Permission Slip 2019
1/4/19 - Our yearly kickoff episode in which women we love give you permission to…
Liberate your attention (adrienne maree brown)
Make just a small adjustment (Autumn Brown)
NOT reply to email (Otegha Uwagbu)
Get to know your body better (Erica Chidi Cohen)
Be tender with yourself (Samhita Mukhopadhyay)
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Destry Maria Sibley
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: Permission Slip 2019
[Ads]
(1:00)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Happy New Year!
Ann: Happy 2019.
Aminatou: We're here. We made it. Did we make it? Debatable. So every year we do an episode where we ask people that we love to give us some wisdom as we go into 2019 and this year we're doing it a little bit differently. We're asking women we love to give you permission to do things that are probably good for you.
[Theme Song]
(1:55)
Ann: So this year we reached out to a handful of women who have kind of different areas of professional expertise, who we love in many different ways, and asked them for what they are thinking about as they're heading into a fresh year. And when we listened to all of these voicemails together we sort of realized that they're all just about granting permission. So the Brown sisters, Adrienne Maree, and Autumn Brown who have an incredible podcast about our apocalyptic political times are giving you permission to liberate your attention and just make small adjustments to what you're doing. Otegha Uwagba who is head of a community called Women Who and is all about professional development, especially for self-employed and self-directed women, is giving you permission to not reply to email. Erica Chidi Cohen who is a doula and one of the co-founders of Loom in L.A. which she'll tell you about, she's giving you permission to get to know your body better to develop body literacy. And our super close bestie Samhita Mukhopadhyay who is the executive editor of Teen Vogue is giving you permission to be tender with yourself. So listen to these voicemails from these incredible women and feel inspired because we do.
Adrienne: Hey Call Your Girlfriend listeners!
Autumn: We're so excited to be on your show.
Adrienne: I know, it feels like a great honor.
Autumn: And privilege. We're the Brown sisters and we are co-hosts of another podcast called How to Survive the End of the World,
Adrienne: Our podcast on how to survive the apocalypse with grace, rigor, and curiosity.
Autumn: I'm Autumn. I am a queer science fiction writer, an activist, a mother of dragons, and I am calling you from the woods in the midst of rural Minnesota covered in snow and heated by a wood fire.
(3:55)
Adrienne: And I'm Adrienne Maree Brown. I am the author of Emergent Strategy and the forthcoming Pleasure Activism and co-editor of Octavia's Brood and an auntie, a doula. I live in Detroit. Right now I'm recording this in New Orleans.
Autumn: That's right. Why're you in New Orleans?
Adrienne: I am facilitating a meeting for Black Youth Project 100, BYP100, and then my whole college crew is coming down for like a girl's trip.
Autumn: Oh my gosh, that's so sweet.
Adrienne: I'm totally looking for the place where I get to pee on people in the street.
Autumn: Is that a thing?
Adrienne: Have you seen Girl's Trip?
Autumn: I haven't seen Girl's Trip. Is that like a part of the . . .
Adrienne: Oh, sorry. I guess that might be a spoiler.
Autumn: You just spoiled it for me. Okay. Wow. [Laughs]
Adrienne: Yes.
Autumn: Well this feels like a good segue into what we wanted to share with the Call Your Girlfriend listeners because . . .
Adrienne: [Laughs] Does it? That's great.
Autumn: In a way we're calling in with some advice . . .
Adrienne: Oh yes.
Autumn: For moving into 2019 with intention, and I think that one of the things that we can do to set intentions is to really just let go of any judgment of the kinds of things we want to be able to do. So Adrienne, if you want to go find . . .
Adrienne: That's so right.
Autumn: . . . a place to pee on other people, then I think you should just live into that intention.
Adrienne: It's like a zip line across Bourbon Street.
Autumn: [Laughs]
Adrienne: So it's not peeing in general on people; it's peeing on a sort of gentrifying force of humans.
Autumn: Okay. It's peeing on people as direct action? I love it.
