as a girl I just knew I was not allowed to say certain things, ask questions, or challenge anyone in authority. Good little Catholic girls follow the rules, only speak when spoken to, and prepare their minds and bodies for Jesus and their future husband. Right? That’s how I was raised.

Then, when I had my blog blowup in my face over 5 years ago, I was literally silenced. I wasn’t allowed to say what was happening or how I felt about it. I had to just choke it down and try to move on, and that didn’t work at all, as I discussed in episode 1 of my new show. So when you have a chance to listen to episode 1 of UNSUBSCRIBED, you’ll get the complete background on all of that.

Also--About a year after my depression diagnosis, I had a literal piece of my throat cut out of me. Talk about a shushing! I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which is a form of hypothyroidism, and the nodules were inconclusive if they were cancerous or not, so half of my thyroid was taken out. My lifelong silencing had finally caught up and manifested in a disease right in my throat.

This is how serious shushing is. And one of the many things I learned about this disease is that it is 10 times more common in women than in men. 10 times!!! Hmmm, I wonder why that is! Because women have been silenced for millenia. We have not been allowed to speak our minds. And it literally becomes a problem in the throat. 

While we’re on the topic of talking, let’s switch right over to storytelling. This is Fire #2: Storytelling.

I’m not talking about the kind of storytelling like sitting next to your child’s bed at night and making up a fantastic story about kings and queens and such. That’s fiction. I’m talking about the kind of storytelling that we make up in our head about real people. It’s fake-fiction which is a really damaging type of fiction. Let me explain, because these stories make me cringe soooooo badly. These stories are complete fabrications, projections, and non-truths. 

I often hear these stories among friends and family, and a lot of it is on mainstream media. We have become a society of storytellers and that is not a compliment. 

A while ago I was at lunch with a group of ladies and one of them was talking about a college acquaintance they recently discovered on social media and WOW had that person changed! This man didn't even look like the same guy because he was so overweight, clearly unhealthy, and miserable looking. Another gal at the table began to insert a story. "Oh, he probably just sits around every night watching TV and scarfing down Doritos."

Storytelling.

You do not know that for a fact. It is a complete fabrication you just made up in your mind. You projected an unhealthy activity onto a man you do not know. You created a non-truth into the minds of the other women at the table, and that was unnecessary and just not nice at all. This is not truth-telling, like what I was just talking about. This is total baloney. So let's PLEASE stop the storytelling. Stop projecting your stories onto other people. If you do not know it to be a fact, then just tend to your salad please. Stop the storytelling.

Here’s another thing that really tickles my torch, which is Fire #3: Doormat women.

When women allow disrespectful people/behaviors to be and stay in their lives, it sets us all back. I have to slap myself on the wrist over this because I did it too for a long time. I was afraid to rock the boat and upset other people so I put up with behaviors that were disrespectful to me and I allowed a certain person access to my thoughts, and to continue deteriorating my self-worth. Until one day I just finally had enough and I put all of my thoughts to paper. I was savage with my words because I was letting out everything I had held onto for decades.  I put up a firm boundary and then the person crossed it so I had to block them. And I feel so much better not allowing that person to have any real estate in my head anymore. They are gone and I couldn’t be happier about my decision to take back my self-worth and confidence by speaking up and saying what should have been said eons ago.

Fire #4: Degrading words.

I hate anything degrading to women and these are the examples that I have personally encountered, like the word pussy. I think it was Betty White that is credited with saying something about why are pussy’s called weak? Balls are weak. So my thought on this is, if we really want to call something or someone weak, let’s call them a pair of balls! Not a pussy. Another thing that bothers me is stupid blonde jokes. Since when did hair color have anything to do with brainpower? Stop the stupid blonde jokes. They really don’t make any sense at all so just stop it. Finally, the strength issue. Women are just weaker than men, therefore inferior. Hell to the NO, I do not subscribe to that thought because I personally had a watermelon sized baby pulled out of my body via c-section without anesthesia. Yes it hurt, but I did not scream the same way most men do when you simply squeeze a zit on their back. So no, women are not weaker than men.

Fire #5 Double Duty for Moms.

Here’s a good one that will hit home for a lot of you listeners. Moms not getting credit for the hard jobs they have at work and at home. Because I think this is true and I would love to be corrected if I am wrong, but I do believe that most working moms have 2 jobs where their husbands only have 1. Of course I know this isn’t the case for everyone because there are a lot more men today that are helping with household chores and taking care of kids, but by and large, it is mostly the moms that work all day at a job and then come home and do all of the chores and childcare, and dads just work at a job and then come home.

Talking about this reminds me of a 1950’s home ec textbook, which is what shaped our grandmothers, therefore impacting our mothers and the way they thought about keeping the home and children, and it trickles down to us. Are we going to accept this or are we going to unsubscribe from it? This book talks about having a piping hot dinner ready for your husband as soon as he comes home, prepping yourself with fresh makeup and ribbon-tied hair, clearing away any clutter that might bother him, preparing the children with clean clothes and faces and hands, minimizing noise by turning off any appliances that might disturb him, not coming to him with a list of complaints, laying him down in a soft chair with a pillow and taking off his shoes, handing him a drink, and speaking in a soft soothing voice (only after he’s talked to you first), and never talking about anything that can interrupt his need to unwind and relax. What BALONEY!!!!!

So this is a great segue to men that “babysit” their own children. Which is another thing that I cannot stand hearing. You do not babysit your own kids. You care for them. Moms don’t babysit their own kids and neither do dads. So please, dads out there, stop saying you babysit your kids on occasion when the wife has something to do away from home, like an appointment. You are caring for your own kids. Not babysitting.

So what do you think about these examples? Are these things from my life sparking any change in you? What type of social conditioning do you want to question and challenge?

I’m going to propose a little homework assignment for you. You can use actual paper or the notes app on your phone, but I want you to start jotting down anytime you get a cringe in your belly. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the cringe you feel when something is being said or a situation is happening around you and you just don’t really feel aligned with it. You feel icky. You know something is right and you may or may not know why you feel this way, but I want you to jot it down anyway. And then after the situation or conversation is over and you have some free time, sit down with that and just think. Why did that bother me? Why did I feel that cringe? What was said or done that I don’t think was good or right? What does this have to teach me about me? Why do I think this isn’t aligning with my personal values? 

So for example, when I’m talking and someone shushes me I get enraged. I really do. I hate being shushed. So when I sit with that, I come to the understanding that I don’t like people telling me what I can say and not say. I like the freedom and autonomy of knowing that when I speak, which isn’t often, I mean whatever I say. And someone telling me I cannot say what I want to say feels degrading to my freedom and autonomy because as a sovereign human being I know what’s best for me. Sidenote-I didn’t always know but this is where years of work on my self-awareness has benefitted me because now I do know what is best for me. I trust my intuition. I trust my thoughts. I trust my words. I trust myself.

So I’d love to hear from you, once you’ve done this exercise. You can email me directly  or dm me on Instagram or Facebook. Or, if any of you are on Truth Social, I am there also, it’s quite new so I’m not used to including it anywhere but yes I am on Truth Social too. So please let me know how this exercise goes for you and what you’ve learned about yourself because of it.