Good News Sunday! September 25, 2022
We are doing something new and different on Sundays with GC News - we hope you will enjoy it. And we need your input!
This day in Herstory: Jacqueline Audry, born September 25, 1908 (died June 22, 1977), was a French film director who began making films in post-World War II France and specialised in literary adaptations. She was the first commercially successful female director of post-war France. (more)
About our new weekly feature, Good News Sunday
What it is, why we’re doing it, and what you can expect
We are doing something new and different on Sundays with GC News - we hope you will enjoy it. And we need your input!
Actually, we’re doing something new and different both weekend days, Saturday and Sunday. You may have noticed yesterday we premiered a new weekly feature, GC Review. Good News Sunday will, like GC Review, prioritize “crowd sourcing.”
We want to give you, the GC Community, opportunities to contribute to GC News.
For GC Review, we welcome your suggestions of past articles, and for Good News Sundays we invite you to share your good news.
Fighting gender ideology can feel like being in a war zone - especially if you are a parent with a trans-identified child. The fight can be stressful for anyone who simply cares about truth and about having a healthy world today and for future generations. So much of the news we come across every day can be disheartening. Sometimes, some of us feel a little crazy. How can that teacher with the huge fake breasts and the bullet nipples be allowed to continue to dress like that? In school? With the blessing of the administrators? What planet are we on?
It doesn’t matter where in the world you live or where you are on the political spectrum, so many of the stories we share every day on GC News are just nuts.
So, we have decided to reserve Sundays to share good news stories, to help us all remember that we’re taking back territory, inch by inch, from the crazies who are intent on “queering” all of reality. We hope that most of these good news stories will come from you - our subscribers and readers - your personal stories of victory and gratitude in the context of dealing with gender ideology. They don’t have to be big. They just have to help the rest of us remember that we’re winning this war, even though it might take many years.
You might want to share your story about a step in the right direction with your trans-identified child, an acknowledgement of some simple shared understanding. Or maybe a tough but heartwarming conversation with a friend who is finally starting to get what you’ve been going on about. A policy change because of a meeting at a school board where you bravely spoke you mind. Any breakthrough with a teacher, a politician, or health professional who finally reads the article you shared from Genspect. New friends who share a worldview grounded in reality, respect for women and the safeguarding of children.
Maybe we missed an article in your local media, covering a GC-friendly school board decision. Share the good news with the whole world!
Most of them won’t be big stories - and that’s just fine. The good news is that all of us together are making a difference, one small step at a time. Share something positive with the rest of us. Inspire us. Encourage us. Empower us!
The good news could be about your state of mind. “I Realized I have more in common with my conservative Christian neighbor (or my woke, Bernie Sanders-lovin' neighbor) than I thought!” Or “went for ice cream with my kid and we both forgot the tension and laughed together like we haven’t since the Pandemic.” Or it can be something monumental, such as your child desisting and getting into playing drums. We would so love to hear those stories. And many others will too.
The attitude of gratitude is a key piece of the idea. Today’s inaugural article, “Ancient Wisdom,” by StoicMom, describes this mind-set in a lovely and heartfelt way. She posted it on her Substack yesterday (September 24), and we knew at once that it beautifully expresses so much that we’ve had in mind in our planning for Good News Sundays. We’re republishing it here, with her gracious permission, to kick off and maybe set the tone for this new weekly feature.
You might not think there is any good news or anything to be grateful for—but part of the process we hope to encourage is to seek beauty, even in the pain. As StoicMom says, there is always something to be thankful for, because “the obstacle is the way.”
We are looking for your good news stories about the gender landscape, but it is also a great habit to cultivate for all the difficulties we face in life. Please write to us and share your stories, either anonymously or not. It can be just a few sentences, but no longer than 500 words max. You can put your submission in a reply to a GC News daily post, or email us at GCNews@substack.com.
We’re all in this together.
Please note that we may not be able to publish everything submitted, but we’ll reply to everyone who submits and let you know.
Ancient Wisdom
By StoicMom
First published September 24, 2022
on The StoicMom Project
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the title of this Substack from StoicMom’s Newsletter (which was kind of the default that just made the newsletter possessive to my username) to The StoicMom Project. It was really on a whim, but it felt right. Then it hit me I’d shifted the tone a bit.
A project indicates that we’re trying to accomplish something, create something, learn something, right? We’re working toward a result. My tagline has been: using my daughter’s trans identity as inspiration to become a better human.
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That was always the intent of this site for me. To document my own journey of using Stoic principles to deal with this painful and destabilizing external circumstance that Life (and my daughter) had dropped in my lap to:
Figure out what I can and can’t control
Use this difficult circumstance to learn and grow and become stronger, more stable—essentially, to exercise “the obstacle is the way”
Reframe things in a way that made them less scary, more actionable–so I could stop feeling impotent and make progress on those things within my control: namely my thoughts, actions, perspectives, and beliefs, or as I like to say “my inner world.”
Like the Stoics, I came to recognize how little of the world I have control over, yet there was so much power in the idea of “changing the world” by changing my inner world. I could transform the experience I was having if I took responsibility for these things that were within my control.
To be honest, I had discovered this long ago. I knew this line already; I’d even say I had tested this previously. Yet it seemed Life wanted to make sure I’d really learned this one: The Obstacle is the Way. So my daughter brought me the strangest, most difficult, most destabilizing experience I could have imagined.
And there was even more ancient wisdom this project would come to beat me over the head with; I really didn’t have to invent anything, I just had to allow myself to learn what so many humans throughout time had already discovered. Cliches and outdated sayings, fairytales and archetypes, philosophies and mythology that contain these ancient lessons…they all converged to remind me there’s really nothing new under the sun. Humans have been figuring out how to overcome suffering for as long as we’ve been a species. Hint: it’s an inside job.
