We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere

Your head will present you with a thousand excuses, but you can and will find the time. You can and will find the space. You can and will find the courage. That which is no longer necessary to your well-being will fall away.

The Nine Principles that follow are for you personally and also for the world you inhabit.

They are not just for your yoga mat or your place of worship. They are for the big decisions and for the small. They work just as well in helping you choose how to vote as they do in the grocery store aisle as they do in your intimate relationships. Nothing is too important or too mundane for them to have an impact on. Don’t keep them just for crises – they will work in every aspect of your daily life. We promise.

This is a journey towards love.

Prepare to be amazed.

Principle 1

HONESTY: (#ulink_072fcd82-0161-5c4f-8e93-92510f186a48)

Getting Real

‘To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.’

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Honesty is the guide that leads us home. It returns us to our true selves and enables us to live authentically, courageously and congruently.

Most of us do our best to tell the truth. We might tell the occasional white lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or exaggerate a story for the sake of effect, but aside from that we try to be honest.

And yet, there is one person we lie to on a regular basis, perhaps even without realizing it – ourselves.

We all do it. We tell ourselves we’re OK when we’re not. We tell ourselves we don’t mind when we do and that we can’t when we can. We say yes when we mean no and no when we want to say yes. We override our instinct in the name of being practical or polite. We bury our dreams and then help others fulfil theirs. We disguise, shave and shape ourselves to conform to an artificial feminine ideal only to suffer the consequences: depression, relationship problems, anger issues, addiction and despair.

WE’s First Principle takes us inwards. It involves digging down beneath the surface of who we think we are, in order to reclaim our true selves.

It’s a process that involves discovering and discarding the lies and myths we’ve accumulated over the years, which have resulted in us becoming estranged from ourselves. It requires courage, commitment and self-care.

Most of us are called to this journey when we hit an obstacle in life – a relationship that’s ended badly, a betrayal or disappointment, or when one of the distractions or addictions we use to cope stops working. When our lives are ticking along and appear to be functioning, it’s easier to ignore that niggle deep in our soul, pleading for our attention.

But wherever you are in your life, and whatever is happening, WE’s First Principle will bring an enormous sense of relief and freedom. There is nothing quite like being able to say, ‘This is who I really am,’ and to feel truly glad about it.

Losing ourselves

‘Severe separations in early life leave emotional scars on the brain because they assault the essential human connection: the [parent–child] bond, which teaches us that we are lovable.’

JUDITH VIORST

From early childhood most of us start to lose touch with our authentic self.

Our instinctive need to be loved, feel safe and belong leads us to adapt. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, we shift in response to our parents’, teachers’ and peers’ perceptions of who we are and what we should be. And in the process we naturally abandon parts of ourselves.

The extent to which each of us does this largely depends on how well we are cared for in our early years. We rely on the world we’re born into to reflect back to us who we are. If the message we receive as babies and toddlers is that we’re loved and ‘enough’ just as we are, we’ll have a much greater chance of developing a resilient sense of self. The less secure we are during those early years, the more we adapt ourselves to try to get that missing approval.

We create false selves to ensure our emotional and sometimes physical survival – sub-personalities that are almost us but not quite. They help us to get our needs met at a time when we are too young and dependent to have any other choices. The problem comes when we continue to rely on them long after they’ve fulfilled their useful purpose. Often they become so habitual that we no longer realize they’re not who we really are.

EXERCISE 1: Would the Real Me Please Stand Up

This exercise will help you begin to reconnect with your authentic self.

Pause for a moment and think about which false selves you may have developed over your lifetime. Remember that each one of them came into existence to keep you safe. They’re not bad, they’ve just outlived their purpose and they prevent you from living authentically. Take out your journal. Close your eyes and allow yourself to slide backwards along the timeline of your life. Be as honest as you’re able about the sub-personalities you’ve developed.

For example, perhaps as a girl you relieved household tensions by making people laugh, so as an adult you continue to clown your way through life – never showing your tears and keeping everyone else smiling at your own expense. Or maybe you were the ‘good’ girl who was rewarded for working hard, and now you’re at the top of a career ladder and you have no idea why you climbed it.

