The culture I grew up in no longer exists. It was born of a place in time before the internet, PCs, or even cassette tapes.
I once tracked how long it took a trend from the pages of my magazines to reach my part of the world: TWO years. (I was a Sheldon, so what?)
I didn’t have the whole world’s opinion about everything in my face all the time.
(There was this thing called “reality”where we hung out. That was hard enough.)
I didn’t have to think about things like “deepfake” videos where an AI program samples voice and image data, creating fake videos and passing them off as real. We can’t tell the difference.
And no matter what level of education you had, I never met anyone when I was a kid who thought the world was flat. That just didn’t make any sense.
I find myself struggling, being of that world, trying to adapt to this one. Things seem more complicated with a million passwords that I have to change all the time and somehow keep track of.
My info keeps getting breached.
I never really got into Facebook in the first place and it becoming the battleground for verbal civil war
didn’t make it any more enticing.
So, here at the cusp of a half century where my culture and environment have changed much more rapidly than my body and mind’s ability to keep pace, I say to thee, No More.
Don’t worry, this is not a suicide note. It’s more of a Neo-at-the-end-of-the-first-Matrix-movie note.
Not that you should try to dodge bullets, but what Neo did was change his perspective. Knowing the path and walking the path were not the same thing.
In other words, “There is no spoon…it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.”
This is how I’ve decided to deal with things.
One of my coping mechanisms is meditation and one day I started thinking about what it is that humans must do.
To be alive, what do I have to do?
Here’s what I came up with:
1. Breathe oxygen
2. Exhale CO2
3. Eat and drink
4. Excrete waste
5. Sleep
THAT’S LITERALLY IT!!!
(mind blown)
Every other restriction to anything we ever have been, are, or will be is of our own minds. Maybe minds shaped by time, place, culture, and happenstance, but in our minds nonetheless. Enforced by others who agree.
We make it up and we can remake it.
That being the case, seriously, people, what are we doing here?
We can change the narrative. Each of us. All of us.
How do I know?
Because I grew up a fat girl in a world of cocaine thinness, prevalent eating disorders, and skinny Jordache jeans I never could fit into (and I tried for YEARS, believe me).
I learned I was ugly. That I “had such a pretty face”.
But now Ashley Graham is in Vogue, Lizzo is everywhere, big is normalized as “body positivity”, and may not even be bad for your health.
I’m slowly recovering from the shame I learned from being big when it was a pariah. Try as I did so many times to be thin.
I think of it all now in terms not of what others say, but what my body needs: good food, low fat and salt because of family history, lots of water, and exercise (DDPY y’all!).
Best of all, I wear tight clothes. My husband loves it!
With the change in the environment, I saw that I could be something different than what I thought I could be.
I changed my narrative and now am more empowered and joyful for it!
That’s the power of a changing narrative: A girl who grew up ashamed changes her behavior in her 50’s because the narrative about how she looks has changed.
I hope this is true of other narratives as well.
I’m not giving in to the “money and power above all else” narrative. After all, the love of money is the root of all evil.
Whenever I start to give in to all the horrible narratives woven to defeat me, I look to these for inspiration:
From the SHIELD tv series:
Nick Fury:
But the belief that drives us all is the same, whether it's one man or all mankind.
Phil Coulson:
That they're worth saving.
From the Flash Gordon movie:
Dale Arden: So that's why they let us escape; Klytus thought he'd wiped out your memory.
Dr. Hans Zarkov: But do you know why it really failed?
Dale Arden: I can't imagine.
Dr. Hans Zarkov: As I was going under, I started to recite Shakespeare, the Talmud, the formulas of Einstein, anything I could remember, even a song from the Beatles.
Dr. Hans Zarkov: It armored me, girl; they couldn't wipe those things away. You can't beat the human spirit!
Wonder Woman (from The Wisdom of Wonder Woman by Chronicle Books): Anyone can be a hero by offering four simple words: “How can I help?”
Even when I feel like things are about to go bad in a V for Vendetta way:
After that, there were no roses anymore, not for anyone. I remember how the meaning of words began to change….I remember how "different" became dangerous. I still don't understand it, why they hate us so much.
And it seems all that those in power want is MORE,
I don’t give up.
Why?
Avengers: There are always men like you
Avengers: Not today
Wonder Woman: It’s not about deserve; it’s about what you believe.
Victor Laszlo in Casablanca: If we stop fighting, the world will die.
And because I know if I give in, forever will it dominate my destiny.
After all, we don’t decide the times in which we live, we just decide what to do with the time we have.
If ever faced with the end, I hope to face it in courage:
“Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
So I can make such an end as to be remembered:
End of Angel the TV Series, Episode “Not Fade Away”:
Illyria: You're fading. You'll last ten minutes at the most.
Gunn: Then let's make them memorable.
There you have it.
At 50, I’ve seen a lot, am learning all the time, definitely don’t know everything, and am confused in a complicated world.
But, I will not give up, and I will fight for a world where more people are treated better.
Because that isn’t really a choice to me.