PART II
We Are All Wiggly
Why we need to tell our imperfect stories
Sometimes we do not allow ourselves to glow. Instead of looking outwards, we stare glumly, or obsessively, at ourselves. We spit at our own reflections in the mirror. We chew on regrets like baseballers on tobacco. We too often tell stories of our own lives that are relentlessly negative — ones of failure, mishap, wasted time and fruitless work. We talk of our losses, our errors, our flaws and the unbridgeable gap between some kind of perfection and ourselves. As E.M. Forster wrote, ‘Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere.’ Actual life is often incoherent and messy. Actual faces have lumps and bumps and wrinkles. Quite often, actual life really sucks. But then, somehow, it can get better.
Sometimes, when we tell our stories, or create what Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams calls a ‘narrative identity’ about ourselves, we recount tales of redemption, of motion, of lessons learned, successes earned. At other times we tell what McAdams calls a ‘contamination story’, in which our lives inevitably arc from good to bad. An example might be that when we were in primary school we were bullied mercilessly, and that has permanently scarred us. A redemptive story, on the other hand, might be that we were bullied but learnt to fight, and made one true friend whose loyalty was unsurpassed. Therapists often look at the crafting of these kinds of stories to reframe a client’s thinking and help them understand that events have meaning and they themselves are not without control or choice. Psychologists have also long found signs that the negative, or pessimistic recounting of our own stories, especially in young adulthood, can increase the risk factor of illness when we are older.
So, what are the stories we tell of our own lives?
In 2013, researchers Dan McAdams and Brady Jones ploughed through a stack of adult biographies in search of some clues to a fascinating question: are there any early signs of generativity, or ‘an adult’s commitment to caring for and contributing to the well-being of future generations’? Over a nine-year period they had gathered 158 life stories from African Americans and European Americans. The authors found that generative people frequently recounted stories about people who had supported them, and viewed their lives as part of ‘a network of individuals and institutions that have, over time, provided them with help, opportunities, support and other benefits’. (Narcissistic people were less likely to have this view, and more likely to take credit for their own success.) These findings are important because they show that the effects of kindness can flow on for decades, so that generative acts inspire others to act the same way, and ‘create a virtuous cycle of care, generation after generation’. (Financial stability, it should be noted, often also needs to be present for this to occur.)
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote: ‘We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs, and lives, a “narrative”, and that this narrative is us, our identities. If we wish to know about a man, we ask “What is his story, his real, inmost story?” — for each of us is a biography, a story.’
Why does this matter? Because your story matters. Because too frequently we tell tales of failure and we forget to honour the fact that we tried, the fact that we had purpose, that we cared. I want to talk about the importance of telling your story, even if it is not one that ends in confetti, fanfare and paparazzi packs. Even if what you have achieved seems to have vanished, seems intangible or is not recognised, you can recognise it yourself. Part of validating your own story is finding your voice and claiming your authority, especially for the women and introverts among us. And a crucial part of all of this is the need to accept your imperfections, to shrug off lame dictates about how to dress and the need to please, and to stop beating yourself up when you don’t feel #blessed or #well and you are really feeling more like #FML or #everythingiscrap.
We all instinctively knew how destructive social media could be, even before the research confirmed it. There is a reason Madonna recently said Instagram was designed ‘to make you feel bad’. ‘People are really a slave to winning people’s approvals’, she told The Sun. A recent British survey found that among common social media platforms Instagram had the worst effect on young people’s mental health, with one respondent expressing a common lament: ‘Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren’t good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look “perfect”.’ Now women are asking surgeons for ‘Instagram faces’ that look like they have been filtered. We see so many startled eyes, smooth foreheads and puffy lips that we have almost forgotten what beauty is — and this matters, because too many of us feel like failures the moment we look in the mirror, before our days have even begun. We need to change our lenses, be gentle with ourselves and harsh with those forces that try to teach us to hate ourselves.
It’s never going to be simple, but the best way to bulldoze over the expectation of approval is to master your own story. Sacks wrote: ‘To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.’ A woman, too. As the inordinately wise Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior unless you consent to them doing so. She was right — and we need to refuse to give that consent.
Chapter 6
The Activist’s Attic
IN A CORNER OF a lower floor in the Museum of London stand several glass cases that hold relics of the suffragette movement. In the rows of inert objects you can glimpse the force of the protestors’ actions, their anger and their daring: large, broad brown leather belts with thick chains that stretched through dresses to railings, and axes that slashed through paintings and smashed windows. It is these signs of guerilla combat that are the most striking. The axes are slender, almost delicate. And next to them are memorial brooches featuring axes on backgrounds of flowered material; you can imagine them being pinned to bosoms at meetings — ‘Nice work at the national gallery, love.’ Slash, destroy, pin on a pretty brooch.
Yet what is also significant is what is not displayed in these boxes, not pinned and preserved as emblems of combat: the ephemera of the grinding middle years, the time after the initial excitement of starting a movement, and before the eventual triumph of reform. Absent are the memoranda from the decades before the public eruptions, from the decades of slog and sweat and boredom; the times of endless meetings and arguments between the suffragettes (militant, violent, female-only protesters), suffragists (peaceful campaigners, among whom men were included) and others who wanted to improve the lot of women, all eventually muddling together and gathering behind the banner of ‘Votes for Women’; the years when it was a battle to get anyone to turn up, when the air was thick with the smoke of social disapproval, when individual agitation was undermined by internal bickering, when the strength of opposition or the glacial pace of change made dissent seem futile, or when a handful turned up to protest only to find it seemed like no one cared.
We don’t celebrate the boring years of social movements, only the daring actions and headlines, the eventual victory and acclaim. We hunt for evidence of the headiness of solidarity, not the interminable minutes of, say, a hundred women’s groups, laced with passive aggression and conflict along with a thirst for change. But the history of women’s liberation has not just been bonnets bobbing behind banners — remembering that the first official ‘wave’ was about suffrage for white women — or Indigenous women like Faith Bandler successfully campaigning for the vote in the lead-up to the 1967 referendum in Australia, or the brilliant activism of African American women during the civil rights movement, or an ocean of pink pussyhats (which were criticised for excluding transgender women and women of colour) flooding the streets of Washington DC during the 2017 Women’s March, or the lava flow of #MeToo stories after the rapacious film mogul Harvey Weinstein was finally outed as a predator. It’s not just the story of eventual, roaring, undergarment-tearing success, but also the story of a thousand ‘failures’ — of women who continued to speak when no one was listening, bills had been defeated, the numbers were against them and they’d been told to give up; of women who burned with the fervour of hope for equality only to be dismissed as insane, troubled, hysterical or angry by their entire neighbourhood, family or community. It’s the story of women who kept marching, through the long years of ignorance, in the hope that others might hear their footfalls and join in; who knew that this marching really meant making countless phone calls, or sitting by a printer, photocopier or even fax machine for a week, or some other dull, repetitive, unglamorous work, or painting signs, or making large pots of tea. None of this was failure — it was persistence — even if it felt like it to those in the thick of it. It’s a feeling I am very familiar with.