Adulting - #44 Why It's Ok To Feel Blue with Scarlett Curtis

Episode Date: October 13, 2019

Hi Podulters, I spoke to the wonderful Scarlett Curtis- activist, author, journalist and all round fantastic feminist. We discussed her first book 'Feminists don't wear pink and other lies', as well as her new title 'Why it's not ok to feel blue and other lies'. We touched on why it's so important to try and include men in our activism as well as why we should talk about our mental health. I hope you enjoy, as always please do rate, review and subscribe!xxxx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem?

Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hey, poddlers. I hope you're well. I'm going to try and be less awkward in these introduction bits, but I don't know what it is. I just sound really awkward. It might be something to do with the fact that I have to record them under my duvet covers. It does get quite warm and fusty under here. And that's because my producer, Hi Spike, says that that's how you get the best sound. So it could be that. But anyway, this week I speak to the lovely Scarlett Curtis, who is a journalist, author, activist, and curator of Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies. And her latest title is Why It's Not Okay to Feel Blue

and Other Lies. And so this episode is why it's okay to feel blue. And we discuss kind of both elements of those books. Feminism, why it's important that we try to include men in our feminism, how to be intersectional, and also touching on mental health and why it is okay to talk about it, and why you should reach out and get help if you need some. I really hope you enjoy the episode and do check out Scarlett and her work. She is a force to be reckoned with. Bye! Hi guys and welcome to Adulting. Today I'm joined by Scarlett Curtis. Hi.

How are you doing i'm good yeah this is so nice we're sitting on the floor and i feel very cozy and fun yes very relaxed yeah very relaxed oh you just told me that i didn't um what's the word what's it called lisp lisp and i just list really went relaxed i have a lisp anyway so when i have my invisalign and it's like major lisping i've never noticed you list a tiny lisp i noticed when I have my Invisalign in it's like major lisping. I've never noticed you lisp. A tiny lisp. I noticed it when I listened to podcasts. I never listen to myself on podcasts. No I do not like listening to myself back. Yeah it's horrible. Yeah it's quite stressful. Okay amazing. Do you want to tell people who you are and what you do? So my name is Scarlett Curtis. I

say I'm a writer and an activist. I do a lot of journalism I have also a podcast um and I also run a feminist activist collective called the pink protest with three other amazing women and we do like feminist campaigning and events and we also produce a lot of podcasts and then I have done I did brought out a book called families don't wear pink and other lies and I'm just about to bring out another one called it's not okay to feel blue and other lies amazing it's a very complicated title no one can get it right I keep just calling it the blue book yeah but it's it's such a good I was actually gonna say this to you it's so clever the color idea because it's really clever to branch out on that yes I hope so um yeah and then you can have a nice

little collection um I want to ask you how long has the pink protest been around now so I think we I started it and then the others kind of came on board about two and a half years ago cool yeah so we we do we do kind of a lot of things I mean it's run by four girls all of whom have other jobs so it's a bit hectic but we have done two major campaigns where we changed the law which was very cool and then we've done a few other really fun campaigns we did a campaign on wanking which was great um encouraging people to wank more girls to to rank more um and then yeah we do pretty much like monthly events and we now produce four podcasts which is very fun it is really cool that you branch out so far because I guess the initial idea before the pink protest was against the pink pound

and the charge against women was that whether so no we started it before that we started it really with this idea that it would be a kind of umbrella activist collective, mostly because I think I also felt like I cared about so many issues and every group that I joined or everything that I did was kind of very focused on just one thing. So we started it as an umbrella collective.

We started by making this video series, kind of trying to redefine what an activist is and what an activist means. And then that was when we met Amica George and she had just started talking about period poverty and we kind of worked with her to create the free periods campaign and then organized this huge protest where and we ended up getting like 3 000 girls in parliament square which was very fun and then we yeah we changed I think two laws Parliament Square, which was very fun. And then we, yeah, we changed, I think, two laws around period poverty, which was very exciting. But the idea is very much to be able to have the freedom to work with anyone

and kind of focus on anything, which is really fun. It's interesting, actually, because I wonder how much subliminally that's paid into my idea of feminism, because I've definitely followed you since you started the pink protest and like knowing what you've been up to and my idea of feminism over the last five years has definitely evolved from being solely very um a small scale women's issue idea in my mind to expanding to everything from race class gender and kind of I kind of see almost anything as feminism now. Totally. And I often think whenever I get backlash from people or people being confused about feminism,

it's actually because they don't understand it. And they maybe think it's about like posh white women being more empowered. And I'm like, actually, it's really not about that. And it's about very concrete ways in which women and men aren't equal and also I think what I've realised more and more recently is how much the patriarchy affects men as well and how actually that's a huge part of our fight is kind of how to dismantle toxic masculinity and that whole side

