My Baby-Thin Skin
The shame of "disappointing" people, and our doubled selves.
Hi friends, I’ve been fielding many similar questions in my DMs about the writing process, creativity, and what to share/what not to share (upcoming newsletter about this). Along with how to manage the intense psychic/emotional river that we’re all swimming in while trying not to drown. (I’m writing this as an atmospheric river dumps on LA.) I’m going to attempt to answer a few of these questions in an upcoming episode of Pulling the Thread (you can drop additional questions in the comments below, or respond to this email), but I also thought it would be nice to host a drop-in office hours style session on Zoom. If it works, we’ll repeat it. No agenda, just an opportunity to chat, have a moment of community, and crowd-source some wisdom. I’ve picked February 11th at 10amPT/1pmET to kick it off—short notice, I know, but let’s get it going. The registration link is below, behind the paywall, but as always, I’m happy to comp paid subscriptions if it’s not in your budget. Just respond to this email and ask.
I did a workshop last week with an energy teacher named Prune Harris, who in some ways is straight out of central casting for a Dr. Strange spin-off. Prune is a Celtic shaman, versed in many different energy systems—chakras, Dantian points, elements—who built a practice working on people directly, though now she primarily teaches. I met her many months ago, when I was in a bout of chronic hyperventilation and she taught me a variation of this heart hold that immediately calms my nervous system down. (You can scroll down this post for the video of the one she taught me.)
(This is Prune teaching us a nine-fold prayer to connect the elements and begin the day.)
Over the course of the two days, we talked a fair amount about our auras and the holes or vortexes that can develop in them (unsurprisingly, for many women there can be a vortex in front of the heart from too much giving and not enough receiving). She also taught us about the auric membrane, which holds the energy field and can also be perforated. To demonstrate, she had me hold my arm to the side while she pushed it down and hunted for my aura’s edge. She then did a karate chop-like slash on its circumference, after which my arm could withstand no pressure. (It was very Dr. Strange, though she didn’t throw me through a portal.)
Now, all is not lost for those with holes in our auras. To patch it up, you use your fingertips to weave figure eights in the air around your body, however you like to do it, up and down. (You can also perform this service for others.) Then to strengthen your auric membrane, you rub your hands together over your heart, and press them out, up, and all around. What I loved about Prune’s method is that it’s oriented to your preferences—you don’t need to do any of these things perfectly. And it’s DIY.
As I was reweaving my aura after Prune perforated it, I noticed something strange: While it felt so good to weave finger eights around my head (it feels like someone is playing with my hair, even though there’s no actual touch involved), as soon as I moved to my throat area, I felt waves of nausea. Prune told me to move my hands even farther from my body, and then finally, to leave the area alone. I could not tolerate it (and still can’t).
Longtime readers will know that I have a lot of neck and throat stuff: I fell off a horse and broke my neck in 2022 (I was miraculously fine, aside from the broken neck), though my issues pre-date that. It’s all throat chakra stuff: Fear of speaking the truth, yet also feeling compelled to open my mouth and say it…sometimes in unvarnished ways. Over and over again.
This is a double-bind for me, and something I wrote about at great length in On Our Best Behavior (Chapter: Pride). It’s why I ghostwrote 12 books before feeling like I could write my own. (In defense of ghostwriting, I do love it and nobody should feel shame for needing or wanting a co-writer—writing books is structurally hard!) And it’s why I still have so much fear about being seen, celebrated, known. As a woman, this is easy to understand even as it’s hard for our culture to admit: We sure are terrible to women who seem full of themselves, or like they need to be put back in their places. We love the comeback tour (cue: Miley Cyrus at the Grammy’s) but not as much as we love gunning women out of the sky. Everyday, I wait for the sniper rifles to come for me, for enough people to decide I’ve had enough attention and it’s time for me to go home.
I talked about this nausea around my throat with my therapist last week—how strange it is to feel like my freedom is bound up with my voice: Freedom to work for myself, to stand for myself, to represent myself, to benefit directly from my own ideas. And yet, this freedom is crippling in the creation of its own vulnerability. My very livelihood depends on the resonance of my words, and whether our sometimes vicious culture agrees with them.
And then, of course, there’s the required cultivation of a “personal brand.” As I talked this through with my therapist—how I feel both bound to my voice and restricted by it—he told me that I had made a tongue-out gagging face when I said “personal brand.” I hadn’t realized but I’m not surprised, because I have so much ambivalence about this idea, as I’ve written about before, particularly the language of “branding,” “influencing,” and “following.” Blech. And yet, the sturdier the “personal brand,” the more supportive it becomes, and the more able you are to do the work you care to do. (And in all the want-sharpening work I’ve done in the past few years for On Our Best Behavior, I know I want to write books, host a podcast, and write a newsletter—and support my family in the process, which requires…a personal brand, as much as I hold my nose.)
Naomi Klein writes extensively in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World—an excellent book about which I have so much to say in future newsletters— about the idea of cultivating a personal brand, both her aversion to the idea and also the reality that…she is one. All this, despite being the face of nascent anticapitalism with her runaway bestselling book No Logo in the ‘90s. She also writes about this personal brand problem in the context of our kids, who are learning very early what it is to cultivate, perform, and then project a persona, to be an interesting person in the culture with a story to tell, one worthy of, say, being admitted to college.
