When I was a teenager, I had a bumper sticker on the back of my first car, a Honda Accord hatchback, that said: Question Authority
I had a lot of moxy as a teen along with an inner knowing that the things I was being taught were perhaps not in my best interests. I knew to question.
Yet the programming we all receive from everyone around us — our parents, family, teachers, even our friends — is powerful. It taps into our survival instincts. Learning how to fit in with the group helps to ensure our survival, and so a lot of the programming that we don’t even know to look out for slips in under the radar of our consciousness. Even when we’re questioning teenagers.
After the passages of my teenage years, I spent the next couple of decades trying desperately to be a chameleon, to fit in with my surroundings well enough to get through life, raise children, and survive.
Over the past few years, though, as those children have become teenagers themselves, I’ve been unpacking a lot of the things I’ve been socially conditioned to believe about myself and where I fit in the world.
Unlearning our social conditioning
It started with wearing makeup.
At some point in my late thirties or early forties, I stopped wearing makeup. It’s possible I was simply too tired to put it on one day and realized people didn’t shrink from me in horror when they saw my face unadorned with any extra color.
It’s also when I began living out the motto, “If men don’t have to do it, neither do I.”
Men don’t need to wear makeup — unless they’re hosting The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, or appearing on it. Or on stage in some capacity.
Men don’t need to shave their legs — unless they want to.
Men don’t need to dye their greying hair and try to look younger than they are. Some do, sure. But they aren’t expected to. People don’t applaud them for their bravery in aging gracefully. They’re just told they look distinguished, instead.
What helped me start seeing through the patriarchal bullshit?
Learning I’m non-binary is a big part of it.
Understanding more about my own gender helped a lot. Knowing that I’m not female (while also not male) allows me to step a little to the side of the things I was taught because I was raised as female. It lets me look at them with curiosity, to examine them and see what they’re about, where they come from, and decide how they still fit me, if at all.
From there, I kept getting curious. What else was I taught that was simply not true?
A lot, it turns out.
Compulsory allonormativity and heterosexuality to start with. We’re not all heterosexual. We’re not even all allosexual (people who experience sexual attraction to others). And yet that’s what we’re taught.
The only way to be healthy is to be thin.
And the only way to be thin is to diet.
Both of these beliefs — very prevalent in Western culture (what I’m familiar with) — are false and dangerous. It’s possible to be physically healthy no matter your physical mass. And diets suck and ruin your metabolism.
I knew these truths in my 20s about dieting. My intuitive body told me I needed to eat enough calories to keep my metabolism up. But magazines and media, and even my friends, told me so loudly that the way to go was one diet after another that I believed them instead.
Questioning your own programming
What are the things you’ve been taught based on your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your able-bodiedness, your size? What have you been programmed with?
How are those things working for you?
There are so many areas of our lives in which we’re programmed and conditioned to believe certain things and behave in certain ways. If you’re in a minority group, due to your gender or your sexual orientation, your race, or your disability — those ways of being are there to keep other people in power. They’re not in place for your higher good.
It’s taken me time — and a lot of compassionate introspection and curiosity — to begin to see the beliefs I was given that aren’t actually mine.
Once I started lifting off these layers of expectation that had been slathered onto me from birth, I found so much more of myself underneath.
So how do you do it?
Notice
When you find yourself saying, “I have to…” or “I’ve got to,” or “I must,” notice it. “I have to put on makeup.” “I have to dye my hair.” “I’ve got to lose weight.” Anything that puts you in a box or requires you to do certain things to be acceptable. Learning to notice when that comes up in your mind or out of your mouth.
What are the things you feel like you have to do in order to be acceptable to others?
Get curious
What do you think is going on there? Why do you believe that or where does it come from? Where did you learn it?
Explore with compassion
Gently, with great kindness toward yourself, explore around this a bit. Remember you’re not at fault here. Even the people who taught you these things, they learned them from somewhere themselves. They may have taught you these ways of being as a way of trying to protect you. Have as much compassion as you can for everyone involved. Or righteous anger if that works better. Really, feel what you’re feeling and be gentle with yourself.
Decide what works for you
Do the beliefs you’re holding and your ways of being truly support you? If not, you can change them.
I stopped wearing makeup. And apologizing when I didn’t need to and making people try to like me. The result is that I like myself a whole lot more, feel more comfortable with myself, and am able to show up as more of who I am in this world.
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A few related videos you might enjoy on books that were useful to me on this journey: