Oh, Kendall! This is EXACTLY how I feel lately. Like a layer or two of skin has been rubbed off by their nonsense and I can no longer tolerate the BS entitlement. The space-taking, the objectifying, the easy assumptions. Shaking is how prey animals dispel the fright hormones after an encounter with a predator. It’s a powerful insight to acknowledge I’ve felt like prey my whole life. It messes with you. And it’s so healing to say, NO MORE. (I LOL’d at 8:00 being the middle of the night! 😂 So true.) I read your words and wrote these while listening to “Ocean.” It’s a marvel. 💙
It is a marvel, isn't it? Despite the fact that a layer or two of skin has been rubbed off (so very true) and we feel like prey, there is still music and community and this coven. Shaking alongside you, my friend. Thank you for being here.
Kendall, something in me went full Geiger Counter at that concert scene.
Surface Europe actually delivered one thing: political correctness changed the behavior. Men here learned to swallow the noodle-arm reach, to retire the “Make Her Stutter” games at least where someone could see them. We move through coffee shops and concerts with less of this particular nonsense now.
And yet — the belief roots right where it always rooted. A man who knows to hide it still knows. We just lost our Geiger Counter data.
What stopped me — stopped me cold — was your sentence where you handed Noodle Arms his joy back. He was entitled to his joy. Your whole body registered what was happening. And still your mouth opened and delivered “yeah, it’s all good.”
A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred. Even while John Butler unspools twelve minutes of oceanic grace two feet away.
Here’s what decades outside every dominant group actually taught me — as someone who always landed on the edge of whatever room I walked into: when you belong nowhere, the compliance math shifts. Nobody expects you to play along, so you gain something odd: the freedom to enforce your own edges. I pushed back. Hard sometimes, into very uncomfortable territory for the men involved. And yes, I gathered flack for making people uncomfortable — as if my discomfort registered on a different scale entirely.
The difference lives here: I arrived at those encounters with nothing to protect. You did. The swans folded from galley foil, the pub invitations, the high fives — real things. Belonging runs deep in humans. And the game understood exactly what it dangled when it offered membership as the prize for swallowing the whole thing.
So when you say you’ll keep shaking until the stutter clears — I hear something more tangled than a vow. I hear you running the real arithmetic: what does piss off actually cost now, in the moment? And deciding — slowly, messily — the silence runs higher.
The shift already moved. It moves every time you write the thing you almost said.
My god, Jay. This whole thing left me with gooseflesh on my arms. I love that you tuned into that moment, where I said he was entitled to his joy, where my voice said words so automatically that I didn't even think about my own joy or my entitlement to it. This line, "A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred. Even while John Butler unspools twelve minutes of oceanic grace two feet away." YES. Exactly that.
Thank you for talking about the freedom to enforce your own edges. How you arrived with nothing to protect. How the shift changed the dynamic. It made me think about how Lizzy once talked about how her interactions with men became so entirely different when she shaved her head and stopped wearing makeup and performing traditional femininity. Not exactly the same, I know, but still it touches on this freedom from the scripted roles.
I am ready to forfeit belonging, to pay the "piss off" cost, in order to reclaim what is, and always has been, mine. Shift by shift, we move the needle. Thank you as always for meeting me with such humanity here.
What you say about Lizzy lands close to my own path, especially given the U.S. context. At the time, I still lived officially as female, yet I moved through the world as the half-boy I always was. In 1970, at age three, girls wore skirts and dresses, and their hair grew longer and longer. I wore shorts and kept my hair boyishly short. Later, I wore trousers and kept the short hair.
By fourth grade, peer pressure found me. The constant comments about how unfemale I looked and behaved seeped in. I started growing my hair and felt every millimeter of it. I even tried a bra, and it nearly suffocated me. I refused. I tried makeup for about four weeks, and, bear with the metaphor, it felt like an Indigenous person trying to behave like the dominant population while being told to dress up as an Indigenous person. Everything felt wrong. Awful. I stopped and carried zero regret.
In a strange way, it rendered me de facto invisible to the male gaze. I hardly ever had to endure sexual harassment or worse. Some guys still tried their “normal” luck anyway. I made my lack of interest very clear. In a way, yes, I did not offer, and the demand trickled down to almost nothing. My biography added an air of unapproachability, of unattainability, and it worked quite effectively. During my 25,000 miles of mostly Greyhound travel through the U.S., people addressed me as “Sir” about 80% of the time.
Much later, through my healing journey, I learned how many of my reactions, and even what I had mistaken for actions, came from conditioning: learned helplessness, reactance, and the old drive to fulfill other people’s norms, values, desires, orders, hopes, and expectations. By 2024, I felt clear enough to say 99.5% of it had served one purpose: keeping myself safe from every imaginable threat.
Most of my reactions reached my body at least a minute before they reached my consciousness. There I stood, watching myself repeat the same old behavior, out of step with how I wished and intended to act. By the time I saw what was happening, the moment for getting my foot into my own body’s door had already passed. I could barely watch the taillights of the missed train careen into the dark.
It frustrated the hell out of me.
So I worked on reducing the gap. Meditation, somatic practices, self-reflection. I practiced staying more and more in the true present moment of now, and now. Not only in meditation itself, also in my life. I practiced staying here, now, even when it felt uncomfortable or unpleasant. Stay kind. Stay open. Stay compassionate. Create as safe an inner environment as possible. Keep the intention to remain present in the present moment of now.
And it worked.
I’ll be frank: in 2020, the gap between body reaction and conscious awareness could span two weeks. In March 2024, I experienced my first live sit-in with my body’s present-moment reaction. I watched what happened inside my body and mind at the same time, in real time, through meta-cognition. I could feel the overwhelm arrive. I could see and feel the blue screen of my mind forming in real time, the whole system moving into whiteout, and the frustration rising with it, because I could watch and still change nothing.
Then, two weeks later, I realized I had only watched the consciously available part. My body had already begun shutting down before consciousness arrived.
When a programmed process starts running, stopping it can feel close to impossible. Yet I stayed with it. I had come this far. There had to be a way to reach the point where the “pause” every meditation teacher and many therapists speak about becomes available: the moment before the body starts its automatic program, ingrained through a lifetime of conditioning.
By the end of May 2024, I reached it. At first, I still could not press pause. Then I solved the riddle, and from that point onward, I gained access to this pause: the moment where we can actually tell our body how to react, act, or let the whole thing pass.
For me, this is the first part of true inner freedom. I can hold myself in limbo, so to speak, and examine what the heck is truly going on there: in mind, body, soul, and the whole inner team. Who wants to go? Who wants to stay? Who wants to protect? Who wants to live?
Jay, sorry for the delay in responding to this. I loved reading about your experience with not only the male gaze (or lack thereof), but also and especially your tending to that pause. I feel like this deserves a whole series, or a book. Please write it! There is such truth and alchemy here. The wisdom of our bodies really is something that I feel like we're just now waking up to as a collective after having fallen asleep so many moons ago. As with so many other things, there was a great numbing that happened as we evolved culturally from knowing our place in the world as animal beings to believing we somehow "moved beyond" that. And now that sleeping, numb knowing is reawakening, and as with a numb limb, it hurts like hell as it prickles back to life. It takes tending, as you speak about here. Thank you for reducing and, at times, eliminating the gap so that you can tell us about it. Ever in awe of the work you do, my friend.
Kendall, thank you for your trust in me and the encouragement. I am working on it. The personal memoir might still need a bit more time to be written. I am currently about to have developed a theory how we collectively landed here at this point in time after a development of a 1000 years, you in the USA me in Germany, and that currently takes precedent. And yet it is indeed much like you are referring to in those short sentences about the numb limb. Once I was awake I could not make myself willingly to go back to sleep.
Thank you, Jay. I appreciate you too, and your wisdom and your beautiful writing.
I read your second answer to Kendall. Your journey has indeed been a long one.
I hope that now will come the happiness you deserve.
(Anything is possible, as we know. But sometimes when things have been difficult for too long, it becomes too easy to forget that miracles can and do happen.)
Thank you for this beautiful piece, for stepping away from being one of the guys, for naming (with or without a stutter) all the small and seemingly innocuous acts of entitlement that nevertheless form part of patterns that aren't harmless but full of harm.
