People-Pleasing, Disclaiming, & Qualifying: Why Do Women Feel The Need To Diminish Their Stories?
Episode description
- Being a woman writing memoir is scary and can bring up fears that writing about your own life is self-absorbed or navel-gazing. Why do so many women feel the need to apologize for their work or offer disclaimers that diminish the value of their stories?
- Mother-plussers can be a bundle of contradictions: Steph describes herself as unapologetically apologetic, a nice girl who hates being nice, and an approval-seeker who rails against the systems that cause women to seek approval.
- Steph shares her latest advice for her daughters when they are confronted with a hurtful remark or opinion they don't value: "Do you want to put this in your suitcase and carry it around with you, or would you rather throw it in the garbage?"
- Women are so conditioned to be people pleasers that it's easy to water down our viewpoints and minimize our voices by playing for all sides, rather than unapologetically claiming our own narratives.
- Steph's current goal is accepting that she isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. That can be a tough one to (pardon the pun) swallow when you're used to trying to make everyone comfortable.
In this solo episode, Steph reads an excerpt from her memoir, a piece titled "Gaze At My Navel." She explores her own discomfort with writing memoir, and how she uses disclaimers to integrate self-deprecation into her storytelling to ensure that readers don't think she's taking herself too seriously. She shares her process of becoming more confident when writing about her life, and how hard this has been as a Midwest Nice people-pleaser.
Follow along with her memoir project on her Substack here: http://stephsprenger.substack.com
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