of things so yeah it's very broad I think that maybe initially like certain conversations around feminism were exclusive to posh white women in a time when they were the only ones who had access to be enjoying the conversations and still we as posh white women have the privilege of talking about them but I think what you do so brilliantly is making sure that you're not centering yourself in that conversation and that you do are acting as a platform and a sounding board for other voices and other marginalized groups and it's really interesting you say about bringing men in because this is exactly what it's kind of exactly what I've been thinking about in the minute more than anything is that whenever I do like feminist events or talks and things there's no guys there

and as much as I am the first person to be like you can't say not all men I'm also the first person to realize like if there's no men listening to what we're talking about we're just going to ostracize and make an even bigger chasm between the conversations that we're having and that's not helpful but it's really really hard to engage men when a lot of the time we're talking about I guess the idea that is the white cis man not necessarily like you personally as a white cis man yeah completely I've had this really interesting thing the other day with a friend of mine's boyfriend where we were talking and I was kind of saying that feminism isn't at all against men. It's against the patriarchy. The patriarchy is this system of power that the world has been run on forever.

And he, you know, and I have this phrase which I say, which is that women cannot pull the patriarchy just as much as men and men are victims of patriarchy just as much as women and he just looked at me and was like when you say patriarchy I hear men like you can explain it as much as you want you can you know get all theoretical and academic which I tend to do but I hear men when you say patriarchy and I actually think that's a real issue and I've been been trying recently to say, like, systems of power instead of that, because it's true, you know, and it's not against men. It's against this very hierarchical system upon which the world has been created. And, yeah, it's very interesting. It is really hard to turn the line and talk about things which we all fit into a category so even when before someone said a white woman there would probably would have been a time when i would have blanched and been

like no it's not me but it's not about it's kind of about the theory of what that label means rather than like what individuals fit under that bracket because it much in the same way as you're saying like misogyny people think men but women can carry just as much misogyny yeah completely i i actually think i sometimes go too much the other way where I'm like oh white women yeah oh wait I actually do have to address that yeah I'm allowed to say that um yeah it's very interesting though and I'm very obsessed with like looking at those systems of power and analyzing how they work and kind of recognizing them within my everyday life and we do

have some men that come to our events we do some events which are BYOB so you get to bring your own boy for free oh I love that and we're getting a few more but it is definitely hard and and I think it's hard the thing that I try and do is like whenever a man or a woman expresses even a tiny bit of interest to be as accommodating as possible and like welcoming because I think often people are scared that they're going to mess up and get backlash and actually we're fighting a bigger enemy you know we're fighting men who literally obsessively don't think women should have rights and try and take them away so I think I'm quite a passive feminist in some ways and I try and like accept anyone who's trying even a tiny bit I think that's really

forward thinking because I don't think it's passive I think it's a really great thing which the left needs to learn from I can't remember the saying but it's something about how the left so busy fighting with each other that we can't totally the right yeah close ranks and the left just eats each other completely and I also the thing I've been thinking recently is we need everything you know we need I know a lot of feminist activists who are further down the line than me you know who really are working to pick apart gender pick apart like non-binary pick apart all these things pick apart capitalism because like the whole of feminism is kind of fueled by capitalism and we need them and I hope we also need people like me who are like anyone can be a feminist

and you just have to believe men and women are equal and here's a very beginner's guide you know that was really what I was trying to do with Feminist Don't Wear Pink I um I did my degree in like the history of social movements kind of really focusing on women's movements and I was living in New York and I was part of a lot of like really hardcore feminist activist groups where there were amazing women there and they were all like zero waste zero you know they were just amazing and they totally lived lived it completely but everything I read and everything I went to I did feel a bit excluded and I was like if I'm feeling this way and I'm

getting my degree in it and totally immersed in it like how is anyone ever going to come into this from nothing so I really wanted to make a book that was like all the questions you were too scared to ask or maybe you know I think often a lot of people the first feminist book they'll buy is Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist which is an incredible book but it's a really academic book of essays and it's really complicated and I wanted to make something that was like teenage girls could get it and hopefully realise they were feminist from a young age. It's such an incredible and important thing to do because as you say to make things more inclusive not only is it academic and that that's exclusionary and that you might not understand it but how is someone who's not been educated to the level