Adrienne: I don't want to spoil too much of it. Yes, yes. So I feel your non-judgment. I feel safe. So let's dive in. Let's dive in. Autumn, what I would love to ask you is if you had advice for kind of how to be the best possible human that you can be for 2019 what would you tell people? How can people really change well?
(5:54)
Autumn: Hmm, yes. How do you change yourself?
Adrienne: Yeah.
Autumn: I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I am actively in a period of major personal change and transformation in my life that has been brought on by going through a pretty intense burnout related to my movement work. And I'm sure that many of the Call Your Girlfriend listeners will be familiar with that. I know that there's a lot of folks who work in social justice and activism who listen to the show and we know how painful and fatiguing the work can be. And also how beautiful the work can be and how irresistible it can be. So I've been in the painful fatiguing part. [Laughs] So the thing that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of how to change my own life is something that I recently was able to articulate to myself as the power of a small adjustment.
Adrienne: Yes.
Autumn: I was having a conversation with my partner the other night and he was pointing out to me that even in a visionary conversation I have the ability to hyperly focus on very small details. And I said to him yeah, that's because I believe in the power of the small adjustment. And then I was like oh, I really do believe in the power of a small adjustment! And partly it's because I've seen the power of a small adjustment in my own life over and over again. Like oh, if I adjust my attention in this small way there are these significant ripple effects across all of my relationships. And the example -- I shared this with you recently Adrienne but one of the examples that has made a really big difference in my life as a parent is that in the last few months I've just made this intentional practice, like mindfulness practice with my kids, that from the moment they get home from school until the moment that they go to bed I basically don't pick up my phone.
Adrienne: Love this.
(7:50)
Autumn: And also if they start talking to me I pause whatever I'm doing and look them in the eye while they're talking to me. And those two small adjustments which really are just like small adjustments that are primarily behavioral . . .
Adrienne: Yes.
Autumn: Has made such a huge difference in my ability to be fully present with them, and the more -- and of course the ripple effect of that is if I'm more present with my children and having more quality interactions with them I feel better. They feel better. Everyone's happier.
Adrienne: Yes. Yeah.
Autumn: And that means that it's easier for me to actually get through my work in spite of my fatigue because I know that I have the ward at the end of the day of getting to experience full presence. Yeah, so the power of a small adjustment is the advice that I would give regarding how to change your own life. And now I want to turn it back to you Adrienne.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Autumn: I'm wondering what would be your wisdom for how someone can actively change the world around them?
Adrienne: Ooh, yes. We have this apocalyptic world all around us right now and I think it's very easy to let it take all of our attention. And the guidance that I talk to people about, the thing that I've been clicking into and practicing myself this year, has been attention liberation. This idea that we are in a condition that is made more terrible by the fact that those in power and leadership have learned to play with our attention and how to put it, you know, one moment after the next moment, put us into a new cycle of crisis and a new cycle of powerlessness, right? That they only want us to pay attention to things we really cannot touch, we really cannot impact. Often it is fake news. Often it is a totally false threat. Often it is something unconstitutional that's not even possible, but they will get our attention to go beyond that for the day. Then the next day it'll be something else and the next day it'll be something else.
(9:45)
And so I feel like what we're getting better at and what we need to continue getting better at is making the discernment of this is a real threat and we have a real solution that we can actually enact together right now. Or this is not a real threat, it's a waste of our time, and we will not give it any of our attention. And I think that each time we liberate some of our attention from the bullshit we increase the amount of attention we have to give to those things we actually care about and want to grow. And I think that if we move enough of our attention from bullshit to real shit then we suddenly fine that we have abundant amounts of attention and I think abundant amounts of attention leads to abundant justice. Because I think part of what happens is if we're giving all our attention to that oppressive negative force it makes it feel like the weight is unbearable and it keeps us isolated and separated from each other we start to compete with each other. It's like oh, there's only a tiny little bit of attention that will go to social justice and we have to, you know, slice it up like this pie and none of us have enough instead of . . .
Autumn: Our movement's the best. No, our movement's the best! Our strategy's the most important! No, our strategy's the most important! [Laughs]
Adrienne: There's that and I also think the sadder thing is our situation is worse than yours, right?
Autumn: Yeah.
Adrienne: I think when we get into that place where it's like we're all trying to make the case that what's happening to us is worse than what's happening to anyone else, that keeps us from being able to see that this oppression is holding us all down in all of these different ways and it doesn't serve any of us, right?
Autumn: And the strategies that it's using to hold us down are all linked together.
Adrienne: They're super tied in together and it's why supremacy. It's patriarchy. It's capitalism. It's these really large things that all of us have to move against and we move against them by generating and cultivating and curating and growing something that is much more compelling and much more viable and much more long-term. And to me that comes when we're like oh, there's enough justice for all of us. Let's fucking do this, right?
(11:48)
So that to me is the main thing you can do to actually save the whole world is to take your attention away from those who don't deserve it and put it on those things that do deserve it. Like it can be the same issue, right? So it's like looking at climate change through the lens of am I going to pay attention to what climate change deniers are saying? Or am I going to bring my attention over to really brilliant scientists who are talking about what we can actually do to generate safe conditions for bees and generate safer conditions for our babies?
Autumn: Right. Or am I going to bring my attention to the ways that like climate justice and prison abolition are intrinsically linked, right?
Adrienne: Exactly. Exactly.
Autumn: How do I put my attention at the actual intersections that matter most right now?
Adrienne: Exactly. So we love y'all and we send you positive energy for 2019.
Autumn: Yes, take your attention liberation and your power of the small adjustment and enjoy it. If you are interested in hearing more about apocalypse survival you can subscribe to our podcast How to Survive the End of the World. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts and it'll update right next to Call Your Girlfriend. We would love to hear more from you and we hope you have a beautiful new year.
Adrienne: Thank you!
Otegha: Hey CYG listeners, I'm Otegha Uwagba and I'm a writer, brand consultant, and the founder of Women Who which is a London-based platform that connects and supports and educates working women via additional content and real life events. The aim of Women Who is basically to help working women create the careers they truly want and deserve, and I set it up a few years ago in reaction to my years of working in the rather male-dominated advertising industry. I've also written a book, Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women which pretty much does what it says on the tin. It's a career guide for working women. And I'm currently working on my second book which is a money memoir about my relationship with money over the years and how that relates to women's relationships with money more generally.
(14:00)
I also host a podcast In Good Company. So basically I do a lot of things which means I get a lot of emails. I get emails from editors and from PRs, from clients I'm working with and brands who want to talk about working together, from members of the Women Who community who I love and obviously just a ton of general inquiries.
I've been self-employed for about three years now and I think in the last 18 months or so, pretty much since my first book came out, I've definitely found that my biggest time suck besides social media is my email inbox. And I started to find that really frustrating because sending emails all day is not the way to make progress on creative projects. And I think for me things really came to a head at the start of 2018. I went on holiday in January 2018 for about two weeks and because it was my first holiday in a couple years I didn't take my laptop with me and I decided to completely stay off emails. I checked in every few days and if something kind of important had come in I'd send a super quick response but for the most part I was off email and not addressing things for about two weeks.
So when I did eventually get back to work my inbox was basically a hot mess. And the funny thing is I actually managed to catch up with all my emails pretty quickly actually, in about a day. But for weeks afterwards I really felt like I was spending around 80% of my time just reading or responding to or thinking about how to respond to emails. I was literally drowning. And I think having that time away made me realize how much time I actually do spend on emails, so I decided to experiment with a few different solutions to try and develop a better relationship with my email inbox and to stop emails taking up what felt like all of my time.
