Category — Uncategorized

We went to see The Post and then stopped at a diner to get fries afterward.  While we were driving to the diner, I checked my email on my phone and saw that VOTY (Voices of the Year, in case you haven’t been to the BlogHer conference) winners had been announced.  I’m not going to BlogHer this year, but I usually have a few friends on the VOTY list.  I wanted to send them congratulations in the morning.

But the list description was confusing.  Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton?  Were they having multiple presenters this year?  (For those who haven’t been to BlogHer, a few years ago, they started having a celebrity presenter at VOTY vs having one of us* present.) I clicked on the list and became even more confused.  The honourees were… celebrities for lack of a better word.

They were organizers of the Women’s March like Linda Sarsour.  Or the founder of #metoo, Tarana Burke.  They were Gwyneth and Chelsea and Jodi Kantor from the New York Times.

They weren’t us*.

I keep using that word — *us — and maybe it’s because it gets to the heart of VOTY.  Voices of the Year was the community keynote.  It was a time in the conference when we didn’t have a celebrity or expert tell us how to live or think or feel.  I mean, those main keynotes were great, but this was OUR keynote, the regular blogger’s keynote, and 20 or so women would get up and read a piece that had been chosen by the judges for inclusion.

It was democratic, and I’ve been on both ends of the process.  I had a piece chosen for the second VOTY.  What you can’t see from the video is that I wore the merry widow-like contraption on the stage, and I hiked up the skirt on the other side of the podium when I got to that point in the story.  I was TERRIFIED, but I knew that every single woman in that room would get it.  So I did it.  I was sharing a funny story, but it was also a very emotional story for me because… it was about not feeling like a woman.  Not being able to do this thing that women do.  And trying to take back one tiny piece of control in that situation.  Hearing the reaction from the audience as I read my story made me feel like I was being cushioned by thousands of other women’s hands.  Held up.

And I was a judge for two other VOTYs.  It was an honour that you sometimes got when you were chosen for VOTY — you turned around and got to invite other people into the community keynote.  I read hundreds of posts and marked my favourites, and then got to attend and listen to them aloud.

The community keynote was always the highlight of BlogHer, a true reflection of my daily work at the BlogHer site.  For nine years, I read every post that came into my section and chose the ones to push to the front page.  Most of the time I didn’t know the woman.  They were chosen because they wrote something great and we wanted more people to read it.  But I got to know them because once they were chosen once, they kept coming back and writing other great things.  I met so many people through BlogHer.

BlogHer was — for women — the site where regular people (us) wrote their reaction to the daily news or life events.  It was honest and raw and confessional and conversational.  And then the Internet flooded with similar sites and everything changed.  But I got to be there for nine years, part of this incredible community of women.

There’s this line in The Post where the men are discussing Katharine Graham, and one of them points out that if a person is told they’re incompetent and their voice doesn’t matter enough times, they’ll believe it and it will inform their actions.  Or something like that.  And when we were watching that part of the movie, I was thinking about how Katharine Graham’s story is really every woman’s story.  Girls receive an outsider message over and over again, and it sometimes becomes the way we view our work and our voice and our words.

But BlogHer was a hugely successful space that took back that narrative and said EVERY WOMAN’S WORDS MATTER.  Not just the ones that bubble up to the top and break the surface, becoming newsworthy.  That every single woman, famous or not, has something to say.  And we should all listen.

So if I cried reading the VOTY news, it was because I was thinking about what was lost.  Those women like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton will continue to have their voices heard, even if they’re not in VOTY.  They’ve broken the surface and become newsworthy.  If SheKnows, who now owns BlogHer, had called it something else, it wouldn’t have bothered me.  But VOTY was the community keynote, a time to celebrate voices that weren’t heard otherwise.

The same night, I read the Washington Post article about how women’s blogs have become a glossy magazine of perfection and sponsored content.  And, yes, there is some truth in that statement when you think about the early days of the Internet when we wrote just because we wanted to write without any understanding of what blogging could be.  But that article missed the fact that the old style of blogging still exists.  Every day I read blogs that are confessional and conversational, with nary a product placement in site.

At the same time, I don’t blame those women who do write sponsored content.  I celebrate them.  Blogging has been a way to make a living, and I am glad they have found a way to be financially compensated for their work.  Some people write because they want to write.  And some people write because they get paid to write.  And both are valid paths to putting words into the universe.  And sometimes they are one and the same; confessional, conversational, and compensated.

I miss the old community.  I also know that a large chunk of the old community is still alive and well because I see them in my blog feed every day.  And I see new people join us, all the time.  I read stories every day that are confessional and conversational, the same as the early days of blogging.

Thank you for keeping it real.  Thank you for continuing to write.  Getting your voice out there is important.  I promise.

Not to get self-helpy — except that I am going to get self-helpy — but so many of the thoughts in this article resonated with me.  I didn’t agree with all of the advice, but there was enough here to highlight that I started pulling out my favourite quotes.  They all seemed like good guides for 2018; moreover because the article was this random piece that popped into my feed — not something I’d normally read — as if the Internet was trying to send me a message.