to read that going to be able to and it will then stay in that pot of white posh feminists yeah interestingly I find that a lot of what goes on with feminism is it can go it's kind of like a boomerang where on the one hand being a vegan zero-waste feminist is amazing but also those groups can also then leave other people as you say feeling ostracized and then not include more people so I think we need representation of every kind of person into it and as you say like you wouldn't expect a four-year-old to go and do their a-levels yeah you can't it's the same thing it is a process of understanding and you've got to have someone catering to every need otherwise it will remain an exclusive cult idea and i think a lot there's this really funny thing which is i think very inherent to women where we there's this amazing like study that came out which was basically

saying with investing men just make money invest it like trust that they'll know how to do that and women all feel like they need to take a course before they invest because they're like I don't know how this works I don't know what these specific terms mean I think it's the same with feminism where and this actually stopped a bit but a few years ago everyone I was talking to about feminism would be like really into this really like we were saying I just feel I don't know enough yet to be a feminist and I haven't read enough and I haven't done enough and my thing is always like you do not need to have read anything like you wouldn't think you need to read anything to think that poverty is bad like this is a sort of universal issue and you can just start off by saying you're a feminist and then the other stuff can come later or not

even come at all I've had um pushback from men as well when I've spoken about feminist issues and they'll go where's your proof and stuff and it's just another way of shaming you or kind of making you feel like you can't speak up it's just another way of closing the door and going you're not qualified enough to talk about your own issues which I could tell you a million I might not have like um feminist rhetoric from the 1970s to back up my argument but I could tell you that yesterday this happened to me and it was like a real thing yeah and it's funny that we I think it's another way of keeping women quiet to be honest so this is it's true but this is also one of my like very easy tips which is that I have a note on my notes app on my phone of feminist

stats and I have them there at all times and it means if I get anyone saying that I can just whip out these stats and be like well actually um and that was also like two of the biggest campaigns we've done one was on period poverty another was on FGM which is female genital mutilation and the reason I really wanted to focus on both these issues is they're really concrete issues that affect a specific intersection of women. You know, don't affect me, don't affect you. But they're real things that are happening and they're only happening to women. And that is quite a good way to get men involved as well because they can see it and they can

understand it, you know, and they can see the stats. But yeah, it is, that's definitely a way. And whenever I get, the reason I have the stats on my phone is because whenever I get confronted like that I just get so emotional and I'm like well I just I've spent my whole life feeling less than and I don't think I would have if I was mad and you're like I don't want to be whipping out my trauma yeah just to like prove in a pub that feminism is real you know and also I think because we all live as women and we get very used to the way that we are treated that we kind of don't realize up until the point when you start to understand feminism

that actually all of that is unfair yeah so then when you try to talk about it and a man goes to you oh no this isn't your lived experience I actually I know you just get angry because it's really really hard to then be like okay I'm going to sit down with you I actually did it the other weekend with some guys I would school them was trying to like explain privilege and it was just so exhausting it's so exhausting and you're like I came to this party I went to a party the other day and I I find I never go out and I was like I'm gonna do it I'm gonna go out and I got dressed up and I was really excited I spent two hours at the party having conversations with men trying to prove that feminism yeah needed and was real and I literally after that at the party having conversations with men trying to prove that

feminism yeah needed and was real and I literally after that I was like I'm just gonna go home like this hasn't been fun and I have started recently to be like I'm not gonna fight this fight right now like you don't need to do it all the time no you're right and it's interesting because what happens to me this probably happens to you is you'll say one comment which you think is like a really normal thing to say so just like obviously you're gonna think that because you're a white cis man and then that will just go they'll be like are you calling me racist and you're like no no it's just that and then that's it I know then you're in and then you're in but what also I want to talk about I guess one of the reasons why I think you said before that you don't go out that

much is because of your you suffer with your mental health yes which is the next book that's come out which I also think is important because it's still tied into feminism like one of the barriers that we don't see for everyone and part of the intersectionality of feminism is looking at how do we disrupt the barriers that hold people back from being able to live in a world full of yeah hierarchies etc completely and I think that was really something I realized. So when we were touring with Feminist Don't Wear Pink, every single event would end up being about mental health and it wasn't about, you know, straight up anxiety or depression.

It was about these complicated blurred lines where women had been through so much that they had just started, it had, you know, cracked their self-esteem, it had cracked their feelings of self-worth and they were just in such a low place and I think actually that's often what happens with oppression is it's not that you recognize you're being oppressed it's that you think you deserve the treatment that you're getting and so then you perpetuate it yourself because you're like oh no I'm not good enough for this job I'm I should actually probably resign like I can't keep up and you actually can you're just being oh no, I'm not good enough for this job. I should actually probably resign. Like I can't keep up.