(15:44)
So over the course of 2018 I tried a few different things and I came up with a couple of email rules that I'm going to share with you all because they've definitely helped me manage my inbox more effectively over the past year. I think the first and most important thing I can say is you don't have to reply to every email. This is really key and it's a lesson I actually learned from my friend Reni Eddo-Lodge who I interviewed for my podcast and she's written a really phenomenally successful book called Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. And it just -- it was everywhere. I mean it's been translated into dozens of languages. You know, the requests on her time just massively skyrocketed and she said to me that she eventually realized she simply couldn't respond to every single email. Even the really well-meaning ones and things she found really interesting, because if she did that she would never get any work done again. And she's a writer and a journalist and so that is her actual work.
And I really took that conversation to heart, and soon after we spoke, I think it was the next day, I tried that in my own life. And to be honest it had never really occurred to me before that conversation that not responding to emails was an option. And, you know, sometimes I do feel a little bit bad. There are lots of emails that come into my inbox and I'm like ooh, I'd love to respond to this. But I kind of have to remind myself that doing that is necessary for me to protect my time and achieve my own professional goals. So I think particularly if you're self-employed which means you kind of get cold inquiries and people kind of wanting to work with you and not pay you for that time it's okay to not respond to every single email you get. And I think people will kind of understand that. Or even if they don't understand it I think that's fine.
Another thing about responding to emails is you don't have to respond immediately. I used to work in advertising and in ad agencies the culture is definitely one where you respond to emails straightaway. Especially if they're from clients, you don't let email sit in your inbox for an entire day. It's just not a dong thing. So I definitely brought that attitude with me into self-employment. But then I read this article on Catapult the headline of which was do you want to be known for your writing or for your swift email responses? And I was like hmm, the first one please. And the article basically encourages you to cultivate the percent of unreliability when it comes to emails. Being known for my unreliability really does not fit in with the professional reputation that I want to have but when I thought about it it actually made a lot of sense. And the article basically need the argument that you sort of need to cast off the pressure that you feel and that we put on ourselves to reply to emails straight away. And I used to feel like I was making a really big statement if I took more than a day to respond to certain emails or like I was letting people down or that people would be sitting there thinking I was rude. And you know what? Who knows. Maybe they are. But I'm sort of training people to expect slower responses from me by not rushing to respond to emails within a couple of hours. And overall I feel under less pressure to respond to emails immediately and that has been really transformative for me.
(18:50)
And I also think that the responses I do send, when I do reply to them, tend to be more measured and better thought through. So I think everyone's winning. I think it's really easy for your inbox to essentially become a to-do list that's written by someone who isn't you so taking time to respond to emails when you're ready to do that is all about prioritizing. Obviously there are certain emails you're always going to reply to quickly because they're important because I feel like that's maybe 30% of my inbox and the other 70% are definitely things that don't suffer if I take a few days to get around to responding to them. And the lady who wrote the article also made the really great point that it's kind of harder for women to do this I think because we've been socialized in so many ways to constantly be trying to prove ourselves and so it's as if our values are kind of contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others which is a whole other issue. But yeah, if you want your life changed go read that article. It's on Catapult.
(19:45)
And the last thing that I've done this year that's been really important is I have switched my notifications off. I initially experimented with deleting the Gmail app off my mobile phone altogether, but that was a complete nightmare. I'd be on my way to a meeting and realize I didn't actually know the address because that had been sent to me via email. I didn't have my emails on my mobile phone, so that approach lasted about three days. But what I've done since is I've just switched off the PUSH notifications on my phone which is really obvious device that I think lots of people have done but it took me surprisingly long to try out. And I think in fact the reason it took me so long to try out is because I used to be in the mindset of thinking emails needed instant replies. But I've kind of gotten to the point where I think it's kind of related to the point I made before about taking your time to reply to emails. Once I realized I could actually do that I became a lot less invested of keeping track of every single email that came into my inbox as it arrived and became way more comfortable with not having my email notifications on.