I couldn't have said it any better; "the small and seemingly innocuous acts of entitlement that nevertheless form part of patterns that aren't harmless but full of harm." All by themselves, sometimes these things seem hardly worth mentioning. But together, over a lifetime, it's a pattern worth shaking over! xoxo
Dear Kendall, I am laughing, I am crying, I am bristling, I am shaking but definitely not stuttering, and I am loving every word of this. I am done swallowing the rage and feeling the guilt, and making excuses and keeping the peace.
And what about asking FIRST FFS!? "I'm loving this and swept away by the music and you're cute and would you like to dance?", BEFORE the noodling arms and annoying space invading. To which a reply of "thank you, it's amazing isn't it and you're very kind but no thank you", would feel fine, and not as if you're having to justify yourself for not being 'grateful for the attention' or 'cool with the thing that they're already effing doing'.....
We're just DONE, right?? And I agree that whole conversation would have been so lovely if permission had been asked and respect had been the baseline. Why is that so hard? Why is decency such a radical notion? Sigh. Alas, thank you for being such an important part of this coven, Emily!
First; what great writing, Kendall. I enjoyed reading this from start to finish. Second; argh, those loud voices! But you are right; the ones who own them will not be thinking about it later, will not regret that they overpowered everyone in the room and managed to direct all the attention to themselves.
But you find your people, don't you? Or they find you. I found you. 🙏💚
And I’ve come back to add to this comment that you inspired a very long conversation between my wife and me about misogyny!
I love that you found me as well, Don, and I you. You're such a good man to stand beside. And I also love that this inspired a good conversation between you and your wife-- that's the highest praise! Here's to voices that are less overpowering, but so much more powerful in their restraint.
Thanks for sharing again from your heart, Kendall. This made me remember who I used to be. I was never the loud guy, and I’m too much of an introvert to flail on the dance floor, but I was the guy, at dinner parties with friends, where I assumed that what I had to say was vitally important. It’s painful to remember how easily I centered myself and my thoughts. After politely listening to others I would wait my turn and then I had THE thing to say. I can only say how grateful I am to have lived through enough self-imposed pain to arrive at a place of greater self-awareness. My toxic masculinity (I still can’t think of a better description) was a bit quieter, less voice-across-the-coffee-shop loud, but no less entitled.
Anyway, thanks again for another amazing essay. Much respect.
PS - on a happier note, last night my daughters and I attended the final concert in Bruce Springsteen’s Land of Hope & Dreams tour in DC. It was a privilege to be there: a night of protest, love and the best of patriotism. For the first time perhaps in decades I felt proud to be an American.
I love your commitment to and capacity for self-reflection here, Robert. Your story about having THE THING to say is so relatable. We're so inflated with our own special importance sometimes, especially when we are young. More so, I think, when the prevailing culture tells men that they are the authority on all things. It's just the water we are all swimming in. I'm so glad you've found your truer, more authentic voice now. And that Springsteen concert must have been so life giving!
This is so incredibly powerful. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been called a blue haired feminist since my late teens - where I used to shrink, now I grow. Yes I’m a feminist, yes I’m unapologetic, and yes I’m angry - you should be too. Misogyny hurts us all. I’ve never been one of the guys and I’m glad about it. I wrote in a cafe most days and that scene is upsettingly real. I was next to two young men talking about some young women in unflattering terms and I turned to them and asked them to mind there vocabulary as there were children around and I didn’t much care for it either. They were shocked to say the lest and sheepishly left. I was very proud of myself.
I’ve started to reclaim so of the male centered language too - my favourite is a “pain in the tit/vagina’ for any and all inconveniences (as a bonus it makes men very uncomfortable)
I’m very proud of you too! I feel like that pause between action and inaction can be so paralyzing, and the more we speak up, the less afraid we are. Bring on the blue haired feminists! And I am absolutely going to start saying, “pain in my tit.” 👏😂❤
Thank you for your solidarity, friend. Standing up and saying something does feel risky, but so do does silence. We got this, no matter what the committee says. ;)
Thank you for showing such vulnerability and for teaching me some of the subtleties of the feminine soul.
As a man, I find myself wishing I had a Geiger counter sensitive to other people's Geiger counters. Yet, as a physicist, I remember the warning we were always given: when the dose is too high, the Geiger counter falls silent—it goes deaf.
So thank you for the reminder of how important it is to be fully present with my whole being.
Thank you, friend. So happy to have you sitting in the circle. And I'm loving the inherent metaphor in the Gieger Counter going silent when the dose it too high! I need to sit with that one for a bit.
That's so interesting about how Geiger counters 'go deaf'... What a metaphor for how we can become complicit, complacent, dulled, desensitised, and even immobilised 💭
Thank you for talking about what so many of us don’t do or when we do, it comes out apologetic, complicit, sheepish, almost ashamed to be mentioning anything at all. Yet more and more we find our light, we see that the world doesn’t stop if something is said but a small shimmer within grows and becomes stronger❤️❤️
Wow, Vickie. ..."the world doesn’t stop if something is said but a small shimmer within grows and becomes stronger." Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Thank you for this.
Thank you for your honesty here. When we share the moments when we have faltered in speaking up and played a part in silencing our voices, we help others recognize it in ourselves and that’s where awareness lies and that’s where change starts. I see your story in my life and one situation is coming to mind right now and my heart breaks for those that are speaking their truth and being shunned for it.
My heart breaks for that as well, Brie. Which is why we need to embrace those being shunned and let them know that they are not alone. It's so powerful when we just say, "I believe you." And "Me too." xoxo
You touched me deeply with this wonderful piece! I’ve watched all of this happen repeatedly for over 60 years of my life—these teeth-gritting, inner-rage, absolutely unacceptable actions— and I’m thoroughly sick of it. In one example you shared: These loud boardroom voices in the spaces where we go for a quiet cup of coffee—booming and sucking all the air out of the room. It happened to me this morning in my local coffee shop. Two men sitting across the room from each other competing with their escalating voices and hearty forced guffaws. I ended up leaving because it was so obnoxious. We all get tired of having to leave.
You too with the coffee house shouting?? I would say this is a coincidence, but I'm afraid it's just the most common thing in the world. And i can imagine that after 60 years, it just becomes louder and louder and more and more intolerable. "We all get tired of having to leave." Amen to that, Mary-Jo.
Absolutely brilliant & so timely, sister Lamb. One of my favorite things about this story was how connected you felt at the concert. To Source, to everyone (maybe not noodle arms), and it reminds me of a phrase for that exact feeling, listening to magic in a crowd with others that Brenè Brown calls “collective effervescence” 🫧
Your stories ALWAYS take me to that place. I imagine all us readers swaying in the fizz of your chapters and echoes of your stories all over the world. Thank you 🙏
I love this so much: COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE! Leave it to Brene to find the perfect word for it. And yes, the connection to Source was the best part for me, too. Even with Noodle Arms, idiot that he was. We're all idiots sometimes. Love you so much, sis. xoxo
What compelling writing, what precise naming of the unspoken wallpaper women live with! Thank you for this, Kendall. I’m going to share it with my granddaughter.
Glorious song you shared! Thank you. And as for your words, they rang so true that I found myself anxious as I read them. Those situations are SO NOT OK. And those 3 am re-hashes of the frustration of being forced to deal with that sort of selfish idiocy - oh yeah!
Oh, Kendall! This is EXACTLY how I feel lately. Like a layer or two of skin has been rubbed off by their nonsense and I can no longer tolerate the BS entitlement. The space-taking, the objectifying, the easy assumptions. Shaking is how prey animals dispel the fright hormones after an encounter with a predator. It’s a powerful insight to acknowledge I’ve felt like prey my whole life. It messes with you. And it’s so healing to say, NO MORE. (I LOL’d at 8:00 being the middle of the night! 😂 So true.) I read your words and wrote these while listening to “Ocean.” It’s a marvel. 💙
It is a marvel, isn't it? Despite the fact that a layer or two of skin has been rubbed off (so very true) and we feel like prey, there is still music and community and this coven. Shaking alongside you, my friend. Thank you for being here.
I second this, Julie! And holy cow, that song!!!💜
Kendall, something in me went full Geiger Counter at that concert scene.
Surface Europe actually delivered one thing: political correctness changed the behavior. Men here learned to swallow the noodle-arm reach, to retire the “Make Her Stutter” games at least where someone could see them. We move through coffee shops and concerts with less of this particular nonsense now.
And yet — the belief roots right where it always rooted. A man who knows to hide it still knows. We just lost our Geiger Counter data.
What stopped me — stopped me cold — was your sentence where you handed Noodle Arms his joy back. He was entitled to his joy. Your whole body registered what was happening. And still your mouth opened and delivered “yeah, it’s all good.”
A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred. Even while John Butler unspools twelve minutes of oceanic grace two feet away.
Here’s what decades outside every dominant group actually taught me — as someone who always landed on the edge of whatever room I walked into: when you belong nowhere, the compliance math shifts. Nobody expects you to play along, so you gain something odd: the freedom to enforce your own edges. I pushed back. Hard sometimes, into very uncomfortable territory for the men involved. And yes, I gathered flack for making people uncomfortable — as if my discomfort registered on a different scale entirely.
The difference lives here: I arrived at those encounters with nothing to protect. You did. The swans folded from galley foil, the pub invitations, the high fives — real things. Belonging runs deep in humans. And the game understood exactly what it dangled when it offered membership as the prize for swallowing the whole thing.
So when you say you’ll keep shaking until the stutter clears — I hear something more tangled than a vow. I hear you running the real arithmetic: what does piss off actually cost now, in the moment? And deciding — slowly, messily — the silence runs higher.
The shift already moved. It moves every time you write the thing you almost said.
My god, Jay. This whole thing left me with gooseflesh on my arms. I love that you tuned into that moment, where I said he was entitled to his joy, where my voice said words so automatically that I didn't even think about my own joy or my entitlement to it. This line, "A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred. Even while John Butler unspools twelve minutes of oceanic grace two feet away." YES. Exactly that.
Thank you for talking about the freedom to enforce your own edges. How you arrived with nothing to protect. How the shift changed the dynamic. It made me think about how Lizzy once talked about how her interactions with men became so entirely different when she shaved her head and stopped wearing makeup and performing traditional femininity. Not exactly the same, I know, but still it touches on this freedom from the scripted roles.
I am ready to forfeit belonging, to pay the "piss off" cost, in order to reclaim what is, and always has been, mine. Shift by shift, we move the needle. Thank you as always for meeting me with such humanity here.
Kendall, thank you.
What you say about Lizzy lands close to my own path, especially given the U.S. context. At the time, I still lived officially as female, yet I moved through the world as the half-boy I always was. In 1970, at age three, girls wore skirts and dresses, and their hair grew longer and longer. I wore shorts and kept my hair boyishly short. Later, I wore trousers and kept the short hair.
By fourth grade, peer pressure found me. The constant comments about how unfemale I looked and behaved seeped in. I started growing my hair and felt every millimeter of it. I even tried a bra, and it nearly suffocated me. I refused. I tried makeup for about four weeks, and, bear with the metaphor, it felt like an Indigenous person trying to behave like the dominant population while being told to dress up as an Indigenous person. Everything felt wrong. Awful. I stopped and carried zero regret.
In a strange way, it rendered me de facto invisible to the male gaze. I hardly ever had to endure sexual harassment or worse. Some guys still tried their “normal” luck anyway. I made my lack of interest very clear. In a way, yes, I did not offer, and the demand trickled down to almost nothing. My biography added an air of unapproachability, of unattainability, and it worked quite effectively. During my 25,000 miles of mostly Greyhound travel through the U.S., people addressed me as “Sir” about 80% of the time.
Much later, through my healing journey, I learned how many of my reactions, and even what I had mistaken for actions, came from conditioning: learned helplessness, reactance, and the old drive to fulfill other people’s norms, values, desires, orders, hopes, and expectations. By 2024, I felt clear enough to say 99.5% of it had served one purpose: keeping myself safe from every imaginable threat.
Most of my reactions reached my body at least a minute before they reached my consciousness. There I stood, watching myself repeat the same old behavior, out of step with how I wished and intended to act. By the time I saw what was happening, the moment for getting my foot into my own body’s door had already passed. I could barely watch the taillights of the missed train careen into the dark.
It frustrated the hell out of me.
So I worked on reducing the gap. Meditation, somatic practices, self-reflection. I practiced staying more and more in the true present moment of now, and now. Not only in meditation itself, also in my life. I practiced staying here, now, even when it felt uncomfortable or unpleasant. Stay kind. Stay open. Stay compassionate. Create as safe an inner environment as possible. Keep the intention to remain present in the present moment of now.
And it worked.
I’ll be frank: in 2020, the gap between body reaction and conscious awareness could span two weeks. In March 2024, I experienced my first live sit-in with my body’s present-moment reaction. I watched what happened inside my body and mind at the same time, in real time, through meta-cognition. I could feel the overwhelm arrive. I could see and feel the blue screen of my mind forming in real time, the whole system moving into whiteout, and the frustration rising with it, because I could watch and still change nothing.
Then, two weeks later, I realized I had only watched the consciously available part. My body had already begun shutting down before consciousness arrived.
When a programmed process starts running, stopping it can feel close to impossible. Yet I stayed with it. I had come this far. There had to be a way to reach the point where the “pause” every meditation teacher and many therapists speak about becomes available: the moment before the body starts its automatic program, ingrained through a lifetime of conditioning.
By the end of May 2024, I reached it. At first, I still could not press pause. Then I solved the riddle, and from that point onward, I gained access to this pause: the moment where we can actually tell our body how to react, act, or let the whole thing pass.
For me, this is the first part of true inner freedom. I can hold myself in limbo, so to speak, and examine what the heck is truly going on there: in mind, body, soul, and the whole inner team. Who wants to go? Who wants to stay? Who wants to protect? Who wants to live?
It is possible.
Jay, sorry for the delay in responding to this. I loved reading about your experience with not only the male gaze (or lack thereof), but also and especially your tending to that pause. I feel like this deserves a whole series, or a book. Please write it! There is such truth and alchemy here. The wisdom of our bodies really is something that I feel like we're just now waking up to as a collective after having fallen asleep so many moons ago. As with so many other things, there was a great numbing that happened as we evolved culturally from knowing our place in the world as animal beings to believing we somehow "moved beyond" that. And now that sleeping, numb knowing is reawakening, and as with a numb limb, it hurts like hell as it prickles back to life. It takes tending, as you speak about here. Thank you for reducing and, at times, eliminating the gap so that you can tell us about it. Ever in awe of the work you do, my friend.
Kendall, thank you for your trust in me and the encouragement. I am working on it. The personal memoir might still need a bit more time to be written. I am currently about to have developed a theory how we collectively landed here at this point in time after a development of a 1000 years, you in the USA me in Germany, and that currently takes precedent. And yet it is indeed much like you are referring to in those short sentences about the numb limb. Once I was awake I could not make myself willingly to go back to sleep.
True inner freedom. It is possible. But sometimes that journey home can be long and difficult.
You have been strong enough and brave enough to have made it, Jay.
That line got me too. ‘A survival script so deeply grooved ………’
Jay, you have an ability to dive deep into the pulsing heart of things, and to then sum up what you see there so beautifully.
‘A survival script so deeply grooved we run it in the middle of something sacred.’ Yes.
Thank you so much Kay, I appreciate you. Just added a longish answer to Kendall’s answer to me, if you’re interested.
Thank you, Jay. I appreciate you too, and your wisdom and your beautiful writing.
I read your second answer to Kendall. Your journey has indeed been a long one.
I hope that now will come the happiness you deserve.
(Anything is possible, as we know. But sometimes when things have been difficult for too long, it becomes too easy to forget that miracles can and do happen.)
Thank you for this beautiful piece, for stepping away from being one of the guys, for naming (with or without a stutter) all the small and seemingly innocuous acts of entitlement that nevertheless form part of patterns that aren't harmless but full of harm.
I couldn't have said it any better; "the small and seemingly innocuous acts of entitlement that nevertheless form part of patterns that aren't harmless but full of harm." All by themselves, sometimes these things seem hardly worth mentioning. But together, over a lifetime, it's a pattern worth shaking over! xoxo
‘all the small and seemingly innocuous acts of entitlement that nevertheless form part of patterns that aren’t harmless but full of harm.’
Yes, exactly this.
Dear Kendall, I am laughing, I am crying, I am bristling, I am shaking but definitely not stuttering, and I am loving every word of this. I am done swallowing the rage and feeling the guilt, and making excuses and keeping the peace.
And what about asking FIRST FFS!? "I'm loving this and swept away by the music and you're cute and would you like to dance?", BEFORE the noodling arms and annoying space invading. To which a reply of "thank you, it's amazing isn't it and you're very kind but no thank you", would feel fine, and not as if you're having to justify yourself for not being 'grateful for the attention' or 'cool with the thing that they're already effing doing'.....
We're just DONE, right?? And I agree that whole conversation would have been so lovely if permission had been asked and respect had been the baseline. Why is that so hard? Why is decency such a radical notion? Sigh. Alas, thank you for being such an important part of this coven, Emily!
Yes to this. Asking permission and respect should be the baseline! We are DONE!
First; what great writing, Kendall. I enjoyed reading this from start to finish. Second; argh, those loud voices! But you are right; the ones who own them will not be thinking about it later, will not regret that they overpowered everyone in the room and managed to direct all the attention to themselves.
But you find your people, don't you? Or they find you. I found you. 🙏💚
And I’ve come back to add to this comment that you inspired a very long conversation between my wife and me about misogyny!
I love that you found me as well, Don, and I you. You're such a good man to stand beside. And I also love that this inspired a good conversation between you and your wife-- that's the highest praise! Here's to voices that are less overpowering, but so much more powerful in their restraint.
Thanks for sharing again from your heart, Kendall. This made me remember who I used to be. I was never the loud guy, and I’m too much of an introvert to flail on the dance floor, but I was the guy, at dinner parties with friends, where I assumed that what I had to say was vitally important. It’s painful to remember how easily I centered myself and my thoughts. After politely listening to others I would wait my turn and then I had THE thing to say. I can only say how grateful I am to have lived through enough self-imposed pain to arrive at a place of greater self-awareness. My toxic masculinity (I still can’t think of a better description) was a bit quieter, less voice-across-the-coffee-shop loud, but no less entitled.
Anyway, thanks again for another amazing essay. Much respect.
PS - on a happier note, last night my daughters and I attended the final concert in Bruce Springsteen’s Land of Hope & Dreams tour in DC. It was a privilege to be there: a night of protest, love and the best of patriotism. For the first time perhaps in decades I felt proud to be an American.
I love your commitment to and capacity for self-reflection here, Robert. Your story about having THE THING to say is so relatable. We're so inflated with our own special importance sometimes, especially when we are young. More so, I think, when the prevailing culture tells men that they are the authority on all things. It's just the water we are all swimming in. I'm so glad you've found your truer, more authentic voice now. And that Springsteen concert must have been so life giving!
This is so incredibly powerful. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been called a blue haired feminist since my late teens - where I used to shrink, now I grow. Yes I’m a feminist, yes I’m unapologetic, and yes I’m angry - you should be too. Misogyny hurts us all. I’ve never been one of the guys and I’m glad about it. I wrote in a cafe most days and that scene is upsettingly real. I was next to two young men talking about some young women in unflattering terms and I turned to them and asked them to mind there vocabulary as there were children around and I didn’t much care for it either. They were shocked to say the lest and sheepishly left. I was very proud of myself.
I’ve started to reclaim so of the male centered language too - my favourite is a “pain in the tit/vagina’ for any and all inconveniences (as a bonus it makes men very uncomfortable)
I’m very proud of you too! I feel like that pause between action and inaction can be so paralyzing, and the more we speak up, the less afraid we are. Bring on the blue haired feminists! And I am absolutely going to start saying, “pain in my tit.” 👏😂❤
Haha yay! I’m so glad to spread the phrase. I’d like it to be my lasting contribution to the language if I’m honest haha
Thank you for this, Kendall. You have expressed so exactly how these things feel.
The irritation spiralling to anger - but coming with these things the knowledge of what might happen if I do stand up and say or do something.
Then later, the Committee show up at my place too.
8pm is the middle of the night.
And I love that song too.
