Voice of Shite

Oh, man, I've been reading Amy Poehler's new book Yes Please.  Because there's two kinds of heroes in my world, and they are writers and comedians, and comedians who write pretty much are my favorite people on the planet.

[Books aren't on my Shtopping list, by the way.  I know they should be.  I know I should order things from the library and then go pick them up and read them in the allotted time and then return them.  I love libraries.  I believe in them.  We use them all the time for kids' books.  But I am an erratic reader.  At any one time I'm reading sixteen books.  I'm not kidding.  So for me it's worth it to spend $8 a book for the Kindle because it might take me a year to read one book.  Or it could take a day.  But I never know which, and the pressure of needing to pick something up at the library and return it at a certain time is too much for my little brain to manage.   And if there's one area of my life I don't need more stress in it's reading.]

Poehler has this chapter called "plain girl vs. the demon" that I just feel like every woman should read every morning of her life.  Get up, drink your coffee, read this chapter, feel better, be nicer=world, better place.

Also, it will help you talk to your daughters.  More on that in a second.

Here's a good passage from "plain girl v. the demon:"

I hate how I look.  That is the mantra we repeat over and over again.  [...].  

That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice.  This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave.  You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away.  It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don't deserve love.  And the scary part is the demon is your own voice.  But it doesn't sound like you.  It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you.  Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall.  The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking.  The bad news is it never goes away.  If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment.  You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone.  But it is not.  It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you.

This motherfucker is patient.

I just read this passage today, but I heard Poehler describe it on Fresh Air  last week.  Aside:  I listen to Fresh Air incessantly, and yes I am always interviewing myself in my own head, Terry Gross style.  I listen to that show so much that I literally feel like I know everything about everything at this point.  I can tell you things about ISIS, Johnny Cash's session drummer, and how to train cats.  No one person should really know all of that.  Except Terry Gross.

Anyway, I love the passage above, because it's just so much better than the typical response to talking about the demon voice--the Voice of Shite--which is to say, "Shut up, you're so pretty!"  Or, if you have sassy friends who are being supportive, just "Shut the fuck up."  It is comforting to know that one of my heroes, who I think is hilarious and smart and pretty, has the demon, just like I have the demon, just like we all have the demon.

My 8-year-old Nolie came into my bedroom last week and said she needed to talk.  She said there was a girl at school who was mean to her, and that every time that girl was mean to her, Nolie heard in her head the words, "You are so fat."  The girl wasn't calling Nolie fat, and Nolie's not fat, but the Voice of Shite is already ringing loud and clear in Nolie's head.  Normally moms get blamed for instilling fat-consciousness into their girls, and maybe I've done some of that.  Or maybe we all just have the Voice of Shite and need to develop some strategies other than mama guilt for addressing it.

In fact, I think I would have normally been tempted to tell Nolie that she's not fat, and to shut up because she's so pretty.  She would have whined that I was just saying that because I'm her mom.  And then I would have cycled through some heady self-recrimination and tried to figure out what I was doing wrong.  My own Voice of Shite would have kicked in something fierce.

But I had just heard Poehler's interview, and so instead I told Nolie all about the Voice of Shite and how we all have the Voice and have to learn that this Voice is not our true selves and to put it on the shelf when it makes an appearance.  Because the Voice loves to lie to us, and is a very good liar.  So good that we think it's the truth.

Nolie nodded.  She got it instantly.  And then we cried a little and she gave me a hug and got ready for bed.

I bet we'll have to have that conversation a few more times.   Maybe many.  I'm 39 and still have tell the Voice to bug off.

Poehler ends the chapter by saying that we eventually figure out what our "currency" is, and that really helps to shut the Voice of Shite up.  She figured out hers was not being "pretty" but it was being "funny."  And it doesn't make sense to argue about this and say well, Amy Poehler is pretty (she is).  Because the point is that's not where her identity lies.  It's not where her true self lives.  And chasing after that would make her less pretty, less sexy, and probably less funny.

I wonder if this is why I've been feeling better since the whole gray hair decision.  I know "authentic" is a tricky word, but it describes how I feel.  More myself.  Perhaps this is because it opened the door to liberating myself from a currency I was always trying to attain (prettiness?  youth?), which is freeing me up to live my real currency, which I think might be writing and teaching and sass.

No wonder I love those funny writers and gots to read all the books.