No Is A Complete Sentence

I think that it was the Olsen twins that coined the phrase "No is a complete sentence".  

I have a checkered past with the word no.  Something suggested to me that would push me out of my safe zone, past the walls I had built; that was an easy no.  Saying no to someone wanting me to do something, change myself for them, give in to what they wanted over what I wanted, impossible.

But I grew slowly to discover is this.  Saying no is liberating.  Not changing or giving in, feels wonderful.  Every day, I take a step further away from whom I was and walk towards who I am.

Take hobbies for example.  I love writing and usually try and get something written down, even if it is only a paragraph or two, every week.  At the moment, I try to write a post a week but it depends on how I feel on any given day.  You cannot force writing.  It just comes.

My partner has many hobbies.  He is always doing one hobby or another in the evening and one night he suggested that I should get another hobby for when the writing did not come. He doesn't watch TV and does not understand the binge watching of TV series.

I laugh now, but I thought that getting another hobby would please him so....I came up with knitting.  

I got some needles, some wool and one night, I gave it a go.  Except.  I did not want to fucking knit.  I wanted to watch the damn TV.  I lasted a night.  There was a lot of swearing.

I think that probably shows just how comfortable I already felt with him back then.  Giving up after one night.  The old me would have tried, and tried and tried.  I would have made it my vocation to please him.  To succeed.

I remember him laughing the next night when I threw away the needles and gave the wool to the cat to play with.  He said "Baby, just because I suggest something, doesn't mean you have to do it.  You don't have to try to please me.  You already please me, just as you are.  You need to please you."

You need to please you.  How often do we just stop, and please ourselves?

That was one of the many steps that I learned.  You don't have to try and please people for them to like you.  They either like you, or they don't.  You do not need to earn anyone's approval.  If they think you do need to earn it, screw them.

I have discovered that there are many phrases I that I did not feel comfortable saying.  It is only in the past year that I find myself able to start using them again.  

No.  

I don't want to.  

You can do that yourself.

I was always the caretaker, the organiser, the fixer.  

The one who always said yes, even when I secretly thought no.  

On the outside, I was the good organiser, the one who you could count on to take care of the "thing" that needed sorting.  But the truth was that I was trying to find love and acceptance by giving, then more giving.  I gave so much of myself that I thought that there was nothing left.

I am still the organiser and the fixer.  I have found that it is a part of me and I do enjoy it.  But the difference now is that I take a step back when I want.  I say no when I have too much on my plate.  I say no, just because I do not want to.

The temptation to help people will always be with me and is part of who I am.  But now, it is on my terms.

Trying saying no.  I don't want to.  Leave it to someone else for once to arrange.  If you are like I once was, it will be hard.  But you can do it.  You owe it to yourself.  You deserve it.

And if you fall off the bandwagon, just remember, no is a complete sentence.

The Curved Opinion Short Stories Part 10: Where Did You Go?

I heard the bike before I saw it.  But I did not need to see the bike to know what it was and who was riding it.

I had heard the sound of that motorcycle going up and down our driveway every day for twenty years.  Like clockwork.  6.15am and 4.45pm on the dot.

Except I had not heard that sound for the last two years.  Not since my husband had left for work at 6.15am on a Thursday, 13th February 2024 and never came home.

There was nothing special about that day.  I had made his breakfast as usual, packed up a large lunch for him as I always did.  A flask of strong coffee, two huge turkey sandwiches which were his favourite.  Another flask full of homemade soup.  Working as a machinery mechanic he put in a long day overhauling and fixing the equipment for a local factory and he worked hard.

We had spoken that morning about it being Valentines Day the next day and he told me that he planned to take me out for a meal.  This was unusual.  He did not normally do romance.  He showed me he loved me in the things that he did, but he did not like what he called "performative love".

Adam and I met when he was 21 and I was 18.  It was more than just love at first sight.  It just was.  We were together; and that was that.  We married two years later in a local orchard.  He worked hard to provide for us, I ran the home.  It worked for us.  Children were wanted, but that turned out not to be possible.

I remember the day that we found out that we were to be a childless couple.  The problem was with both me, and him.  It could have broken us, but it didn't.  We created a beautiful home, cultivated our hobbies, him with his love of motorcycles, me with my love of felting, crafting and baking.  It worked for us.