As she writes of the students she teaches:
“They have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their ‘real’ selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of themselves onto others (the unenlightened, the problematic, the deplorable, the ‘not me’ that sharpens the borders of the ‘me’). This triad—of partitioning, performing, and projecting—is fast becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us, but whom others nonetheless perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, riches. But it’s a precarious kind of wish fulfillment, one that can be blown up with a single bad take or post.” (p. 56-57)
As I’ve been out in the world on my own these past few years, I’ve felt relatively safe—and have received little blowback (mind, I know better than to ever, ever, read the comments). I’ve chalked this up to being very careful (itself a kind of cultivation) to make sure there’s no space between “real” me and the me I dish out to Instagram. I’ve tried to sew myself to myself, working under the theory that you make yourself really vulnerable when you leave a chasm or vacuum between who you are and who you profess to be. People can sense the dissonance and the manufactured self—theories and takedowns then multiply as people try to get closer to the reality. It happens all the time.
For women, it can be hard to distinguish between criticism based on this (the doubling of the self through a digital or projected avatar), and on what I mentioned above…that we will really take any opportunity to put women back in their place. I named this very overtly in my book because I figured in due time, it would also happen to me. And while it hasn’t, really, in the past few months, I recognize that things are changing for me. While I used to field the occasional nasty email or DM—truly very occasional—there’s been a significant uptick in recent months. Some of this is because of Israel-Palestine (not based on anything I’ve said or posted, but by following me around Instagram and noting what I’ve liked, or not liked, and then discussing me in the comments…resulting in me being described as both a genocidal Zionist and a Nazi).
And some of it is something else…I’ve received emails and DM’s about a wide variety of things—really wide, often head-scratching. Last week, after more or less going dark on Instagram, I put up something to support my facialist, Christine Chin, who runs a small business out of her LES storefront. She has helped me keep my rosacea under control for 20 years (rosacea is an awful, progressive skin condition). It was a pretty benign if random post (based on my career, I get a decent number of questions about my skin, so not totally out of left-field), yet I found myself accused of “ick” and ageism. (So confused by the latter, I waded into the comments for clarification…and I’m still confused.) I know I shouldn’t do this, and I didn’t respond to any DMs, but it hurts? Because that’s the real me—and criticism hits all my good girl, wanting to please wounds. I have thin skin. And a porous auric membrane.
I also know I’m in Klein’s world of digital doubles and doppelgangers now because so many of these comments and DMs and emails include the word disappointed, which I really thought was a word reserved for parents to weaponize against their kids. It’s a deeply shaming and intimate word when used against another person. In fact, just now, as I was typing this paragraph, someone commented, on an unrelated IG post: “Really disappointing to@see the zio[n] content you like and support.”
Disappoint comes from Old French (desappointer), which means to “deprive of a position.” But here’s the thing: I’ve never asked to be put in a position of moral authority. I’ve certainly never asked to be put on a pedestal. I’ve never insisted that anyone take up my beliefs or feelings about anything, at any time. I’d legitimately be concerned if anyone felt like they were in wholesale agreement with me about everything. And I certainly don’t want to be anyone’s guru! I don’t know what’s happening to us that we’ve reached a point in the culture where if someone doesn’t Venn diagram with your immovable belief system on every issue, at every moment of time, into the trash heap they go. Our fingers go mute, mute, mute.
In What the Mystics Know, Richard Rohr writes: “As we face our own inner Herods and Hitlers, we both recognize their disguises in others and we learn a certain forgiveness that is necessary for ongoing political involvement. I am always a part of the problem. I can never really stand apart, above, or beyond human sinfulness. I am a part of the tragic sense of life, and there is no perfect orthodoxy on which to stand.” While this sounds awfully depressing, I find Rohr’s work and words to be the opposite: We are all part of a cosmic pattern that’s often equal parts dark and light. And it’s part of our human hubris and polarized thinking to cling to certainty that we always know which part is dark, and which part is light. As we know too well, people change, situations shift, history both resolves and mutates our view—and the whole process is intractably hard and sometimes terrible.
In this moment, I recognize that I’m on the cusp of my next spate of personal work, the next layer of the onion—essential development for the book I’m now writing, but also as a means for staying visible in the world. Like Prune taught me, I have to weave my own protection. There are many moments when I want to armor up and cover my baby-like skin, or beat a retreat back into the world of book ghosts and corporate life, but I know that would be ducking out on work required of all of us. Our durability in this fractured and polarized world requires reclaiming our doubles and integrating them back into ourselves. It requires calling back all of our projections and engaging with each other honestly. It requires keeping our throat chakras clear, open, and perhaps unbridled. And most importantly, it requires firing up our ability to both process our own feelings and think for ourselves. As Richard Rohr writes, “We long for great-souled people who can hold the chaos together within themselves—and give us the courage to do the same.” May we be, or become, those people.
And may I be forever disappointed in your eyes, feet firmly planted on the ground.
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
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