Pink Chiffon, Navy Jumpers and Who Gets the Deciding Vote
Last week at Ideas Fest, one of our first stops was Lu in Lu Land’s bus, where she has an absolutely jam-packed dressing-up wardrobe that makes my Funky Diva suitcase look positively restrained.
Obviously, I had to have a rummage.
At one point I was wafting around in a floor-length hot pink chiffon peignoir (think OTT Yootha Joyce), despite already being dressed head to toe in pink swirls with huge BITCH earrings. There was already quite a lot going on before I added several metres of floaty pink chiffon into the mix.
What I love about Lu is that she’s colourful, playful and completely herself. She’s probably at the extreme end of what people imagine when I talk about self-expression and Funky Diva energy. I wrote something about it afterwards because it occurred to me that Unsausaging doesn’t have to mean becoming louder, more colourful or more flamboyant.
You don’t have to dress like Lu or me. You might be happiest in jeans and a navy jumper.
The bit I’m interested in is whether you’re wearing your navy jumper because you love it, or because somewhere along the way you decided the thing you REALLY wanted was too bright, silly, young, attention-seeking, impractical or a bit much. I initially thought that was about self-expression when I wrote it, but now I’m not so sure.
I’ve recorded lots of Diva Delves (my new podcast) conversations over the past couple of weeks and I keep noticing things that are making me reconsider some of my own thinking around Funky Diva Vibes…
For example, Liv (Episode 7) is a drag queen who can be found wearing enormous wigs, boobs, corsets, sequins and all manner of fabulousness. Out of drag, they describe themselves as quiet and relaxed, wearing earth tones and drinking tea. They need both versions because too much of either wouldn’t feel comfortable.
There’s something else about Liv’s story that I keep coming back to as well. Their early drag deliberately played around with gender and didn’t involve wigs or padding. Later, when Liv lost their day job and needed to make money from drag, commercial bookings required something much closer to the RuPaul version of a drag queen.
So, Liv adapted and the wigs went on, along with the boobs, corsets, hips and all the other stuff they’d previously resisted. And they discovered they actually loved it!
Vayne their friend who’s also a drag queen (episode 3) encouraged them to try more make-up and, despite initially being reluctant, Liv would look at the result and think they looked amazing.
Something they’d originally done partly because of an outside expectation became something they genuinely enjoyed. And this has been bothering my Sausage Machine brain a bit. I talk a lot about shoulds and invisible rules, but now I’m thinking perhaps I’ve been in danger of making the should itself the problem.
Nikki (episode 2) gave me another example when I interviewed her. As a teenager, she was told she should learn shorthand and typing. She didn’t want to, but she did it anyway and later admitted that everyone who’d told her to do it had been right. It became a really useful skill. Apparently sometimes the should is right. How annoying. 😂
It’s making me realise Unsausaging is less about rejecting the rules and more about noticing what part they’re playing in our decisions.
Sometimes we might look at a should and decide it’s bollocks. On another occasion we might decide there’s actually something useful in it. We can try something because another person suggests it and discover we love it or change our mind about something we were previously adamant wasn’t for us.
There are also times when we might deliberately choose the conventional option because it works perfectly well for us. I’ve had a very mundane example of this with networking recently. I always say I can’t be arsed with networking, which is true, except it’s also not quite true.
I did have to dip out of a speed-networking session halfway through at Ideas Fest because it felt difficult. Yet I spent loads of time at Ideas Fest talking to people – make it make sense lol.
I like what I’ve decided to call ‘verbal ping-pong’ with like-minded folk, it often starts with a bit of light-hearted banter or being a bit daft and conversations going off on tangents. I can happily do that for hours. So, actually, I don’t dislike networking in the sense of meeting new people and making connections. I dislike quite a lot of the ways I’m apparently supposed to do it.
That distinction matters to me because I’m no longer trying to make myself enjoy something that doesn’t suit me. I can choose to find another way.
There’s another part of this that I’ve been thinking about too, because knowing what you want doesn’t necessarily mean you find it easy to say it. That’s definitely true for me at times, and I know it’s linked to old ‘baggage’.
I don’t like intentionally upsetting people, and most of the time it really matters to me that I’m understood. I will explain myself because I want the other person to understand why I’ve made a particular decision, especially if I care about them.
During my conversation with Jenny, (episode 4) we talked about the times we say yes when the real answer is no because we want to be kind. One tiny yes might be absolutely fine. Lots of them over time can start to affect who we are and how we live our lives – not good...
That feels very different from the popular idea that becoming more confident means you eventually stop giving a shit what anybody thinks. Almost everybody I’ve asked that question during the Diva Delves chat has ended up qualifying their answer in some way and they do still care.
So do I.
Other people can know things we don’t. Someone we trust can point something out and make us reconsider. We can take advice, listen to opinions, think about how our decisions affect people and sometimes decide to compromise because the relationship matters more to us than getting our own way.
Bella (Episode 5) talks about their partner, Liv, sometimes catching one of their thoughts and helping them see that what they’d absorbed wasn’t necessarily true. Bella described the ongoing process of unlearning things they’d picked up without even realising it.
Perhaps that’s the bit that has shifted something for me. The Sausage Machine isn’t just a collection of stupid rules we need to escape from. Some of those rules aka squishes might be useful. Some might have been useful once and no longer fit. Others might be things we consciously choose because we quite like them. It’s what happens when all that stuff becomes so embedded that we stop noticing there was ever a choice.
Which brings me back to Lu’s bonkers bus and dressing up tent…
A person wearing a floor-length hot pink chiffon peignoir could be doing it because:
a) they bloody love it
b) everyone around them is doing it
c) they think being unconventional is what’s now expected of them
d) someone handed it to them, and they thought they’d give it a go
The same applies to the person in the navy jumper. Therefore, I don’t think we can tell how Unsausaged someone is by looking at them, it has much more to do with how much say they have in the life they’re actually living.
Other people still get an opinion, circumstances get a say, money, practicality, kindness, safety and responsibility all get to chuck their thoughts into the mix too.
I’m just increasingly interested in who gets the deciding vote – that is Unsausaged Funky Diva energy.
