Category: Update

Update

Haters, This is Not Your Home

by Corinne January 10, 2021

Note: I am sharing this content across all my personal & professional accounts tonight and I have begun the process of removing content and/or blocking fans/followers.

Nearly 20 years ago, someone told me that people will only say or do certain things if they think they have a home with you, meaning they will make offensive comments or act inappropriately because they think you are okay with it.

That concept has been on my mind a lot for the last 9 months. I guess you could say it’s fully gestated and ready to be birthed, because I’m writing this today to post across my online platform and clarify what does and does not have a home with me.

You do not have a home with me if you cannot understand why all lives don’t matter until black, brown, indigenous, women’s, and LGBTQIA lives matter.

You do not have a home with me if you think believing in Jesus absolves you from aligning yourself with a political party that has been complicit in allowing one man to encourage and enable hate crimes and sedition.

You do not have a home with me if you refuse to comprehend why there is a call to defund the police by communities of marginalized people who have experienced racial profiling, harassment, and police brutality, all of which have been well documented.

You do not have a home with me if you think it’s funny to mock mental health issues, or if you think anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD or a host of other diagnoses are not real and can be overcome by willpower.

You do not have a home with me if you infantilize or mock people with disabilities, or don’t consider accessibility to be your concern.

You do not have a home with me if you say you “see both sides” and are unwilling to speak up when you bear witness to hateful, oppressive behavior.

You do not have a home with me if you are unwilling to carefully consider your thoughts, beliefs and actions towards people of a different race, gender identity, sexual preference, religion, ethnicity, or ability than your own AND determine whether those thoughts, beliefs and actions are in alignment with your highest, best self.

Who DOES have a home with me? People who are willing to be honest in their struggle to address their biases and prejudices. People who are willing to take a deep dive into their belief systems and say, “Hey, this belief is messed up, I need to replace it.” People who are willing to have conversations on hard topics and find resources that will help make them better allies.

If you saw yourself reflected in any of these statements, and you’re unwilling to work on these issues, then I expect you to show yourself out. If you think this content is up for debate, and decide you need to defend your behavior in the comments, or be hateful/oppressive, you will be blocked.

15 Year Anniversary , , , , , , , , ,

Love Me, Love My Blog: On Blogging, Boundaries and Privacy

by Corinne June 22, 2019

One of my initial concerns about blogging was how private I wanted to be. If this was a place for me to share experiences and explore ideas – many of which would be frowned upon by long-time friends and family members – did I want anyone and everyone to know what I was writing about? Or did I want to keep my identity a secret?

Initially I kept everything as quiet as possible. But I am notoriously bad at keeping secrets about myself. When it comes to my life, I am a believer in “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I believe we all want to feel known and understood, and if our online personas are the way we let people know who we are, then sharing that content might bring us that much closer to feeling known and understood – and, ultimately, loved.

http://www.girlwithmoxie.com/2004/06/cyber-snooping/

Reading through this post from 15 years ago, I struggle to remember which coworker this was, though I have a pretty good idea. She left a few months after I started and later helped me get an interview with her new employer, but I decided it wasn’t a good fit as the job was a lateral move in many ways.

I also realize I was making a lot out of nothing. She gave me the link to her blog and that constituted permission for me to read it. If I had told our mutual supervisor about her blog, though, that would have been a bad idea. (That supervisor was a hot mess, but I had yet to discover this fact.)

I still struggle to practice detached compassion, whether with colleagues, friends or family. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in other people’s problems, especially when your own problems feel insurmountable or trivial. Solving their issues – or helping them find solutions – is extremely validating.

Then there’s the matter of codependency. For years I saw that word as being exclusive to alcohol and drug addiction, but I finally came to accept that codependency is ubiquitous. It’s the subtext in so many songs and TV show plotlines. It sneaks into every relationship, whether with a romantic partner or a parent. In short: codependency is a bitch.

At the heart of all of this is boundaries: setting and maintaining those lines of involvement, whether physical, mental, spiritual or emotional. Knowing when to call someone on their behavior because they have breached a boundary line and dealing with the potential fallout. I still struggle with this, too. But like this blog, I am a work in progress.

15 Year Anniversary , , , , , , ,

It was 15 years ago today…

by Corinne June 14, 2019

…that I began the Girl with Moxie blog. To paraphrase another song, I started at Blogspot, now I’m here (on self-hosted WordPress).

A lot has changed for me in 15 years, both personally and professionally. I started the blog out of boredom and restlessness at my office job. One day while surfing the interwebz, I found a wealth of bloggers who were writing about music, movies, TV, books, their lives, their jobs, their kids. I was introduced to music I had never heard of, found recipes and ideas that intrigued me, made new friends. I decided to dive in and write about whatever was on my mind.

I miss that simplicity. Because while I enjoy Instagram and Twitter is good for breaking news and a laugh, and Facebook does occasionally have its merits, there was something very gratifying about seeking out blogs to read and connecting with fellow bloggers on a much more low-tech scale. Long-form writing is still around, but it is often drowned out by all the video content.

Even though I don’t blog like I used to, I refuse to give up this site for many reasons, the main one being that it’s still an avenue for me to explore ideas and share my experiences without the editorial process of querying, rewriting, editing and handling rejection. I still get some traffic here (seeing the Google searches that bring people to the GWM blog is often amusing), a good friend hosts the site for free, and it’s an archive of my cyberpresence in a way that other resources aren’t.

Here’s the plan: I’ll share content from that first year and add some updates. I’ll try to carve out the time to craft new posts (it ain’t easy these days, for reasons I will get into later).

Let’s do this, kids.