👟👠 The stories we tell...(#33)

Hi !  Welcome back. This week I am thinking (and writing) about stories, shadows, consequences, Christmas menus, Arab dads and good eyes . If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can join here or by clicking the button below. - Eve D.❣️

WEEK IN REVIEW

I can smell the holiday season in the air. Still have so much work to do before mid December, and I honestly don’t think I am taking it seriously enough. The next weeks will require some serious motivation and discipline.

🎄 This week brought us Nov 15, which is the official opening date of the Christmas season in this household. We celebrated by listening to Mariah Carey (Zac: “This is the month she makes $3 million in royalties” ). Next week I am starting to wear my Christmas earrings. I have a lot, and I wear a different pair every day. I love it!

✏️ Exam season is in full swing. I need a drink. 

🍽️ Because we are in exam season, and because I apparently can’t be trusted to provide sufficiently good nutrition to my daughter during her time of stress, we ate dinner at my sister’s three times this week. (The joke is on them. I know how to cook, I just don’t want to).

🏠️ I’m purging and rearranging my house. I moved all the furniture around in my bedroom (it’s a big room and has a three -seater couch, two desks, two bookshelves, a bed etc). I don’t know much about Feng Shui, but the energy feels so different in the space, and I am more relaxed and rested. Like I’ve been on holiday. Should read up more about it. 

📨 I was surprised by how many of you wrote to me about the US election results! Varied points of view (also surprising!) but so good to know that we can express our opinions and stay civil at the same time. (You can just hit reply to this newsletter if you want to send me a private message. I read and reply to all of them)

❤️ Where are we on the girlfriend/boyfriend labels in midlife? I am in full favour of the girlfriend label ( ❣️) but I haven’t had a “boyfriend” in like…twenty years? Granted, my previous long term partner was also father of my child, so “boyfriend” seemed like I was downplaying that 🤣 … he was thus my “partner”. But that sounds like a business arrangement, and I didn’t much like it. Maybe this is why people get married 🤣 .

SHADOWS

The stories we tell…

This story is about our Shadows.

A friend (let’s call her Meg) did a really bad thing. (The details are not important). It was an error in judgment, and a reflection of extreme low self-respect. I reached out, and had a serious conversation with Meg, explaining why what she did was horrendously bad, and why it needed to stop. (This was a very difficult conversation). She vaguely agreed that it needed to stop, but not that what she did was bad. Her intentions, she says, were good. (We’ll get back to that, below). 

In addition, Meg had one of her friends (whom I have never met) write to me and tell me this: 

I also discussed Meg’s actions with two of my very close friends, who immediately agreed with my take on it. I am also pretty confident that if I walked up to any reader of this newsletter and told them what Meg did, they would be horrified. I told this to Meg, and her response was: 

Indeed, Meg told her (other) friends the same story she told me, and her friends sided with her (and even wanted to defend her actions to me). She knew how to tell the story the way that would elicit the response she wanted. It didn’t work on me, and it wouldn’t work on my other two friends either… but it worked on some - and it also worked on her. 

That got me thinking. The power of stories is immense. I have spoken about this before here, when I discussed the book Storyworthy. But then, I was talking about stories we tell others, for fun. What about the stories we tell ourselves? Meg is not a bad person. She did a bad thing, and she justified it to herself with a (bullshit) story about good intentions that she fully believed, and then she doubled down when called on it.

So how do we make sure that the stories we tell ourselves are the ones we need to hear? I’ve thought about this a lot over the week, and was reminded of a conversation I heard with James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst. He was talking about how we all have a Shadow, Jung's metaphor for those parts of our psyche that when brought to our consciousness we find troubling, perhaps contradictory to our values. In this Shadow, we carry the entirety of nature's capacity to express itself eg through greed, jealousy, even cruelty. How do we recognise this Shadow, and what it makes us? It often shows up in consequences that pile up (see below). But there is a simpler way:

🔺 Find yourself a person who knows you and cares about you, and ask them. They will be quick to tell you. 🔺

I think this must be really difficult to do. You need to be able to listen to this person, hear what they are saying, not deflect, project or defend, and accept that they are talking to you with love and care. And yet, they will be telling you things that are not good to hear. It can’t be easy to hear a person you care about deeply tell you things that are “wrong” with you. But it seems like this is a good way to be better. 

