As Gloria Steinem wrote, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Seeing the rigged game isn’t a neutral experience; you’ll probably feel some feelings about it as you go through the world spotting the ways the game is rigged and the ways the world is lying to you about the ways the game is rigged. These feelings are uncomfortable, and when they get really intense it’s tempting to ignore them and just stop playing. In other words: burnout. So let’s not ignore them.
Rage is a big one. A lot of us are carrying around decades of incomplete stress response cycles because Human Giver Syndrome told us we had to be happy and calm and not make other people uncomfortable with our anger. Move, sing, scream, write, chop wood. Purge the rage. Complete the cycle.
Grief is another big one. We mourn for the loss of the life we might have had, the person we might have been, if we had been born into a world that believed women are 100 percent people and that men should be attentive to the needs of others. And it’s complicated, too, because this lying, unfair world made you who you are, and a lot of who you are is pretty amazing, right? Not perfect, no one is perfect, but wow. Wow.
What do you do with the grief? You go through the tunnel. You allow it to move through you. Each time, your best self, the part that makes you go “Wow!”—even if you don’t yet know who she is—will be with you as you grieve; she is the light at the end.
And there’s despair. Despair is different from grief. It’s the helpless, hopeless feeling we get when our Monitors give up on a goal, deciding it is unattainable.
Fortunately, science can help us with despair.
2. Unlearning Helplessness: Do a Thing
In those small, short-term experimental conditions, just telling the helpless human that the game is rigged was enough to make them feel better. But when learned helplessness has been induced over a lifetime of experience, you need to teach your nervous system that it’s not helpless.
How?
You do something—and “something” is anything that isn’t nothing. The patriarchy (ugh) is designed like the perfect shuttle-box experiment, frustrating and disappointing us over and over until we give up. But that research also demonstrated how helplessness can be unlearned.
Here’s how they did it for dogs: After inducing learned helplessness, experimenters physically dragged the dogs over the barrier to the safe side of the shuttle box, over and over. By moving its body and consequently changing its situation, the experimenters led the dog to learn that its physical efforts could result in change.
Humans can unlearn helplessness the same way. In chapter 1, we learned that you don’t have to deal with a stressor directly to deal with the stress itself. Helplessness works the same way. When you feel trapped, free yourself from anything, and it will teach your body that you are not helpless.
For instance, feeling helpless and hopeless after watching news about the state of international politics? Don’t distract yourself or numb out; do a thing. Do yard work or gardening, to care for your small patch of the world. Take food to somebody who needs a little boost. Take your dog to the park. Show up at a Black Lives Matter march. You might even call your government representative. That’s great. That’s participation. You’re not helpless. Your goal is not to stabilize the government—that’s not your job (unless you happen to be a person whose job that is, in which case you still need to deal with the stress, as well as the stressor!)—your goal is to stabilize you, so that you can maintain a sense of efficacy, so that you can do the important stuff your family and your community need from you. As the saying goes, “Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.” And “something” is anything that isn’t nothing.
It’s likely that you’ve received the message that when you’re feeling overwhelmed with helplessness it’s because you just can’t be “rational,” you’re just overreacting, and the problem is your “mindset” or your weakness or just generally your fault. You should be able to do just as well as any man, and if you can’t, the problem is you.
It’s not true, and the people who say it is are gaslighting you. The truth is you learned helplessness from experiences of being helpless.
We unlearn helplessness by doing a thing—a thing that uses our body. Go for a walk. Scream into a pillow. Or, as Carrie Fisher put it, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” Reverse the effects of helplessness by creating a context where you can do a thing.
In the animated movie Finding Nemo, we get to know Dory the blue tang, a friendly fish who suffers from short-term memory loss. Famously voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, Dory advises her friends to “just keep swimming” when things are difficult. She even sings a song about it. In Finding Dory, we learn (spoiler) that it was her parents who taught her that even with her short-term memory loss, there was always a way to get through a difficulty. If you just keep swimming, you’ll find your way. And when your brain wants to give up because there’s no land in sight, you keep swimming, not because you’re certain swimming will take you where you want to go, but to prove to yourself that you can still swim.
3. Smash
You’re completing the cycle. You’re doing things, using your body, to remind yourself that you are not helpless.
Step three: Smash the patriarchy. Smash it to pieces.
You smash it by making meaning—engaging with your Something Larger in ways that heal Human Giver Syndrome.
SMASHIN’-SOME-PATRIARCHY WORKSHEET
My Something Larger is:
Something I do to engage with my Something Larger that also smashes some patriarchy is:
I’ll know I smashed some patriarchy when…(soon, certain, positive, concrete, specific, and personal):
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A caveat: Don’t smash with the goal of “ending the patriarchy.” You are not going to see the end of gender inequality or racial inequality or any other inequality. You are going to see progress, just as you can see that progress has happened over the last hundred years. Instead, your goal—which, remember, should be soon, certain, positive, concrete, specific, and personal—can be something like “Buy all my friends’ birthday presents from woman-owned stores.” Or “In every meeting, invite women to speak first.” Or “Give my boys a lesson each day in being a human giver.” Or just “SMASH DAILY.” Put a reminder in your calendar. Did you smash today?
Sophie was practicing explaining the unwinnable game to Emily.
“Nobody would need this workshop if they could just spend an hour being me. People ask if my hair is real. My doctor tells me I’m too fat for him to take my pulse. Teenagers throw garbage at me from their car while I’m walking down the sidewalk…”
“And yet you don’t blow up the building,” Emily said. “You’re a frickin’ superhero.”
“Yes,” Sophie said emphatically. “Racism, sexism, sizeism, microaggressions, macroaggressions—this system is brutal, and there’s no beating it. It’s the Kobayashi Maru. None of us is getting out of this alive. But I win every time because I prove my character. Look how strong it made me. Look how smart it made me.” She gestured down at herself. “Look how hot it made me.”
Emily nodded. “You are the new hotness.”
What Emily meant by that is the subject of the next chapter.
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