Community Share

Jeans by Shanon M. Deyerle

(As always, for the best reader experience, consider the substack APP or “open in browser” button above. It’s also where the tweaked & edited version will live after I find all my typos and run-ons having not been edited before pressing send. Forgive me as I am learning to live by the rule “done is better than perfect”)

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Hi friend, I don’t know about you, but I have been watching a lot of the live updates about the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Such a sad and monumental moment in history. When I saw the footage of the double rainbow over the palace, I was covered in chills and a bit teary-eyed. Talk about having all the feels.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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As promised, I have our first community share!

Here you will find:

• Shanon’s feel-good story

• Q&A with Shanon

• A brief yet powerful experience Mia had with another woman and jeans

• An assignment for us all

• Lastly, how you can share your feel-good story with this community

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Jeans. That’s what it all started with. She needed a new pair of jeans because the ones we’d bought were either lost or didn’t fit … or something. Truth is I wasn’t really sure WHAT happened to those jeans we’d searched high and low to find. All I knew was that somehow they were gone, and I was currently trying to reassure my teary eyed eleven year old that we’d find another pair.

“But I can never find anything that fits. Nothing looks right. I hate shopping.”

So many negative thoughts. And the ironic thing? I often joked with friends that our tall, lean daughter was so lucky she’d inherited her father’s body. “She’ll always be able to find jeans that fit,” I would chuckle with a slight bit of jealousy in my humor (my Irish stock prohibits my thighs from being off-the-rack ready).

I tried to reassure her that she was built just right, that we would find things that fit and that looked like “her.” She had an answer for each of my encouragements, and as I listened, I heard more. I learned that hiding behind her blue eyes was jealousy, and I was caught off guard.

She’d not expressed jealousy much growing up. Our daughter was pretty good about appreciating what she had without comparing to others. Unless it was candy. If you had York Peppermint Patties, all bets were off.

But there it was, and it was so, so sad.  Our beautiful, kind and brilliant girl was comparing everything about herself to the people around her - and she was certain she was at the bottom of the List.

We all make one, don’t we? Our List with a capital L? The one that we write our entire lives, the one that contains our truths, our secrets, our fears, our joys. The one that makes us who we are, and the one that we can use to justify any and all of the things we might be telling ourselves at any given time. It is our best and our worst summed up in bullet points that don’t even begin to tell the whole truth, and yet, somehow we believe it.

I, for example, have a very long List. It includes all kinds of useful information, like:

-   You’ve made a lot of mistakes, and some of them are so big you’ll never be able to make them right;

-   You need to take care of everyone else before you take care of yourself;

-   You’re smart, but you’re not doing enough with your life to share that;

-   You should really lose that weight you’ve put on – you were skinnier after you had your first baby than you are now.

My List goes on and on, and it contains much of the same. Of course, over the years I’ve worked hard in therapy and through my relationships to add better, more positive ideas to my List. It’s helped. I actually think I’ve been changing my old List and writing a new one. A better one. And I thought I was passing those better ideas on to my kids.

But our daughter’s heart was trapped in comparison mode, and it made her jealous of so many things. Jealous of the girls who never wore the same thing to school twice. Jealous of the girls who had more than one pair of UGGs or the latest IPhone. Jealous of the kids who seemed to have what she did not – bigger houses, better rooms decorated by PBteen, perfect grades without extra work, long hair.

It made me wonder about her List. What’s on it? What does she believe about herself? What does she believe about the world? More importantly – how am I helping her to write a List that tells the truth? The balanced, healthy, always-love-and-accept-yourself truth?

Maybe I’m not doing such a great job on that one.

Ugh – it’s really so very hard for kids these days. We want to give them more than we had, as all parents do. But this world we are in right now … well, it wants to give them more than they can handle. It tells us – and them – that they need and deserve more than they really do. It makes them grow up too fast, and it confuses them about everything, from social skills to body image, to how much $100 really is worth.

We describe entitlement as a problem in this world, but I feel like that’s not the whole story for the kids I know. It’s also somewhat about blind acceptance.  We talk about children as sponges when they are babies and learning to talk and walk and do all the amazing things infants learn to do. But I think our children are sponges throughout their young lives. 

They watch everything around them and they learn from it all. Everything. The difference is, the things they are learning now have less to do with skills and more to do with self-concept.

Maybe that’s because they’re at a developmental stage where it’s normal to try to understand and make decisions about themselves in relation to their peers. Comparison comes from a healthy, normal place. It’s a way to gather information and to make sense of how the individual fits into the system. That’s important for a sixth-grader.