And you actually can, you're just being made to feel that way. And something I really wanted to do with this book that I felt was a bit missing from the mental health conversation was really look at the intersections of mental health. And, you know, there are two things here. There's one, which is like,

mental health can affect everyone. You know, we talk about male privilege a lot, but men are three times more likely to take their own life than women that's actually an area they really lose out on so I really want to say like everyone's story is valid everyone is going through something you don't know like you can be the luckiest seemingly the luckiest happiest person in the world and you can still be really suffering but also let's look at how gender race class disability intersect with mental health and mean that this isn't an equal sphere and this isn't an equal standing you know there's so many people in the book that are from like either african families or first generation immigrant families and they're talking about how their parents don't even

recognize mental health at all and that's an experience that as much as I've been through, I'll never know what that feels like to be told by people close to your life that you should just pray it away or that you should push on through or that you shouldn't talk about it. And there's also a whole area on access to treatment. There's three amazing men from Syria in the book and they've had such a hard time finding an Arabic therapist because you know therapy is really scarce in the NHS let alone like a specific Arabic therapist who understands your trauma and it's just I really wanted to look

at that and I think that was something I hadn't really seen in the mental health space. I think you also present a really good example of something which I've been told and also felt victim to thinking which is that you like I we have pretty similar privileges but you suffered really badly with your physical health and then that in like then implicated your mental health and I think it's really important to outline and I actually am like talking about this something that I'm going to post later on but privilege is separate from what you experience in your personal life your privilege is kind of like where you fit into these hierarchical systems and then your personal life is completely separate and I think for you to speak so openly and honestly about what you went through shows us that in a really good light

because it is actually quite an unusual I don't know there's not that many people that speak about it in the way that you do up until now it's definitely coming out more yeah no completely in it I don't know why I feel really comfortable with it like I think when I was in America I had a lot I think I went there sort of thinking like you know because I was 19 when I moved and I'd had five years of just hell and I went there sort of being like I've just been through the worst thing ever and I think when I was there and I was working with these activists I really realised that yes what I went through was so bad and I wouldn't wish on anyone else and I don't believe pain is comparable I don't think you can say someone like the worst thing anyone ever said to me when I was

bad was like oh well imagine if you were like you know didn't have enough food to eat like or imagine if you didn't have a nice bed sleep on and I was like I can't yeah now I am and it's making me feel worse because I'm just sad about those people too and like I think everyone's pain is valid but also I know that I went through what I went through in a country that has a great healthcare system with parents that were tried to be accommodating with money that I could afford treatment and therapy and you know it's the two don't cancel each other out and I think we need to talk about both definitely I think we need to talk about them in in the exact way of like what is them

is someone suffering from a chronic mental illness have they suffered with their mental health and then what how does that fit in with what's their family life like as you said like what's their religion what's their background and often it comes down to inequality so the worse you suffer by your privileges the worse you will suffer with your mental and physical health which is the most unjust thing in the world because if you're already in a place of bad privilege it's such a shame that it's often like it goes around in circles so I always think about this but say like when it comes to privilege of class and things like say someone who had to drop out of school during their GCSEs to look after their parent

who's disabled then wants to go and get a job later on in life but isn't able to because they've got no work like it's it's just yeah everything everything adds it adds up and it gets worse which is what's really really hard and really difficult and then we get all the the worst thing is the conversations that people have really in a really chilled way about how oh these people from this socioeconomic class are xyz or there's more mental illness in these places and it's like no you're completely reading the statistics you're not looking at the bigger picture of it yeah I mean I always think those statistics are so dodgy anyway because we know how many how few people admit to having these problems so I'm like whenever I see one of those stats I'm like well you know you're you're looking

at the whenever anyone says anxiety is getting worse I'm like it probably isn't it's just no one 100 years was talking about this I think another thing that's really interesting within that it just kind of ties to what you were saying and this is like irrespective of in section but something I definitely noticed when I when my mental health was really bad is that you know it starts off with it just being in your head and I don't know what it is something wrong with your brain chemistry trauma whatever happens but then as it goes on and on your life becomes something that would make anyone depressed you know this is what my dad used to talk about this to me a lot because by the time I was 19 I was still as depressed as I was when I

was 15 but I didn't have GCCs I didn't have A-levels I didn't have any friends anymore I didn't feel like I had a purpose like if anyone was flung into my situation then even if they had the best mental health in the world they would have been depressed so it's very hard to pull your life try and pull your life back while you're trying to pull your mental health back because yeah I don't know if that quite makes sense but it it's just a real snowball effect it makes complete sense the first time that I really knew my dad's family has suffered with depression I didn't know that when I went to university for the first time I met people who are my age who spoke about having depression I didn't know whether or not people had it I don't