So when the day came, 18 years into our marriage that he disappeared, there was no reason.  We were happy.  He just drove off on his motorcycle that morning and did not come back.  He did not arrive at work, no one remembered seeing him.  It was as if he had been simply plucked from the earth.

I reported him as missing, but the local police did not seem to take that much interest.  They did all the usual things of course that you expect when someone goes missing.  They interviewed friends, work colleagues, his family; although there was little of the latter.  They checked the local woods and canvassed door to door.  But after three weeks of searching without a lead, they lost interest, suggesting that he had left me for another woman.  But that was not Adam.  Cheating in any form was something he could never abide.

My heart was broken.  To never find him, never get an answer as to what had happened that morning was more than I could bear.  Yet, somehow, I knew that somewhere, somehow, he was alive,  I felt it.

With no money coming into the house now I got a job with a catering company.  I loved baking so it seemed an obvious choice.  I made cakes and desserts for weddings and events.  My career flourished, but the rest of my life did not.  I could not move on.  I would not.  He was out there, somewhere.

So when I heard the familiar rumble of the motorcycle that morning, two years after he had disappeared, part of me was not surprised.  I had been waiting.  Waiting to hear the sound of that engine that told me that he was home.

I raced through the kitchen and on to the porch as he pulled up.  He looked the same.  No helmet because he said that his head was hard enough.  The same leathers.  The same stubbly beard that I loved.  That look of love in his eyes that he had whenever he saw me.

I shouted, no, screamed at him "Where the hell have you been?"  He looked at me as he climbed off the bike, looking more serious than I had ever seen him.

"Do you still love me?" he asked.  "I never stopped" I whispered as he approached me and pulled me into his arms.  "Do you trust me?" he said looking directly into my eyes.  I shouldn't.  He had been gone for two years without a word.  Yet I nodded.  I did.

"Then pack a bag.  As much as you can fit into a rucksack.  No time for questions.  Will you come?"

I looked into his eyes once more for a long minute and smiled.  "Give me 15 minutes to pack".

Women's Rights And The Two Elephants in the Room

So, my thoughts have moved on from my recent post about women's rights.

This is not a pleasant post to write. But this is what I have in my head right now. It will no doubt come out in a jumble, because my brain is jumping from thought to thought at lightening speed.  This is not a happy post so I understand if you do not read further.  That is as close to a trigger warning as you will get from me.

So what am I talking about today? My fear.  That women may lose our rights, we just cannot see it yet. 

In order to look at where we are now, it is important to look back at where we were.

It is 98 years since all women were given the vote (some women were given that right in 1918 at the same time as men). It is 56 years since the Equal Pay Act was introduced (but was enacted 5 years later). It is 51 years since the Sex Discrimination Act.  It is 35 years since rape in marriage was recognised as a crime. (All UK) 

Only one of these is in living memory for me.  Aside from the vote, all are in living memory for my mother.

In the space of 100 years we have gained the vote, the right to equal pay, the right not to be discriminated against because of our sex or marital status.  We have gained the right to have credit in our own name with needing a male co-signer.  We are able to report sexual violence by our husbands to the police and it be recognised as a crime.

It is shocking to be honest that it took until 1991 for the last one to happen.  Before that, it was deemed that a woman gives irrevocable consent to her husband when she marries him.  

Could modern day women even comprehend that the women who came before us could vote, work, have a mortgage and hold our own money, yet access to our bodies by our husbands was permissible until one Judge said different.  Because it was one case that changed the law, not an act of parliament.

Therein lies one of the problems women are facing. Unless you are Gen X or older and live in a first world country, you do not truly know what it was like to be treated and deemed as secondary to a man in terms of our worth. Treated almost like a child who needed supervision.  Whose bodies belonged to our husbands. 

Women today are more independent than we have ever before. We have money, we have equality, we have choices. We can choose to marry if we want, or not. We can choose to have children, or no. We are free. 

Or are we? 

Because what I have come to understand more and more over the past few years is freedom is an illusion. Because we are not free. You cannot be free if that freedom can be taken away. And it can. And possibly, it will be. 

