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| People braved this icy driveway to come to the meeting. |
Discuss your experiences of doing the Hero Qualities and Speech Bubbles exercises – no pressure to bare your souls, you can simply discuss what it was like to explore these things. Optional activity: Get crafty and personify your ugly voice. Make that stupid monster. Then tell it what you really think of it. (Ask every participant to bring some scrap supplies or stuff from the recycling bin; have some scissors and glue on hand.)
After some initial chatter, we commenced to sharing both our feelings about the Hero Qualities exercise and what our hero qualities actually were.
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| These are my hero qualities and their categories. |
We had a wide variety of hero qualities shared, and it was interesting to see what kinds of things we'd each put on our list. Some of us had included professional or academic achievements; others included personal qualities, like empathy. I especially liked the more abstract things like recreating expensive ideas on the cheap, reflecting on your own professional practice, and being able to tell how a person's feeling based on the smell of their flatulence. Some of us had an easy time sorting these into categories; others had a lot of trouble identifying commonalities.
More than one of us expressed the sense that as we were making this very list, our ugly voice was offering a running commentary about how we were wrong to think we were good at these things. Sometimes something on one person's list would lead another person to say, "Oh, that should be on my list, too!" And best of all, of course, was every time someone said, "You are SO good at that!" I fell into the trap of not maintaining the spirit of the event and when my dear sister M.E. offered up one thing that she's good at, as only a judgey older sister could I said, "Are you REALLY, though?" And I felt horribly guilty immediately afterwards, but it actually led to a good discussion of how we know we're good at things, and I conceded that, whatever it was (and I can't even remember now), she is indeed very good at it.
Then, it was onto the hard part: talking about the Speech Bubbles exercise and how the ugly voice makes us feel.
We didn't discuss our specific responses to this, partly because nobody really wanted to rehash these, and partly because JCH said that she'd done a lot of work in the past to quiet this voice and didn't want other people's voices stirring hers up.
This opened the opportunity to talk about depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, and how we learn to handle this voice. Some people found it was valuable to take this voice as a challenge, to prove it wrong. M.E. recommended Kimya Dawson's song, "The Competition," which you can listen to below:
This song is all about dealing with those voices.
I shared my own experience with depression. My ugly voice looks like the Thesulac demon from the TV show Angel. When the episode featuring this demon aired, I was just barely in remission; I had been on meds for not quite a year. It is so easy to see the ugly voice as a version of ourselves (as, indeed, A.S. said she did), that it was so valuable to me to have something external to ascribe it to. Many of us felt it was valuable to be able to externalize this voice, but A.S. pointed out that, if you have actually had someone not-you saying the same things your ugly voice does, then it's not hard at all to imagine it as something external. We agreed that exploring this kind of trauma isn't really within the scope of Make It Mighty Ugly, but we also talked about how, if you aren't spending time with the people who say these things to you anymore, but you're still hearing them inside your head, then you must have internalized the ideas and there might be value in externalizing them again.
Then it was crafting time! Everyone had brought so many supplies. We started making physical embodiments of those ugly voices.
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| So many craft supplies, and this is a tiny fraction of what we had available. Also, CHOCOLATE. Because chocolate shuts up the ugly voice, y'all. |
I realized quickly that to give my Thesulac demon tentacles from felt was going to involve a lot of sewing and fiddly stuffing, and rapidly changed directions. I cut off all of his felt tentacles and sewed his head closed around a bunch of pipe cleaners, instead. I used the least beautiful version of whipstitch possible, constructed him hastily, and was finished much faster than everyone else. Which gave me time to wonder if I was doing this activity wrong. You see how insidious these voices are?
In the end, we all had a ton of fun creating these little creatures, and we all have somebody we can say "SHUT UP YOU'RE WRONG!" to the next time this voice pops up.
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| Ugly Voice Group Photo! |
From left to right:
My Thesulac.
J.C.H'.s Fear of Success, because if she gets really good at something then she might have to only do that one thing anymore.
A.S.'s prettier, more perfect version of herself, but with mean cat eyes and devil horns
Sonja's little french liar-pants-on-fire man riding C.R.'s mean slug
M.E.'s Guy the Possum-T-Rex-Green-Eyed-Monster, so named so that she can say, "Shut up, Guy!"
This was great fun after a couple days of us all being relatively snowed-in and probably on the verge of cabin fever. I'm very much looking forward to the next one!