know but no one certainly had it I don't know but no one certainly had spoken about it or definitely not spoken about medication me and now actually once I started talking about it everyone yeah my life came up to me and I was like well you could have told me this when I was 17 yeah exactly I was the only crazy person in the world and and when I first discovered it I then it also came with the knowledge that someone who's depressed often is the person that obviously needs your help but will push you away the most and this is a really interesting thing to learn because I would be like well I can just help and actually as you say I think you become really self-destructive and I think one of the things that happens with when you have low self-worth

or bad mental health is that you feel so shit that you don't feel like you're worth love or help and then you push everyone away and on both sides of the coin whether you're the friend or the person suffering at the time it completely changes yeah your relationships and I think that was really interesting for me to learn because we all even like being on the other side of it as a friend there needs to be more information out there like someone who's with depression or suffering might well act like they don't like you or act in ways that can be perceived as mean because I didn't know that and it does happen I mean I remember feeling at times and I still feel this like I had become this person I hated like I felt so spiteful I felt so angry anything anyone said to me and I'm naturally very like cheerful person I think and anything anyone said to me I would just make me

furious and even like I was horrible to my brothers I was horrible to my mum like everyone in my life I just pushed away and I used to feel I remember feeling so spiky and I was like I just feel like I have these spikes and it means that anyone who comes near me gets hurt and I know you're not actually talking about adulting as much anymore but for me a big part of my recovery was pushing myself to this point where even though I still felt awful I was doing a few normal things like normal in air quotes but I was doing a few things that were sort of healthy and made me a part of society and made me a person and I could never have gotten better without those things because my life was just this downward

slope of like more and more isolation more and more misery more and more sort of you know falling into this hole and it it was actually a lot of those kind of little normal things that ended up taking me out of it. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling winning in an exciting live dealer studio exclusively on FanDuel Casino where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem?

Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. It's interesting you say about feelings, Vicky. I felt the exact same. I remember I've never had depression or anything to my knowledge, but I've definitely been through like low periods. I remember my last year of uni, I felt really low and I was the same, like I was, felt so upset by everything, but also like didn't want to be nice to everyone, but then I'd say something like, why the fuck should I do that? And then you like, it was

so self-destructive. And then when I left, I think I needed a change and it was like that coming to the end of uni, I don't know. And then as you said I think I needed a change and it was like that coming to the end of uni I don't know and then as you said that I just started to be like oh actually these things I thought I hated like making my bed in the morning or being organized actually it's weird how much um having a routine and being organized genuinely is one of the best things you can do for yourself it's the best thing like for me genuinely if I'm feeling bad yeah making my bed cleaning my flat doing my laundry going to get my nails done like getting my head just doing things that make me feel human again uh and they seem so silly and I think often they seem quite like vain but they for me that's what helps like it really helps tiny things like that but it's just

making me think even as we're talking about this we've spoken about how like socioeconomic status might impact mental health if you're someone who is has very low income or no income and you're suffering with the mental health and you don't have the um tools to clean or intimate like it just no wonder it gets exacerbated it's just those really simple things that we don't think about so many things are privileged i feel like i overused the word privilege so much I kind of wish I had another word but everything that we're able to do is still like a massive yeah completely and I think that's definitely one of the issues I feel very conflicted about like the self-care industry um I think it's really self-care is amazing but I also think we need to be focusing more on

self-care that isn't paying for things yeah there's a lot of the self-care I think we get recommended you have to spend money on money yeah and it's important within this conversation just to talk about things that don't actually cost money I also think that consumerism in general could be really damaging for mental health because I think I've definitely before looked for happiness in um consumption of things whether that's diet products or trying to lose weight or buying new clothes or constantly searching for external means of uh making myself feel like I'm better yeah and like sometimes oh I mean I I've actually never talked to this before but I had a total shopping addiction and like really yeah and it was totally that like I remember talking to my therapist about it and it was like I just I thought that like

buying things would make me feel better and it would be tiny things like if I passed if I was feeling a bit anxious and I passed a newsagent I'd go in and buy like a stick of gum or you know a drink or like a tiny little thing but it was like and then I remember at night I would just be on like online shopping sites and even if I didn't buy anything it was like filling my basket yeah that feeling of yeah just I can buy my way out of this I can I'll just there's something I'll get the right coat and then I'll feel like a human again or I'll get the right lamp and I'll feel happy in my home it was just this you're we're told again and again by this like fucking capitalist society that we can spend money to make our lives better and it just isn't true it's so interesting