We have already had the precursor. Abortion rights in the US. 

I am not starting an abortion debate here.  It matters not whether you are pro life or pro choice.  My point does not focus on that.

It is the way that the law is being implemented that is the truly terrifying part. Because abortion bans could be just that. An abortion ban, either limited to a number of weeks or none at all. But they have gone beyond that. 

 There are some women have been prosecuted for having a miscarriage despite evidence that this was the case. Women have died because the fetus inside them was worth more than saving her life.  Women have been forced to carry a dead baby to term. Women have been forced to carry a baby that will not live outside of the womb. A brain dead woman in a coma was kept alive until a time when her baby could be retrieved by caesarean.

That isn't about healthcare or the rights of a fetus. Can you even imagine the horror of carrying your baby, knowing that it's survival is impossible, for months, until you deliver and that baby that you wanted so much, is dead.  

That is torture. 

You also have to look how the actions of some women are blamed on all women. 

For example, the girls who have made their career on Onlyfans. I don't agree with it or their actions, and I wonder where their actual self worth and self respect have gone. But the rhetoric is that because some women/girls do this, it is apparently proof that all women are clearly whores when left to their own devices. 

I now touch on the Clancy trial, which is a mess from beginning to end. All of it and from every side.  I do not agree with the women protesting at the Court house and I think some of the women who have posted about it on TikTok have lost their goddamn minds. But I understand that that is their opinion (and their right to have it and say it). But again, the actions of some women are being judged against all women. 

Calls to remove our right to vote. Worry about women being in any kind of important position. How can you be a doctor, a teacher, a solicitor, anyone in charges if our hormones can one day make us go psychotic. This is simplistic, of course. Psychosis affects only 0.1% of mothers and the majority of those get the help they need and they recover. 

But we are not judged the same way that men are. And we never will be.  

Men commit the majority of violent crimes. They commit around 90-95% of all whole family murders (US stats). What I am afraid to to say is, that it does not matter.  

The double standard of not all men, but apparently, yes, all women.   

A man commits an atrocity and the response is “Not all men.”  Worse, what did she do to provoke him, what was he going through etc etc 

A woman commits an atrocity and suddenly there are questions about women's judgement, women's hormones, women's suitability for responsibility, women's emotional stability, women's ability to hold office, women's ability to make decisions.

I mention in the title to this post about there being two elephants in the room.  I will touch on the second later. 

The first is that, I hate to type this, I hate to think this, but the men who say "take rights from women because ......." are not saying it for mere effect. They understand that it can happen. May happen. Yes, may happen.  Because rights that are given, can be taken.  And that it what we have forgotten. 

We didn't take out rights by force. We fought for them, yes, absolutely. But ultimately, we were still given them.  It isn't even just ordinary men (and some women) who are saying that our rights should be taken away. It is some of the people who run the country (US). 

Think about it. 

Again I look at abortion rights in the US and the examples I give above. Women can vote, have our own money, run our own lives, hold power, run for office, rule the country. Yet in a country where women can have it all and many do, the rights to their bodies were taken.  

In an increasing amount of cases, that were nothing to do with the rights of a fetus.  And there was nothing that women could do about it. 

I hate to agree with what some men say on the matter, because the fact is, we have forgotten that men are stronger physically than women and that is important. We cannot physically defend ourselves and if men chose to subjugate us again, there is nothing we can actually do about it. See above as the clearest example. 

Physical strength does not enact laws of course. Power does. And that is why the physical strength comes into it. Because if laws change, we cannot physically fight back as a man can. Our voices will matter none. 

Margaret Atwood knew it. Deep down, so do we. 

We live on a tightrope that we have forgotten we live on. We have become complacent. And that is a massive fucking problem. 

I know what I don't want to do, and never will. I will never look at another woman's actions, thoughts and beliefs and think that that it applies to all women. I believe that each person is responsible only for their own actions. 

But what I am beginning to realise, way, way too fucking late, is that this will be our downfall. 

Because we do not live in the same world as men. 

We have spent decades presuming that every generation of women would have more freedom than the one before it. Perhaps that is the most dangerous assumption of all. Because history doesn't work that way. 

