My New Year's resolution: no more sweat-shop clothing!

My track record with New Year resolutions isn't great, so this year I took a different approach and decided to work on something that was actually important to me, as opposed to something I thought I really "should" do (eg more exercise, sit up straighter, rescue orphaned baby birds). I figured if I nominated a goal that was aligned with my values system, I'd have better odds with the follow-through, because it was something I cared about. 

My mission this year was to avoid buying any clothing I knew (or had good reason to suspect) was made in a sweat shop. 

I'd been feeling guilty about my habit of buying cheaply made garments for some time and when that horrific Bangladeshi factory fire in 2013 put this ethical issue in the international spotlight, my conscience started to get louder and louder. This year I decided it was time to break up with H&M et al.

Yes, I do know that my refusal to buy clothing from suspect chain stores will not save workers' lives but it will mean I'm not contributing to a regime that victimises and exploits people in developing nations. It also means I'm supporting workers in my own country. I believe that we're all here to learn how to treat each other with kindness, and the way we use our money is part of that. 

Turns out, this is one of the more labour-intensive goals I've taken on. Every time I want to buy something, I have to research the label's manufacturing systems. This is quite a process as a lot of companies seem unwilling to divulge relevant information (which is very telling). The majority of things I've wanted to buy, I've had to pass on because it's clear they are not ethically made. On the positive side, I'm saving lots of money (silver linings, people!).

It feels good to be putting my money into my local economy and I'm enjoying trawling through market stalls and second-hand stores. I've learned more about the Australian Textile, Clothing and Footwear industry's Ethical Clothing standard, which verifies all workers are receiving their legal entitlements - but so far only 15 labels have been granted accreditation. That tells you everything you need to know. 

Oxfam is putting pressure on Australian labels to lift their game in this area. The organisation is tracking which companies have signed up to the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Accord, a legally binding document which facilitates a healthy and safe working environment in this nation (Bangladesh's textile industry, by the way, is forecast to quadruple in size over the next 20 years. So fairly significant then.).

Aussie retailers that have not signed the accord - and which, consequently, I will never step foot in again - include Best&Less and the Just Group, which operates Just Jeans, Dotti, Portmans, Jacqui E, Jay Jays and Peter Alexander. Sad face.

A lot of chain stores I used to frequent have signed this accord, but I remain suspicious of them anyway. Sorry Kmart, but how is it possible that an $8 T-shirt has been made in good conditions? Sigh.

Confession: It's only mid-March and I've already broken my resolution. 

Here's where I came undone: sports shoes. Turns out it is almost impossible to source running shoes that are ethically made. Because I have pronated feet and knee problems, I need quality, specialised shoes to support me in my fitness regimen, and it seems like every major sports shoe label has a black mark against its name. Oxfam says that none of the sports brands pass the grade in terms of workers' rights. Its sternest words are for Nike, Adidas and Puma. I avoided that shady trifecta and went with a pair of Asics but I have good reason to doubt they were made by fairly treated workers. But what could I do? Rock and hard place.

Despite this violation, I'm confident I can get my New Year's resolution back on track. This is something that's really important to me, and I hope this post inspires you to think about your buying practices too. 

I'll let you know how it works out for me. 

Tissues and issues: a beginner's guide to confronting Fear

I thought long and hard about whether to publish this post. It’s more personal than I am comfortable sharing. The reason I did decide to upload it was because the point of this blog from the outset was to share my story of personal growth honestly. I believe that Fear is something we ALL struggle with, in different forms. We are different, but we are all the same.

What’s the name of that headache you get after intense crying? Is there even a name for that? There should be.

On Saturday I looked at a photo of me with my family dog and with no warning I burst into tears and could not stop. This photo is very precious to me. It was taken last March, three weeks before I left New Zealand and it shows me cuddling the dog for what I suspected might have been the last time (luckily he is in very good health and I was able to see him again at Christmas). He is generally affectionate but usually gravitates towards my parents for cuddles, so for him to lavish so much love on me on this occasion was wonderful, and I lapped it up. Cue #dogselfie.

