Odds and ends 11

It Takes Me More Than 3 Hours To Write One Story by Shannon Ashley (from Medium)

“The reality is that there probably are certain types of stories that you could write more quickly than others. That doesn’t mean those are the stories that will put you on the map, however. It also doesn’t mean that those are the stories you’ll actually want to write.

If I had to give an explanation as to why so many writers insist that the stories where they didn’t really try wound up being the most popular, I’d say it’s got nothing to do with the number of minutes it took them to write. Instead, I’d say the real answers are flow and letting go of expectations…

Yet, I’ve accepted that there are some things I will never be, and a fast writer is at the top of the list. When people espouse the so-called benefits of writing your articles in only an hour, I know they mean well. They typically believe it and truly aren’t trying to steer you wrong. But I’m afraid it really does steer other writers wrong. Aside from literal deadlines, the last thing any writer should be fixated on is how many minutes one story takes them.”

The Weather by Aubrey Hirsch (From Gay Mag on Medium)

“D’s depression is the weather in our house, except there’s no forecast. Some days we wake to sunny skies, gentle breezes. We talk and laugh. We eat and nap. We watch the baby the way one watches a campfire, not for any particular reason, but because it is there and strangely fascinating in its combination of predictability and surprise.”

A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement by Joshua Coleman (from The Atlantic)

One of the downsides of the careful, conscientious, anxious parenting that has become common in the United States is that our children sometimes get too much of us—not only our time and dedication, but our worry, our concern. Sometimes the steady current of our movement toward children creates a wave so powerful that it threatens to push them off their own moorings; it leaves them unable to find their footing until they’re safely beyond the parent’s reach. Sometimes they need to leave the parent to find themselves.

Creativity Has One Tremendous Downside That Is Rarely Spoken About by Tim Denning (from Medium)

“Writer, Sean Kernan, shared the quote “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” Growing up around Navy SEALs taught him this mantra.

Your creativity is amplified when you vary the speed and spend time slowing down and completely putting the brakes on it. It has taken me seven years of publishing thousands of long-form articles online to understand that lesson.

Progress happens when you go slow or completely stop, so you can reflect.”

Video: It’s Helping Time by Michael Weiss (from Harvard Business School Newsroom)

“Martin Luther King said that time is one of the great myths of. American society. That he had been told if you just wait, things will get better for Blacks. If you just wait, economic injustice, racial injustice will cede. And he said that that’s not true. That essentially time is neutral. And our job is to help time.” (Bold mine)

What Do You Like About Yourself? by Joanna Goddard (from Cup of Jo)

“Says Suzi: “I have a motto: ‘Do it scared. Do it tired.’ I live according to my values and I show up for my life. I won’t back down from doing something if the reasons are fear or being tired.””

Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash

Hot

The heat starts deep under my skin, pushing towards the surface with the force and inevitability of an oncoming wave.

I can feel when it starts, but by then it is too late.

I can tell myself that I am not actually hot, just flooded with sensation, but it makes no difference. I am warm, wet, dripping.

My internal thermostat is broken.

Every month, I go to have an implant injected into my stomach. And it freezes my body’s cycles. I feel I am standing on the knife’s edge of menopause.

It’s not much fun during the days, but it’s the nights that really get me.

I wake up, shivering and sweating at the same time.

If I get up to use the toilet, or tend to Rosie after she cries out, I know I have to budget at least fifteen minutes of lying in bed before I can put the covers back on. Otherwise the heat will come.

I don’t think women were designed to go through this change while looking after small children.

Bit by bit, it makes my sleep unravel.

I am doing everything in my power to cling to my potential to rest. It seems strange to think I used to be a champion sleeper.

There has been some improvement. One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I borrowed a book about insomnia from the online library at 2am. I proceeded to start following every recommendation in the book to the letter.

It seems to be working.

The most important part is sleep restriction – you are not allowed to do anything but sleep in your bed, and if you are stressing out, or not tired, you have to get back out of bed.

Maybe I am just so exhausted that it helps me sleep through the heatwaves? But somehow, my overall energy does feel better.

I don’t touch sugar. I meditate every day (mostly). I do yoga, even if just for five minutes, every day.

And then for one day I stop doing those things. I eat a bowl of ice cream. I sleep in instead of doing yoga. I write instead of meditate. And suddenly I am hot again.

Correlation or causation? Who knows.

Let’s blame sugar. It’s always easy to blame sugar.