Rights aren't a staircase that only goes upwards. They are laws. And laws can be changed. 

We do not have our rights because the world finally decided that women deserved them. Women fought, protested, campaigned and sometimes sacrificed themselves for them. Some suffragettes were tortured in prison for it. 

Perhaps the thing we have forgotten is not how far we've come. Perhaps it is that we can go backwards. 

And we can go backwards.  The rights of women will be judged as a failed social experiment.

What do we do with/about what I have said above? I have no clue. That is again is the problem. We are way past the starting gate. We just didn't realise, or we forgot, about the rope that tethered us to the starting gate. That can be pulled back. 

We were so concerned about freedom and our rights, that we forgot that we needed to protect them and keep them safe. We shouldn't have to. But the sad fact is that we do.  And we may have to fight, all over again.

Women as a whole are not prepared for what may happen. And that is fucking terrifying and makes me angry as hell.  That women as a whole are judged on the views of a few.   That is not equality.  It is a game that was played as part of a whole.

On that point, we move on to the second elephant in the room. That goes way further down the rabbit hole. The problem actually is not men versus women, women versus men. We have been pitted against each other. And never more so than today. Because the puppet masters, the people who are actually in charge of this world want us to fight with each other. 

They want the drama. They want the distractions. Which go far beyond men versus women, women versus men. 

Because the people who are in power can only operate successfully if no one notices the man behind the curtain. 

They pit us against ourselves and create new issues for us to fight about (look at the trans debate for example) in order to distract us from the laws they change, the plans they make and want to enact. 

While we squabble, the whole world is changing around us and not for the better. 

In short, we are all screwed. 

Or, perhaps we're not. 

Perhaps the first step is simply remembering that the tightrope is there and the majority of the planet are balancing on it. Unlike the circus. we do not have a safety net below us. But collectively, we can choose to get off that tightrope and face the puppet masters. 

Stop fighting each other and face the real enemy in the room.

That ship has not yet sailed.

Life Does Begin at 40

Everyone knows the phrase "Life begins at 40".  But I don't really think that it is something that you can ever understand, until you actually reach your 40s.

Let's face it, being in your 20s and 30s is a lot of fun, but also has a lot of pressure attached to it, whether you are a woman or a man, but I am a woman, so here is my perspective.

Your 20s and 30s are all about goals, societal pressures; family pressures; trying to find "the one".  Educate yourself, find the right career, establish yourself in that career, find your partner, have a family (if you choose to), look after your children, juggle, everything.

They say that your frontal lobe does not fully develop until you hit 25, but it isn't really until you reach your 40s that you actually start to become yourself and more than that, own who you are.   You care less what people think.  You have spent enough time with yourself to actually know who you are, what you want and what makes you happy.  What makes you, you and what makes you tick.  You no longer feel the need to fit in.

These days I think of life as being in two halves.  The life you had before 40 and the one you have after.  Each can be amazing, but different.

The first half of my life was not amazing.  But everything after I turned 40 has been on an upward trajectory that still has not stopped.  I am happier every single year.  I remind myself of that every day.  How lucky I am.  

I think what I have realised as I have grown and especially since I hit my 40s is that we are not passengers in this life.  We need to interact, move through life and not become stagnant.   We need to truly look at ourselves.  Our flaws, our talents.  Things we would like to change.  Things that we would like to promote.

And then do it.

Take the leap.  Do the scary thing.  Say the thing you aren't supposed to.  Do, whatever the hell you want to.  Say no when you want.  Say yes when you want.  Look into yourself and heal your demons because now you are stronger than they are.

When you hit menopause, ride that wave.  You will find that you no longer give a fuck, about anything; and that is just wonderful.

I will always remember my grandmother who used to be such a well dressed lady, with beautiful auburn hair.  When she reached 65, she stopped bothering to dye her hair and she cared much less about what she wore.  In one way I think hell yes, embrace who you are and don't dress for other people.  

But the reason she gave for the change in her ways was simply "I am old now".  She accompanied this by not doing anything else with her life, apart from sitting and watching television.  She ended up having over 20 years more in her life, yet she had decided that her life had ended at 65.  I never want that to happen to me.