My relationship with my email inbox is definitely still a work in progress. There have definitely still been days or weeks where I feel like I'm trapped in an endless cycle of Gmail auto-responses. I still check my emails multiple times a day as opposed to having three allotted slots. That's kind of my 2019 day. And a lot of people probably think I'm terrible at emails, but you know what? I think I can live with that. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at oteghauwagba, that's spelled O-T-E-G-H-A U-W-A-G-B-A. Or follow Women Who at @womenwho. You can buy my career guide Little Black Book on Amazon or all good book stores and if you want to join the Women Who community sign up at www.womenwho.co/join. Happy New Year.
[Music and Ads]
(23:45)
Erica: Hi, my name is Erica Chidi Cohen and I am a doula, author, and co-founder and CEO of Loom which provides empowered education from periods to parenting out here in L.A. It's been quite the year as I'm sure you know. [Laughs] Especially for us women or female-identifying people. And I think one of the key things I'm really getting on my soapbox about going into 2019 is the concept of body literacy. It's typically been used to describe learning about your own fertility, however it can have a more expansive definition to encapsulate understanding how your body works. So, you know, whether it's finally figuring out how to track your period if you're currently not on hormones, or if you are on birth control whether an IUD or you're taking the pill, just having a deeper understanding of how it's affecting you. And so many of us firstly either got introduced to our menstrual cycle or our period in a way that wasn't very empowered.
There's this opportunity to reinvent your relationship with your period and have it feel like you're actually in the driver's seat. And if you're not currently cycling with hormones there's this opportunity to just become reacquainted with this potentially pill that you've been taking for sort of 10 or 15 years or an IUD you've had for a couple of years. Because I think when we learn about especially birth control it's always from a contraceptive one. It's always from a fear-based place. And oftentimes it just switches off a lot of our curiosity around what it is that we're about to onboard. So that's a really big part of body literacy is just understanding what's actually happening in your body, what you're putting in your body.
(25:52)
So people that are currently cycling without hormones, so no IUD, no pill, one of the first things that you can do is download a good period-tracking app. My favorite is Clue. There's a lot out there. But the key things that I really think are important to look for are 1) your bleed, so how often your bleed is actually happening. Because most people think that your menstrual cycle is just the length of your period. It's actually from bleed to bleed. It's the whole entire thing. And the second thing I want to track is your fluids.
What's interesting is as you move through your menstrual cycle your cervical mucus or your cervical fluid changes. Right after you have your period it's pretty dry and not really there then as you move towards ovulation it gets a little bit more lotiony, sticky. Then as you get to the peak of ovulation it's kind of the consistency of raw egg whites. And then you move into your luteal phase which is again right before you get your period and it's kind of dry and disappears a little bit again.
And so starting to notice that is a really key part of body literacy. If you want to track your fluid, if you're feeling like ugh, I don't know, I don't really want to be in such high contact with what's going on down there, the gentlest way to do it is sometimes to just check your underwear at the end of the day. Like there should be kind of a difference in the striations of your fluid as you move through the month. Like you'll see when there's more and you'll see when there's less. Another opportunity is when you're going to the bathroom and happen to pee and you wipe yourself. You can just take a look at the tissue and be like okay, what's happening here?
And for those that are really not worried about it you can just pop a finger in there and just check out the consistency. But again it's one of our main indicators to let us know what phase of the cycle you're in. And thanks to the patriarchy, RIP whenever that happens, we haven't really been given the support to be as in touch with our bodies. And so it can be a really amazing practice to start to build just to kind of get a baseline.
(28:00)
And then the third thing I want people to track in Clue is your mood because your mood has so much variability through the month as you move from phase-to-phase in your cycle. All of a sudden if you find that you get really anxious and depressed right after ovulation up until you get your period then that's more phasic. That's kind of phasic mood dis-regulation as opposed to if you feel like that the whole month then maybe that's something that you actually really need support around psychologically. But if it's happening in that smaller period then you can start to feel a little more removed from it and maybe a little bit more supported in that. And just in my luteal phase I'm not really super anxious and super depressed all the time. And then in a wider sense when it comes to body literacy it's really this overall observation of how the feeling is in your body. So whether that's just looking at sleep hygiene for example, like what's the quality of the sleep you're getting? Are you setting up your room or setting up your home in a way that's going to be supportive of good sleep?
