This month I read a life-changing book: Project 333: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge that Proves Less Really is So Much More.
In January I talk about this challenge in detail and how it played out in my life. For me the better part of the guide was when the author talked about life topics like being creative and breaking rules. (Hint: Creative people live longer.)
To get followers to buy the book I’ll quote from it. The single most useful advice was asking readers what other rules we could break along with fashion rules.
To wit:
We should break written and unwritten rules such as “The rules and expectations that other people have quietly (or not so quietly) set for you.”
Isn’t that how it goes that other people think they know what’s best for us. We fall in line and sink into doing what they say. Then we get ill conforming to this false version of ourselves.
It’s time to take back our lives. To trust ourselves to know what’s right for us in terms of how we should think feel live act love and dress.
Our uniqueness and our differentness are gifts we give each other.
Let’s not allow those “minders” to impact how we feel about ourselves.
Lastly: author Courtney Carver gets this imperative stance right too:
“Just because things are crazy around you doesn’t mean things have to be crazy within you.”
The novel above is spiky, surreal, seductive. Forget that it received only 3.8 stars on Amazon. I recommend that everyone reads this book.
Though fiction the narrative exposes the dark side of the skincare industry. By the time I got to only page 119 I had no interest in buying and using anti-aging creams.
The book should turn all readers off from seeking eternal youth. Save your hard-earned money. Use it to donate to charity. Buy a new shade of lipstick guilt-free. Our skin is beautiful even with lines and wrinkles.
Rouge is the gold standard for the craft of fiction. The book should win a literary prize.
You can check it out of the library if you can’t buy it.
I checked out of the library the book above. This is the book to read if you care about what’s going on and want to aid in changing things.
The first habit to adopt is to see what goes on from the other person’s point of view. It’s called a Point of View for a reason. Everyone’s lived experience impacts how each of us thinks about life, the world, and people.
Scapegoating the readers of books is not the way to end injustice. Authors have been fixated on changing the behavior they assume the reader has when those media darlings haven’t met you.
One of their cardinal sins is hiring a life coach as if wanting to improve yourself is an injustice.
In real life as well as between the pages of books there’s a better alternative to stereotyping people:
Each of us should tell our unvarnished stories. Storytelling is the way to kindle empathy and to motivate readers to act or to change their mind.
In this season when the holiday card greeting Peace on Earth appears to be a cosmic joke I persist in having hope. I remain an optimist.
There’s work that each of us can do to aid in healing. It starts when we choose recovery and reconciliation instead of waging a war with people we view as our enemies.
Positive change IS happening in corners of society in America under the radar of the people who have been given a media platform to spread hateful and hurtful rhetoric.
We don’t have to buy what they’re selling us this season. They can attack us sight unseen when the truth is hiding in plain sight: change is going on.
Let’s not click on the bait or repost bitter barbed-wire attacks.
Love is All Colors just like Love is All Sizes. And Love is Love however it appears. People are falling in love with each other. Individuals are acting as Advocates. Fathers are raising their kids to have manners and compassion.
These tiny acts of justice are going on all around us.
Now more than ever seeing each other and recognizing each other is the way to go.
I’ll end here with what a famous Russian art instructor told me when I took his life painting class. He told me: “Paint what you see not what you know.”
Let’s take five minutes to share our stories with each other. To show who we are and what we stand for. Let’s take a stand against the agents of acrimony who keep us divided.
Chances are I won’t have a million followers. That’s okay. In the book above the author reveals that metaverse platforms like Facebook promote polarizing content precisely because it gets people to react click like and share the content and linger on the sites.
Animosity goes viral. CJ Casciotta the author of the book ends his guide with the call for reconciliation. He thinks the Poets among us have the gifts to change things.
How eerie it was then that in this blog recently I expressed my stance that I’m going to “call in” others not call out real people.
In whatever I do say and write I want to make people feel good. No–I won’t contribute to making others feel like poop. If I don’t want to feel like toilet scum why would I want others to feel that way.
In here I’ll give away the secret to being effective:
A person who is made to feel ashamed is not going to have the energy nor motivation to change their behavior.
Good luck trying to convert them to your cause when you’re attacking them and cutting them down.
Anger serves only to harm the person feeling that way not the object of their anger. Do we really want to live our whole lives fueled up on resentment?
Bitter dark and small should be a chocolate drop. Not how we think about and act towards each other.
Let’s each of us vow not to sharpen our knives to compete in the shame wars going on. Forks Over Knives should be our life philosophy not just an eating plan.
It’s okay to cut into a chicken cutlet. Why should we cut into others with hateful and hurtful rhetoric. Things haven’t changed so that is exactly why it’s likely we should change our tactics.
Like the author of the above book I choose to be a “hopemonger” not a hatemonger.
Let’s resist the siren call of clicking share on incendiary invectives. The best way to neutralize the attempts to shame each other is to not respond to the original attack. To not swallow the “click-bait.”
The year is ending. It’s time to think about where we have been and where each of us wants to go in 2024. I’m an eternal optimist. I think each of us has the power to create the world we want to see.
In my view too it starts with choosing reconciliation. With renouncing harmful acts of hating judging criticizing labeling and acting violent.
We each of us have the right to choose our own path in life. We don’t have to buy what being’s sold about how to treat each other.
The second book I checked out of the library was True Style is What’s Underneath: The Self-Acceptance Revolution.
A candidate for a PhD on recovery interviewed me. She asked what I thought the most positive thing was that came from being unwell.
“I value difference,” I told her.
The unique individuals in this guide take off where the others started in the Street Unicorns: Bold Expressionists of Style book I reviewed in a blog entry earlier.
Authors Lily and Elisa had the calling “to uncover what’s underneath authentic style, helping to build a world where getting dressed each morning is an act of self-love.”
I’ll quote from individuals featured in the book as the sparkplug to ignite readers to buy True Style.
Jillian Mercado:
“If you never had to struggle or fight for anything in your life, how could you know who you are and what you’re made of?
If you’re different, that’s sunlight in somebody’s world.”
Tallulah Willis:
“I always say, ‘You know the feeling you’re supposed to have on your wedding day, that you feel like a princess? Why not have that every day?'”
Little old blogger Christina would rather be the sunlight. Not a tornado.
The author of the book above is on the cover of the October/November issue of Women’s Health. I received the magazine two days ago. This weekend I checked her book out of a library. I recommend you buy the guide.
Her SPEAK manifesto is shorthand for Surrender Power Empathy Authenticity Knowledge.
Tunde tells readers to “lead with empathy.” She recounts her struggle with not liking her muscular arms.
Tunde is a Peloton bike instructor who reaches 20,000 cyclists in her motivational workout sessions. She is a face of Revlon cosmetics and a Nike apparel athlete.
Tunde’s book and the pep talks she gave in it touched me. I have the opposite experience of Tunde and other young women. I didn’t think I had to conform or should choose to conform to have other teens accept me.
By the time I was only 6 years old I was bullied. At the same time I was taught my ABCs I learned that the other kids didn’t like me. An outsider from that early age I had no one I thought I should impress.
Often I read first-person accounts of women who tried to starve themselves thin to fit in or get others to like them. They had body image issues like Tunde.
It is not a compliment it’s racist and insulting to tell a person like Tunde: “You’re pretty for a Black girl” or “You’d be pretty if you lost weight.”
I had no admirers either secret ones or others who gave me comments like that.
As for Tunde’s take on Authenticity I’ll get at her abiding belief in my own words: “When you show up as yourself great things happen.”
Secrecy breeds shame. Hiding who you are–and keeping in a closet the parts of yourself you think no one will like or approve of–causes ill health.
My mother doesn’t understand how I could’ve recovered from the bullying in a way where I don’t often think or talk of it. Yet the reality was 6-year old girls had already become bullies and I was their target. Up until I turned 14 and went to a different school.
This treatment should have been the tip-off that as an adult I’d be attacked for speaking out to say that recovery is possible.
Whether it’s from racism like Tunde experienced, ageism, mental or physical illness, political division or anything else we struggle with my mission in this lifetime is to promote recovery and healing.
In the coming blog entry I’ll review the second book I checked out of the library: True Style is What’s Underneath: The Self-acceptance Revolution.
A chip is not the kind of accessory we should be carrying on our shoulder. We each of us have the power to change our lives for the better regardless of our circumstance.
It starts when we take to heart the Tunde-isms in SPEAK and begin speaking up for ourselves.
The subtitle tells it all: Get from where you are to where you want to be. Like Tunde I believe it’s possible to do this.
I’m a 58-year old white woman who played Run DMC Public Enemy and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince on my FM radio show when I was a disc jockey in the 1980s.
In the 1990s I marched to the beat of Queen Latifah singing “U-N-I-T-Y.”
That was the extent of my love affair with rap music.
So when I checked out of the library Life Lessons from Hip-Hop- it was an unlikely contender for the best self-help book I’ve ever read.
The rappers who were interviewed said things that mirrored how I’ve felt in their own words.
So I bought the book to read again. To get readers to buy the book I’ll quote the prime insights from 2 Hip-Hop artists.
Please I implore followers to listen to what they say.
I respect any artists who use their emotional energy to tell stories that can move readers listeners and audience members to action and compassion.
In Big Sean: Talk to Someone
“I realized that the only way somebody can affect how I’m feeling is if I give them permission to make me feel like that.”
In Pharrell Williams: Be Empathic
“Empathy is the skeleton key to any room…It’s the number-one thing we need before love. Because if you have no empathy, then you can’t even get to why you should love someone else.
That goes for the one you marry, the one you hate, your parents, your children, strangers.
If you have no empathy, it’s not possible for you to like and definitely not possible for you to love.”
After reading the above book I coined the term Bite of Life as in taking a Bite of Life.
For Beauty Individuality Truth and Empathy. This is what I believe in.
My view runs counter to the Dermalogica founder author. She doesn’t like and use the word beauty. I beg to differ.
Seeing beauty in the ordinary–in the broken; in the struggle; in the people, places, and things no one else deems beautiful–is a gift each of us can give each other.
What I seek to do is Celebrate Life by dressing up; by making art out of the everyday; by spreading joy and optimism in a world full of despair.
Read Skin in the Game to get a shot of confidence. Jane Wurwand’s life story could be any of ours with a twist. She had a failed first marriage by the age of 21–and things could’ve gotten worse.
Wurwand is living proof of what I’ve written before that where you start out is not where you have to remain.
That ambition born of altruism is the right way to lead in business and in life.
Wurwand references Madam C.J. Walker in Skin in the Game. How could she not. Walker was a radical beauty entrepreneur in her time.
Reading Skin in the Game I thought: “She could do it. So can I.”
Though I checked the book out of the library I recommend you buy it. It’s worth taking the gems of advice to heart.
You want to conquer a market. Or succeed in any venture. Be kind and care about people.
That’s what Wurwand made her mission as the founder of a skincare line that grossed $1Million in its first year in 1986.
How to Date Your Wardrobe is a gift book hardcover packed with ideas and insight.
Page 79 sums up author Heather Newberger’s ethic:
“Instead of wasting your time wishing you were a different person, it’s important for all of us to let go of who we think we should be–so that we may enjoy the individuals we already are.”
This sentence has haunted me as it gets at what I’ve been reckoning with in my life. As hard as it can be to act true to ourselves in a society where you’ve expected to conform, I say being who you are is the only way to succeed in life.
The new electric purple lipstick I bought tells it like I am: The shade is called Unconventional Babe.
As sixty beckons for a lot of us it’s the time to do things differently. I recommend trying out a new haircut or taking up a hobby like cooking or starting to exercise.
It’s the perfect time to date your wardrobe and “revive, revitalize, and reinvigorate your style” like Heather Newberger advocates.
Simply creating new outfits has improved my outlook and given me incomparable joy.
Forget following fashion trends. If you don’t feel comfortable in what you’re wearing you won’t feel good or look good either.
I bought this book and refer to it often.
It’s my contention that when things aren’t going right in your life doing what comes easy to you that you like doing will save you from sinking into despair.
In one instant I changed my thinking. Talking about clothes and fashion isn’t frivolous when doing so can lift up others.
Men are not given grief for talking about and following sports.
Why should women be tsk-tsked for talking about dressing up and enjoying clothes?
I tell you it was liberating to get rid of the donation bags.
When you finally own only what you love to wear it makes getting dressed easier.
Seeing those beauties in my closet puts a smile on my face.
Read How to Date Your Wardrobe. Doing so you just might realize that changing your view of yourself can be as simple as changing what you wear.
The above book is the best of its kind that should be required reading by everyone in America.
The author talks about effective ways to tackle pressing issues like climate change and runaway consumerism.
In my life I choose not to travel long distances on airplanes that use fossil fuels. That’s the way I have of making a difference.
The second thing I’ve done is that I don’t eat meat. Not only for health reasons I do it because of the impact of CAFO slaughterhouses on the environment and degrading treatment of the workers there.
The third prime thing I do is to not shop on impulse. I hold onto the clothes I buy for at least five years or longer.
This year I’m going to retire the winter coat I’ve had for 11 years. Hopefully I can find a 100 percent wool coat this fall.
In the last 3 years I’ve donated 15 bags of clothes to the Salvation Army. The reality is most donated clothing winds up in a landfill in Ghana, Africa after being sold to resellers there.
My goal is to only buy clothes I’ll wear until they’re no longer wearable. Instead of accumulating un-wise buys I bring home that I rarely wear.
Cue the violins for the items I call “1990s office worker” shirts that I’m tossing in a new donation bag.
They. Are Not. Who I Am Today.
I turn 58 this spring. On a kick I am to upend the status quo.
Two years shy of 60 if you’re like me you’ll be reassessing everything in your life.
We’re getting closer to what I call the This is It! decade.
With my time here on Earth getting shorter I don’t want to waste my time money energy or effort on things that don’t positively impact my life or other people’s lives.
I’ll end here by saying that none of us should fear becoming older. Or fear speaking out on the things that matter to us.
The author of Wallet Activism revealed that the ban on plastic straws adversely effected individuals with disabilities. A lot of whom cannot use a paper straw to drink.
The list goes on of “green” practices that aren’t really effective when scrutinized further.
Read Wallet Activism and decide for yourself what measures you want to and can take to protect our Planet–and more than that the People living on our Planet.
Left of the Dial 