Episode 164 - What I Wish I Would’ve Told You About Your Body
Most women learn to experience their bodies through other people’s eyes before they ever learn how to truly live inside them. I’ve had a few conversations recently that brought up things I wish I had known about bodies when I was younger, and things I wish I had talked about with my own daughter. In this episode, I’m unpacking everything from the unspoken rules women absorb from a young age to the patriarchal systems that keep those rules in place. There is such a rich conversation here for mothers to have with their daughters, but also for us to have with the younger versions of ourselves who grew up inside these same systems of sexual objectification, shame, and discomfort in our bodies. Here’s what I cover:
5 examples of good girl rules that shape the way women think about and experience their bodies
The book More Than a Body and the “instrument versus ornament” reframe that changed how I think about self-objectification
How girls develop shame around their bodies when they don’t have anyone to talk to about what they are experiencing
The hidden trade women are offered between male attention and connection to themselves
What it can sound like to have important conversations with girls about their bodies
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I've had a couple conversations lately that I want to talk about with you because they've brought up some things that I wish I had shared with my own daughter, some things that I wish I had known, and some things that I want to talk about with you about bodies.
01:18
I have a dear friend. We've been friends since high school. She called me and explained that she wanted to talk through something her 13-year-old daughter wants to wear short shorts and crop tops. And she didn't know what to do.
01:33
Now, her daughter also happens to have an older sister who's 16. And her 16-year-old sister has 16-year-old friends who are boys. And so younger daughter is hanging out with older daughter and kind of older daughter's group of friends.
01:48
And my friend's mind went to where I think a lot of mothers' minds would go of like, she's going to start having sex. And I'm not laughing because I think it's funny. I'm laughing because it is so familiar.
02:01
I've made that leap, right? When my daughter's body started changing as bodies do, and it's just natural process of maturing and going through puberty and boys start to notice. I think it is very ancient and wise that those alarm bells start going off inside of mothers and fathers' brains.
02:24
And those alarm bells are not necessarily wrong. I think the question is, what do we do about those alarm bells in a way that honors who our children are and what they need and what they're noticing.
02:40
And at the same time, what they're not prepared for, what they don't understand, the type of systems that they are entering and becoming a part of that they are completely unaware even exist. And so as we talked and we ended up talking for a long time, it became obvious to me that a lot of us think that the shorts are the problem.
03:04
I mean, I was certainly taught growing up, and I think in a lot of conservative religious communities, the shorts are the problem, just don't wear the shorts. But the shorts are only part of the problem.
03:12
And what is actually here is a really rich conversation for mothers or fathers to have with their own daughters and for us to have with the younger versions of ourselves who didn't know some of these things, who were also part of this same system of patriarchy and sexual objectification and feeling uncomfortable in your body and not knowing exactly what to do.
03:41
And so I just wanted to have a conversation about it with you because yes, this episode is for mothers of daughters, but it's also really helped me as I look back at my own girlhood and when I wanted to wear short shorts.
03:56
And it's for anyone who had those experiences and also just for anyone who grew up in a body where the world had opinions about it before you really could understand why, which is, I think, all of us.
04:13
I want to talk about the rules, the rules for good girls around their bodies. This is not something that people say out loud, but we are swimming in them. They are the ones that are handed to girls a million different ways, magazine covers, through the way they hear their mothers and other grown women talk about their own bodies, what gets seen on TV and movies, how they observe their peers responding to female bodies and who is popular,
04:42
who is not, right? It's so prevalent. And I want to name them because here's what I believe will help. Any girl who can see the system that she lives in has a fighting chance. And a girl who can't see it just lives inside of it and is thrown around by it without having any conscious awareness of what's happening to her.
05:09
So let's start with what we teach girls about their bodies. Again, not on purpose, mostly, but here's what they learn. Number one, your body exists to be looked at, not experienced, not inhabited, not listened to.
05:26
It exists to be displayed. And so if you go back to the crop top, that is the uniform of this rule, the push-up bra, the way that, remember when duck lips were like such a funny internet thing? Like the full kissable lips, the way we stand, the way we push our breasts out.
05:50
Like, so we look taller or smaller or bigger in places where we're supposed to be bigger and smaller in places where we're supposed to be smaller. There's tutorials that teach you how to stand in photos so that you look thinner.