And then I also think body literacy has a lot to do with intuition as well. And, you know, it's funny. Sometimes you say the word intuition and people are like "Oh, I'm gone. It's way too woo-woo for me. I don't really know how to ascertain how that works." But I like to call it like a whole body yes and then a niche no. sometimes whether it's when you're at work or you're having a meeting with someone or you're just hanging out with a friend there are subtle signs in your body that indicates whether you're relaxed and comfortable or there's tension or there's discomfort.
(29:50)
And a lot of times I talk to my clients about then starting to recognize when their whole body feels relaxed and at ease and this is definitely a yes, and when you might find that there's a part of you -- and that's why I say like a niche no -- a part of me that feels tense. It's easier to ignore it. And what I really try to get people comfortable with is just starting to notice where is the no in the body? Do you find you're swallowing a lot? Do you find you're having tension in the upper part of your belly? Do you find your shoulders getting tight? It's just starting to kind of understand how your body is communicating with you to let you know that something might be a little off or something here needs a little more inquiry, and then also learning to really kind of embrace and feel comfortable when you feel that full sense of just release ane relaxation in your body when you're in the presence of a particular person or when you're trying to make a decision. Like an email comes through and you're reading the email and you're just noticing gosh, I really feel tight in my body. What does that mean? Is it just the pressure of maybe a deadline? Or is it something that's being said through this email that really needs to make you think more about whether or not this work opportunity or this particular person is really in resonance in your life?
When you start to build this full picture, you're potentially looking at your cycle, you're potentially looking at your sleep hygiene. You're also looking at how your bowel movements and your eliminations are, and you're also just noticing how do I feel in connection with other people? Am I at ease in my body or am I kind of filled with tension? Or is the tension subtle? And all of this kind of inner awareness really aggregates to you feeling more confident just as a person in the world.
(31:45)
Samhita: Hi, my name is Samhita Mukhopadhyay. I'm the executive editor at Teen Vogue. So 2018 was a very big year for me I think between turning 40 and, you know, going from kind of freelancing and doing a book to having regular meetings with a publishing legend at Conde Nast. [Laughs] I think my biggest learning, and I wish -- at 40 I can say this and I'm glad I learned it at even this time -- is when you're ambitious and you're always hoping that things will get better and you're always looking to land in a new place or kind of excel more in your career, that things are actually going to be okay. And you don't always have to have this really concrete sense of exactly where you're going. Sometimes the process is where a lot of the information and the learning is about yourself and what you want and kind of what you want to do in your life. And I think I have just always been anxious about what's next? What am I doing next? How am I going to really make this next thing happen and step back and have the sense that, you know . . . not to get too hippy-dippy, but the universe will provide and there's a lesson even in the things that don't work out. There's always something to kind of help you.
It's really important. Like I do set really broad and loose goals, but I also -- like I think it's really important to keep realistic goals for yourself. And that's kind of, like I know a lot of -- like the beginning of the year -- it's like oh, I'm going to . . . you know, like change my health. I'm going to start working out five times a week and I'm going do my morning pages every morning and I'm going to do . . . and I think that's just not an honest reflection. Those are not always made with an honest reflection of where you're at in that moment.
You know, we judge ourselves so much for these things we feel we need to be doing to live a healthy life or a good life that are often very hard to incorporate. Like for me it's like I already wake up really early in the morning. It's really hard for me to wake up another 30 minutes early just to write in my journal. Or, you know, to work out every single day, or these things that I think are going to be what makes me a successful person. And there's just -- I think that being really honest with yourself of you know what? I am actually doing pretty well. What are the little things I can do that would make me feel a little bit better? Or make me feel like I'm meeting some of these bigger, broader goals rather than setting yourself up kind of for failure and not -- then having that cycle of oh, well let me just give up because it doesn't even matter. Why should I focus on self-care? Every time I try it's like I can't do it exactly the way, or this kind of really grand vision of what I think self-care is supposed to look like. It's like well maybe it means literally every day for five minutes I set my alarm and I just take a breath and look out the window. And that's what it is for like a month, you know? Really finding achievable ways to kind of incorporate those goals.
