My own personal shame triggers – the particular measures of unworthiness I struggle against – are the fears that deep down, I’m both untalented and lazy. Did that stop me spending most of the next day obsessively analysing my behaviour to spot the multitude of ways I’d made a tit of myself? No, no, it did not. Now, who knows? He might have been shy and just came across poorly. One guy, though, was a bit sniffy towards me, a bit too cool for school when we were introduced, a master of the ‘why are YOU here?’ look.
#Deal hustl after dark full#
Only the other night I was at a Big Arts Event full of Objectively Successful People, most of whom were utterly lovely. Why am I judging myself by standards I would never hold another woman to? So, then you pile shame at being overweight onto shame at being unhappy at being overweight onto shame at being a Bad Feminist onto being ashamed to admit any of it cos it makes you sound crazy… see how this works?) I’ve put on a load of weight over the last couple of years, and that makes me even more self-conscious (as well as annoyed at myself for being so: I’ve read enough feminist texts to know weight is a patriarchal issue. As someone a good decade older than most of my friends who do the same thing (often, more successfully), I often feel old and uncool. Less polished, less informed, less successful: why am I even here? This imposter syndrome might have improved slightly since I moved North – I feel a lot more at home when I am not being besieged by Southern accents on all sides – but it never quite goes away. Put me among a bunch of arty types, and I instantly feel like an intruder. (And I’m aware that everything I say here comes from someone who is quite high up on the privilege scale – I’m white, cis, able bodied, university-educated from a time when people like me could actually afford to go to university – so will apply a thousand times more and in a thousand different ways to those from other groups). In part, this is the natural consequence of being a working-class woman in an industry still dominated by the middle- and upper-class men. I often find myself besieged by such emotions. Sometimes I think a wee wifey with a bell would be easier to deal with: at least, when everyone can hear it, someone else might tell her to shut up. It’s the constant voice in your head telling you that you don’t belong here, you aren’t good enough, you don’t deserve it. This seems extreme, until you consider that shame (or, if you’d like to put it more palatably, unworthiness and the fear of being unworthy) often feels just like that. It conjures up images of yer woman from Game of Thrones, following you around with a bell and a stony-faced expression as you’re forced to parade your nakedness to the world. How they apply to freelance and creative lives in general, and to my own experiences, as a working-class woman with a sometimes precarious relationship to the creative industries.
![deal hustl after dark deal hustl after dark](https://occ-0-3011-114.1.nflxso.net/dnm/api/v6/9pS1daC2n6UGc3dUogvWIPMR_OU/AAAABQmwrtD9kMo5MhUYNgg0ECyvMutee5V9th84KoqNYFqg-0IcWl1n4FPKMJ7Ykxqa1P_xjVphCqZbWorNo3E7LSRL0FkgQkcYd3R_O9iZC4bTyeeM.jpg)
I am reading Brené Brown at the moment – rereading, to be honest – and it has got me thinking a lot about her key topics of shame, fear and the ‘hustle of worthiness’.