It’s the same red-faced sensation that accompanies embarrassment, where you feel the warmth flooding your face. Only this time the trigger isn’t shame. It’s something else – but what?

The root cause remains a mystery.

I thought maybe these episodes wouldn’t be as frustrating if I understood why it happened. So I googled it. And from what I can tell from my amateur research, it is a mystery.

A mystery…

No one knows why women find themselves suddenly at the mercy of an out of control internal furnace. Despite the fact that every woman eventually goes through some version of this change, there simply hasn’t been enough research done to understand it.

Why don’t we talk about this more – what it feels like, how we cope? Sometimes it feels like I am the only person in the world this is happening to. And yet, it’s hard to think of an experience more universal. Not every woman bears a child. But every woman travels through the menopause if she is lucky to live long enough.

There are sometimes I don’t mind the sensation of the heat. I can observe it calmly, almost as if I were outside myself. It’s fascinating, feeling it move through my body like a row of dominoes, toppling one after another.

I thought hot flashes were boring before I experienced them, but each one feels like a dramatic episode: inciting incident, build to an overwhelming climax, denoument.

I was someone who was always cold. No longer.

I keep blankets in layers. I look longing at clothes made from synthetic fabrics I can no longer bring myself to wear.

When this change happened to my mother, she joked about it being a kind of game: “she’s hot, she’s cold, she’s freezing”.

It isn’t fun. But I can keep things in perspective: the sensations were infinitely worse during chemo.

I imagined my ovaries screaming, shrivelled up, dying in reaction to the toxic chemicals bathing my body.

In the space of just a few months I had gone from breastfeeding, through IVF, to this hormonal wasteland. No wonder my body was crashing.

When people asked me how I was coping, I would tell them “I can’t control my temperature.” Which on the surface doesn’t seem like a particularly devastating side effect, given the challenges cancer can bring. Listening to myself, it sounded like complaining about trivial things. I had no way of communicating how excruciating it was. I came to dread bedtime, when it was at its worst.

Between the headaches and the hot flashes and the gastrointestinal distress, I reached a point where I forgot what normal sleep felt like.

By comparison, now is a walk in the park.

And yet, I am still hot.

Sometimes, when I feel the heat start to spread, I imagine that I am lying on a beach, with the sun warming my body, and a cool drink by my side. It’s the closest I will get to a vacation during these crazy times.

I will be glad when this rollercoaster eventually stops. There is a surgery in my future that will take care of that. For now, I just try to accept it.

I don’t know how to be honest about it without being melodramatic. (Maybe it’s the hormones talking.) I’m worried this makes it all sound unbearable.

It isn’t. It’s just another strange experience of living in a female body.

It is almost bedtime. I have no idea what awaits me, sleep or sauna.

But as the heat rises and the blood rushes, at least I can take comfort in this undeniable evidence that I am alive.

Photo by Armando Ascorve Morales on Unsplash

Space vs stuff

It seems to me that keeping a home environment nice and tidy comes down to a fundamental conflict between space and stuff.

What is clutter?

We talk about clutter as a noun, but I think that actually, it’s more a condition – a way of being.

Clutter is the state of having too much stuff to fit in the space it needs to go into.

As human beings, we naturally gravitate toward finding a balance between stuff and space. An empty room feels soulless and unsettling. One packed to the brim feels overstuffed and anxiety-inducing.

Where that golden spot is is different for each person – it’s a matter personal preference.

Most of the dialogue around this right now seems to present clutter as being a kind of moral failing, and minimalism as inherently virtuous.

Clutter is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are happy in that space.

In my grandfather’s old shed, he had all kinds of treasures – half built inventions, coffee cans filled with screws, fishing poles, bits of wood, seeds to plant… I can’t even begin to recall the volume and variety of strange and half-broken things in there. But it was magical the way he could rummage around and find just the thing that was needed for any situation.

Was it cluttered? Undoubtedly – the amount of stuff he had packed into that small space was much more than it was designed to hold. But it worked for him, and it made him happy to be in his workshop.

Clutter only becomes a problem when it makes your space less usable.

Clutter needs boundaries

Here’s the thing – my grandfather’s mess was contained to that shed.

The home had one junk drawer – everything else was lean and clean. My Granny ran a tight ship, and was ruthless about removing any clutter or unnecessary items in the house.

Granny was a brilliantly pragmatic housekeeper – not someone who delighted in the domestic, but who got it done without a fuss. (My mom always liked to point out how her furniture was perfectly spaced so the vacuum would fit without having to move anything.)

Are you a space person? Or a stuff person?