now that I'm trying like to not buy news I'm trying to be a bit more sustainable how often I'll catch myself thinking oh if I just had like this top and I'll like like trying to interrogate myself what is it about this top that's gonna like none of your friends gonna like you more yeah you're not gonna be better at your job you're just gonna lose that time yeah exactly I've done a thing this year where I haven't bought any clothes all year so good and it it like obviously a huge part of it was the sustainability thing but also I think for me I couldn't buy less like I felt like I couldn't I was like I need to actually try stopping and then see what happens and it does it makes you question those thoughts and I really had to pick apart the thoughts I have

of like if I just had the right dress I'll be able to do this thing and what I hate is I've spoken about this before but I often think that these kind of conversations get cut down and people go oh it's just two girls again talking about shopping and but they're so representative like bigger wider problems and it's whatever you struggle with I truly as much you know we can talk about and the whole book and you'll see when it comes out it's all about the intersectionality of these things but also like everyone struggles with different things and I I try and I think it's it's worth talking about and also with fast fashion at the moment that kind of shopping really hasn't become like a class indicator I think it's very universal and sometimes especially in lower income communities they can be fed this messaging of buy things to get yourself out of this even more than

yeah anyone else you know but even not about class i think just about what we forget is that every single time that we struggle we're trying to cope in a society like all of these things don't happen by accident everything is kind of created and you're being manipulated all the time by whether it's capitalism or the structure or anything like that and i think what sometimes people try to do especially people that hold a lot of privilege is undermine conversations when the topics around them don't sound important yes it's all super important otherwise why are these companies worth billions of pounds i see that a lot with this is very separate but with anything around like the makeup industry or the cosmetic industry where it's just considered so frivolous. And yeah, it's, as you say, a billion, billion dollar industry.

Well, I find that really interesting, especially with cosmetic procedures, because I kind of flip-flop all the time about what I think about it. Because sometimes I'm like, I don't like that everyone's getting it done. Because then it makes, sometimes I'm like, maybe I should get my, I get I get emails do you want this done and for five minutes I'll be sat there thinking well I suppose I could just get my lips and then I was like then I'd have to tell people then am I advertising it or yeah me and my friend have this joke of like should we get lip fillers it's not a joke maybe we should yeah but the interesting thing is we're being taught that as women like our greatest capital is our looks and then like one half of feminism is kind of saying embrace your sexual which I completely agree with but the other half says you know you're worth so much more the way

you look is the least interesting thing about you and I agree with both of those things yeah I want to be really sexually attractive but I don't want to be told that I'm sexually attractive and like I'm constantly caught in this conundrum and then cosmetic surgery I think so interesting because obviously we know the rates of it it's women it's much higher yeah I think about it you are literally getting butchered yeah to look better which is kind of sick but maybe that's just the evolution of thing is I think you're like me I interrogate literally anything that comes into my brain and that could be quite tiring yeah it could be so tiring and I think it's the whole mental illness in itself but no I do agree and I also think with all of this it's just your motive behind it you know I definitely have been through phases where I felt like

you know these things would cure me and I think that's often what you see with comedic surgery it's like yeah people who probably are struggling with a form of depression or anxiety thinking that and being told that if they get this thing done it will help but I also think there's a side of it where like I have found that some of that stuff like you know when I was at my one of my worst points I used to paint my nails like twice a day and that used to really help me because it was a moment of self-care and it was a moment of like I spent so long hating everything about my body and in such a deep way because I think I've been through so much illness and pain I was like this body is just a mess and it was for me at least and I never want to like preach anything but for me those things often do help you know and it's creativity yeah

and that's such a cliche now but there's a reason cliches are cliches for a reason um I think yeah often those things can really help I think as well I kind of said this the other day but Jessica Foster

who I absolutely love is an amazing comedian always talks about how she's so great she always says that with food when you're addicted to it the reason it's so hard

to repair your relationship with food is you can't just stop eating whereas with like alcohol, drugs, whatever but this is the same for so many things in society

it works the same with clothes we can't go out the house and not have a face like those things are always operating so to say that you either opt in or opt out is really redundant and it's kind of why I hate it when people say to me always the argument would be like but you wear provocative stuff how are you feminist I'm like because I can't opt in and out of capitalism or I can't opt in and out of this patriarchy we have to still no one's ever going to be a perfect feminist because what we think about feminism is completely almost in a utopia which is separate from the world that we live in completely so it's an it's an ideal version but to even try and tear someone down for their attempts is stupid in and of itself

because it's just ignorant to the fact that we're all um victims to the powers that be like none of us really have power no we don't and I think I've really sort of tried to learn in both feminism and my health to just embrace the contradictions and I think I'm so I've I'm really proud of where I am like I'm I've you know never even thought I'd be able to like live a life that was even remotely normal and I think we can try and be like this perfect this and that and understand everything but also in the end of the day you just have to get through like the hours and get through to the end of the day and I think we just all have to be a bit more forgiving of each other I didn't know if I was gonna ask you because I know you talk about it a lot so I didn't want you to feel like you

