If you only have 1 minute…

1 Thought For You To Finish

This week’s prompt comes from my inspiring conversation with Dr. Amy Beckley, CEO of Proov. Dr. Amy has researched how breast cancer metastasizes and how women can measure their fertility. “Science is just so cool”, she told me. She would love to know your answer:

“If I could solve one scientific problem, it would be…”

Breast Cancer Cells by the National Cancer Institute

🎧 Listen to Dr. Amy’s conversation on the Misseducated Podcast here🎙

Let us know your answer in the comments!

Have a great week,

Tash 🤗

If you only have 3 minutes…

2 Thoughts from Me

“My great-grandmother in Ireland kept chickens, so she could trade the eggs for sugar and flour and raise her six children. I have birth control. I have a good education. I better not fuck this up.”
“Men have feelings. Men have vulnerabilities. And men deserve to have a space where they can safely express these, especially in their close romantic relationships. Men deserve to be cuddled too. We, as females and as a society, can still love them for it. And we should do more to provide them with that.” I Pegged My Boyfriend.

2 Thoughts from Others

Dr. Amy Beckley shared these thoughts on the Misseducated Podcast:

“If you think about who’s educating the society right now, it’s not the generic medication companies that will get a $10 co-pay from you. It is a Big Pharma that makes $40,000 off an IVF cycle. And I said, hmm, I think women need better education and better tools.”
“The number one crisis we have in our economy right now is our inability to reproduce our working class. Inflation, the cost of childcare and the cost of IVF. Millennials are like, forget it, I’m just going to be childless and I’m going to travel the world. There’s no incentive anymore. I think countries have to pay more attention to it.”

If you only have 10 minutes…

Behold, Part #3, the last installment of my longer piece, “How to Build Creative Courage: On Escaping The Tyranny of Comparing Yourself To Other People.”

Remember that you can always take the next train

I didn’t study English Literature in college. Instead, I chose to study Business. When I decided a couple years later that I wanted to become a writer, this immediately became a painful source of insecurity for me. All the successful writers, I thought, had studied English Literature at university. They were book worms since they came out of the womb, but that wasn’t me. How could I have the audacity to call myself a writer without any of these necessary qualifications?

One day, when I was still living in New York City, I was rushing out the door (though I can’t even remember where I was going). I sprinted to the subway, and when I got there, the train doors closed in my face.

“Fuck,” I cried, as the passengers inside glanced up at me coolly, well on their way to their destinations. I was going to miss all my connecting stops, and I’d practically have to be airlifted by private helicopter to have any chance of making it on time.

I frantically refreshed the Google Maps route on my phone again and again. Nothing changed. Not my transfer stops. Not my arrival time. Google Maps was obviously broken. I ran up the stairs to try and get phone signal to reroute my journey. Except that it was the right journey. There was another train coming almost immediately behind it. I dashed down the stairs again and leapt into the subway car just before the doors closed. I was flustered until we left the next station. But, I had made it.

In this embarrassing experience, I learnt that we are all on our own journeys. We can’t go back and change the past, but we can always take the next train. There are always beginner courses we can take to study our craft. There are always nights where we can read more books to improve our literature skills. Rather than beating myself up for not studying English Literature at university, I’m now spending my time writing new short stories, getting feedback on my pieces (like this one) and publishing them on my Substack.

It may take us longer, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we will all get to our destinations eventually. And if I find myself worrying about this, I think about the women in their 80s in my writing classes, and how powerful and amazing their stories are. As Charles Olson says in the poem, “Maximus to Himself”,

“We are all late in a slow time.”

Compare yourself to yourself

At the end of last year, I wanted to understand my website’s SEO. When I checked my analytics on SimilarWeb, I added the website of a female podcasting duo who I know as a benchmark. But when I compared our SEO rankings, I was met with shock and horror. Their website ranks higher than mine on Google! And their website isn’t even about writing! In fact, it has basically no writing on it at all. They were beating me at my own game. With this thought alone, I sat around for weeks feeling defeated.

I had long forgotten the words of psychologist Professor Heidi Grant, and the recommendations she gave in a talk for 99U. In it, she says,

“Instead of thinking about your performance relative to other people, people with a get-better mindset instead say no, what’s really important is: am I performing better than I did in the past? Am I learning? Am I getting better?”

Still down in the dumps, I decided to check my website SEO ranking again. In just two months since I started blogging more, my website had climbed almost 2 million spots in all ranked websites in the United States, from around 5,100,000^th to 3,200,000^th.

I had been so busy stressing about the podcast duo’s success that I hadn’t even noticed that my own website ranking had improved, a lot. I made a pact with myself that day: as much I can, I compare myself to myself. This has made a huge difference to my mental health, and not to mention my writing and my website ranking.

When we compare ourselves to ourselves, it helps us understand our abilities over time, and it highlights the areas where we still have room to grow. As Professor Heidi Grant directs us:

“It’s not: Am I the smartest person in the room? It’s: Am I smarter than I was a week ago, a month ago or a year ago because I’ve been taking the time to learn? Am I still improving?”

As a competitive person, I personally love this idea, because I find myself wanting to compete with myself and push myself more. It’s reassuring and motivating to look back in the last couple months and see how much I have improved. As Wolfgang Puck said,

“The grass is greener where you water it.”

Be discerning about which dreams are really yours

Scrolling through Instagram, I recently saw pictures of an old friend from college holidaying with her boyfriend on a beach in Hawaii. Before I could stop myself, I was hit by a flurry of thoughts. Why was I not on a beach in Hawaii with my very hot and very wealthy boyfriend? My measly salary could never compete with this romantic, candlelit dinner of purple-iris-garnished poke bowls! I was so quick to abandon not only myself, but also the life that I’ve been painstakingly building as an aspiring-creative living in Mexico.

Bridal showers. Weddings. Pregnancy announcements. Fall family photo shoots throwing piles of auburn leaves into the air. Under capitalism and this brave new world of Instagram advertising, there is no limit to the amount of socially manufactured crap that is sold to me as a woman. It makes me feel constantly lacking, lonely and inadequate about myself.

When we consume garbage content on social media, we start to long for dreams that are not really our own. Social media teaches us that there are no limits to how our lives could and should be better. Maybe we see pictures of our friend living out of a van, doing handstands against a backdrop of gorgeous mountains somewhere in the US. It starts to make us itch. Maybe we want this, too. But then, if you think about the reality of living out of that tiny van, with no shower, in the winter, and having no personal space away from your partner. That actually sounds kind of…awful.

I encourage you to consume things on social media cautiously. When I find myself obsessing about having the perfect gender reveal for my imaginary child even though I don’t have a partner yet, I know it’s time to put my phone down, delete my Instagram app again, and slowly back away. You’re good as you are, sweetcheeks. And remember: Garbage in, garbage out.

Focus on Intrinsic Goals and Creating From A Spirit of Service

I recently found out about Miriam Haart, a Stanford student, engineering extraordinaire and personality on the Netflix show, My Unorthodox Life. Miriam has a podcast called Faking It which also focuses on issues for people with vaginas. In fact, she’s interviewed at least two of the same people I’ve interviewed for Misseducated, except that her personal following is currently 260x greater than mine.

When I thought about how massive her following is compared to mine, I felt a deep, sinking feeling in my chest. My efforts to start those conversations with my podcast seemed a bit pointless, didn’t they? If I can’t impact more than a quarter of a million people, what is the point of doing it? I should probably reconsider my aspirations to advocate for change for people with vaginas. And I should probably return to the corporate world with my tail between my legs, I thought.

In fact, I was being swayed by the dangerous extrinsic goals of status and popularity. As researchers like Emeritus Professor Tim Kasser have found, people who focus on extrinsic goals, or getting rewards, praise and stuff that is external to us, are significantly more dissatisfied and depressed. (According to the documentary, “Happy”, the other two main areas of extrinsic goals in addition to status and popularity are money, or seeking financial success, and image, or trying to look good and have the right appearance).

Instead, Kasser encourages us to focus on intrinsic goals, or goals that are inherently satisfying to us as humans. The three areas of intrinsic goals they have studied are:

Personal growth, or trying to become who we really are
Having close connected relationships with family and friends
Community feeling, or having a sense of wanting to help the world be a better place

When I think about my podcast as a way for me to reach my intrinsic goals, it takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m not doing it for popularity or status. I’m doing it for my personal growth, as I want to develop my interviewing and public speaking skills. I am also doing it for that community feeling, by amplifying stories from the female experience and giving more credit to women who have been historically overlooked.

Intrinsic goals present us with a more calming and satisfying outlook on life. They help us see that it doesn’t matter if we improve one thousand people’s lives or one person’s life. Our creations are a gift for the betterment of others. And that feels inherently rewarding. The more I focus on my intrinsic goals, the less being an Instagram influencer matters to me.

As Julia Cameron encourages us,

“Why don’t you try writing from a spirit of service?”

Conclusion

Reflecting on this article, it is sad and a bit surprising to me that most of my issues with social comparison are rooted in Instagram. But perhaps this is the experience for many of us in our generation: social media is the front line of our internal battles for our own self-worth. Building our creative courage as free, self-expressive humans may well come down to our ability to manage how and why and for how long we scroll on the algorithms.

I would like to finish with the words of one of my writing teachers, Ann Randolph. Ann begins each class with an invocation, where she says,

“May I have the courage to speak my truth. May I honor my story and my voice, knowing my story and my voice matter.”

So, I hope you remember that your voice, your actions, your work and your story matter. They matter because they are yours. I encourage you to keep following your own creative dreams, and to make sure you’re only comparing yourself to how you were doing a month ago or a year ago. Good luck!

Thanks again to Alan Jinich and Joe Stonor for help with editing!

Misseducated

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