Since reaching my 40s, I have grown more as a person than I have for the previous 40 years.  I have had the courage to try new experiences, see and do new things.  For example, I love music and there have been DJs that I have always wanted to see.  In the past few years I have seen the majority of DJs that I have always wanted too; with the remaining two coming up in the next year. 

My 20s and 30s were the grounds on which I started to learn who I was.  Now I know who I am, what I am and what I am capable of.  I advocate for myself now.   I am proud of who I have become and the journey I have taken to get there.

I care nothing now of what other people think about me.  If you like me, wonderful.  If you don't, goodbye.  I will not waste my time, energy and love on people who do not deserve it.  I will not waste my thoughts on people whom I would not take advise from.

Reaching your forties equals freedom.  Freedom of your mind.  Freedom to be yourself with no apologies.  The freedom to go and have that meal in a restaurant on your own if you want to, or indulge a spa day for some self care.

Everyone has dreams and aspirations.  Be it a successful career, a family, being married, goals you have set for yourself.  All of those things are good, but if you are not happy in yourself, there will always be something missing.

Being in my 40s now means that there is nothing missing.  I found myself.  I found the life I wanted to have, and I am living it.  I have friends, loved ones, my partner.  There is no lacking in my life because I do the things that I want.  

Your earlier life was work.  Working on yourself, who you wanted to be, what you wanted to be.  Living up to expectations, or at least trying to.  Trying to please other people, meet their expectations.  Saying yes when you really meant no.

Reaching your 40s means that that journey is over.  Your new one begins and the best part, you can take the rest of your life wherever you want.  On your terms.

Embrace it.  Enjoy it.  We only get one life.  Let's really live it.

Women’s Rights – Is Equality Something That Can Be Taken Away?

There is a conversation spreading across parts of the internet that should concern every woman, regardless of her politics, views and beliefs.

In the manosphere, and increasingly among some women who support it, people are openly asking whether women should still have rights.

Not because women have done something collectively wrong.  But because in their eyes, some women have.

Women have spent centuries fighting for the right to make decisions about our own lives.

We wanted to vote. We wanted the right to be educated and to work, gaining our own financial independence. We wanted rights over our own bodies. We wanted to be able to leave an unhappy or abusive marriage without being treated as though we had committed some terrible social crime.

We fought for those rights, and we won them.

But here is the uncomfortable question.

What happens when the freedom we fought for is threatened to be taken away because some men do not agree with the views of some women?

Ultimately, women do not need men to agree with us.  We don’t need other women to agree with us either.

One of the biggest things the women's rights movement achieved was establishing the principle that women are capable, able and allowed to make decisions for ourselves.

This sounds so obvious now.  But it wasn't always.

For the majority of history, women’s roles were expected to be wives, mothers and homemakers. In some cases, particularly among working-class women, they were also expected to work. Unless you had money, women have always worked, but wife, mother and homemaker remained our primary expected roles.  We have always burned the candle at both ends.

Those roles were restricted by law, by money, by societal expectations and, quite often, by our fathers and later, our husbands.

Women knew that we were worth more than the value that had been placed upon us, and we fought against it.

But equality was never supposed to mean that women would be deemed as incapable of making mistakes and if some women did, that that equality would be questioned and taken away.

Freedom includes the freedom to make bad decisions.  And that is where things get complicated.

Because if we say that women should be trusted to make their own choices, we cannot also argue that every choice made by a woman is automatically a good one, simply because she is a woman.  We also cannot argue that if a section of women do not make good choices, that their choices stand against all women.

That isn't equality.  That's infantilisation on the one part and a puppeteer kind of control on the other.

Those two positions might be completely different, but they have something important in common.

Neither of them treats women as fully autonomous adults.

If I am allowed to vote, work, earn my own money, choose whether and whom to marry, choose whether to have children or not, and decide what happens to my own body, then I am also capable of being told that I have made a bad decision.

I am capable of being criticised for that decision.  I am capable of being called out on it.

I don't suddenly require a counsellor and a participation trophy because someone disagrees with me.

Women are adults.  We can deal with disagreement.

At least, we should be able to.

And this is where the manosphere which lurks primarily on the internet comes into it.

