This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation. Image above from my time in NYC! (More of my favorite photos of Central Park, all taken while running!, here.)
This week, I was deeply moved by this thoughtful reading of an iconic scene from Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation of Little Women* from the brand Bond and Grace. (If you’ve not heard of them before, Bond and Grace sells gorgeous “art books” that reimagine classic texts with spectacular illustrations as well as notes and other back matter from faculty at various institutions. I met the founder at a lunch last year, and though I barely know her, I was so bowled over by the Little Women post, I had to email her with praise!) Anyhow, in the analysis, they explore Jo March’s line: “I’m so sick of being told love is all a woman is good for.” They observe that Jo is expressing more than a feminist take on her gender identity. She is venting (their words): “The inarticulate rage of having so much more in you than what the world wants to see.”
Wow. I felt this especially in my younger years — when I was 20, I wrote about the vague “bigness” I felt inside that seemed to be constantly overlooked by the people around me. In fact, my 20s could best be described as a decade of shape-shifting and shrinking to fit whatever mold I felt I was meant to be in. But sometimes I have experienced this in more recent years, too. A few years ago, some women I barely knew mocked my blog in front of me. It stung, but I reached for my old self-coaching — “let people be wrong about you” — and I reckoned: “hurt people hurt people.” I strained to find grace instead of anger. I only got halfway there; if I am honest with you, I still avoid these women when I see them. I’ve done enough soul-searching on the incident that I recognize my primary emotion was embarrassment. They saw fluff — which, to be fair, some of my shopping posts are! — but I work hard at every aspect of this blog, whether curating fashion finds or letting my heart bleed out on paper about my own matrescence. I adhere to the philosophy of making everything the most important thing. More importantly, I absolutely love what I do. I am the happiest clam in the sea. It hurt me to have this tremendous joy trivialized.
Anyhow, there’s enough distance in the rear view mirror for me to have mainly let go of this, and mainly realize I still need to work on developing a thicker skin. Because, like, why do I care what those women think?! I know next to nothing about them, and vice versa. Why would I ask people for directions when they have no idea where I’m going?! And — frankly — people will always invent ways to trivialize what you do. (I am thinking of that incident I wrote about recently in which an interviewer had the gumption to tell Ann Patchett that she wasn’t a real writer because she didn’t use a descriptionary.) In short: you might as well do as you please. Be your own weird self! Write about shoes. Take up birding. Lean into some fringe sub-genre of fan fiction. Make your own starter. I like people who aren’t afraid of being “cringe.” I had a mentor back in my start-up days who made the point that “being a pessimist is always easier and cooler”; it’s harder, more vulnerable, to be the optimist. No need to “play it cool” — chase what makes you lean forward and the people that matter will stick around, and probably love you for it.
Magpies, you have so much more in you than the world wants to see! But it is not your job to show everyone what’s inside. Or, rather, it would be impossible to do this. So in the words of Mary Oliver —
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
*****
*Little Women continues to echo throughout my life in the most interesting ways. I wrote a little bit about this multivalent text here. It continues to give me new sky.
**Also, the music from this movie is incredible. It’s made its way onto our secret work playlist.
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