06:03
None of this has to do with how your body feels. It has to do 100% with how it looks. And there's a book that I want to mention here that changed so many things for me. It's called More Than a Body by Lindsay and Lexi Kite.
06:20
And they are both PhDs, amazing. They're twin sisters. And they've spent their careers studying what this rule does to women and girls, objectification. And they offer a reframe that I think is really healthy.
06:38
Your body is an instrument, not an ornament. An ornament just exists to be looked at, to be displayed, to be judged as either, you know, beautiful or not beautiful, appropriate or not appropriate, enough or not enough.
06:53
An instrument exists to be used, to do things, to carry you through life, to climb things, to experience things, to have a rich human experience, to let you run and think and create and feel and connect.
07:09
But from the time girls are very, very small, we let them be instruments when they're young. But then at some point, they become ornaments. Think about little girls running around and going down the slide and swinging and not caring if they get dirty or if they fall down.
07:28
You know, maybe they cry, we pick them back up and they go to it again. That is a body that's being an instrument. Think of the way that little girls talk and share what's going on for them and the curiosity that is so prevalent in girlhood up to a certain age.
07:47
And then it becomes an ornament. So we're going to come back to that in just a minute. Rule number two, the attention that you receive from either the opposite sex or from the object of your desires, because again, we're not all heterosexual, that that gaze is the reward.
08:10
For the purposes of this conversation and this podcast episode, we're going to frame it heterosexually just because that's where the good girl rules really kind of come in hard. Because a boy's gaze gets coded as success.
08:27
And then that grows up into a man's gaze, a man's approval is currency. It means something. And this isn't a side effect. This is the design. Because when a girl wears something that gets noticed, something fires off in her brain that says, that's it.
08:49
I did it right. And I think it's important to be honest about this particular rule because I think there's a disservice that happens when we pretend that this rule and that payoff inside of a girl's brain isn't real.
09:04
Male attention is something. It feels like something. It feels like power sometimes. It feels like visibility. It feels like mattering in a room full of people. It feels like belonging. And we have to talk about it that way.
09:20
We have to understand that it means safety and connection and belonging and having a place. Because if we don't, we risk talking about it in a way where a girl will think, well, that there's something wrong with me then because I like being looked at.
09:36
I like it when men notice me. I think it's important for me to look nice. And we don't want to diminish the power of that. What we want her to understand is in the context of it, that that noticing as a price, that that noticing comes with strings attached.
09:57
We're going to come back to that in a little bit as well. Rule number three, your body and a normal body is a problem to be constantly managed. Your body is too little, too fat, too thin, too hairy, too flat, too heavy, too much chest, not enough chest, wrong shape, wrong size, right shape, something wrong with your nose, something wrong with your eyelashes, something wrong with your lips.
10:22
And there is just this constant barrage of something that always needs fixing. I'm at the age where I'm starting to notice, oh, you know what? My skin doesn't look the same as it used to, or there's some wrinkles around my eyes or my mouth that I didn't used to be there.
10:41
That programming that my body is to look a certain way, and I'm supposed to measure it against this beauty standard, and I'm supposed to fix what doesn't measure up never ends. And the thing that no one tells us is it's not a one-time thing.
11:01
You don't fix it and then you're done. You fix it and then there's another thing and another thing and another thing and then you age and the normal life happens and there's another and another. I mean, I know women who are in their 60s and 70s and still wanting to feel okay in their bodies and they don't.
11:19
They're still waiting to feel like they got to the end of some list and can just be in their body and it still isn't there. And that's because of this rule. Lots of fixing all the time. Otherwise, you're not measuring up.
11:36
Rule number four, your comfort comes last. Whether you're comfortable wearing something or not wearing something, it's the last thing on the list because the things that are more important on that list is what will boys think?
11:52
What will men do? What will other people say? What will they think of me if I'm wearing this or doing this? Because a girl's physical ease in her own skin and her right to exist in her own body without apologizing for it, that is not on the list.
12:10
That's not the priority. The priority is everyone else's reaction to your body, and that's what you need to be paying attention to. We communicate this to girls thousands of different ways before they're even 10 years old in what we tell them to wear, in the way that we tell them to pull their shirts down, in the way that we tell them to adjust, in the way that we tell them that them being uncomfortable,
12:41
I know we say it flippantly, but you know, beauty is pain, is such a common thread in the media that we see and in the way that women are prized and held up for meeting beauty standards. None of that is about how comfortable they get to be in their body with what they're wearing, with how they're feeling, with the amount of explaining or apologizing that they should do when they don't meet beauty standards.
