Yeah, No. Not Happening.

by Karen Karbo

  The shadow bulldozes right on through our twee affirmations. There is no healing your shadow side with positive thoughts. There is no convincing it to calm the fuck down with a cheery, upbeat mantra. “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” means nothing to your shadow side. It is completely impervious to positive thinking.

  How does this black, dense shadow show up in your life? It’s a clever beast: what you can’t accept in yourself, you can’t accept in others. The shadowy aspects of yourself that you’re afraid to acknowledge, you project onto other people.

  The perfect dramatic representation can be found in Laura Dern’s character, Amy Jellicoe, in HBO’s short-lived dramedy Enlightened. After she has a full-on mascara-smeared-lo-her-chin meltdown at work, Amy spends a couple months at a retreat in Hawaii. After she returns, she is “enlightened,” but also as self-absorbed, manipulative, and enraged as she was before, even though she talks the right talk. The joke is not her New Age beliefs, but her complete lack of self-awareness and inability to accept her shadow side.

  Internet callout and cancel culture exists because it feels much better to project your shadow onto other people, especially when you don’t have to look them in the eye. I’m not talking about righteous expressions of anger in response to world events, social injustice, and you know the rest, but the finger-pointing, name-calling, insulting, and holier-than-thou judging, from the right, the left, and everyone in between—I’m assuming there are still some out there—directed at other people who’ve done nothing more than expressed a different opinion.

  To further complicate matters, our shadow side includes qualities deemed unacceptable by society and our family. Often these traits revolve around gender. In earlier generations boys were trained not to show their feelings, while girls were trained not to show their competence and leadership abilities. Or their anger, come to that. Your parents, teachers, other authority figures, and peers might have punished you, or not invited you to the slumber party, for exhibiting these traits as a little girl, and thus you hid them, stuffing your ambition, your will, your strength, and your desires to make your way in the world on your own and to state your opinions with no apologies in the back of some far-off storage unit of the mind. Millennials are smarter on this front, and presumably twenty-first-century parents will avoid shaming their children for failing to exhibit the proper gendered behavior, although they’ve got the Battle of the Almighty Screen to wage. I don’t envy them.

  Do women have deeper, denser shadows than men? I’m guessing yes. Remember the Angel in the House? That bitch has become the Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave. We still somehow feel the need to suppress qualities that might be viewed as positive were they exhibited by men, because power, strength, ambition, aggression, anger, and speaking your mind with passion and clarity, otherwise known as being “shrill,” are still considered negative female traits.

  This brings us back to feelings of shame, the source of much of our drive to improve ourselves. Recall the definition: “. . . the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” Our perceived flaws are often related to our shadow side. We’ve tucked so much of what we’ve been taught were unacceptable traits into our shadow that it takes very little to kindle shame, which is activated not when someone else is judging us, as it often seems, but when we are judging ourselves.

  How do we cope with our negative self-assessment? We attempt to distance ourselves from it by staying silent and pretending it doesn’t exist. We attempt to solve the shame through self-improvery. Or we try to “beat” shame by projecting it onto others.

  This is evident when you’re being an asshole for no discernable reason.

  Like most women, I wasn’t an innocent bystander in the mommy wars. I’ve supported myself and often the whole family with my writing, which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is like having a lemonade stand for a living. I chose this life. I enjoy this life. It’s always interesting, if fiscally harrowing. That said, three weeks after my daughter was born, I had a huge deadline. My husband was a film sound designer and was out of town on a job. It was a dumb assignment that didn’t even pay particularly well, and anyone else would have turned it down, by whom I mean anyone who wasn’t desperate for money. Fortunately, I was a champion breastfeeder and my daughter was a champion breastfeedee. I hooked her up to one boob, freeing me to type with one hand. The day before the piece was due, I came down with a raging case of mastitis.

  My new-mom friend Julia worked for a company in Portland that offered a very generous maternity leave package. The week before her maternity leave was up, she decided to quit to stay home with her son because her husband was in finance and made a boatload. When I told her about the dumb deadline and the mastitis—I still remember my teeth chattering with the fever/chill combo as I talked to her on the phone—she offered to come over to help with the baby so I could finish the piece. She had thoughtfully taken her son to her mother’s house, so she could focus on taking care of my daughter. She brought some homemade pumpkin bread with her, which was very nice, and also as annoying as fuck.

  She cut us each a slice of pumpkin bread and asked, “So how on earth did this happen?”

  At that moment, I decided we could never be friends. She had an infant and the time to bake homemade pumpkin bread, while her husband was at work making money with other people’s money, or whatever it is finance guys do. She wasn’t one of those stay-at-home moms who came down with mastitis, because those who did, like me, were idiots who forgot that you needed to switch boobs, that you couldn’t just hang your baby on your nipple the way you might hang a tote bag on a hook. I felt myself withdraw. The baby was napping anyway, and after we ate our bread I told her she didn’t need to stick around. She looked perplexed. I never called her again, and when mutual friends wondered if I’d seen Julia lately, I said she was too bougie for me, and also, I couldn’t stand how she thought she was all that—nineties speak for entitled. I knew what I was doing, having been an avid reader of The Portable Jung, but I did it anyway. I was pissed off at myself for pursuing two conflicting realities, and thinking because I desired them, I was entitled to them. I wanted to be a writer—I was a writer—but I spent money as if I were Julia, with her husband in finance. Had I accepted my choice, and budgeted accordingly, I wouldn’t have needed to take the stupid assignment that led to my having to crash a deadline when my daughter was a newborn.

