فصل 04

CHAPTER 4

The Lie

I’M BETTER THAN YOU

I feel the need to confess . . . I shave my toes.

I totally do.

Sometimes—not all the time, mind you—I look down in the shower and see my big toes sporting locks long enough to braid. It’s embarrassing, sure, but a quick swipe of my razor returns my toe knuckles to their usual silky-smooth glory.

None of this would be such an epic admission for me to make except that I once made fun of a girl in freshman-year English class for doing this exact thing. Blargh! I feel like such a jerk even now, a hundred and fifty years later.

Friends, let me paint a quick picture of myself in high school. I was a solid twenty pounds heavier, I wore clothes from Goodwill, and I was the president of the drama club. I wasn’t someone who teased others; I was someone who got teased. But there was that one instance when I did tease—the one and only time in my memory that I actively made fun of someone else. Maybe that’s why it sticks out in my brain. Maybe that’s why it still feels so shameful.

We’ll call this girl Schmina.

Her actual name is Tina, but I’m trying to write in code here.

Schmina was the girl who always seemed totally confident in herself. She developed breasts and a sense of humor light-years before the rest of us, and she was popular in a way I would never be. One day in Mrs. Jachetti’s English class, when we were supposed to be writing a paper on Zora Neale Hurston, Schmina mentioned something about shaving her toes. I don’t know why she mentioned it . . . I assume popular girls share grooming tidbits the way the rest of us mortals talk about the weather. But anyway, while I didn’t say anything to her directly, I talked soooo much smack about it to my best friend later that day. “Who shaves their feet? More importantly, who has hairy digits in need of shaving? Schmina clearly has some kind of glandular disease she’s not copping to.”

What a ridiculous conversation! Most people would have forgotten about a conversation like that by now, but it keeps haunting me years later because the whole time I was mocking Schmina and her hairy toes, I was totally shaving my own! To this day, hand to God, whenever I look down at my big toe and see that it’s looking a little shaggy, I think about what a jerk my teenage self was.

Rach flaw number one? Hairy digits.

Rach flaw number two? Hypocrisy.

A story about hairy toes, a girl named Schmina, and the adolescent angst I really should have worked through with a licensed therapist years ago may seem like the most frivolous topic ever. But then, I daresay that tearing down other women is usually based on something no less frivolous than the insecurities of our fourteen-year-old selves.

Why do we do it, ladies? Why do we gossip? Why do we rag on each other? Why do we say hello on Sunday mornings with the same tongues we use to lash others behind their backs a few days later? Does it make us feel better about ourselves? Does it make us feel safer to mock someone who has stepped outside of the parameters we deem acceptable? If we can point out their flaws, does doing so diminish our own?

Of course it doesn’t. In fact, the stones we most often try and fling at others are the ones that have been thrown at us.

Have you ever shaved your toes?

And what I really mean by that is, have you ever made fun of someone else? Have you ever pointed your finger in their direction and ignored the three other fingers on your hand pointing back at you? We’ve all been there, but that doesn’t make it okay. Bringing others down won’t elevate you. Recognizing that all words have power—even the ones whispered behind someone’s back—is how you adjust your behavior.

A few weeks ago there was a woman on my plane from LA to Chicago. She and her husband were traveling with two boys, the youngest of whom was about four. He was also the worst-behaved child I’ve ever seen. Before we’d even pulled back from the gate, he was screaming—and I don’t mean a whine or a protest. I mean screaming bloody murder about having to sit in a seat when he wanted to run around. His mother had to forcibly hold him in the chair for at least half an hour while he hollered to be released. Everyone on the plane, myself included, was miserable until he stopped. But a little while later, when I got up to go to the restroom, I saw why he’d finally quieted he’d been given a big bag of gummy worms to happily eat his way through.

Friends, I will be honest with you. I was disgusted.

First of all, as a strict parent who was raised by strict parents, listening to him screaming, I thought, Oh, heck no! All through takeoff I was thinking about his mom. I was thinking about how she needed to discipline him better, have boundaries, get support from her spouse. And when I saw that she’d rewarded his bad behavior? And with sugar? Keep me near the cross, Lord Jesus! I kept thinking, This woman doesn’t have a clue.

Later at the baggage claim, I saw the family again. The four-year-old was wild—jumping up on a stopped luggage belt, hitting his brother, and running around in circles while everyone stared. What is wrong with his mother? I kept thinking, Why doesn’t she get a handle on him?!