13:10
The message is your comfort is, if it's even on the list, it is dead last. Another rule, rule number five, sexual attention is the power you are actively encouraged to pursue. And in fact, it's the only power you are actively encouraged to pursue.
13:31
Let's just sit with this one for a second, because there's lots of different ways to be powerful. You could be very knowledgeable, right? You could have financial independence. You could cultivate authority in a room or expertise that takes years to build.
13:48
The good girl rules are not actively encouraging any of that. What we want you to do is be powerfully attractive. The hip-hop, the pushed up chest, the duck clips, the short shorts. These are the tools that women are handed and specifically encouraged to use because they give men something.
14:15
And what gives men the thing that they want, that's permitted and it is celebrated. The other kinds of power, being smart, being ambitious, being financially independent, being assertive and authoritative, we don't want any of that because it makes women less manageable.
14:37
It takes their time and attention away from cultivating their attractiveness as power. And we don't want that. And girls learn this so early. She learns that this power of attraction can open doors, that it can give her belonging, that it can give her an edge above other women who are not willing to meet beauty standards.
15:03
And that is powerful. And I think, again, if we can talk honestly about these rules, if we can give girls this context, it actually helps them to know how to navigate them better instead of just pretending that they don't exist.
15:22
Rule number six, your body has needs and those needs are shameful. Or your body has a natural state and that is shameful. Body hair, periods, hunger, you're supposed to hide all of that. Desire, your own actual desire, what you want, what feels good to you is not as important as what other people need from your body.
15:49
In fact, some of your own desires might even just be dangerous. We don't talk about periods. We don't talk about body hair. We don't talk about the normal bodily functions that are part of being a human and make them normal.
16:04
We don't talk about it in polite company, not at the dinner table, between boys and girls. And girls learn to be ashamed of the very body that they live in. I still remember my mom teaching me how to wrap up a pad or a tampon so that nobody knew what it was, as if the very fact that I was on my period was supposed to be hidden because it was, right?
16:31
She wasn't directly teaching me to be ashamed of my period, but I was ashamed of my period. She didn't say to me, Sara, you should be ashamed, but we do this all the time, teaching girls to hide things and not talk about things that their bodies have as needs or as very natural human developments and processes.
16:54
So I wanted to go through some of those rules, and there are others that I didn't name specifically. Those just seem like kind of the heavy hitters. They are not accidents. They are not some unfortunate side effect of a culture that just didn't know better.
17:10
They are a system and they are coherent. They are consistent. And it is an incredibly well-functioning system that has been designed by men for their pleasure and so that the capitalist arm of patriarchy can now come in and sell us all kinds of things that we need to make our bodies meet these beauty standards.
17:34
We have hair removal kits. We have push-up bras. We have things to make us look better and skinnier and lose weight and fix our nose and lip filler and everything else. So this incredibly well managed, well-functioning system benefits men and benefits the people who have products to sell us.
17:57
And here is the side effect for girls. This is what the system actually does. Inside a girl, inside her mind, inside the private kind of commentary of her own head, it splits her. And Lindsay and Lexi Kite describe it this way, which I just thought was so brilliant because I could remember when self-objectification takes hold, meaning when I become a person who is aware of my body and I'm aware of other people watching my body,
18:37
it takes, and again, this is happening in like middle school, a girl's identity literally splits in two. There is one identity that is living her life, and there's another that is watching and judging her.
18:51
She becomes her own internal critic because she's watching. She's watching how other people are watching her and she's monitoring how she looks. She's watching for signs of approval or disapproval from other people and then she's holding herself up to these standards rather than being able to focus just on what she's doing and how she's feeling.
19:19
When I read that, I was like, yes, that is exactly it. That is the thing that I had never been able to describe. Trying to do my life, right? Sit in class, walk down a hallway, make a comment, raise my hand in class and ask a question.
19:38
But part of my mind, a whole dedicated portion of my mental energy is running a separate track. Do I look okay right now? Is my stomach sticking out? Did he notice me? Was that okay? Was that the right amount?