But somehow that normal drive to understand oneself by understanding others, well, that’s gotten my precious girl confused.  She’s thinking that other parents’ shiny cars or a number of Instagram followers or a friend’s perfect grades mean something about their worth as people. She’s thinking that her own worth is diminished by others’ successes. She’s seeing differences between herself and the children around her and she’s deciding that makes them better than her.

What to do? I want her to stand on her own, to not use anything for an assessment of her worth but her own knowledge of who she is.  I want her to feel limitless and free and confident.

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” I tell her.

“Be yourself; everyone else is taken,” I remind her.

“You are exactly who you are supposed to be. God doesn’t make mistakes.”

I sprinkle these thoughts into her head and hope they somehow will take hold.  I encourage her interests and challenge her to participate in the world. I look for moments to celebrate her strengths, and acknowledge her fears, and give her a foundation that will not be shaken by outside influences.

I watch her closely, and I listen really, really hard to what she is saying to me and to what she isn’t.

I let her write her own List.

I love her.

I hug her and I hold her when she cries.

I take her out for a new pair of jeans.

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Name:

Shanon M. Deyerle

Where are you from?

Midlothian, VA

What would you like the reader to take away from your story?

I’d like the reader to be reminded that the things we say internally (and the way we say them) are so important. Not only because they impact our Self, but they trickle down to those around us. And so, maybe today, look at your List. See what you might want to do to revise it. Edit! Because you definitely don’t have to compare your magic to someone else’s for it to be powerful and good. You’re that all on your own.

What does feeling good mean to you?

To me, that means that I have access to an inner calm that holds me up when things get tough. Feeling good isn’t about always being happy. It’s about a knowing, a trust in my Self and the lessons I’ve learned along the way, that allows me to be authentically me as I walk through the world. 

What are three things that a woman can do to feel good? -

-Rest. When your body is telling you it needs a break, slow down and listen.

-Move. It doesn’t have to be a workout, or any big time commitment. It can be 2 minutes of stretching or 4 minutes of jumping around to your favorite song. The idea is that moving gives you a chance to change the energy in and around you. It always makes a difference!

-Connect. Take time (again doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment) to get to know your Self. Take a silly online quiz that gives you a tidbit of info about you, take yourself to that store you’ve been curious about - you don’t have to buy anything - and see what you like about it, call a friend you’ve been meaning to and just chat about what’s been going on with each other - it’s good to hear yourself talk, I swear! Whatever gives you a chance to connect to you, consider doing it. 

Where can others connect with you?

www.powerplacepurpose.com and on IG @power.place.purpose

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Shanon’s story reminded me of an important experience I had in my younger years. If you have been around the Sober Glow for some time, my apologies you may have heard this story before.

I was visiting a friend out in NJ many years ago. I was probably in my late 20s and nowhere near having had any healing around my sister wound. My friend and I were standing outside someone’s front door, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. As I turned around, I saw a woman, maybe in her mid-30s, standing with a carriage in front of her. She looked as if she was just out for a morning stroll with her baby. When I faced her, she said hello and quickly explained that she saw me from the street and wanted to tell me how good my butt looked in the jeans I was wearing. I was quite taken aback by this, and I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it probably wasn’t enough. That was it. She then turned and continued on her way.

This interaction stuck with me. Not only the act of kindness of giving a stranger a compliment but a compliment from another woman.

See, women don’t do that enough. Women don’t compliment other women, especially random strangers, on the street. I did not grow up in an environment where #empoweredwomenempowerwomen. Not in my family nor with my friends. I grew up like most teenage girls where the only thing we knew was that we had to compete with one another. I also grew up being called skinny bitch by my aunts and with the inherited narrative that if someone had symmetrical features and a slim figure, they were most likely labeled a bitch or worse, a slut. I got both labels, a lot.

So having a random woman approach me to offer a proverbial high five in a sweet and vulnerable way was shocking. This moment in time was significant for me because it was one of the first cracks of light to get through the very tall and thick energetic wall I had around me for protection from other women.

THE ASSIGNMENT TODAY:

Compliment a woman in some way. Either someone in your life or a complete stranger. Do it without an agenda other than looking in her eyes and watching how she lights up. Then come back here and share with us in the comment section so we can all feel the energetic shift around women empowering other women.

These community shares will be ongoing. To find out more and to share your own, please reach out to me.

XX,

Mia