Rock Yourself and Live as BRIGHT as YOU Choose

So my girlfriend just messaged me and I asked her how her new job was going. And she said, “It’s going pretty good but I had the weirdest thing happen to me. I got to my desk the other day and there was a typed out note that stated that we have a dress code and that it’s inappropriate for heels to be worn over an inch and tight clothing etc…”

My girlfriend is a great looking girl and she exudes this positive strong energy, and she’s very intuitive and she’s very kind and very conscientious of the people around her and supporting those people. She’s a lifter but yet she loves to…she dresses very confidently. I love it. But when I first met her, I kind of went AHHH! Fantastic!We had a massage therapist who came to work for us some some time ago and she was the first massage therapist that I had ever experienced in that she worked in heels, she had rocking music on, whatever your flavour was, and she always looked fantastic. Not that massage therapists don’t look fantastic but you’re going into a closed in space and I’d probably be more comfortable wearing Crocs all day too.

But she rocked it. She rocked her! And my girlfriend does the same thing.And my first reaction was how’d you deal with that, and she said, “Well I asked about, and asked if there was a dress code, and there isn’t, and then there was another woman who dresses similar to me and she’s quite lovely, and so I decided to ask her, and I said had you ever had any sort of harassment, and she said no, but I do know that women talk behind my back and I know what’s going on.”And my response to my friend was, “Fantastic! This is fantastic!” And she didn’t reply to me right away but I said, “Just give me a second, I’m sending over video’s to you” because I wanted to speak to her about this.

And I had just read a chapter in Glennon Doyle’s book, “Untamed” and again, it was another moment in my experience which I’m actually calling “The Untamed Corona Life” because reading “Untamed” has given me a lot of permission and a lot of understanding as to the choices and decisions that I’ve made in my life, particularly in the last 10 years, where there were a lot of people close to me who said, “no no no, that’s not okay girl.” And I just kind of said, no, I don’t know why but I need to keep going on this path, so people fell away, and there was criticism.I hate two hate letters sent to me. I had a prank call in the middle of the night to my mom. I have had other points of criticism, people behind computers, which I used to just kind of go, it’s easy to criticize somebody behind a phone, behind a computer. And then when you’d see them in person, which was really starting to bug me because I knew they were saying things or they had said things, but I’d run into them in the grocery store or in the street or at Starbucks, and they’d be sweet as pie. Which I get, that is life but I also started stepping into, I’m not interested in that anymore.

But Glennon’s story, which is actually called, the chapter is called, “Comfort Zone” if you’re reading the book yourself. But she talks about humility and it stepped me into another place of understanding being in that place. So, what I’m trying to say is really focusing on being and grounded in who you are and listening to your voice, and this is what I said to my girlfriend.
I said, “Here’s our thing, if you are somebody who stands tall and are blessed with a figure, a confidence, a desire to look in our world today. People…you’ll walk into a room, and you’ll be criticized. And even Glennon says, she says, “You can’t blame me because this has been conditioned in my life.”

We like people who are down and low. We like people who are martyrs. We like people who are doing and giving and giving and giving…selflessly. And then, we’re challenged to stand. We’re challenged to self care. We’re challenged to listen to our voice and be who we need to be because we’re trying to work in a world that that’s expected. And remember, those behaviours are celebrated in men. Those strong, clear, very self-focused confident men. They’re celebrated!

Women we’re bitches! We’re bitches. Trying doing that in the business world. You’re a bitch, and it is really crazy friggin’ hard. It is so hard. But here’s my other thing, is, it’s the majority of the time, it’s women on women. And we get to make some choices right now. We get to choose to not go down that road. Just ‘cause our mothers did and just ‘cause our grandmas did and so forth, it doesn’t mean, WE need to.

I love celebrating women! You know a couple of years ago I was getting out of a cab in Toronto, and as I’m getting out, just hopping onto the street, a girl comes right up to me, so was close to me, and she goes, “Girl, you got a piece of something in your tooth”. And I went, “OMG thank SO you!” But you know what? She could have been in that shit space, I was dressed great, I felt like I looked great, and she absolutely could have went, “Oh look at that chick, she’s got a chunk in her tooth”. Instead, she chose to celebrate me! And she said, “Girlfriend! You look good! Get that thing out of your tooth!” Isn’t that like awesome?

Three weeks ago, I did a little video, and I was playing the piano. I haven’t played that piano, since, I don’t know, Grade 11? And I was kind of proud of myself but I had gotten this cheetah coat after reading the Glennon book and I was just…I thought it was so fun. And so, that particular video I had great messages from people supporting, again, it wasn’t my intention, but I needed to put it out there, for whatever reason I give you these videos.

Anyways, right at end, some guy, don’t know…he basically said, “What’s with the cheetah coat?” That’s all his message was. And it shut me down. It literally shut me down. I turned off Facebook for a week or whatever, I was just like, I’m not doing this…what am I doing?

And that has happened to me many times. It’s like the criticism, you step out there, and I totally get it, when you step out there, you step out there, you’re ready for criticism. And again, like I said to my girlfriend, “Oh this is your lesson, this is your lesson to step into this more to who you are and to find out how you want to stand and how you want to shine. Because when we choose to stand, we choose to shine, which is to share our stories with vulnerability, honesty and truth, not with criticism not with daggers, just with this is who I am and this is what I felt. And this is what I want to say.

You don’t have to agree with me, but you can say, “Good for you! I wouldn’t do it but good for you.” And the same with my girlfriend. I know it was women who were trying to take her down a notch or two. She’s the new kid on the block. She rocks it, her presence rocks it. And if you just look at her surface, you’re going to get this gorgeous confident woman, smart, smart, smart too. Let’s not forget that. And that whole part on why we are settling for what we’ve been taught and for what we think we need to be doing and behaving and believing and getting caught up in gossip and mean mean girl behaviour is just so uncool. It’s just so uncool.

And I get it, like Glennon literally says, “Forgive me for when I see the next rocking woman walking down the street with swagger. Forgive me, because the first reaction I will have will be who the hell does she think she is?” Which, we’ve heard that, many times before. And then she said, “My second reaction is going to be, she knows who she is, she’s a god damned cheetah!”

Halla fucking lullah! And can we celebrate women? And men? I haven’t even talked about that. Men! Celebrate us! Don’t hit on us. Don’t be doing those “funny” comments that are underlying uck. Celebrate us. We want it. Other women need to see it.

Don’t play games. Let’s celebrate each other. We all can be cheetahs. We all can rock our world. Let’s do it.

Cheers!