• “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”  Um, yes, a thousand times, yes.  What else could drive action beyond desire?  Certainly not hope that feels like someone giving you a hug when you’re down, telling you to hang in there because things might go your way.  Desire makes you lace up the proverbial sneakers, right?
• “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”  The idea of directing your sleeping brain is really really really enticing.
• “Once you get process-oriented, as opposed to results-oriented, you realize you too can achieve amazing results. The process, or your behavior, is completely within your control.”  The results, of course, are not.  But the process is, and that’s important to remember.
• “Quantity is the most likely path to quality. The more you produce, the more ideas you will have — some of which will be innovative and original. And you never know which ones will click. You just keep creating.”  Enough said.

So, figuring out your desire, telling your brain to imagine achieving that desire, focusing on the process instead of the result, and trying a lot with the understanding that each try is a chance to get to that desire.  Hello, 2018.  I really am going to be become a mermaid this year.  Success will be miiiiiiiiiiine…

In all seriousness, what is the best advice you’ve gotten in the last year?

We were talking about toys that could give you nightmares, and suddenly an image of a Koosa popped into my brain.  I’m not talking about the stuffed zucchini dish.  I’m talking about the Cabbage Patch Kid/animal hybrids that haunted the 80s.

Up until this week, I had completely forgotten about the existence of Koosas.  I apologize if YOU also had cleared your mind of Koosas and I’m now stuffing them back in your brain by writing about them.

Anyway, we had one that was like… half wolf, half boy… It’s like South Park’s Man Bear Pig, only with less blood and more loops of yarn hair.

I don’t remember how Koosas fit into the larger Cabbage Patch Kid universe. I kept it on the shelf across from my bed, but I needed to tuck it behind other toys so its unblinking eyes didn’t stare at me while I tried to fall asleep.

What was your scariest toy from childhood?

I finally watched an episode of The Wall.  It’s a game show and it involves people answering questions and a giant game of plinko.  Some people are on-screen and others are off-stage, and no one can communicate with one another.  It’s like chance on overdrive.  You need a lot of things to line up — most outside of your control — in order to win.

I watched the show because I read about it on FiveThirtyEight:

As the orbs skitter and kerplunk their way down the wall, the contestants scream, beg and plead with the wall to deliver the orb into the desired slot. They beseech; they supplicate; they importune. Actually, the only really fitting verb for what they do is “pray.” They pray to the wall.

…

And it’s precisely this deeply believed illusion — that you can fight fate, that you can control the randomness, that prayer works if you just pray hard enough — that makes the show so fascinating. Don’t get me wrong: When the show’s on, I, the supposedly cold, statistically minded viewer, deeply believe that I can control the randomness, too.

The one episode we saw didn’t feel like entertainment.  It wasn’t like Jeopardy where it comes down to your base of knowledge or Ellen’s Game of Games where everyone is having a great time having whipped cream blown into their face.  This was painful to observe.  I wanted the couple to win.  At the very least, I didn’t want them to walk away disappointed.

*******

Adding to the tension is that you can’t be contestant twice.  I mean, maybe you can, but let’s assume that contestants get one chance to play the game and see the outcome.  There is no time to learn, no time to gather information, no time to try something new.  It’s just chance.

And I don’t know which is worse: to do the same thing over and over again, trying new things as we do in family building, or getting one shot and then walking away knowing that the outcome was out of your hands.

I have prayed to pee sticks.  I have sat with my hands clasped in prayer, watching the window.   I have asked it to show me what I want to see as if it has the power to decide whether or not I’m pregnant.

The oversized and minuscule tangible reminders of chance.

I read the best piece of advice.  It was about controlling your emotions when you’re getting annoyed by the small things in life. ” Annoyances are small, not serious problems, and it would make all of us and the people around us happier if we could learn to stop being bothered by them.”  Amen.

And the advice was spot on and all do-able, especially the idea of telling yourself you’re being watched and acting accordingly.  Or not telling yourself the story of your annoyance while you’re annoyed because constructing the story you’re going to tell others actually gets you more irritated.  (Um… so I shouldn’t write blog posts in my head when I discover Wallaby maple yogurt has been discontinued.)  And I like the idea of giving my imaginary self what I want even if my actual self can’t have it.

The problem, of course, is dividing the annoyances from the more-than-just-annoyances.  I’m sure there is a scientific scale that ranks irritants from neutral to boiling rage, so there has to be a term for something that is more than being annoyed that you have to wait in line but less than having a screaming match with someone or watching the news.  (What?  Am I the only person who feels like screaming every time she looks at the news?)

All of those listed steps helped to curb my frustration when it was at a low, manageable level.  But rage sort of feels like that episode of I Love Lucy when they’re working in the chocolate factory.  When the chocolates (or annoyances) first start moving down the conveyor belt, it’s simple to deal with them quickly and effectively.  It’s when the chocolates (or annoyances) start moving at a brisk clip that pretending someone is watching or giving my imaginary self what I want is too flimsy to hold up to the irritant.

Still.  Better than being annoyed at the truly little things?  Now I just need help figuring out the annoyances that are truly annoyances and the things that are more than annoyances.  And the annoyances that stem from strangers vs. people I know; the impersonal from the personal, which adds an additional layer to an annoyance.

Read the advice in the articles and tell me what you think.