were talking about it again but if people don't know could you want to do because I want to talk a bit more about the book but about what you went through when you were younger because you just said like you've come out the other side but I guess for people who don't have the context yeah I mean I also really haven't come out the other side it I've had like the most insane anxiety recently but I um when I was 14 I was like a very normal girl um although actually I always say that but looking back I think I was more anxious than I admit you know like I think I always had bits of anxiety I could never do sleepovers that was always my thing I still don't think I've ever been on sleepover um but yeah and then when I was 14 I got really

sick I had a chronic pain condition as a result of an operation and um I spent like three years living in chronic pain I had to drop out of school I couldn't really walk I was in a wheelchair all of that and during that time I used to be very insistent on like my brain's fine my body's just you know going through this thing and then when I was 17 I had an operation which thankfully took me out of pain but I had a complete breakdown and was diagnosed with anxiety depression and PTSD and then spent another kind of two years really in the middle of it like couldn't leave the house without having a panic attack became very very very isolated uh and then since then I would say like I definitely used to think I used to have this thing of like being better in my head and I was like I'll be better one day and I'll be able to do everything and um I'm never going to be there like this is always going to be something

I struggle with every single day and it's always going to be the most important sort of factor defining factor in my life but I am a lot better these days than I used to be and um yeah just years of you know trying to figure this stuff out the thing is i know what you mean about you think it's going to be better but it's the same it's a really hard pill to follow but once you do it kind of i think it does work charlie cox said an amazing thing about how even if you don't suffer from mental illness we all have mental health and that's always going to deviate and it's a bit like how when you realize that happiness you're never just going to be happy forever but you know how you have like fleeting moments of happiness you just got to take those that might be it that day you might only have one really happy period

for an hour and then you feel sad again or whatever and I think that everything is transient and nothing is permanent and we put such a um binary outlook on mental health and we think you're mentally ill you're not you're happy you're sad you and it's everything is so much more complicated than that I saw a really funny thing on Twitter, actually, where a woman was, like, talking to her eight-year-old child, and she said, how was school today? And they said, oh, yeah, it was fine, but they keep putting everything in boxes,

and it doesn't make sense. And she was like, what do you mean? And they said, oh, well, why is maths not music, and music not maths? They keep labelling everything, and the world's much smushier than that. And I was like, that is the most literal, that's the most perfect thing I've ever read so we try to like make things organized into sections and go this is what this looks like and actually at any one given moment in time you could

be feeling ecstatically joyful about your relationship and fear of your career or whatever nothing's nothing's permanent but nothing but on both sides you know completely and I definitely was of that mindset where like my only experience with mental illness when I was or mental health when I was 17 was like people who were very severely severely ill and I thought like okay I'm one of these people now and I couldn't imagine myself living with the feelings I was going to have and like being in the regular world I was like that's never going to happen like and it was only really exactly that when I realized that like all of this is a spectrum and someone someone I say that thing about we all have a mental health the other day and someone really

questioned me on it and I was like it's not an argument like it's just a fact like we all have a physical health we all have a mental health your mental health can be in top shape or it cannot be and yeah I think for me another really thing that's really helped has been not expecting to be happy like it's exactly what you said happiness is amazing when it happens but it's not a right or a given and I my sort of endless goal is just to feel okay which is why the book's called okay but you know just to feel balanced and stable and not really unhappy and if that comes with happiness that's amazing but it's also I think it's sometimes unhelpful to have that thing which I think really sort of exploded in the 60s of like we all have the right to be happy and we all have the right to be you know euphoric all time and I mean it's that other thing as well of like if you're feeling happy all the time you

wouldn't even know what happiness is anymore because it will become the same so you have to have the lows have the highs and it's I guess it's just never going to be the same for everyone this is quite a depressing thing but my sister's fiance always says this apparently everyone has like a set level of happiness yeah and then you can only deviate so far from it but you'll always come to whatever your happiness is we heard that. Have you heard that? Is that true? I think so. I don't know. I think along that line, I find holidays quite hard.

