Join us on our First Open Call! (26th of Jan at 9:30 am Sydney time, 25th for most of the rest of the world)
And help us shape the Lab
C-Lab was born out of a desire to play differently.
In the world at large, the world of academia, education, politics, and most of our systems, the cyclical nature of a woman’s creative expression is not yet understood.
It makes it hard to “play” (and by that I mean, engage with life in a way that would truly fill my heart and the hearts of others) when I have to constantly use my energy to explain myself.
For example, it is crazy for a woman to have to leave her emotional self out of the workplace. When she shuts that part out, she is certainly shutting out a big part of her creative input.
I cry most days.
My tears can’t be reduced to sadness, frustration, or joy. They contain worlds, universes, even. Every time I cry in front of someone I notice a minor contraction in my body. At that moment, when the tears start forming I know that I am in deep connection to truth. I also know that the person I am engaging with will, most likely, be making a very different meaning of what is happening and will probably be missing a lot due to their discomfort of being with someone in tears.
I am not the only one squeezing myself to fit into a tight construct. I’ve spent years witnessing women use words to describe what’s happening to them in the least generous frame possible. I’m just too emotional”, they say, or “I have baby brain, I’m sorry”.
Not to mention all the women who have hidden from their bosses and colleagues, for example, that they have endometriosis. A condition that affects about 14% of women here in Australia. “I’m already at a disadvantage when looking for a job because of pregnancy and birth, I can’t possibly share that I have debilitating pain for 4 days every month.” One woman says. I won’t even expand on the sad truth that “pregnancy and birth” are seen as inconveniences in the capitalist model.
You have to agree with me that if women have to hide aspects of themselves that are fundamental to who they are as humans, their contribution to the world will be impaired. Resentment will build up and she will become a fighter (most of that, unconsciously).
The options we have, as women, in the current society are to either comply and dim our light so much that we become shadows of what’s possible, OR become fighters. The feminist movement, for example, is sourced from our fighting spirit.
This is still necessary as in some countries what happens to women is shocking, but it is not how I want to play. I want to play as my full cyclical self and I want to co-create with other body/minds that don’t look like me. I don’t want to explain when I cry or have my tears reduced to something our minds can easily understand.
I want to contribute to our most wicked problems with all I came to give. My mind doesn’t work in linear patterns and I am so connected to reality ( one of the perks of being in a female body) that the pain I feel with the destruction of the Earth, the wars, and famine, is visceral. I grew up learning to shut these parts of myself down, so I could breathe. I am not compromising anymore. My lack of breath mirrors the pain of our world and I like that.
I would like us all, at least here at C-Lab, to let our guards down and learn how to build from there. This is, of course, an invitation to all, not just women. The bit that I am consciously making space for, however, is the cyclical nature of the female body.
In these conversations, I’d like to invite you to see things in yourself and others through kinder lenses.
No, she is not confused, she is cyclical.
No, she doesn’t need to have words, some phases of the cycle are more “wordless” than others.
No, she doesn’t have “baby-brain”, she has deepened her capacity to attune to her baby’s needs in ways that science is yet to understand.
No, she is not “a bitch”, she is just struggling to meet the demands of modern-day society and her outbursts are showing you how hard it is.
Of course, it is not difficult to understand that if you have never had a cycle, some of the ways women might show up could look “irrational” or confusing to you. If this is the definition of rationality that we are going by “the quality of being based on clear thought and reason: Science rests on the ideals of objectivity and rationality” I’d say that it is very likely that the definition itself came from representatives of 50% of the population and not representatives of the whole. But this is for another post.
This “gap” in meaning is true not only for how we perceive rationality but other attributes. For example, the way most people imagine courage, intelligence, and confidence to look and feel is more true for bodies that can cope better in a linear, fast-paced world. Bodies powered by testosterone, that is.
The first step, as always, is to recognize that we assume we live in a shared reality when, in fact, most of the time we are judging others when they don’t meet our “standards”.
What would happen if we took it to be true that we live in less of a shared reality than we imagine? This is, on the one hand, very basic stuff. We are talking physiology. The problem is that it’s yet not seen as fundamental.
We still don’t relate to one another acknowledging how differently we engage with reality. This is mostly invisible to us. So we walk around, both men and women, judging one another as if everything a man does that annoys us is a mistake and vice-versa.
What if nothing we are doing is a mistake but an insight into how we are?
Imagine being allowed to do a Ph.D. if you barely knew how to read. This is what I am speaking about. We are attempting to have very complex conversations about gender but we are not even coming from a shared understanding of the impact of the different physiologies in our relationship with the world.
Of course, there are distortions on both sides and also in our general view of gender, but if we don’t understand the basics, how are we going to deepen this conversation?
What if instead of quickly rolling your eyes every time someone of the opposite sex does something that baffles you, you become curious? What if you opened yourself up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, the female body/mind and the male body/mind (not to mention the ones that don’t fit the mold ) are more different than we have given credit for, and yet we are all supposed to create and shape the world in equal amounts?
How?
Not sure. Come help us figure it out.
Join us on our first call tomorrow, the 26th of January, at 9:30 am Sydney time zone. Check your time zone here.