Beth Thomas Cohen - Drop the Act, Its Exhausting!: Free Yourself from Your So-Called Put-Together Life

Drop the Act, Its Exhausting!

Drop the Act, Its Exhausting!

Free Yourself from Your So-Called Put-Together Life

Beth Thomas Cohen

with Michele Matrisciani

TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

Lanham New York Boulder London

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 by Beth Thomas Cohen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Beth Thomas, author.

Drop the act, its exhausting! : free yourself from your so-called put-together life / Beth Thomas Cohen ; with Michele Matrisciani.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-4930-0852-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-63076-123-3 (electronic) 1. Self-acceptance in women. 2. Self-realization in women. 3. Self-esteem in women. 4. WomenPsychology. I. Title.

BF575.S37C64 2015

155.3'339dc23

2015028863

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Aiden Rae & Lila James, this book is for you.... I hope I make you proud!

Contents

Introduction

Life Is a Circus, but That Doesnt Mean We Should Put on a Show

I f there is an elephant in the room, I wont ignore it. Ill pitch a circus tent and step onto the podium as ringmaster of the issue. Although Ive made my career in the fashion industry, I am pretty much no frills. I dont wear my husbands T-shirts or anything as bad as that, but much to my surprise, I live a pretty conventional, traditional life, which was carved out by the time I met my to-be husband in college when I was twenty. I was one of the first of my friends to get married, get pregnant, and start my own business, and part of the pleasure of all of that was sharing the ups and downs with all of them. The e-mail updates were my secret way of journaling my lifes eventslarge and smallso I wouldnt forget them. I have short-term memory from way too much....

Im an open book, so as years went on, I e-mailed and IMed (I believe this is now a legitimate verb) less about personal details and more on musings about things that were happening to me and around me, like how the purpose of Realtors eluded me, how much I despise the stick figure family decals on the backs of minivans, the moment I first learned about mucus plugs, or the time I approached a sweaty construction worker and asked him if he expected his hoots to produce any specific desired effect. Im curious, sir, do you want me to whistle back? I asked. What are your criteria for who you holler at? Do you think this will lead to drinks at the nearest pub? This is when people beyond my personal friends started reacting. A publicist by trade, I dont know why I was so surprised that my posts were being forwarded, and men and women of different stages and ages were applauding whatever I was saying. After all, its what I do for a living. I am paid to get people to pay attention. But when the pregnant thirty-something receptionist at my hair salon asked me for my e-mail address after I told her there was a crap catcher in the delivery room, it was a turning point for me. Now, I actually believed what came out of my mouth had value.

Just like me, so many women dont realize the value of their own opinions or observations. It kills me to see so many of us go through the motions of etiquette or political correctness or just plain insecurity and shyness. We people please, go along with the herd, or nod in agreement with an ignorant/arrogant boss and then lose ourselves in the process. In short, we act, and adopt many acts to cover up what we really believe is true. We forget who we really are and what we really want, until we become clones of each other. (I dont think there needs to be one more person in the world walking around wearing a Tory Burch flat.) Even worse, we lose the opportunity for real growth and real interpersonal connection by avoiding speaking the truth about how we feel or what we think and how we see the world through our own eyes. I call this phenomenon adopting the act.

Speaking of, heres how my eyes see my world: its the freaking UN in my house!

I am half-black, half-white, and married to a Jewish guy. I cant do the math to figure out exactly what that makes my two little girls, because I refuse to do math. But for a Cluster F like me, the fashion world worksits an arena in which it doesnt matter what you are; everyone is so superficial, all they are looking for is what , or, more appropriately, who you are wearing. The superficiality that surrounds me helps me avoid the need to feel I have to label myself, but at the same time is a world that is defined by the idea that to look good is to feel good, which has been somewhat of a double-edged sword in my career life. I always had this feeling that there was more out there for me. That I needed to do something to better the world in some way... and getting paid to put pretty things on pretty, privileged people for the rest of my life was not going to cut it.

Im good at what I do, but superficial is the exact opposite of who I am and how I live. I am scarily honest. My poor husband, Brian, is the one who sees it every day. It can be such a great way to be but such a bad way, too, because people really only appreciate honesty in the abstract. Once it comes rolling toward them, the thunder scares them off. But at the end of the day, if a lab tested your blood, dont you expect the lab to call you to tell you if your results showed herpes?

Okay, clearly I wasnt the star of my high school debate team, but I hope you know what Im saying. Everyone in my immediate life knows what Im saying, because I am the person who just says it. All this stuff swims in the room until it feels flooded, but nobody says anything. I didnt purposely make myself the Ambassador of Saying It Like It Is and certainly nobody appointed me to the position of having to blow my lifeguard whistle and announce, Hey folks, were drowning in bullshit here! Women and children first! But I cant help it.

In my defense, I dont mean to be bitchy. I do have a filter. Theres just shit I feel compelled to say, like what a complete injustice looks like. I learned from the injustices in my own life, from a very early age, to call people out on their shit, beginning with my own father. After my parents divorce, my mom had to struggle so hard while my father, who basically had it all, lived a quarter of a mile away. No adult at the time said how fucked up this was, so Id be the one to stick up for her. And now, I cant stop calling people out on their stupidity and selfishness. For instance, why today I feel like I need a giant sign on my shirt saying, These kids are mine when I walk into my local Starbucks, is beyond me. Or No, Im not their nanny! Like I said, though, I do have a filter, or else I wouldve already made a spectacle of myself by turning to the woman behind me in line who just asked me how much my family paid me because she is looking for a new nanny herself, and saying, Why dont you remove yourself from my face until you open your eyes and notice we live in a melting pot! And finally, I really cant keep my mouth shut when I see how some families define their relationships with their family members by measuring the amount that they do or dont do for each other! Do we have to keep count? Do we have to measure these things as a family or can we just do what we can do for each other and hope that we all contribute in some way?