And I think that for me, that's because it feels like this, I'm always searching for like stability and things that will make my everyday life a bit easier. And holidays just feel like this like week where you get to be ecstatically happy and then you have to go back to like normality and yeah I've always struggled with that because I'm like what if I'm not happy this week and then also what if I'm too happy and then I go back and feel sad so I think I'd always rather spend any holiday money like trying to feel a bit more normal in

my everyday life but I think that's good to know that my sister and I reason talking about how like at Christmas sometimes we both revert back to being kids and can be quite like moody because there's like stuff that happened when we were little that we think of like being Christmas time instead of like this really happy time sometimes it can make us not be in a good mood and then you feel so much guilt because you're like this is Christmas and I'm supposed to be filled with joy and frankly i feel like a five-year-old i'm gonna have an absolute i had an actual tantrum last christmas just because i think i was in this mindset of like you get memories come back and i think the normalcy of being able to say that is what's really important

and also the mental health is really important that we all recognize it because ivan said yesterday when it's cloudy outside my mood is 20 times what i find it really hard to make myself to do anything and like and we all feel that but for some reason we're like oh it's it's true we're all impacted yeah i had someone else who was a bit older read the book the other day because she was it was like a journalist and she sort of said like i didn't think i was gonna like it and i thought it's gonna be really whiny and actually when she read it like loads of things in it that maybe she'd never thought of as like mental illness or in the mental health sphere she was like oh yeah I relate to that so much and I think all those things are mental health and we just don't talk about it in that way. Yeah I

completely agree when it comes to because I love the fact that when with both your books you it's a collaborative effort and that you've thought of a subject and you're quite expert on it already but instead of just kind of writing your own piece you've got all these different voices from different places was that always something that you thought you were going to do or did that come to you as you is that something you found impactful yeah I it definitely was I mean I started writing when I was very young I started a blog when I was 15 and then doing a lot of journalism from the age of kind of 16 and so I started having these kind of conversations about books much earlier than I ever thought I would and you know I I just don't think a book on feminism by a 21 year old posh white girl

is something I would want to read I don't think it's something anyone else would want to read and I it's something I'm just not interested in and I would never want to make something that I wasn't interested in same with mental health and what really appealed to me was this idea of making something that expressed all the different areas of a topic and everyone else's sort of views on it and again like we were saying all different intersections all the different ways that this topic can manifest and I just that was what I always wanted to do and I especially on these two topics it's just never something I would have done on my own did you know after uh Feminist Don't Buy Pink did you know there would always be another one or did that just come along and you were like this is

this is right as well I think it really came from the the sort of conversation around Feminist at My Pink and the events and within all the feminist activism I've done, mental health was such a through line and such a recurring topic. And also just, and even with this book, it's so interesting. There are so many men in it. And obviously there weren't any men in Feminist at My Pink. And I kind of thought I understood toxic masculinity and I thought I understood that whole area I've got three brothers and I think within any feminist

conversation it's something we all like mention a bit at the end of a panel or whatever but reading these pieces I was like I genuinely had no idea it was this bad and I had no idea that it affected men this much in this way and so that was something else I really wanted to do after going to somewhere pink I sort of find a way to get men involved I do that as well on this podcast I very rarely can even think of men that I've had on which is so interesting I have had men I've had Scotty who I think I love and yeah um who else I had oh i've had henry fraser um so he was paralyzed from the neck down when he dived into the sea and i did amazing paintings with his mouth so the men i've had on um tend to have some other intersection i think i've oh no i've had two white cisgendered men

one of them on to talk about toxic toxic masculinity and another one who's a doctor was talking about like diet culture and stuff but uh I do very much try to make sure that every guest has some kind of intersection and ironically white cis men fare very badly in that yeah I mean they do fine in lots of other areas yeah exactly I do think it was really an amazing process just reading all these pieces and being like oh wow I did not quite understand the severity of this. And I think that's where it could really tie in together. And finally, as we said right at the beginning, bring men into this feminist conversation, because I agree much in the same way that you were saying

that people might not recognise when something's a mental health issue. I think there's a lot of time when men don't realise that actually what they're suffering from is the very same thing that we feel like we're oppressed by. Yes, exactly, exactly. I think that's so right. And we need to make way more effort to link those two things together. Definitely.

Okay, so if people want to comment, when's the book out actually? The book is out on October 3rd. So soon. Very soon. You can get it on Amazon or in all good bookshops. And yeah, we'll be doing lots of like fun events and stuff so probably best to follow me on instagram amazing and you're at scar scott curtis and will you be doing a um podcast for the book we're not going to do one yet i think we might do one maybe

at a later date but yeah all of feminist nowhere pink is still up there. I think there's so many amazing podcasts within this space. And a lot of actually people in the book have their own mental podcast. So I wanted to give it a break for a minute. Yeah. There'll be stuff coming up. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.

It's been amazing. Thank you so much for listening, guys. And I will see you soon. Bye. Bye. much for listening guys and i will see you soon bye fanduel casinos exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do.

Enjoy the number one feeling winning in an exciting live dealer studio exclusively on FanDuel Casino where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly.