On Women & Scarcity

I have a friend, a colleague of sorts, who makes me uncomfortable on a regular basis.  I often leave her office feeling ever-so-slightly shaken; my hands a tad clammy and my heart beating a little faster than usual.  Want to know what she does?

She compliments me.

I’ll be bent over the computer in deep concentration or digging through my bag searching for a pen and she’ll say,

“Girl, you are wearing those boots today!  Wow.  You are looking wonderful.  I mean it.  You look goooooood.”

And then she’ll smile at me, nodding her head approvingly.

It’s not just compliments, either.  She’s also the first one to “like” my writing or my Facebook posts.  She shares wholeheartedly in my joy when I succeed and she doesn’t hesitate for a hot second to tell me that she likes and appreciates the work I’m doing.  It’s genuine and open and warm.   And a little unnerving.

Why, though?  Why does it unsettle me so?

It’s All Greek to Me

I think it unsettles me because it’s a language in which I’m not conversant.  It’s not how I typically interact with other women. I play my cards a little closer to my chest and while I admittedly have a hard time letting my guard down, I think most women in my life function this way as well, at least on some level.  It’s simply the mode of operation for most of us.   I might admire your confidence or your convictions, your outfit or your haircut, and I might even mention one or all of them at some point but I’m not going to be too effusive or eager about it.

We live in a culture of supposed scarcity.  Every billboard, every commercial, every magazine tells us the same story.  You aren’t ________ enough.  Cool, skinny, smart, rich, charming, pretty, you name it.  You aren’t enough.   Add to those feelings the innumerable ways that women have had to jockey for their place at the proverbial table and I think we’re close to cracking the code of female interaction.

Imagine a long table full of food aplenty.  Desserts and drinks and options galore.  But as soon as you are about to sit down, someone laughs and says, “No, that’s not for you!”   Then they show you to your table which is considerably smaller and, compared to the other table, the spread sparse.

Seat’s Taken

Women have been sitting at this short table for centuries and what has it taught us?   Shown again and again to a table with limited scope and scanty choices we have inevitably been set up to spar for space and contend for opportunity.  Surrounded on all sides by a constant sense of scarcity, we inevitably buy in to the belief that there is never enough.  We must be ever-vigilant and on the watch to get while the getting’s good.  When the pickings are slim, you gotta be sure you get yours.

This leaves little room to root for someone else’s success if it means that we might miss our shot.  If she is intelligent, or beautiful, or successful, or interesting, or fill-in-the-blank, what about me?  It’s the fallacy of the scarcity mentality.  We mistakenly assume that there isn’t enough room for all of us.   You must be relegated to the far end of the table so that I can maintain my seat.

Most worrisome is that we don’t even realize that we are operating out of this false sense of shortage.  I didn’t, at least, until I was confronted by my friend and her bald admiration and encouragement.  She has found a way to see through the lie of scarcity and chooses instead to operate from a place of plenty.  Rather than withholding her delight and her high esteem in an futile attempt at self-preservation, she gives it freely and without reserve.

An Antidote

Cheryl Strayed, in her Dear Sugar column, writes this about withholding our true feelings:

 

“Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.

So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.”

 

Certainly women are not the only ones who suffer in this climate of never enough.  There are many, many manifestations of the myth of paucity and no one is immune.  But I don’t think we actually need to work all that hard to see through the lie.  We need only to remember that God has spread before us a banqueting table the likes of which we have never seen; that there is indeed room for each and every one of us.   We remember that a seat has been saved and God is waiting to anoint our heads with oil and make our cups to overflow.

Oh, and we should probably remember not to be jackasses, too.