This photo is attached to my wall so I see it every day, but the reason it aroused such intense emotion last weekend was because I looked at the joy in my eyes and I suddenly remembered what unconditional love felt like. And that brought me face to face with my deepest, most powerful Fear* (thank you very fucking much, Autumn equinox): that I will never be deeply loved. And just for good measure, it brought along its ugly twin: the Fear that I am not worthy of love.

Yes, I know both these thoughts are bullshit. That’s the thing about Fears – they have no basis in reality. But it’s only when we are prepared to stand up to them (instead of running away) that we can truly see that.

Why is this ugly stuff coming up now? From an astrological perspective the Autumn equinox – which took place on Saturday, the day of this teary incident – brings us face to face with the darkness of our Fears, thereby spotlighting the areas we most need to work on in order to move forward and evolve.

These core Fears are something I have probably always had, without being aware of them, and have tried to bury, unsuccessfully, with several methods over my lifetime that range from binge eating to keeping people at arm’s length.

Now that I’m becoming more comfortable in my own skin (old age will do that to ya), and am no longer scrambling around for an emotional Band-Aid, these Fears are back with a vengeance. Which feels really crappy and hurty but is actually a good thing, because that gives me the opportunity to overcome them once and for all (I hope). Instead of dealing with symptoms I am now dealing with the root cause. If you know what the problem is, you can fix it, right?

In the rawness of my tears last weekend, I felt a measure of relief that I was no longer running away from my Fears. There was a sort of acceptance – an acknowledgement that, yes, I’m scared, but I recognise what I’m dealing with now (namely: a tired old story with no factual basis) and I’m not letting it run riot over my emotions. I’m going to remind myself of the many tangible reasons I know these Fears to be untrue. I’m going to refer back to my Self-Appreciation Project jar and reflect on why I’m absolutely a worthy human being. And then I’m going to dust myself off and go back to participating in all the joy, sadness and mediocrity of the human experience. The only way out is through.

Has anyone else found themselves challenged by “old stuff” and an underlying Fear response this past weekend? Would love to hear your stories.

*Eagle-eyed readers will notice I always capitalise Fear. There’s a reason for that. my experience of Fear is that it is powerful it has often stood over me like a bully, so that’s why I personify it.

Are you on someone's Meltdown Watch List?

“She was drowning but nobody saw her struggle.”

This quote pops up on my Pinterest feed from time to time (often attributed to Hamlet – um really?) and it always reminds me of the private struggles of so many people, particularly women, in maintaining the façade of I’m-beyond-busy but-it’s-totally-fine-I-can-handle-it while internally they are falling apart. What I’m talking about is the unwinnable battle to meet our own, and others’, expectations of what a full and successful life looks like, and the toll that takes on our physical, mental and emotional health.

The refusal to ask for help because everyone else seems to be coping (top tip: they are not), and that would appear weak. And how we worsen that struggle by keeping it private.

This is particularly relevant at the moment because so many of my daily angel card readings have been urging us all to slow down, say ‘no’ more often and to make finding peace a priority.*

A friend of mine recently joked about adding a mutual friend’s name to their Meltdown Watch List. This is kinda funny, but also kinda not. Because it’s true.

I know people with so many balls in the air they can no longer see the clouds. They have children, ailing parents, relentless business demands, high-maintenance landlords, gruelling deadlines, overgrown lawns, intense exercise routines, friends they never see and relationships under strain. I know you know people like this too. Perhaps you ARE that person.

I have a friend who works 60+ hours a week. She went to see her doctor because she couldn’t figure out why she was in tears almost every day. The doctor prescribed anti-depressants to allow her to continue with her relentless schedule (instead of listening to the messages her body is sending her, urging her to stop). It’s clear to me she’s not depressed – she’s exhausted.

I find the thought process that drives this lifestyle really interesting – the ways we delude ourselves that prolonged exhaustion is normal and that we can continue to live at break-neck speed. Memo from your body: you cannot.

