The feminine urge to judge ourselves

This article is not about the body judgement women are conditioned to harbor. While we all do at times critique our appearance, weight, skin, smile, hair, height, size, andy any other feature we are told must conform to a standard set by male-cultivated media, this is something far deeper and more subtle a form of control we enact on ourselves.

This morning’s meditation yielded an opportunity to dive into an uncomfortable emotion and experience that has been popping up for me a lot recently, and I have been sort of pushing it aside and telling myself ‘That doesn’t really bother me. I’m good, no need to worry.’

All women who go down the road of shadow work and introspection eventually face the internal voice that has been conditioned to tell them they are too much of something and not enough of another.

And specifically, the way we are taught to judge ourselves, through patriarchal constructs that tell us we must be simultaneously modest, demure, and unopinionated lest men determine us to be of loose moral character, while also being sexy and appealing to the male gaze, lest men find us unattractive or, goddess forbid, old.

I had been judging myself harshly over different phases of my personal journey, most intensely recently over several phases I went through post divorces or breakups in which I needed validation externally because I was attention-starved in previous relationships, and grew up experiencing various forms of emotional or parental rejection due to how my parents raised their children.

These circumstances created the perfect storm of attention-seeking and the current version of me cringes at some of the self-destructive behaviors of the past versions of me, however, in that cringe, I found myself judging those versions of me.

And that judgement came in the form of internalized misogyny, which I abhor in others, and they say we hate the things in others that are a reflection of the characters in ourselves we wish we could change.

To be clear, I think it is normal and healthy to cringe at least a little when you look at the past versions of yourself, and if you can’t do that, it likely means you haven’t changed for the better. But with that cringe should also be an acknowledgement of compassion for yourself who was doing the best they thought they could with what they had at the time. And, most importantly, they changed.

So, there I was sitting with this difficult perspective of judging my past behaviors and actions, but this time, rather than just taking the easy way out and saying ‘Well, I forgive myself. Its not a big deal.’ and then taking no actual action, I decided to pick apart what that judgement was and where it came from.

Through that exercise in asking ‘where did that come from?’ …okay, then where did that come from?…alright, so where did that come from? and so on, I arrived at the realization that I was applying a patriarchal lens over my own life, behaviors, actions, and thoughts and effectively keeping myself small and limited, just the way the patriarchy seeks to oppress (men and women) through social norms which are constructed to control.

The central point I had to chew on was I was applying the same set of expectations to me that I fight so hard for others to throw off. I was judging my appearance, my body, my interests, my hobbies, and my actions and words and trying to make myself feel shame over things that were really just a reflection of one small part of me trying to be authentic in a world of people who are too terrified to be themselves.

Femininity has many definitions, depending who you ask. But the true nature of the divine feminine is to be free, feel, create, and connect. It is not bounded by arbitrary standards of behavior or appearance. Within every woman is an urge to freely create a world that fulfills all souls within it to their highest potential.

The systematic destruction of systems of spirituality focused on the divine feminine was purposeful. Women thinking and living freely were, and still are, a threat to patriarchy, capitalism, and organized religion. Men are comfortable being followers of those oppressive systems because they think they benefit from them, but women innately know those systems are broken and only give the appearance of prosperity.

But a society can never be truly prosperous or free if some within it do not have prosperity or freedom, can it?

And so, women are taught to police their own and others behaviors that signal an embrace of freedom. By the time we’re adults, its second nature to think to ourselves ‘better not do that, otherwise someone will think I’m [insert some arbitrary label applied to women pejoratively: promiscuous, bossy, ditzy, clumsy, unprofessional, needy, clingy, insecure, crazy, etc].’

“Just behave” has never been my forte, and quite frankly, sounds awful. Women who behave relative to what the patriarchy expects of them never reach their full potential and only serve to hold other women back out of their complacency in the face of oppression. Enter the creation of the term ‘pick me bitch.’

The ever present pick me bitch, who desperately wants men to like her and include her, thinks she’ll achieve that one day if she just criticizes and tells on other women more. The only male approval she actually receives is them approving of how small she makes herself in their presence, but she doesn’t realize that. Any attention from men is good attention, right?

I come from a long line of women who do not behave, and in my experience, those of us who misbehaved the most based on what the patriarchy considers ‘good’ and ‘compliant’, were the happiest. So, I worked through this and came up with the transmutation of that initial judgement to make it into an embrace of change, mistakes, and authenticity.

While I know better than to repeat those behaviors or actions because they simply did not serve any constructive purpose in my life, I also recognize that I needed to do those things in order to learn about myself and

how others view me or relate to me. I also needed to find my own internal validation and those phases were absolutely critical and necessary to me arriving at the conclusion that I in fact needed only my own love and validation. Nothing else can ever replace how that feels.

A woman who has lived the majority of her life trying to be what men wanted (impossible to achieve, by the way) only to realize she can actually just be herself, try new things, fail, regroup, try some other new things, fail but also succeed, then continue on in that pattern, will only ever arrive at the end of life with a beautiful collection of memories and experiences to keep her company on the other side.

I prefer not to spend eternity remembering how small I made myself in order to not make others uncomfortable about me living fully just because they’re unable to be who they truly want to be.