Then I saw her standing next to the luggage carousel . . . utterly exhausted. When I really looked at her, I saw she was near tears, looking bewildered and totally overwhelmed. Her husband wore the same shell-shocked expression as their son ran in circles around them.

And a gentle voice reminded me, Rachel, you don’t know their story.

I was so humbled in my ignorance. Maybe this little boy had special needs that made it hard for him to control his impulses. Maybe this little boy was a new adoptive child who had struggled in foster homes for most of his young life—something I should be graceful about, given what we’ve been through. Maybe this little boy was just badly behaved and his parents were struggling to discipline him because their older son had been easy to manage at this age. Whatever the reason, I will never know—because instead of asking or offering the benefit of the doubt, I cast my judgment on her before I even asked myself why things might be this way.

Women judging other women. It’s been on my heart for a while. It’s something I’ve tried to wrap my brain around fully so I could put it into words. I see it all around me in so many different ways, and that poor, tired mama on the flight to Chicago reminded me of what I want to say.

What I want to say is that we all judge each other, but even though we all do it, that’s not an excuse. Judging is still one of the most hurtful, spiteful impulses we own, and our judgments keep us from building a stronger tribe . . . or from having a tribe in the first place. Our judgment prohibits us from beautiful, life-affirming friendships. Our judgment keeps us from connecting in deeper, richer ways because we’re too stuck on the surface-level assumptions we’ve made.

Ladies, our judging has to stop.

So does our compulsion to compete with everyone around us.

Let me give an example of that too. When I heard that some of my girlfriends were going to run the Nike Women’s Half Marathon in San Francisco, I was excited. For some of them, it was their first race. I was also overjoyed because it would involve a weekend trip somewhere. I promptly invited myself along for the ride. The plan was for us to leave on Friday, drive the five-ish hours between LA and SF, hang out in town on Saturday, then run the race and drive home on Sunday. Wait. Scratch that. They would run the race . . . I would stand on the side of the road and clap for them while they jogged by. This felt especially interesting because I am a runner . . . and more than that, I am competitive about running. I like to challenge myself. I like to try bigger and better races. I like to beat my personal record and push myself to be the best. What I do not like—what I had never actually done—is cheering for others while they do something I am fully capable of doing right along with them. I kept thinking, What if I didn’t need to prove myself in this situation? What if making myself into someone better has more to do with my willingness to be of service than my willingness to compete?

So I went to San Francisco. In fact, I drove everyone to San Francisco because I figured the last thing I’d want if I were about to run thirteen miles would be to drive four hundred miles.

It’s worth saying that while I did all of this and had so much stinking fun with the ladies, I didn’t always have a good attitude about my willingness to be a cheerleader. On Sunday morning when everyone headed out bright and early to the starting line, I got myself together and headed in the other direction, to the five-mile marker. About twenty minutes into my journey, I realized it was unlikely that I would get a cab at six a.m. on a Sunday morning. Around this time I realized that walking alone in the dark in downtown SF might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I legitimately thought at one point, See, this is what happens when you try and do something nice you get murdered on the streets of an unknown city!

I get pretty dramatic when I am in fear for my life and haven’t had any coffee.

Anyway, at that point I decided to turn around and head for the finish line since walking there felt safer than walking to mile five. Turns out, walking to the finish line meant walking up approximately thirty-two hills that were taller than some mountains I know. I was sweaty and grouchy by the time I arrived, grumbling under my breath about the whole ordeal, and thinking, Why on earth did I agree to do this?

Then I saw my first elite marathon runner.

Elite marathon runners are those superhumans who run a race in like five minutes. They look like cheetahs or gazelles as they fly down the road, and they are truly breathtaking to behold. As someone who ran twelve-and-a-half-minute miles in my first marathon (elite female runners, by comparison, run like six- or seven-minute miles), I was in awe. Since I’m always so far behind these athletes in the race, I’ve never been able to see one. I stood there and watched one after another sprint by and felt so blessed to see them in action. For the two and a half hours that followed, I stood in that exact spot and cheered on strangers. I clapped nonstop (my skill as a preacher’s daughter finally coming into play!). I screamed until my throat was sore. I yelled all the things that encourage me when I hear them from the sidelines during a race.

“You are so strong!”

“You’re almost there!”

“You can do this!”

And the last one is something I’ve never heard but always tell myself when it gets hard during a run. I yelled it over and over again whenever I saw someone who looked ready to drop

“You’ve lived through tougher things than this. Don’t give up now!”

Finally, it was there in that exact spot that I got to see my friends Katie and Brittany jogging up from mile twelve in their first-ever half marathon. You can see it in a picture someone shot of us. I’m screaming like a maniac and trying not to throw myself over the fence to attack them with hugs. I was so proud of them I was laughing and crying—as if their achievement was somehow my own. I jogged alongside them, outside the track, wrapped up in the joy of the moment, and I heard God very distinctly say, “Imagine all of the things you would have missed today if you’d only been out here for yourself.”

I never would have seen the elite runners. I never would have been there when my friend Hannah ran her personal best (13.1 miles in under two hours!). I wouldn’t have been able to stand next to Joy, who put my cheering to shame. After running her own race, she screamed louder than anyone from the sidelines, encouraging the other runners. I wouldn’t have been there to hug Katie and Brittany. I wouldn’t have seen any of it . . . I would have run another half marathon, like I’d done ten times before, and I’d have had nothing to show for it but a little extra pride and the banana they give you at the end.

The first step toward getting past the desire to judge and compete is admitting that nobody is immune. For some of us, we judge in little ways rolling our eyes at the way someone is dressed, frowning at a badly behaved child in the grocery store, or making assumptions about another mother at school pickup who has a serious expression and wears a suit every day and seems uptight. For others, judging is a bigger problem berating your little sister because her views are different from yours, viciously gossiping with other women, taking to social media to write hateful things to people you don’t even know simply because they’ve stepped outside the lines of what you think is good.

The second step is recognizing that just because you believe it doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone. In so many instances judgment comes from a place of feeling as though you’ve somehow got it all figured out when they do not. Judging each other actually makes us feel safer in our own choices. Faith is one of the most abused instances of this. We decide that our religion is right; therefore, every other religion must be wrong. Within the same religion, or heck, even within the same church, people judge each other for not being the right kind of Christian, Catholic, Mormon, or Jedi. I don’t know the central tenet of your faith, but the central tenet of mine is “love thy neighbor.” Not “love thy neighbor if they look and act and think like you.” Not “love thy neighbor so long as they wear the right clothes and say the right things.”

Just love them.

Yes, I also believe in holding each other accountable; but holding each other accountable takes place inside community and relationships. Holding each other accountable comes from a beautiful place in the heart of friendship that makes you sit down with your friend and ask with love if they’ve looked at their own actions in a particular light. Holding each other accountable comes from a place of love. Judgment comes from a place of fear, disdain, or even hate. So be careful about dressing your judgments up as accountability to make your conscience feel better.

I have worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to create content that caters to women. I have spent numerous hours trying to figure out exactly what women like us want in life. Do you know what they want? Do you know the number one thing that I hear most, get emails about most, get asked for advice on most? Friends. How to make friends. How to keep friends. How to cultivate real, valuable relationships. That’s what women are craving. That’s what they really want and hope for, and if that’s true, we have to start at the beginning.

We start from the beginning, and we teach ourselves to keep an open mind. We begin with that first hello or handshake, and we stop ourselves from making decisions not founded in fact and experience. We look for commonality instead of seeking out differences. We ignore things like hair or clothes or weight or race or religion or socioeconomic background. We pay attention to things like character and heart and wisdom and experience. And no, it might not be easy, but I promise it will be worth it. Your tribe is out there, and if you haven’t found it yet, I’d challenge you to consider that maybe your people come in a different package than you thought they might.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. Nonjudgmental friends. We often become whomever we surround ourselves with. If your friends are full of gossip and vitriol, I promise you’ll start to develop the habit. When you’re looking for a community of women, look for the ones who want to build each other up instead of tear each other down.

2. Policing myself. If we’re already judgmental (and let’s be honest, most of us are), we have to work hard on policing ourselves. When I find myself judging someone in my head, I force myself to stop and think of compliments about that person. By doing this, I’m learning to look for the positive instead of reaching for the negatives.

3. Dealing with it. Usually our judgment and gossip come from a deep well of our own insecurities. Get to the bottom of what’s going on with you. What’s making you lash out at others? The first step toward becoming the best version of yourself is being honest, truly honest, about what makes you tick.