Recently I interviewed holistic nutritionist

Dr Libby Weaver

for a

Women’s Health

magazine story about exhaustion. She talked about how women are paying a high price for trying to do everything at once, and refusing to stop. The result is everything from weight gain to digestive issues, fertility problems and prolonged moodiness.

-

Guys, life is busy. I can’t change that, and neither can you. Also, I don’t have kids, so I feel like I can’t fully understand the scale of difficulty involved in finding stillness when you have a family. I don’t know how you can make your life more manageable but I do know that if you have good reason to believe you are on someone’s Meltdown Watch List, you have to ask yourself some serious questions about the way you’re living. You can have everything you want – your mum was right about that – but not all at once.

If you are drowning, you must call for a lifeguard. Your lifeguards are your partner, your siblings, your closest confidantes and your most trusted work colleagues – these people are your support team. If they know that you are struggling, they can help you find solutions to move forward.

This team does not, however, include people who are draining your mental or physical energy with their demands. When it comes to dealing with those people, learn to say no. Saying no is a difficult thing for many women because we worry that it means people won’t like us. But here’s the truth: if relationships with these people are worth their mettle, they will be robust enough to cope with you cancelling coffee dates or refusing to babysit their raucous children every week/help plan their wedding/drive for two hours to groom their pony. Say no (especially to the pony thing; that’s ridiculous) without fear of fallout. You are the only one in charge of your physical and emotional health; protect these priceless resources by deciding what is most important in your life. Prioritise those things, then relax your standards on what is not.

You can stop drowning right now.

*If you’re not across my daily card readings, follow me on Instagram

@onegroundedangel

or like my

One Grounded Angel

page on Facebook.

Ready, set, procrastinate!

There’s a mouldy nectarine in the bottom of my fridge. It’s been about a week since I first noticed it, and I have continued to notice it, several times a day, without doing anything about it. The nectarine continues to rot, and I continue to ignore it. It’s a bit of a shit Mexican standoff really; of course the nectarine will ultimately win, and all of my fresh vegies will lose, which means I lose. And yet despite knowing that the mess in the vegie drawer is getting worse the longer I delay throwing out that nectarine, I continue to ignore the problem. Gross.

I’m not telling you about my nectarine sitch to explain how desperately my vegie drawer needs a solid clean – and I want to assure you that the rest of my house is very tidy and hygienic – but because it illustrates in a really disgusting way just how procrastination has taken hold of my life lately.

Here is a list of things I need to do that I have been putting off for a month or so, some trivial, others fairly pressing:

·                     ·      Locking in dates for my trip to New York this winter. (Note to self: it is officially Autumn now. Autumn is followed by winter. That means winter is happening very soon. Pull your finger out!)

·                     ·      Getting a new gym program. I am so booored by my workouts that I’m putting very little effort in (counter-productive, no?). Some days I don’t even sweat. If I’m going to drag my ass out of bed at 5.30am you’d think I’d be committed to making the most of this time. But somehow the effort of booking a personal trainer to create a new program for me keeps falling into the ‘I’ll do it next week’ category.

·                     ·      Following through on all the angel card readings I have promised people. It’s not that I don’t want to do the readings, I just never quite get around to locking them in.

·                     ·      Sorting out my accounting records. Yuck.

·                     ·      Getting some new meditation podcasts. I feel like I’m not going deep enough with my meditations at the moment, and not getting the clarity I used to. This something I really I need to address, or else I’m going to find my ability to manage stress and the general challenges of everyday life will be seriously hampered, and I’ll start getting stuck.

·                     ·      Finishing the two new short stories I’ve started and polishing two older ones to be entered in competitions (one of my goals this year).

·                     ·      Enrolling in more volunteering projects (another key 2015 goal).

When I look at this list, there’s a common denominator. It’s so obvious that Fear is at play behind my decision to delay/avoid all of these tasks. I don’t want to tackle my accounting records because they never add up properly at first and it takes hours longer than it should and it’s frustrating and I’m scared I will realise I’m too stupid to manage being self-employed. I don’t want to plan my New York trip because I’m scared I will find that I can’t afford it, and have to ditch the whole idea. I don’t want to find new meditation podcasts because I’m scared they might be too hard, and will prove that, actually, I really suck at meditation and will never improve. I don’t want to do more angel card readings for my friends because I’m scared the messages I give people might not be meaningful to them or will reveal stuff they don’t want to hear and they’ll hold that against me and tell other people I’m crap and WHAT IF THAT’S TRUE?!

Wow.

In short, I’m scared I’m not good enough. I’m scared I will fail. So basically I’m scared of the same stuff you, and every other person on this planet, is scared of – and that’s why I’m procrastinating.

But here’s the thing about Fear: it only holds its power over you for as long as there is an absence of proof that the things you are scared of could happen. And the only way to know if that proof exists is to do what you’re scared of. Yuck. The good news: through that process one of two things will happen: you will find that the thing you were scared of was never really there, or you will find that you can handle it. That’s a win-win situation.

I know all of this, and yet I continue to procrastinate. I’m putting a stop to that right now. You all are my witnesses. I’ve set myself a challenge to tick as many of these things off my list as I can by April 16 (four weeks away).

I’ll start with that nectarine. 


UPDATE: Since writing this post, my housemate has thrown out the rotten fruit and cleaned out the vegie drawer. Subsequent laboratory testing has revealed it was a peach, not a nectarine. All is well.

Choose your own creative adventure

Last weekend I went to a session with that quick-witted word-sorceress Liz Gilbert (#fangirlmoment) at the Sydney Opera House, as part of a series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day. If you follow Liz on Facebook or have seen her inspiring TED talk about creativity you’ll know this bestselling author has made it her mission to inspire everyone to “get out of your own way” when it comes to unleashing the creative being that lies within all of us.*

It’s a worthy mission. In our haste to increase our incomes, enhance our love lives, climb the career ladder and just cope with the busyness of life, the desire to indulge our creativity tends to fall by the wayside. But it’s not an indulgence at all.

Even if you don’t want to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture or write the next Fifty Shades of Grey (please don’t; the literary world deserves better), spending more time being creative can have some pretty awesome flow-on effects – greater happiness and a sense of purpose being chief among them. It also keeps you focused – especially if you have a ‘1’ in your numerology, like I do. Liz says that if she doesn’t have a creative project on the go, she starts destroying relationships with those around her. Ouch! “A creative mind is like a border collie. If you don’t give it a job to do, it will find a job – and you won’t like the job it finds for itself,” she explains.

The benefits of creativity are not in creating a one-of-a-kind, precious product, they're in the process of creating. And it’s not just about art, drama or writing. Raising children is a creative endeavour and so too are exercise, cooking and reading.

There are myriad reasons most people put off that creative project they’ve long been dreaming of. Here is a small selection Liz mentioned in her talk:

• Someone else is already doing this (or: EVERYONE else is already doing this)
•   I haven’t got the time/money/energy
•  I’m no good at this
•   There’s no point
•   I’m not ready
• I’m too fat (WTF? Apparently this is an actual reason people give)

All of these are just excuses we create because we’re deeply afraid we’re not good enough, which is a common fear. But it's something we have to learn to get past. Creativity requires us to reach beyond our safety zone, which is something the subconscious regards as very, very dangerous. “Fear will always be provoked by creativity, because creativity asks us to enter into realms of uncertain outcomes,” Liz says. And that, of course, is when growth, both creative and emotional, happens.

Liz’s approach is not to try and eliminate Fear** completely – because it never goes away, ever – but to accommodate it, then ignore it and go ahead and follow the creative path anyway. Without that strategy she might never have had such a remarkable career. She tells Fear: “You get a vote, but you do not get a voice.”

I went home after this talk and dug out the short stories I had abandoned late last year because I thought they were shit. They may well be shit but as Liz has reminded me, there’s every reason to keep going with them, if for no other benefit than the joy of the process.

Time to put my border collie on a shorter leash.

*I’ve written about this before; read my previous post here.

**Eagle-eyed readers will notice I always capitalise Fear. There’s a reason for that. my experience of Fear is that it is powerful it has often stood over me like a bully, so that’s why I personify it.