A mishmash newsletter

Friendships, pasta strainer blow dry, Snoop Dogg's affirmations & self-love versus self-deprecation

Hello,

How are you? I’m cranky. My mouth accidentally fell into half a bottle of red wine last night after a couple of months of drinking very little. Now I’m tetchy and headache-y but actually this is a good sign. It used to be that half a bottle wouldn’t even register… now my body is such a clean vessel that any booze is causing chaos. Hurrah.

In other news I came across this gorgeous sentence in a book review: ‘so many women are taking journeys these days I’m surprised anyone is home.’

I forwarded it to mum.

It’s been a full week of book writing/editing - another journey! - so this week I’ll just share a few links and bits of news.

First bit of news! Aisling, who some of you will remember from lockdown workshops, is holding a Boobs and Belly Love Massage and Meditation online 15th February. Everything Aisling does is fun and a bit magical and I always leave her sessions smiling. Do join.

And another clever friend Gary is also offering an online course designed to help you find your voice. Gary is a classically trained musician who has performed on West End stages and has also trained as a hypnotherapist. He helps people feel confident enough to do their thing in the world - whether performing on stages, speaking up at meetings, anything really… He does one to one work and online courses. The reviews he gets are rave. The music he composes is also lush, check that out too.

We’ll be Writing for Fun and Sanity every Saturday in February from the 11th. There has been a request to do evening sessions. Would that be better for some of you? Let me know what kind of day and time would be your preference.

And Natalie Golberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, the most gorgeous book about writing as a way of getting to know yourself and pay attention to the world, is running an online course. I have signed up. If you are interested check it out here.

Finally, quite a few of you bought Project You’s New Year Diary, created by Selina Barker who is a life coach and a friend. She is running workshops over the next few months and I plan on attending. Her approach is down to earth and energising.

Things I’m reading

Friendships

There is a lot being written about friendship at the moment. As people are getting married later in life or not at all, friendships are becoming more important. Instead of being a thing on the side they are, for many of us, central to our lives.

We might think they are supposed to come effortlessly but all relationships involve work and communication and resolving conflict, which is why some people are going to friendship counselling.

The rise in working from home, people moving and living alone means that a lot of people don’t have friends to call on and that is a source of shame. But there is nothing shameful about it - it’s a symptom of modern life.

This article by Anita Chaudhuri has some really interesting terms in it, including ‘friendship recession’ and ‘learned loneliness’ - which refers to how we can become so used to have few social connections that we don’t even realise we are lonely anymore, we just think we are in a bad mood and don’t know why. Some paragraphs from the article:

Meanwhile, in the US, the term “friendship recession” entered the lexicon after census data revealed that Americans were spending an ever-decreasing amount of time with friends. The blame cannot solely be put on the pandemic because the decline has been steady since 2014. A decade ago, people spent six and a half hours a week with close friends, but by 2021 that figure had plummeted to just 2hr 45min.

So what’s going on? Have we simply become allergic to other people? Psychologist Marisa G Franco, author of Platonic, believes that many of us are socially adrift without even being aware of it. “The issue we are seeing now is something called ‘learned loneliness’ – people have adjusted to isolation. It’s not that they have gone off socialising, it’s that they have learned to live with an unfulfilled need,” she says. “A recent study from Pew Research showed that 35% of people feel that socialising is less important than it was before the pandemic.”

Meanwhile this article introduces research which shows that our relationships are the single most important thing to our health and happiness and yet we give less and less time to them. The article suggests literally totting up the number of hours you spend with the people you love and asking is it enough? It might be that you only saw your best friend for two days over the last year for example. It talks about the importance of building up ‘social fitness’. it might feel like an effort to keep up with people but the more we do it the more we do it and the better we feel.

I’m writing all this while spending no time with friends as I get on with book writing… but it’s not forever. As my best friend put it ‘I’m being there for you by not being there.’

Self-love / self-acceptance / self-i’m-ok-could-be worse…

I’ve been reading and writing about self-love this week and came across this quote from the late great feminist writer bell hooks who was talking about re-reading her old work. She is quoted in the interview as saying "‘When I was reading The Will to Change in preparation for talking to you - I hadn’t read it in a couple of years - I was like, “bell hooks, this is a really good book and I think that you should just close this book and take some time in silence to be thankful to the divine for your really smart mind and for the gift of these thoughts.” I don’t think I’d have been able to do that twenty years ago. I would have had some notion that '“you’re really full of yourself”, rather than “I can have an honest assessment of my value”. Women will love each other more and our daughters and people more if we can have that honest assessment.’

I love it, especially that last line. When we’re busy being self-deprecating and super critical, we are too lost in our self doubt to raise others up. Also by saying, “hey, I’m good at this” it allows other women to say the same, something that we are not conditioned to do. I wrote before about self-deprecation being a slippy slope and I need to remind myself of this more.

What I’m watching

Haven’t watched it yet but the Pamela Anderson doc on Netflix is supposed to be great.

I watched Empire of Light with Olivia Colman and thought it was wonderful. It’s set in a 1980s cinema in Hastings (a British seaside down) Colman’s character is a middle aged woman with mental health issues who falls in love with one of the young employees at the cinema. Their unlikely relationship changes both their lives. It really reminded me to be open to love in its most unlikely forms. A tender touching film.

Trend-setting news

I am not on TikTok but somehow my social media is full of a lot of trends that originate on TikTok. Here are few I became aware of this week:

People are using pasta strainers to blow dry their hair into curls and using lube as primer… and there is a scandal going on that’s been dubbed Lashlighting (a play on gaslighting) - where someone has been accused of pretending to review magic mascaras but has been cheating with fake eyelashes. Scandal!

Also rapper Snoop Dogg is doing affirmations for kids. Did you know that? I’m in the coffee shop now and it’s playing on the speakers. Ah.

Ok bye for now, book and painkillers to get back to.

Love

mx