The first step to building a happier relationship to your environment is working out if you are happy in your space.

The next thing you need to know is – are you a space person or a stuff person?

Which one of these things is the priority that drives your decision making?

For space people, the main priority is how the space is working as a whole, and how the objects fit together – for example, the person who would give away a book that doesn’t fit on their bookshelf without thinking twice.

For stuff people, the perspective is different. I naturally fall more in this camp. Every object has a story: a past, or an as-yet-unrealised future potential. I tend to be more attached to the individual things than I am to the overall environment.

Here’s an example in action, drawing on that image of books…

I have spent hours meticulous researching bookcases to try to find things that are exactly the right size to house my writing papers. The goal is making a home for the stuff. This is a stuff first approach.

Whereas my sister is the type of person who would see a bookshelf that works with her decor and buy it, then figure out what fits on it and get rid of the rest. This is a space first approach.

Both personality tendencies have benefits and drawbacks.

If you’re a space person, you run the risk of missing out on the details (and you have probably thrown away things that you shouldn’t). But you almost certainly have a space that is working pretty well for you.

If you are a things-first person, there is very likely a disconnect between the number of possessions you feel attached to and your available space. Meaning – you have a clutter problem.

To create a nice environment, space has to win

I hate to admit it, but I’ve come to believe that the space people are right. When these two approaches are in conflict, space has to win.

This requires an evolutionary shift in our thinking. Human beings have been programmed to stockpile with good reason – hanging on to things and building resources is historically an important way to be prepared for lean times, particularly unexpected ones. (i.e. You may not like your old shirt, but it’s better than naked. Or you may hate canned peas, but it’s better than hungry.) This is the heritage that has been passed down over centuries.

But for most of us today, the dangers of living in a space with too much stuff are far greater than the dangers of scarcity.

Untidy or overstuffed spaces make it harder to keep healthy habits – no one wants to exercise on a floor they can’t see or cook in a cluttered kitchen.

Clutter exists on a continuum, but you don’t have to be at a hoarder level for the baggage of extra stuff to make your life difficult. And it’s surprisingly easy for this to become hazardous. (After a difficult move our house was in total disarray, and I was really thrilled to meet the personal goal of not having to trip over piles, or worry about things falling on my head when I open my cabinets.)

When the accumulation of objects starts to veer into true hoarding behaviour, that’s when the danger gets really extreme. These spaces are unhygienic, they can be firetraps, and the risk of excess stuff causing injuries grows exponentially. And the problem only gets worse, because the fact that you can’t find what you need leads to buying even more stuff.

I can’t change the fact that I’m a stuff person, that I probably will always hold onto things a bit longer than I need to, or take a stuff-first approach.

But I have to recognise that if I want a space that feels good, then I have to make the big picture the priority.

You know the saying ‘can’t see the forest for the trees?’ That is exactly what happens for those of us who prioritise stuff.

So, how do stuff people learn to manage the clutter?

I am still very much a work in progress on this. But I’ve come to believe there are strategies that can really improve things for us stuff people. We don’t have to ignore our natural inclinations, we have to learn to work with them.

That is exactly the issue I will be tackling next in this project.

Photo by Luca Laurence on Unsplash

The best foundations for ‘chemo-face’ problem skin

Cancer takes a lot from a person. I managed to take it in stride when I lost my breasts and my hair, but when my skin exploded, I completely freaked out.

It felt like happened overnight. My face was a mess. I had sores on my scalp.

It was physically painful, and a huge blow to my self confidence after the other trials of cancer.

I managed to get an appointment with a dermatologist almost immediately. I had previously had skin issues linked to an autoimmune condition. (I’m not sure I’m ready yet to go into a lot of detail on this experience, but I was so ill I had to drop a University class.)

I was terrified that my cancer treatment had somehow affected my hormones in a way that meant this earlier experience would be repeating itself. Fortunately, that was not the case, but it still felt absolutely dreadful.

Bye-bye, Bare Minerals

I think Bare Minerals is great and I had been using this as my go-to foundation for about a decade. But apparently, this is a no-no with this kind of acne. The dermatologist told me I should stop using it, and change out the rest of my makeup as well.

Why? The infection in your skin can get transferred to the makeup brush, and you end up painting your face with this over and over.

Powder foundation was out. But I desperately wanted something to help my skin look a bit more normal.

I’ve always loved makeup, and I made it my mission to find the best way to cover this up.

This was in pre-pandemic days, when people could still go to shopping malls. (Doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago?) My energy was already starting to flag due to treatment, but this was so important to me I found a way to make it happen.

I used the steroid high from my chemotherapy treatments to fuel more than one trip to the shops.

I went to basically every makeup counter, and got samples to try. I tested them all in artificial and natural light, most more than once. I was SERIOUS about this experiment. (These aren’t affiliate links – just my opinion on what’s good.)

The real issue: texture

My selection criteria came almost entirely down to the way it went on, not the shade of the foundation.

When you have a blemish or something you want to cover up, not so hard to cover it with another colour. It’s much harder to mask uneven texture.

With severe skin problems, texture is the bigger problem. The surface is often uneven or peeling in places, and it’s really easy to have the foundation heighten this.

It’s best to get a foundation that matches your skin, but it’s possible to work around a so-so colour match by blending.

However, if it doesn’t go on smoothly, there is literally nothing you can do to compensate for this. (Well, maybe if you’re a professional makeup artist there is, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to crack this nut in the midst of cancer treatment.)

So these recommendations are based on the consistency, which should hopefully be helpful to other people regardless of skin tone.

Some people get really concerned about only using natural products after a cancer diagnosis, but this wasn’t true for me. I completely get where these folks are coming from, but I felt like I had enough things to worry about already. So if this is really important to you, these recommendations probably won’t be so helpful (sorry!).

Winner: Estee Lauder Double Wear Foundation

This was hands-down the winner. It went on so well that even when my skin texture was uneven, it gave a smooth finish. It’s heavy enough to provide really good coverage, but it doesn’t become mask-like.

While it might not match Fenty for shade range (I mean, what does?), it has a pretty wide array, which would make this a good pick for most folks.

Runner up: Charlotte Tilbury Light Wonder Foundation

I really thought this coverage was going to be too light to be effective, but it worked really well. I had a lot of my chemo in the warmer summer months, and having a lighter option in my makeup bag was really welcome.

I used this when my skin wasn’t acting up quite so much and I didn’t feel I needed as heavy of a product.

Again, the smoothness was what made this stand out. Irregularities and dry patches were covered really effectively.

Bonus – Concealer: Studio Finish SPF 35 Concealer

This cream comes in a little pot, and reminds me of stage makeup in a really wonderful way. It’s quite thick and gives really good coverage, but blends out so beautifully that it doesn’t look like you’re actually highlighting your pimples (an unfortunate result for some products).

I used this with both the Estee Lauder and the lighter Charlotte Tilbury foundations to go over problem spots.

(It’s worth noting that you could also use this as foundation in its own right if you are looking for really serious coverage.)

Final thoughts

Makeup did wonders to help my self-confidence during my cancer treatment, but makeup isn’t everything. It’s worth asking for help, not just covering things up.

If your skin is causing you problems during chemo, you don’t just have to suffer in silence. Ask for a referral to a skin doctor if you want to talk through your issues and prescribe medications that may help.

Also, there’s something to be said for letting unhappy skin breathe, so skipping the makeup as often as possible is probably a good idea.

The beauty of who we are as people remains no matter what our faces look like.

If you’re suffering, just remember that it will get better. These skin problems feel like a distant dream – but I’m still really enjoying using the wonderful foundations I discovered. (Plus an occasional dip back into the Bare Minerals, which is now happily back in my makeup bag.)

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Do you want to be seen – or are you trying to be admired?

Art is a process of making things visible. The thing we most often end up making visible is ourselves.

In my earlier days as an artist, I wanted so strongly for the piece to be viewed as separate from me.

Ideally, I wanted to disappear, and have people only see the work.

I didn’t realise this at the time, but this was an immense act of hubris. I was trying to hold myself separate from and above the things that I was creating. I have a lot of empathy for my earlier self – I was trying to protect my heart and my ego, and this mindset allowed me to persevere as a writer.

As I have gotten older, my feelings about the relationship between the artist and the art have shifted. I feel like this connection is something to be celebrated and nurtured. The artist is not their work – but these two things are deeply intertwined.

The things we create are made from us – our minds, feelings, viewpoints, experiences. How can we presume to hold ourselves separate? That need to say ‘that isn’t part of me’ carries whiffs of self-doubt, or in its most severe manifestations, self-loathing.

I ended up going down a little rabbit hole this week, watching a whole bunch of music videos from artists that seem to be straddling the boundary between amateur and professional work. It’s fascinating to look at ones from artists who are clearly talented, but where something hasn’t clicked into place yet.

Obviously production values can make a big difference between artists at this level and true stars, but the biggest thing I noticed was the self-consciousness. I could see some of them wondering, ‘how do I look to the camera’, or moving in ways that felt really practiced. It’s like they were watching themselves from the outside.

The gap that separates the really exceptional artists is this: exceptional artists want to be seen, everyone else wants to be admired.

The desire to be admired is tempting, and leads nowhere but to misery.

I’m speaking from experience here. I did quite a lot of performing as a child, through high school, and then at university. And I found myself often approaching it as something competitive. The goal was to communicate an idea or feeling, sure, but I also had something to prove.

When I sang, I think I was just as concerned whether people would think ‘that is a beautifully sung note’ as I was about singing from my soul. When I wrote a poem, I wanted people to think ‘oh that’s clever’ and wasn’t focusing on being as honesty as the main goal. When I acted in a play, I wanted people to think I was beautiful, and I wasn’t interested in characters that would puncture this facade.

I had no idea how much joy and freedom I was missing out on.

When I would watch the artists whose work touched me most, I would often feel jealous of their seeming abandon and unselfconsciousness. I would try to find it by studying their patterns and motions – not realising this was something that could only be created from the inside.

I didn’t know how to connect with this approach, but it feels like this is finally coming into focus for me through the self-reflective process of this blog.

I kept this blog secret and private for about 18 months because I needed the time to find my own voice and to write without the fear of judgment. But my goal from the start is to allow myself to be seen and known as fully as possible – mostly for Rose.

It has been so liberating to experience this shift in mindset – even though I didn’t realise it was happening at the time. I just kept experiencing more joy and more flow – and when I lost it, I could re-centre by asking myself whether I was being willing to be seen, or whether there was still part of myself that was hiding.

It’s worth saying that trying to be seen doesn’t mean you have to reveal everything or be available and visible all the time. Privacy has its place. Exhibitionism is just as tied up in the need to manipulate others into a response that drives a desire for admiration. I’m not looking for a kind of vulnerability that strips me bare, but instead total presence.

Now, my goal with my work is not to fit into a box of others’ approval. I am still susceptible to this urge, like most people, but I’m working with the artistic process to discover my fullest self and let it be seen.

I’m trying to bring this approach – which grew out of deeply personal writing – more and more into my fictional work. Can I still be as ‘me’ as possible? How much of my heart and soul can I bring into it? Can I let go of my preconceptions of what things should be to create the work that only I can make?

As human beings, most of us spend so much of our lives packaging ourselves to be palatable and appealing to some imaginary societal force. There is nothing wrong with desiring recognition and approval – and the social capital that comes along with this. It’s a pretty basic motivation. But it limits expressiveness.

When we make work, the people are making up their minds about it – in effect judging us. We can go down this rabbit hole of trying to understand and manipulate this response. Or we can refocus on staying inside our own experiences and being our truest selves.

This is what I am reaching towards every day.

Now, when I find myself getting stuck and losing the flow in my work, I reset my compass by asking myself: “Am I trying to be admired, or am I trying to be seen?”

‘Seen’ is by far the richer choice.

Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash

Luxury

What would our ancestors think
If they could see our palatial homes
Taps with cold and hot water
That doesn’t have to be carried in a bucket

Would they marvel at the microwave
Heating a TV dinner at the press of a button
And the magic of mobile phones
That let us talk to loved ones across the globe

What would endless racks of clothes
In a brightly lit shopping mall look like
To a weaver who has spent her whole life
Hunched over a loom, and in her age
Can no longer make her back or fingers straight

What luxury, they would say, and what temptation

Would the person who once lived in a small hut
On land now occupied by traffic lights and idling cars
Marvel at the power of these amazing machines
Or would he be sad he could not hear the birds?

Photo by Nabeel Syed on Unsplash

The Load

My day is a backpack 
Splitting at the seams
Stuffed to the brim
With countless tasks and dreams

My life tries to struggle on
Teetering from the weight
I cram more time inside it
I’m still somehow always late

Set it down
Look around
Feel the ground

Birds take flight
Because they travel light

Photo by Adam Hornyak on Unsplash

Alanis Morissette’s ‘Such Pretty Forks in the Road’ is a masterpiece (plus: a mini-manifesto on artistic criticism)

This album has been the soundtrack of my pandemic life.

It first came to my attention when my mom sent me this video, which was making the rounds on social media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jenJ4_TlZcU

This song is called ‘Ablaze’, and it is a manifesto about a mother’s love for her children – declaring ‘my mission is to keep / the light in your eyes ablaze.’