Perhaps you gained your sense of worth by care-taking an alcoholic or otherwise sick parent and now continue to give more than you have and wonder why you are always running on empty. Or maybe you grew up in an environment where there was nobody you could rely on and so you developed a mask of independence that leaves you seemingly invincible but horribly alone.

It may be difficult to draw sharp distinctions between the characters you’ve played, whose boundaries may conflict and overlap. Were you Mummy’s little helper or Daddy’s princess? Were you the intellectual or the dropout? Were you the peacemaker or the truth-teller (or both)? Were you a people-pleaser, a party-girl, a loner or a saint? Were you Miss Perfect, a rebel or a critic who sat on the sidelines? Or were you invisible? Write down every sub-personality you find.

Each of us will have developed a number of selves to ensure our survival. Normally you’ll find five or six dominant ones that are still with you in adult life.

Now take every one that you’ve found and visualize her as a separate person. Greet her and thank her for the protection she has given you. Each of them has helped to keep you safe.

When you’ve worked through your list take five deep breaths in and out and congratulate yourself. This is an important step you’ve taken. Even though these sub-personalities will emerge and sometimes still be useful, from now on you will see them for what they are – masks that you’ve needed to wear – and you will not mistake them for yourself. Who you truly are lies beneath and beyond them, and you are now on your journey to meet her.

As you go through your day try to notice when you slip into one of your sub-personalities. Practising honesty will enable you to identify them and then let them gently drop away, in the same way that a husk drops from a seed.

When I told the school careers advisor that I wanted to be a secretary at the BBC (I didn’t dare tell her that I wanted to be a reporter because I didn’t think it would ever be possible), she laughed at me and said, ‘Don’t you think every girl wants to do that? Why don’t you be a bit more realistic and work at the insurance company? They’re always looking for typists.’ When, years later, I found myself reporting for the BBC, I always carried a sense that I should be in the typing pool rather than on air. While the men around me had a sense of entitlement and clearly planned their career progression, I always felt as if I was begging to be allowed to do what I loved rather than claiming my rightful place at the table.

JN

Other people’s stuff

‘When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.’

BETTY FRIEDAN

How we are seen by others and society as a whole informs how we see ourselves. The messages we’re given as women about what it is and isn’t OK for us to do, feel, look like or want, get absorbed.

Whether the message is that we need to be passive and wait to be chosen or that we should try to have it all – children and the seat in the boardroom – the complex truth of who we are gets obscured. Our sense of what is possible is limited and we bury parts of ourselves, fearing we won’t fit into the world as it is.

Similarly our perception of our physical self gets distorted by the constant messages we receive about what we should and shouldn’t wear, weigh and eat, and how we should or shouldn’t look. No matter how hard we try, it’s difficult not to be affected. They’re all around us in what we read and hear, and in the images we see on a daily basis. Whether it’s scantily clad, airbrushed models staring down at us from billboards or magazine covers, or images on social media, the message is the same: it’s not OK to be who we are.

The price of social media

The stress that social media is causing young women is heavily implicated in a dramatic rise in mental illness. Levels of self-harm, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic mental illness are all on the increase.

A quarter of 16–24-year-old women have anxiety, depression, panic disorders, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder according to UK government-funded research.

And the proportion of young women self-harming has trebled between 2007 and 2014.

At this stage of WE’s journey your goal is to discover and know your true self. Becoming conscious of those messages is the first stage to escaping their toxic power.

When I was broadcasting I felt obliged to don the ‘uniform’ – power suit and heels – that my news editors and the industry expected. I was very conscious that I was perpetuating the stereotypes I hoped my work would dispel, but I felt trapped. If I didn’t look the part I wouldn’t get to play the part. And I desperately wanted the part. So I dressed up and pretended to be someone I was not in order to get the chance to tell the truth – one of the many acts of hypocrisy that I engaged in to become ‘successful’. I became part of the problem that I was hoping to solve and each time I put on my work suits I felt myself getting more and more estranged from my real self and my levels of internal self-hatred grew.

JN