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852 || Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
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I recently finished the library copy of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - who you may know from Eat, Pray, Love fame - and if I’m honest I read it in college ish and was not a fan. I judged her hard, and because of it - I avoided content until recently when clips of her offering incredibly insightful thoughts I decided to give her new book - the one she was often promoting with these interviews - a shot. The book is Big Magic. And it’s a fairly short read about creative living and as is always the case with self-help type books, I have a few notes, but overall the book was really lovely and made me think - which is really all you can ask for in a book. It’s a book I’m sure I’ll return to - and may even buy for my own shelf eventually, because it’s about the spark + realigning with it - which as a creative, is a necessary part of the process every once in a while. This book doesn’t define creativity as pursuing a life that is exclusively or professionally devoted to the arts, rather it’s written as a manual with universal aspirations and provides lessons in how to unleash your creativity.
Here are my favorite insights from the book -
On fear: If you pass your hand over a petri dish containing a tadpole, the tadpole will flinch beneath your shadow. That tadpole cannot write poetry, and it cannot sing, and it will never know love or jealousy or triumph, and it has a brain the size of a punctuation mark, but it damn sure knows how to be afraid of the unknown. Well so do I, so do we all but theres nothing particularly compelling about that. Theres no extra credit for being afraid of the unknown. Fear is a deeply ancient instinct. Evolutionarily vital. But it aint especially “smart”.
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1873 || expressive emotions vs. suppression
11:40|How we display our emotions vary based on where we were born. There are consequences to our cultural influences. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/discoverpsychology2/chapter/culture-and-emotion/https://nobaproject.com/modules/culture-and-emotionhttps://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/this-is-america/202603/how-social-cultural-and-political-structures-influence-our-feelingsSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1872 || socialized emotion
10:41|The expression of our emotions, the value we put on them, and how we're affected by them is dependent on how we're socialized. The importance we put on certain emotions varies across cultures. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/201803/how-culture-shapes-emotionshttps://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/this-is-america/202603/how-social-cultural-and-political-structures-influence-our-feelingsSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1871 || emotions are manufactured
08:55|Emotions feel so internally important, but they are actually impacted by so much more than my personal experience. Our society manipulates our emotions and exploits us through them. https://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/this-is-america/202603/how-social-cultural-and-political-structures-influence-our-feelingshttps://medium.com/@v_bhagya/the-politics-of-feeling-how-emotions-move-shape-and-control-us-51e5627a7e1fhttps://brianneradke.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/ahmed-sara-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion-introduction-feel-your-way/Support the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1870 || when our emotions aren't ours
11:25|Our emotional states are heavily influenced by the stories we hear, but we tend to forget the narrative and only remember the "feelings". This means we can be influenced by stories that are completely made up. So, we can easily adopt feelings that aren't rooted in reality, but feel so real to us (the feeler), that we start to believe these feelings are facts. Emotions are movable. They connect us to "this and that". They move us, connect us, attach us, and transform us. We have the feelings, but erase the history of the feeling so that the feeling feels natural, and the story becomes irrelevant. This is how people can become emotionally attached to their own subordination. Norms appear through the concealment of repetition.https://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cultural_Politics_of_EmotionSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1869 || emotions are stories that impact our behaviors
12:08|We should be paying attention to what emotions DO rather than what they ARE.We assign emotional values to things because of the way we're taught in our culture. Our emotions orient us towards or away from certain bodies. It allows us to justify biases against entire groups of people because it becomes the cultural norm.Unfortunately, there are very bad people who take advantage of this cultural shaping through emotions. They weaponize hatred by co-opting language and making themselves the victims so that we can't help the TRUE victims.https://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cultural_Politics_of_EmotionSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1868 || the emotion economy
11:45|Emotions circulate and accumulate value across our society through repetition. We must pay attention to what these emotions DO rather than what they ARE. We assign emotional values to things because of the way we're taught in our culture. Our emotions orient us towards or away from certain bodies. It allows us to justify biases against entire groups of people because it becomes the cultural norm.Unfortunately, there are very bad people who take advantage of this cultural shaping through emotions. They weaponize hatred by co-opting language and making themselves the victims so that we can't help the TRUE victims. https://www.saranahmed.com/books-1/https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4qhttps://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cultural_Politics_of_EmotionSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1867 || empathy isn't a sin
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10:55|We must incorporate moral reasoning, altruism, and compassion into our empathy. Otherwise, we may end up blinded by biases we can't even see. THE SOURCES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompassionSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.1865 || the empathy trap
09:57|Too much empathy is not always a good thing. Human empathy is highly selective, which means it's not always "fair" or objective. Fortunately, there are ways to be empathetic, more fairly. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-problem-with/202605/the-problem-with-empathyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathyhttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200930-can-empathy-be-bad-for-youSupport the BDS movement.organize clothing swaps with your friends.Get free resources from Annas Archive.Join your local DSABecome a READING PARTNERRead Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.