19:51
Was it too much? Was it not enough? It is exhausting and it's constant and it starts so young that most of us don't even know what is happening. We think that voice is us. It's just what it means to be a girl.
20:09
I constantly have to be aware of what other people think of my body. But it isn't. It is what that system trained us to do to ourselves. So it would not have to do it anymore. This is so powerful and so insidious.
20:27
When a woman is busy monitoring her own body, monitoring all of the aspects of how she moves through the world with these standards, she doesn't have a lot of energy left over for other things. A woman who needs male approval to feel valuable is going to shape herself around what men want.
20:51
A woman who has been taught that her own desire is dangerous will not trust herself. She's going to outsource her own knowing to whoever outside of her seems most confident or whoever's attention she wants to capture.
21:07
She's going to ask permission before she acts. She's going to shrink and second guess and stay quiet in moments that sometimes really matter for her safety or for her comfort because she doesn't know how to risk their approval without causing something that feels really uncomfortable, not belonging, not meeting these beauty standards, not measuring up.
21:37
So when we have that split, when we become both the person in our body and the person watching our body, now nobody has to do anything from the outside because we're doing it to ourselves on the inside.
21:55
In my conversation with my friend, I remembered and I told her this story. When I was in high school, I got a hold of a pair of short shorts and my mother did not want me to wear them. Obviously, growing up Mormon, as I did, there were very specific rules about what I was allowed to wear and what I wasn't allowed to wear.
22:17
And I don't even remember where these shorts came from, but man, I hung on to those things for dear life. Those shorts meant that I could be like everybody else, right? Those shorts meant that I wasn't the weird, awkward Mormon girl.
22:34
It was about getting attention for something else, right? I had gotten some attention for being the weird, you know, awkward Mormon girl. But when I had those shorts on, now I could get attention for the way my legs looked in those shorts, the way that I felt changed.
22:58
And there were a lot of things that I still felt very self-conscious about. I mean, I got teased for having a visible mustache by another boy in my room in like fourth grade, maybe fifth, got teased for it.
23:12
Totally remember it. And there was no one I could talk to about that. I knew it was bad. I knew it was shameful, but I didn't, I also didn't feel like I could talk to my mom about it. She was a great mom in so many ways.
23:26
She also didn't talk to me about my body. We didn't talk about it. She didn't talk to me about her body. She didn't talk to me about what a body was supposed to do as it changed. If it hadn't been for, you know, the school district class about starting my period, I would not have known because those were just private matters.
23:49
And while she was willing to go to the store and get me pads when it was time, I had to tell her like, hey, I think I've started my period. And so I grew up feeling really acutely aware that there were a lot of things that I didn't know about.
24:06
I didn't know that you could get rid of body hair, right? Even just so that I could suffer a little bit less and not be teased at school. She didn't talk to me about makeup, right? When I could start wearing it, when I could, I remember begging her to let me shave my legs.
24:23
Listen, my brothers called me carpet legs. That's how bad it was. And my sixth grade class was going to the beach and I begged her to please let me shave my legs. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
24:37
I finally wore her down. I went into the shower and just started shaving my legs with a dry razor. Totally took off a three inch strip of skin right there on your shin bone. I know we've all done it because I just didn't have, I didn't have any direction.
24:54
And so what I absorbed from all of her silence was something that I couldn't have articulated then, but I really understand it and see it in me now, which is your body is something to be ashamed of. It is something to be managed in private.
25:10
It is something that you're just going to have to figure out on your own. Don't ask for help. Just figure out how to handle it. And so when I finally got those shorts, it was about feeling normal. It was about being able to now belong to this category of girls who were sexy or cute.
25:33
And I didn't understand at the time, but looking back, me, my mother would have had to have like fried those shorts from my cold dead hands because I was not going to give them up. It was so important for me to have that belonging and matter in that way.
25:52
And so when I think about how I have absorbed and how I have tried to emulate the good girl rules about bodies, I have so much compassion for it. I'm not all the way through this. I don't have some existence where I don't notice the male gaze, where I don't notice my skin sagging and wrinkles happening and things changing, because all of us have just been swimming in these rules ever since we were little.
26:23
So when I was talking to my friend about my own short shorts experience, I also remembered when my daughter came downstairs in her own short shorts. And of course she did, because I think it is totally normal.