(34:40)
And I feel like one of the biggest things I ever did for myself and for my health was to just be like I'm not going to look in the mirror and be like I'm starting a diet because that's not authentic to who I am. That's not authentic to my life. And it's this endless cycle of shame and this endless cycle of failure where it's like no, let me just remind myself. Let me just get through this meal or this day. And the actual difficult thing is to just be like I'm not going to judge myself. I'm not going to judge myself and hold myself to that which is actually to me it also requires a level of discipline but helps you achieve so many of your other goals. Because then you're not like every single thing you do is oh, god, another thing I messed up or another thing that I need to be doing better. No, I didn't mess up. I didn't do it exactly like I wanted to do it and maybe next time I'll remember to do it this way. But I did it and that's important.
You know, just we all just need to try a little tenderness. It's like, you know, having a little bit of compassion for yourself and saying we all work so hard to function in this crazy, crazy overloaded world and it's hard. The day-to-day can be really hard and just stepping back and being like you know what? That was fine. What just happened was fine. It's okay that it wasn't excellent. It's okay that I didn't do it every single way that I wanted to do it. Like maybe next time I will, maybe I won't, and that's okay.
(36:05)
I go back-and-forth where I have these years where I'm like I'm really going to . . . this is going to be a year about immersing myself in experiences, and other years are about pulling back. 2019 is really going to be about pulling back for me. I think I, you know . . . just as we prepare for 2020, even the Twitter conversations and all of that stuff, I start to physically feel ill. And I'm just like you know what? We don't -- I could just not be on Twitter. I could just not be in these spaces that kind of create and I think continually reproduce . . . like they're so valuable for so many reasons but I do think that, you know, pulling back and really restoring myself for what I think is going to be . . . it's going to be a tough year. I think 2020 is going to be a tough year. Even if you're not involved in politics I think it's going to be a tough year. And we're going to be busy because there are going to be so many women running. We're going to be so busy. [Laughs] You know? So I've just really been thinking about 2019 for me is about stepping back from a lot of that because those conversations, no matter how many times we have them, we can keep having them and we're going to have many opportunities to have them. And so, you know, kind of taking more time away from social media and taking more time in my personal life and spending real life face-to-face time with people. Or long-distance friends I can FaceTime with, you know?
2018 was very much a year of immersion for me of really being in the mix and just falling off on my friendships and that kind of stuff. I'm not a great multitasker so I kind of have to be like that. Like I kind of -- it's like where I am, that's where I am. I'm really looking forward to it, and I've been setting up my work life that way of really being like okay, these are the things I can do and these are things I can't do. I need to kind of step back and make space for literally getting stoned and watching TV, a big hobby of mine. [Laughs]
(38:00)
Aminatou: I love this. 2019 is probably going to be trash but we are going to do amazing things together.
Ann: The best advice from the best women. I love this episode every year because you and I are just like "Yes, thank you. Mm-hmm." [Laughs] We are not . . .
Aminatou: I'm just taking notes. Love it.
Ann: 100%. So yeah, listen to these women. Support these women. Follow them on the Internet. They're all great. And we'll see you on the Internet all year long.
Aminatou: Happy New Year, y'all! See you on Beyoncé's Internet.
Ann: See you on the book writing grind.
Aminatou: Whew, girl. Goodbye. [Laughter] You can find us many places on the Internet, on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, you can download the show anywhere you listen to your favs, or on Apple Podcasts where we would love it if you left us a review. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @callyrgf. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music is composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, our logos are by Kenesha Sneed, our associate producer is Destry Maria Sibley. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.