11. I Would Have Never Made it as a Woman in Afghanistan

The Bold Acting Newsletter for June 18th, 2023

The fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death. The risk of the former is more immediate than the latter for most of us. And because we are inherently lazy creatures proximity plays an outsized role in how we determine what to worry about. (You can watch my video about prioritizing your worries here.)

We worry about being ostracized by our cohort: the people that make up our extended social circle. These aren’t restricted to our friends — they are normally people we can count on in spite of our behaviour. For some reason we include perfect strangers in the cohort of “People We Need to Please”.

We are constantly trying to measure-up with veritable strangers. Keeping up with the Joneses is like trying to keep up with the train that left a half hour ago. Moving targets are a recipe for missing the mark 99% of the time.

We don’t want to be the tallest poppy. This is a great Canadian tradition. Our fear of being different stops us from taking risks. But really, this is just a fear of being ourselves. We worry that ourself is not good enough.

Our self is the only self we have. It’s the only self possible. It’s your best chance.

This is how you can separate yourself from the pack. And the good news is you are an expert at it. You just have to get out of your own way.

Getting out of your own way means shedding the tells and tics you’ve adopted in order to survive an ordeal like childhood, high school, relationships, parents, reality.

When we leave the nest we see how hard life really is. I don’t mean being a woman in Afghanistan or anything serious. I can’t imagine. I mean I remember coming out of university (that my parent’s paid for) and being on my own for the first time and I could not believe how hard it was. I needed two jobs to stay afloat. I was living on the very margins. And margins are not only relative but difficult. Relative to the Afghani woman I’ve got nothing to complain about. Once we finish dismissing our complaints because there are people that have it harder than us we can admit that we build up walls just to get by. Whether you have all the privilege or none of it there will be suffering. We do it to ourselves.

Now that we know we have these walls we can set them aside. They’re actually tools. They got us this far didn’t they? They’ll always be there for us. But they’re not us.

“Feel the feelings, don’t be the feelings.”

This is my interpretation of living with the third eye. You gently observe your own behaviour. You tweak it like you would tweak a puppet if you held the strings. Nothing is a big deal. The good things in life are no longer met with baseless effusiveness. The bad things aren’t the end of the world. We are calm in the face of adversity. This is also called leadership.

The other day I was riding my bike home from the liquor store. The weather was fine, I was on my bike and I had a fresh bottle of gin that was going to help me make a very wet martini when I got home. (I love them with a lot of vermouth. It’s my new favourite.) When I was turning left from High Park Boulevard to Sunnyside Ave. a car to my left waited for me. The truck behind them honked impatiently. As I rounded the corner I set my sights on the driver of the truck. It was a Polish man in his 60s. As I gave him the hairy eyeball he said “Watch it, fruit loop.” A classic old man burn. A simple, reductive, lightly-homophobic shot across my bow. It made me nostalgic. I delighted in his high-level curmudgeonliness because I used to be indiscernibly angry like him. But I also realized three things:

1. There are plenty of dinosaurs roaming the Earth.

2. When you’re riding your bike on a sunny day there is little reason to throw shade on what should be joyful progress.

3. If I’m still alive after riding my bike through the streets of Toronto I’m doing great.

I know that if I’m breathing then everything is okay. I’ve lowered my expectations that much. For the result is really out of my hands. There are too many variables at play. All I can control is that I do more than people expect of me. I make “going the extra mile” my new “bare minimum”. But for a selfish, often-wrong headed person like me this takes time and practice.

Early to bed Early to rise Work real hard And advertise - Ted Turner The shortest distance home was to ignore the angry man in the truck. Ignoring potential conflict was not always my modus operandi. Too often I would look for confrontation. I got a real charge out of being right. But you can be right or you can be loved. Katy Perry said that.

The shortest distance to growth is facing the adversity in front of you. For me it’s organizing papers with numbers on them. I can’t stand them. I also have to relearn how to do a spreadsheet. For some it is public speaking. For others it is being ourselves. Whatever your thing is go after that which is in front of you right now.

And thank your god you don’t live in Afghanistan.   

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