Once you change your inner world, you’ve essentially trained your brain to handle difficult things. This is simple neuroplasticity that results in resilience. But what this can do for your heart was most surprising to me. And it was profoundly transformational.
It’s truly possible to find gratitude in anything. I believe anyone can develop a lens of gratitude–this is simply a practice. And by viewing the world through this lens, you can completely transform your experience. It’s no wonder this is built into the ancient practice of prayer. And those Stoic ideas of reframing and ‘the obstacle is the way’ are both in play when we decide to be grateful. You might be asking yourself right about now how you could possibly be grateful for this tragic experience? When you can reframe this circumstance as a gift, an opportunity for you to heal yourself and get better at Life, and you start to see the results of that effort, you’ll be amazed at how easily the gratitude comes.
This experience also taught me something I resisted for so much of my life: the power of faith. This was something I would have scoffed at not long ago, yet I hadn’t recognized how this idea connected to the trust I was advocating for when it comes to parenting–trust in ourselves, trust in our children, trust in the bonds we nurtured. That this is simple faith–in humanity and Life itself–and it’s embedded in Christianity and in Taoism. I was pretty blown away when I heard this Taoist principle that resonated so hard for me: if you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy. Which also connects to this ancient idea that…
What you focus on expands. I didn’t even know the meaning of this popular saying is taught in the Bible—having not read it since childhood when this concept would have been too sophisticated for me. This “Law of Attraction” principle, in my mind, simply means heightened attunement to certain elements of your environment. When something enters our awareness and we start paying attention to it, we tend to see it everywhere. Like when you learn a new word or concept that has always been there, but not for you. Then suddenly it’s everywhere and you couldn’t stop seeing it if you tried.
This ties back to that lens again. Only this time, it’s that notion that you’ll always find what you’re looking for. If we suspect people are out to harm us, we’ll find evidence to support this. If we look for what our children are doing ‘wrong’, we’ll find plenty. If we’re trying to shape our children to be a certain kind of person, we’ll find all kinds of things we need to fix about them. On the flipside, if we’re looking for beauty, we’ll find it. Imagine what a different world it might be if every time we met someone new, we were looking for their gifts, what they’re here to contribute, what we might learn from them. How would that person respond differently to us?
If we attune ourselves to our children’s “highest qualities” as Sasha would say, we might see these fascinating humans we birthed into the world very differently. When you look at your child, what are you looking for? Insert that Circe quote again here:
Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.
When you look at your child are you seeing the product of all your parenting efforts, and measuring that gorgeous, perfect human against the standards of a sick society? Are you recognizing yourself as a teenager and trying to save that vulnerable kid?
If your attention is on your child’s highest qualities, it creates an expectation that doesn’t even need to be spoken as such, from my experience anyway. I don’t say to my daughter, “I expect you to make good choices.” I say it as a matter of faith, “I know you love yourself and will make the healthiest choices you can for your body and your future.”
And then there’s love. My mom always said, “we love the ones we serve.” I used to expect things from others and experience resentment when I didn’t get them. Finally I figured out that if I model what I want, like say, doing kind things for others expecting nothing in return, then in those times that I do ask for something, my loved ones seem to want to fulfill my requests. I’ve decided to never do anything with resentment again. If I can’t do it with love, I don’t do it. If I start to feel resentment, I take that as information about my boundaries, and then I make a choice as to whether I can find a loving place to perform this task or whether I need to communicate a boundary.
I’ve also discovered that tragedy can break your heart to pieces, or it can break it open, allowing you to experience more richness, more beauty, more pain, more curiosity, more love. Most of us put shields around our hearts at a very young age. When we realized how much pain this world could cause us because it doesn’t make any effort to truly see us, to accept us as perfectly flawed creatures who are always doing the best we know how to get our needs met, we start armoring ourselves. Our hearts don’t get to develop the resilience needed to fully experience Life because we don’t allow anything to get too close—instead we get really good at keeping others at a distance, at fending off pain.
I’m realizing this is opening a whole new topic and I don’t want to dive in too far in this piece. So, I’ll leave that as a teaser–the idea that this can break your heart open and that that might actually be a good thing. I just want to communicate that I am profoundly changed by taking this Stoic approach (that invited all kinds of ancient wisdom) to this circumstance that my daughter introduced into our home. This is the essence of that idea of being a lighthouse for me. At first, I jumped in the rowboat and chased her out into the stormy seas thinking I could “save” her. That was fear-driven and fear is not attractive and I have little control over the water, the weather, and even my own boat while in the storm, let alone hers.
But a lighthouse can be battered relentlessly and still shine bright, unaffected by the storm, guiding those that are still out at sea and communicating where to find solid land. Many wise humans throughout the ages understood that stable ground is an inside job. Steady is attractive. Life can throw all kinds of tragedy at someone who’s figured this out and that person can stand strong in their values, unaffected by the storm…which eventually passes and the sun comes out, and sometimes there’s even a rainbow, but there is breathtaking beauty that won’t be experienced if you’re clinging to your capsized boat, lost miles out at sea. It’s there–that beauty–but you won’t even notice it because now you’re struggling just to keep your head above water.
So, yes, I’m grateful. My daughter helped me to become a lighthouse. And the StoicMom Project started attracting other moms. Moms who are already lighthouses or are discovering they’d like to take on this inside job and become that steady beacon. We’re learning from each other and we’re populating the coastline of this vast, unpredictable sea with lighthouses.
I changed the name (and my about page) and once I did, I recognized that it’s now an unmistakable invitation. To build a lighthouse. To try a little Stoicism. To change your experience and get on solid ground. To recognize the gift in this—and consider allowing your heart to be broken open.