  Jung believed it was a rare person who could ever truly confront his shadow. The best most of us can do is to identify our projections. To be aware that we’re overreacting or casting harsh and often irrational judgment, for no reason that someone without our issues can see, is a small but important step toward inviting the shadow into consciousness. Leaving our shadow to molder like the leftovers at the back of the fridge, all the while chasing after the female ideal with her artificially generated happy thoughts, does nothing but deepen the darkness and keep us further alienated from our True Selves.

  Self-policing our thoughts and feelings so that we’re always reframing something unfortunate as a terrific opportunity, or telling ourselves that everything happens for a reason, or refusing to allow ourselves to accept traits that we’ve been led to believe have no place in our best self doesn’t make us better people; it just makes us limited people.

  We’re so afraid of the messy stuff inside of us. In 1963, illustrator Maurice Sendak published a 338-word children’s book that was panned upon publication and kept cropping up on banned-books lists. The pearl clutchers argued that Where the Wild Things Are was too dark and too negative for children. Sendak, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, knew all about the muck in the human soul. Most of his family had perished in the Holocaust. Given that, he thought kids were more complex and made of stronger stuff than people imagined.

  The story is about a boy named Max whose mother sends him to bed without supper for misbehaving. To channel his rage, he enters a private ju
ngle populated by fanged creatures over whom he reigns as king. Even though Max grows to love the wild things, and the wild things him, he decides to sail home to his room and to his family, whom he knew loved him. Waiting for him at home was his dinner, “still hot.”

  It remains one of the most beloved books of all time in part because of Sendak’s message: we all have a wild thing inside of us, which we can manage with the help of our imagination. Rather than trying to improve the qualities that feel as if they don’t jibe with what we imagine to be our best self, work with them. The ways in which we cope with the dark side, where the wild things are, is a component of our individuality. Remember the pumpkin bread Julia brought me that day? We found each other on Facebook a few years ago. She tried to recall the last time we’d seen each other—I remembered it exactly. When I mentioned the pumpkin bread, she LOLed. She said she’d baked it as a peace offering. I was momentarily confused. “Peace offering?” I typed.

  “I was so jealous that you got to stay home with your baby and write, I had to do something. I felt like a total bitch!”

  Just now this beautiful thought popped up on Instagram: “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” Unless being angry makes you happy. Which would be one of those shadow-side things that one might be reluctant to admit to oneself. Speaking only for myself, I love a good, sweary, mean-spirited rant. And if that’s part of your shadow side, you should too.

  Chapter 7

  True You Rising

  I have accepted fear as part of life—specifically the fear of change . . . I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back. . . .

  —Erica Jong

  The first rule of yeah, no, not happening is come as you are. The person who says fuck it all is the person you are right this minute. There’s no hopping in the wayback machine to undo the year you spent being bulimic or spending your paycheck on hair extensions, no throwing in the towel because you didn’t take that scholarship or married that lunkhead straight out of high school. Our intention is not simply to stop doing the stuff we don’t want to do, but also to dismiss the fantasy that if we were just better, our lives would be better. Part of this fantasy sometimes consists of, once again, imagining a down-to-the-studs remodeling of our personalities. Filled with resolve, we think, I’m saying no to all this bullshit, NOW!

  Let’s say you’re someone who has put on makeup every morning for twenty years before you left the house. Or started a new diet every time you’ve felt a twinge of insecurity. Or worked extra hard to be nice to people you don’t like, because you’re afraid of coming off as a bitch. Or felt the need to crank up the holiday-making machine at the end of every year, for fear of neglecting your domestic duty. You’re a woman who’s been socialized in this culture, and some of this shit is ingrained, and the first thing to which we must all say yeah, no, not happening is further judging ourselves as flawed, inferior, imperfect.

  In this moment, that’s just you. Maybe you’ll come to realize you can forgo the fake eyelashes, or whatever they’re telling us we need this minute, maybe not. Is it a waste of time and money? For some yes, for others no. For some it’s bowing to the impossible rules as set forth by the patriarchy, for others it’s a way to have a few moments to collect yourself before the day begins and literally put on your game face. Maybe you’ll come to realize you can safely dislike someone and still accord them the respect they deserve as a fellow human trying to make their way. Maybe you’ll one day conclude that the holidays are a lot more fun when it’s a group effort, and not, as my friend Connie says, “an annual festival put on by women for the enjoyment of men and children.”

  Even though I’ve said yeah, no, not happening to a lot of self-improvement, I have not sworn off many self-improvery habits that take time, money, energy, and may best be categorized as shoring up the ruins. I dye my hair. I have strong opinions about concealers. I am vain about my exquisite feet and I love sandals. Also purses and fine cotton T-shirts. I put on mascara before I go out of the house. Beneath the mascara I wear lash building primer even though I don’t think it does any good. I’ve been known to get my eyebrows waxed. I don’t get manicures, but I do have one of those buffer blocks that removes nail ridges. I have some forearm flab (yes, forearm flab) about which I despair but forget about until I see a picture of myself with my arms crossed. I exercise three or four times a week, but learned long ago to say yeah, no, not happening to any kind of athletic event that requires a training log. My eating regime involves staying away from potato chips, eating an apple a day, and having a green salad with dinner.

  I have faith that if you’re reading this book, you already have a good idea about the expectations from which you’d like to free yourself, and that’s where you should start. The things you feel you “should” do but can’t abide. The things that, when doing them, make you feel irritated or depressed. The things you believe to be a waste of time, energy, and money. The things that make you feel unknown to yourself.

  I polled my friends, via email, over cocktails, and on social media, and here is a sample of when they’re saying yeah, no, not happening, and the spirit in which they’re saying it:

  Any of those fucking “look at me” exercises (yeah, I’m talking to you, Zumba)

  Being “not quite so overbearing”

  Heels

  Jogging

  Choking down dietary supplements that, according to my doctor, result only in “very expensive pee”

  Giving up carbs

  Supporting middle-aged white guys in their misguided thinking

  All bullshit pyramid schemes selling upscale skin care, supplements, and essential oils

  Quinoa

  Kale, kale, and did I mention kale?

  Worrying about wrinkles

  Blowing curly hair straight

  Lipstick

  Camping, hiking, and all that outdoorsy shit that’s supposed to make you seem cool and adventuresome

  Doing more than my share just to avoid a fight

  Shapewear

  Holding my tongue rather than calling people on their shit

  Going to concerts, festivals, and parties where there’s no seating

  Opera

  Bush-hair removal

  The assumption that I am the “doer” in the house

  Reiki nonsense

  Motivational memes with the depth of a bumper sticker

  Hiding my flabby upper arms

  Clique-ish mom groups

  Believing a clean house makes me a better woman

  Pretending to be extroverted

  Creepy self-help evangelists who tell you self-discovery costs $10,000 or a sustaining donation

  Mommy wars

  Phony-baloney positivity

  Celery juice

  Learning to speed read (why rush through something you enjoy, for fuck’s sake?)

  Being that woman who produces a Thanksgiving extravaganza, then trying to convince myself I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend hundreds of dollars on food and a week preparing a meal that is consumed in twelve minutes

  Pretending to be excited over recipes, and cooking in general, when I’m just not, and also not feeling guilty or apologizing for this

  Taking anything to the next level

  A friend was in the women’s locker room at the gym after a circuit-training class. She was a regular, as was the young woman using the locker next to hers. My friend said anyone would look at this young woman and find her fitter and prettier than most people. Out of the corner of her eye, my friend watched as the young woman squeezed herself into some shapewear, followed by a pair of jeans she had to jump up and down to zip. The young woman had literally broken a sweat. Then she put her feet, which had a Band-Aid on each heel, into a pair of stilettos. My friend and the woman traded glances, and my friend said, “That looks like an awful lot of work.” The woman rolled her eyes and said, “I don’t even know why I do it.”

  If you don’t even know why y
ou do it, try saying yeah, no, not happening, and see how that feels. If you find you still dig it, then carry on.

  The afternoon of the morning I decided to swear off self-improvement I made a list of all the things I will never improve. It was exhilarating to say fuck it all to everything I felt I should be doing for reasons I couldn’t even remember. After I made my list, I had a cup of coffee with whole milk and an old-fashioned doughnut. Then I had another doughnut, because I felt like it. I was relieved of guilt for skipping the greens in my morning smoothie, as I sometimes did, because I couldn’t bring myself to face fucking Swiss chard at 8:00 a.m. Anyway, not that I was counting calories, because yeah, no, that was totally not happening anymore, but I bet my usual smoothies, made with berries, a frozen banana, some greens, protein powder, almond milk, almond butter, and a little honey, had as many calories—maybe more!—than two old-fashioned doughnuts. While I ate, I read William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, my favorite book of the decade, even though the few women who appear are underdeveloped girlfriends and wives, something I despised. I am aware that you’re not supposed to eat and read at the same time, but yeah, no, not happening. The relief I felt was immense, as if I were on vacation from a very strict girls’ academy that demanded perfection and did not grade on a curve.

  It was 9:20 a.m. I hadn’t journaled, tracked my productivity, exercised, meditated, rolled my eyes while I phoned in some affirmations (no wonder the universe wasn’t cooperating), or planned the daily menu, making sure to include five (or was it nine now?) servings of fruits and vegetables, açai berries, and lots of turmeric. I loaded the dishwasher. I texted Yoyo! to my daughter—our way of checking in. I went out front and watered the begonias struggling to stay alive in the decorative pots on either side of the front steps. I went out back and picked up the dog poop. I deleted all my newsletter subscriptions to websites that peddled self-improvement, including the one I despised most, which conflates spirituality and beauty: one day offering courses on seeking the divine in everyday life, the next trotting out “21 Day Booty Core.”