There is a second, silent sentence when it comes to women's rights.

“Women want equality? Fine. Give them equality. Let’s see how that works out for them.”

It is the equivalent of handing someone enough rope to hang themselves and seeing what they do with it.

We sometimes talk about “women” as though we all want exactly the same things.  We don't.

Women disagree with each other. A lot.

We disagree about abortion, sex and gender. We disagree about pornography. We disagree about prostitution, sex work and OnlyFans.

We disagree about marriage. We disagree about motherhood. We disagree about whether women should prioritise careers.

We disagree about what equality should actually look like.

That is perfectly normal.  In fact, it is inevitable.

The problem we have is that a movement founded on giving women individual freedom can sometimes become incredibly uncomfortable with individual women who exercise that freedom in the “wrong” way.  The wrong way deemed by some men, but also some women.

You are free to choose.  But please choose correctly.

That's not really freedom.

Women are as capable of participating in the same behaviours that harm people as men are.  But why does that lead to calls online to remove women's voting rights, question whether women should sit on juries, or argue that women taking antidepressants should not be allowed to work?

Women are not infallible and some attack our own sex just as well as some men.

Women can be sexist.  Women can bully other women.  Women can shame other women for their choices.

Women can judge mothers, childfree women, married women, single women, older women, younger women and pretty much anyone else who doesn't fit whatever particular definition of “womanhood” is fashionable at the time.

Some women have decided that men can become women, and other women strongly disagree with that.

But if true equality is the goal, then you have to accept the entire package.

Women are capable of brilliance, courage, leadership and compassion.

We are also capable of selfishness, hypocrisy, cruelty and spectacularly bad judgement.

Just like men.

Equality isn't about women being better, or worse than men.  It is about accepting that we are human too.

Sometimes women simply make a bad decision.  I don't have to respect every decision a woman makes in order to respect her right to make it.

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate what I mean is to use myself as an example.

I do not support illegal immigration.

I do not support men who identify as women.

I do not support women who choose to put themselves on OnlyFans.

I do not support the women protesting outside the Lindsay Clancy trial and I certainly don't believe that experiencing motherhood, mental illness or postnatal difficulties makes someone Lindsay Clancy.

Empathy for someone experiencing those struggles is one thing.  Suggesting that her actions somehow represent motherhood or mental illness as a whole is something entirely different.

And this is where the idea of women as a monolith becomes particularly dangerous.  Because some men do see us as such.

They look at women who support certain things and choose to believe that because one group of women believes a thing, this means that all women do and all women are therefore responsible.

And from there, it becomes very easy for them to argue that perhaps women shouldn't have the rights and freedoms we fought so hard to obtain because, apparently, we can’t handle them.

We have seen this most recently in the Clancy case.  There have been calls to take away women’s right to vote.  The right to serve on a jury.  That if a woman is on anti-depressants, she should not be allowed to work.

But here's the thing.

I don't need every person on the planet to agree with me.  I don't even want them to.

If women are more than capable of making their own decisions and forming their own views then you have to accept that they are capable of making those decisions and forming those views that you think are wrong.

That is what autonomy means.

Some men (and women) seem to think that equality is a mere experiment.  That they have given us enough rope to hang ourselves with.  That our actions will somehow prove their point that women did not deserve rights in the first place.

These people have lost sight of what equality is.  Because if we are handed that rope, it now belongs to us too and cannot be taken away.  We are not children. 

We are allowed to be wrong just as we are allowed to be right.  A group of women does not speak for the whole.   They do not represent the whole.

If that was truly the case, then surely the eye would have to turn to men.  Men commit the majority of murders, rapes, assaults.  When a woman is murdered or raped, the questions that rise are “Was she asking for it” – “What did she do to provoke him?” or my favourite, which is not even a question “Women lie”.

But do not look at men this way.  Nor should we.  Because those that commit a crime do not represent the whole.

Perhaps the ultimate victory of women's rights is proving that women are strong enough to get things wrong, learn from bad decisions, disagree with one another, change our minds and carry on making our own choices anyway.

Because equality was never supposed to mean that women would have to live, view and perform under the terms of what men agree.

It was supposed to mean that we were finally allowed to be wrong on our own terms.