(I am also reminded how eons ago my sister and I made a pact with ourselves: if either one of us spotted bad mental behaviour in the other (depression, paranoia, dementia, mood swings etc) they would tell the other, and the other would listen. I am not quite sure why we made this pact, but I suspect it had a lot to do with us thinking that the people around were nuts, and that there was a danger we inherited some of that 😂 . )

So, go find your person. It has to be someone who knows you well, who you cannot bullshit even if you tried. Most likely contenders are your spouse/partner, sibling or best friend. And then slowly start having those conversations. Listen to this podcast with James Hollis for further inspiration. 

(Side note: Good news! Meg did (eventually!) hear me, and has rectified her actions.)

MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES  

Canon asked six photographers to shoot a portrait of the same man. Of course, each photographer has their own style, so the photos were bound to be different, but Canon threw in a curveball: it told a different backstory of the model to each photographer. So, one photographer thought he was shooting a millionaire, another thought he was shooting an alcoholic, and so on. It’s remarkable to see how the backstory affected the mood of the shot.  

BREAKFAST PHOTOGRAPHY 

Speaking of photography. G and I went out for breakfast, and I remembered I wanted a photo to post on my Instagram ( 🙄 )This is the photo I took (and no, I did not post it): 

G, who does not have Instagram but does have an amazing eye for photography took this shot:

Note: we were sitting at the same table, same environment, same time, etc etc. I shot a photo of eggs, he shot a photo of the ceiling being reflected in the screen of a phone. What a show-off!

ASSEMBLY 

As part of our prep for Christmas, my sister and I are discussing menus, and it was (politely) decided that due to my inability to cook anything,  I should be in charge of the trifle and leave the real food to the professionals (my sister and her partner). I was telling this to G, who wanted to know how I was going to make this trifle and I said it would be really easy because I was going to buy the Swiss rolls, ask the kids to make the jelly, get the custard from Woolies, etc etc and he said …”Whoa! You’re not making a trifle, you are assembling a trifle”.

That’s funny, and accurate! Now that I think about it, most of my “cooking” endeavours are exactly that: sourcing good ready made components, and bringing them together in one meal. (Case in point: last week I offered to make G and me dinner, and I sourced a chef who makes high-quality meals to serve in your own house, and then I assembled that. It was delicious. 🤣 ) 

CONSEQUENCES

My friend Laura (who, just to be clear, is not Meg! 🤣 ) shared the most incredible framework with me this week. We were talking about US politics, but it really can be applied to any situation, including Meg’s: 

🔺We judge our actions by our intentions, but our actions will be judged by their consequences. 🔺

Alternatively, we judge our actions by our intentions, but we judge others’ actions by the consequences.

Some examples: 

☑️ You vote for candidate X because you want to improve the economy, but the consequences of them being elected sets back women’s movement by decades. You’ll be judged on that. 

☑️ You want your child to have best opportunities in life so you push them hard academically, and the consequences are that your child has a stressful school career and no friends. You will be judged on that.

We can’t always predict the consequences, of course. But once again, just like with the Shadow, it’s worth bouncing intentions vs consequences off our friends because our good intentions are not going to absolve us from the bad consequences of our actions.

ARAB DAD 

I am mostly off Twitter, Instagram and Facebook but am addicted to YouTube and found this account (@RudyAyoub) recently. It has me rolling on the floor with laughter. It’s a mockery of a rich Arab dad who both hates spending money but also hates being thought of as poor. His long-suffering guitar-playing son is a side character, but all the characters are played by the same person. 

Just make sure you watch the shorts (60 seconds or less), and you should watch at least five or so to really get into it. Enjoy!

MOVIES

We watched Wolfs this week. It’s about two guys (Clooney and Pitt) who “fix messes” and are forced to work together on a case. The star performance is actually from the third character, Austin Abrams, who pulled the movie together brilliantly. Is it as good as Oceans 11? Nope. Is it worth watching? For sure. (Side note: It’s eye-opening to see how these actors are ageing in front of our eyes!) 

Next week we are watching Polite Society. I’ve seen the first 20 seconds of the trailer, and it looks upbeat and fun, so I am looking forward to that. (Side note: what the hell is up with movie trailers giving away the whole plot of the movie?)

Thanks for reading!

That’s it for this week. (Want more? You can find past editions here). I hope you have a great weekend and upcoming week. Please keep sharing /forwarding to your friends/groups 😄 . You can also email me privately by hitting reply on this email.

PS