Part of what is so magical about this performance was seeing Morrissette’s music and her motherhood intertwined. The way she invites her daughter into this space – celebrating her as a joyful thing rather than an impediment to work – captures exactly what I want to do in my own artistic life.

After months of lockdown, when most parents I know where (rightfully) talking about how impossible and exhausting it felt to navigate the conflict between parenting and working, this felt like a balm.

This beautiful line of lyric was the one that came to my mind every time I looked at my daughter and thought my dreams for her future. From doing the dishes, to managing tantrums, I found myself repeating it like a mantra, with all that love and ferocity: “my mission is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze.”

I was eleven when ‘Jagged Little Pill’ was released internationally. I remember the shock and the thrill of encountering this voice – striding boldly into emotional terrain I could feel just coming across the horizon of my own life, but which I did not yet have the words to articulate myself.

People talk about Morrissette’s anger, particularly in regard to this breakout album. But it still drives the conversation today. (In fact, the topic line of Rolling Stone’s profile opens with a quote saying ‘I love anger’.)

But focusing on the anger misses the point. What I find so radical and so refreshing is her honesty. The depth of feeling and willingness to express it in such a vulnerable way spoke to millions and millions of young girls.

She has done it again with ‘Such Pretty Forks In The Road’. She has captured exactly what it feels like to navigate motherhood and adult female life – capturing unhealthy stress relief (‘These…are the reasons I drink’), mental health struggles (‘Call it what you want to / ‘Cause I don’t even care anymore / Call it what you need to / To feel comfortable’), and partnership (‘You call it bright / And I call it simple / And somewhere in the middle is truth’).

I absolutely love her lyrics. They are just the right balance of clear and mystical, so you know exactly what she is talking about, but can also so easily read your own life into them.

I was hungry to hear her talk more about the stories behind the songs, how she created the album, and what this work meant in her own life. I wanted the deep dive into the artistic process.

So I googled it, but with disappointing results. There was very little in-depth journalistic engagement with the album… but lots of three star reviews.

I was shocked – had these critics heard the same album I had? This is the album born of the natural maturing and growth of the same voice that once drove ‘Jagged Little Pill’. She was changing, growing as a person, and taking us on that journey.

How did these critics not connect with it the same way I did? I mean, I’m a songwriter – and I was impressed technically as well as emotionally. What was going on – was I losing my touch?

Then I looked at the bylines. And all these reviews were written by men. (And guessing from their names, a very particular kind of white man.)

Some people are amazing at empathising their way into another’s perspective. Others, less so. The best way to control for this is to make sure lots of different voices can be heard. It made me sad once again that there is so little diversity in who has control of the critical conversation.

A piece of art needs to be reviewed by someone from the audience it is intended for.

There is still room for dissenting / contrasting voices. These are important to create a dialogue or point out flaws or blind spots. But they shouldn’t drown out the conversation an artist is trying to have with their intended audience.

If you can’t really speak to whether a song about postnatal depression captures that experience, you shouldn’t situate yourself as a voice of authority about that work.

I know lots of artists with a powerful antipathy to critics. I’m not one of them – I think they are an important part of the artistic ecosystem, and both good and bad reviews have helped me think in new ways about my own work.

But sometimes there is a missing ingredient, where critics don’t understand that not everyone sees the piece the same way they do. (Ex: a critic may hate a play personally, but if the audience is in hysterics, that needs to be acknowledged.)

What I was seeing in these reviews of Morrissette’s album is a bland ‘yeah it’s good but not amazing’ – but the only way they could feel this way is if they don’t understand the currents of life it was written to engage with.

I wish both the interviewers and the critics had engaged with Morrissette about her intentions – they might have better understood how beautifully this album fulfilled them.

And I also wish, on a purely human level, that they had managed to look a little bit outside of themselves.

As women get more opportunities to make art, we are encountering a critical establishment that isn’t always ready for us. It hasn’t yet learned how to engage with and understand this work.

I hope we get to hear from a wider range of critics and connoisseurs. And I hope the current gatekeepers take the opportunity to think about why they hold the opinions they do, and take the risk of looking beyond them.

This album may not have connected with the men reviewing it. But if they had asked their wives or sisters, they might have heard a different story.

In summary – the critics got this one really, really wrong.

THANK YOU Alanis for creating tracks that gave me energy and inspiration, that saw me in my darkness and struggles, and are just brilliant songs in their own right.

Your music has kept me going during this pandemic, and for that I will be forever grateful.