26:39
I remember feeling that alarm go off in my head and the instinct to question the wisdom of wearing those shorts and maybe to make her change, right? I felt all of that. But the one thing that I decided to do differently was to try to preserve.
27:01
And I didn't, I wasn't a coach at the time. So I didn't think about this in terms of like coaching and how I'm thinking about it now. But I just thought, she gets to exist. She gets to exist in her own body.
27:14
And I'm not really sure how I'm going to do this, but my fear is mine. And I need to manage that. And I need to talk about it with her in a way that doesn't kind of dump all of this fear on her. Because the problem is that the system makes the shorts bad or wrong.
27:36
And so then the opposite feels true. Like, hey, if the shorts are bad or wrong, then covering up is the way to protect yourself. And that's not right either, because right, that just teaches her that her body is somehow still bad and she has to cover it up or other people are going to have thoughts about it.
27:58
I wish I could say that I had a great talk with her, that I was able to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit. I don't think I did a particularly great job of having the kind of conversation that we're going to talk about having in this podcast episode.
28:14
But I think the best I was able to do is just not lecture her, not warn her, and not force her to change. Now, she was just here a couple of weekends ago, and I asked her about this. And she said, oh, I knew that you might not have liked some of the things that I was wearing.
28:31
I knew that you would not like, for example, she, you know, wearing her first bikini. I was aware that you didn't like it, but that you let me do it anyway. I'm not going to say I was able to have an amazing conversation about it with her, the conversation that I wish I had, that I'm going to kind of propose that you have with your daughters or with yourself now.
28:53
But that was progress. And I think whenever we're able to make progress, it's to be celebrated. So what do we actually say to the 13-year-old who wants to wear the short shorts? Going back to what Lindsay and Lexi Kite wrote, I remembered this quote and I think it is so essential.
29:15
Here's what they write. When we live our lives in this perpetual state of body monitoring, we are living passively. We are being judged and consumed by others and not as self-actualized humans actively making choices.
29:38
That is what I think the conversation hinges on. We need to help our daughters recognize when they are existing to be consumed and judged by others and when they are existing as the instrument. Because both things are going to happen.
29:58
I would go so far to say as it is unavoidable in the culture and the way that we are just so inundated in this avalanche of beauty standards that one of the most important things we can do is help our daughters recognize when they are in their bodies and feeling their feelings and doing things that make them happy and feel pleasure and feel proud of themselves.
30:24
And when they switch into that observer mode and they're picking up all the little bits of information around them of people who are watching their body and having reactions to it. We want to raise girls who are aware of when they default to managing their looks and how much time and energy that takes, not because it's bad, but because what it costs them is making real choices about their own bodies and just existing,
31:01
being able to make conscious choices, ones that actually belong to them. Because if I'm putting on short shorts because I think Chad is going to like it, that's not a decision that I'm making for myself.
31:15
But it's also not a bad decision. A decision makes a lot of sense when we think about how we're growing up. And I'm saying this kind of over and over in a couple of different ways because we also don't want to shame anyone who's putting on the short shorts because Chad will like it because it just makes sense.
31:37
We want them to understand the cost. And here's where that quote from the Kite sisters, I think, just matters is that when self-objectification really takes hold, and again, the research in their book says that it really starts hitting in middle school, the result is that girls start sitting out.
31:59
They start opting out of a lot of experiences that are really essential for them to have. And they don't opt out metaphorically. It is literally. They stop raising their hands in class because they're worried about how their arms look.
32:15
They quit sports because they don't want to sweat in front of boys. They skip things because they're on their period. They make themselves smaller and they begin to either literally try to make their bodies smaller or metaphorically disappear from rooms in which they should be learning, they should be experiencing, and they should be becoming and even developing some of those other ways to have power,
32:44
to have knowledge, to have the ability to talk with other people confidently, the ability to be in a room and feel like you belong there despite who notices you and who doesn't. So that's what's really at stake.
33:01
It's not just about the shorts. It's that when the shorts are the biggest thing that matter, girls make themselves smaller. And then decades later, when we're still trying to make ourselves smaller and fit in, all of that rage and resentment and sadness and loneliness, it's really a problem.
33:26
So when I was talking with my friend, here's what I said. You don't need to take the shorts away. I don't think that is the right move here. That's not the conversation that I would encourage you to have.