Thank you for your solidarity, friend. Standing up and saying something does feel risky, but so do does silence. We got this, no matter what the committee says. ;)
I’m happy to be walking with you, friend.
Oh Kendall,
Thank you for showing such vulnerability and for teaching me some of the subtleties of the feminine soul.
As a man, I find myself wishing I had a Geiger counter sensitive to other people's Geiger counters. Yet, as a physicist, I remember the warning we were always given: when the dose is too high, the Geiger counter falls silent—it goes deaf.
So thank you for the reminder of how important it is to be fully present with my whole being.
Tamás
Thank you, friend. So happy to have you sitting in the circle. And I'm loving the inherent metaphor in the Gieger Counter going silent when the dose it too high! I need to sit with that one for a bit.
That's so interesting about how Geiger counters 'go deaf'... What a metaphor for how we can become complicit, complacent, dulled, desensitised, and even immobilised 💭
Thank you for talking about what so many of us don’t do or when we do, it comes out apologetic, complicit, sheepish, almost ashamed to be mentioning anything at all. Yet more and more we find our light, we see that the world doesn’t stop if something is said but a small shimmer within grows and becomes stronger❤️❤️
Wow, Vickie. ..."the world doesn’t stop if something is said but a small shimmer within grows and becomes stronger." Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Thank you for this.
Thank you for your honesty here. When we share the moments when we have faltered in speaking up and played a part in silencing our voices, we help others recognize it in ourselves and that’s where awareness lies and that’s where change starts. I see your story in my life and one situation is coming to mind right now and my heart breaks for those that are speaking their truth and being shunned for it.
My heart breaks for that as well, Brie. Which is why we need to embrace those being shunned and let them know that they are not alone. It's so powerful when we just say, "I believe you." And "Me too." xoxo
My Geiger Counter is always handy. And sometimes it zaps, hard!!
Thanks Kendall. Your essay is the pulse that many of us are feeling now.
Shaking! Best QiGong move I love to use!! (And thanks for the link to the energizing music !!)
You're welcome! I love that you shake in QiGong. There is so much wisdom in that move!
Feels so good!!
You touched me deeply with this wonderful piece! I’ve watched all of this happen repeatedly for over 60 years of my life—these teeth-gritting, inner-rage, absolutely unacceptable actions— and I’m thoroughly sick of it. In one example you shared: These loud boardroom voices in the spaces where we go for a quiet cup of coffee—booming and sucking all the air out of the room. It happened to me this morning in my local coffee shop. Two men sitting across the room from each other competing with their escalating voices and hearty forced guffaws. I ended up leaving because it was so obnoxious. We all get tired of having to leave.
You too with the coffee house shouting?? I would say this is a coincidence, but I'm afraid it's just the most common thing in the world. And i can imagine that after 60 years, it just becomes louder and louder and more and more intolerable. "We all get tired of having to leave." Amen to that, Mary-Jo.
Absolutely brilliant & so timely, sister Lamb. One of my favorite things about this story was how connected you felt at the concert. To Source, to everyone (maybe not noodle arms), and it reminds me of a phrase for that exact feeling, listening to magic in a crowd with others that Brenè Brown calls “collective effervescence” 🫧
Your stories ALWAYS take me to that place. I imagine all us readers swaying in the fizz of your chapters and echoes of your stories all over the world. Thank you 🙏
I love this so much: COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE! Leave it to Brene to find the perfect word for it. And yes, the connection to Source was the best part for me, too. Even with Noodle Arms, idiot that he was. We're all idiots sometimes. Love you so much, sis. xoxo
What compelling writing, what precise naming of the unspoken wallpaper women live with! Thank you for this, Kendall. I’m going to share it with my granddaughter.
The wallpaper! Yes, that's a great way of thinking about it. Thank you, and I'm so glad you are going to share this with your granddaughter, Aileen!
Glorious song you shared! Thank you. And as for your words, they rang so true that I found myself anxious as I read them. Those situations are SO NOT OK. And those 3 am re-hashes of the frustration of being forced to deal with that sort of selfish idiocy - oh yeah!
Oh, the 3am rehash. What a waste of precious sleep! Maybe we should just put that song on next time and say, SHHHHHH. Just listen. ;)