33:39
The conversation is, I want you to understand what is happening here so that you get to decide what you do with it. You talk to her about the system in language that is appropriate for her. You say something like, you know what, there are these rules that nobody says out loud about what girls' bodies are for and what they are allowed to look like, what they are not allowed to look like.
34:03
Tell me what you already know about that because I bet you are so smart. You have already observed some of this. Of course, they're going to have some answers for that, right? Because it is everywhere.
34:14
And so then you tell her that that attention from boys is real and it feels like power and it is something that sets off a very natural, very understandable reaction in her brain. And then you tell her that it has a cost, right?
34:36
When you are constantly getting that attention from boys, what you're not doing is thinking about how your own body feels. You're not getting to keep your body for you in service of what you want to do.
34:52
It becomes all about what they want you to do. And that's a trade that I want you to know you're making. And I want you to make it only in instances when you feel like it's worth it, because they are going to make that trade sometimes.
35:08
And we need to understand it and we need to have a lot of compassion for it and not shame her for it. Because what we want to do is give her correct information, invite her to talk about us with anything that happens, anything she notices, so that we can lovingly help her feel the difference between being an instrument and being an ornament.
35:35
Between pulling on those short shorts because she wants to feel cute and free and like herself, or putting them on because she wants a particular boy to look at her. Both of those things are real. Neither is wrong.
35:50
But what we want is to make it conscious. You want to teach her to notice her own feelings first. What does it feel like in your own body when you're wearing this? Do you feel powerful? Do you feel comfortable?
36:05
Do you feel seen? Do you feel used? Do you feel stared at? Do you feel consumed? All of those are valid. None of them are wrong. And plugging her in to what she's feeling is so powerful. Then you can teach her to watch the difference between what boys say and what boys do.
36:28
Words are easy and behavior is information. You give her the language. It might sound something like, you know, I notice that I feel really happy when Chad looks me up and down. Interesting. Okay, tell me why.
36:45
What do you think it means? No shame, no blame, helping her understand that, okay, when Chad looks at you and that little thing goes off in your brain, it does feel good. What are you also not feeling in that moment?
37:01
Oh, I'm not feeling how I feel. Do I even like Chad, right? Is the thing that I'm most concerned about getting his attention? Why is that? To help our girls become observers of the system and even little detectives so that they can see the way it works and the way it functions is so important because that allows her to see it.
37:25
And when she can see it, she can make different choices about it. One of the reasons why this conversation is so powerful is because this system is not going to change on its own. It's not going to take care of them.
37:42
It's not going to protect them. It's not going to help them have one wild, beautiful, and precious life. We have to do that as their mothers, as their friends, as the women who surround these young girls who are further along the journey from childhood to be able to see and name what we've all just been swimming in.
38:06
And when we pull back the curtain for them, we also pull the curtain back for us. And we understand more clearly that we are also, I'm still being offered a trade at 52. Am I going to maintain my body as an ornament?
38:23
Am I going to try and stop the aging process? Am I going to try and tighten and nip and tuck? And again, I'm not saying any of that is bad. I am saying that I now see that I'm being offered a trade. I can still go the direction of becoming more ornamental and more along the lines of what beauty standards expect of me now, or I can really double down on becoming an instrument in feeling and doing what my body wants and what my body desires.
38:57
I can make that consciously. And so that is what we are offering our girls. It is the chance to live inside this system consciously and to make choices consciously. Because I really think that the most dangerous thing that we inadvertently do for our daughters is not talk about this.
39:20
And so they just kind of participate in this system and they become comfortable in it and they have no idea that they're making that trade. So I'm dying to know as I was preparing this episode and, you know, kind of reminiscing, I had all of these experiences come back to me when I really was doubling down on noticing the male attention.
39:44
What do you remember growing up in your body? I would love to know. I think it's very different, you know, in terms of I came from a very conservative religious background that had its own rules. What do you remember about growing up in your body?
39:58
What were you taught either explicitly with words or in silence, in the looks on other people's faces? What did you have to figure out alone that you wish now you had had some help with? Or what do you wish that someone had told you about the system?
40:18
I'd love to know. Send me an email, sara@sarafisk.coach, or send me a DM. I read every single one because I really want to have an ongoing conversation because as I mentioned, it's not over for me.
40:32
I'm still making those choices between instrument and ornament. I think we all are. And the more we talk about it, the better able we are to live consciously. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
