Goes Without Saying - soft, fragile, & Not Coping: ceo of taking things personal

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

podmothers sephy & wing enter the chat: spiralling on the fear of rejection, the normalisation of influencer culture, vulnerability and shame, projection, embarassment, cringe, tiktok feminism, and taking things personally. ✷shop ✷ www.sephyandwing.co.ukhear more ✷ www.instagram.com/sephyandwingwatch more ✷ www.tiktok.com/@sephyandwing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Nature. I've got a gay rooster named Francois. Here's a show that we recommend. And this is a field guide to gay animals. A podcast about queerness in the natural world.

The animal kingdom is queer and we are a part. Find a field guide to gay animals on Spotify, Apple. Or wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com It goes without saying you're listening to Goes Without Saying with Sefi and Wing. I'm Sefi. And I'm Wing. And this is an episode of you're feeling extra sensitive and fragile today.

We're talking about rejection and actually normalizing it is absolutely okay. As you will hear hearing this episode. I really feel good after recording that. What about you? Good, me too. I feel great. I think it's a nice sort of soft one if you're feeling extra sort of like a gust of wind could kind of knock you over, which I think we've all felt in our lives.

So enjoy. I'm feeling very excited about the news that you just shared at the end of the episode oh actually you kind of shared it yeah i'm excited too hello hello god different vibe from us yeah go on do you want to explain what's going on okay so normally unless we're in the studio and you find us in real life, we come to each other from the void of our own, normally our own beds, to be honest, and we'll FaceTime and then we record our audio separately and then put the audio together and deliver it to you as an episode, whether you choose to listen to it or not.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We've just hit four million as well. Thank you so much. Wowza. Which Wing just hit four million thank you so much which wings just informed me of which god the good news so congrats all around and we're celebrating by not being able to use seffy's seffy doesn't have wi-fi right now because she's in amsterdam so actually i'm gonna blame it on my sister who is eavesdropping on this whole conversation hey lizzie she's in the in the kitchen and i know she's listening right now she doesn't have wi-fi so we can't blame that on me

which is fair she's decided not to have wi-fi in her own house um so i'm having to use my 4g which is obviously limited because i'm abroad um and apparently yeah because i'm abroad and it will cost us more to use the video so we're sacrificing the facetime video so i can't see you and we've never ever done this it feels like a phone call which is almost making it more intimate but then i also think we usually communicate quite a lot through our faces whilst we're recording we like give each other little eye contact signals like we just i see you yawning at me when i'm speaking no we just communicate i can just pick up on your language if you take a sip of water i know you're preparing to speak like it's just you know these things yeah so this feels very

this is new for us look i'm a bit blind right now spicy trying new things yeah exactly we're just shaking it up you maybe you won't be able to tell but i can definitely tell when i listen to like the studio episodes versus like the home episodes you i think you can tell the energy shifts we speak over each other more in person i think we have a better time in person i think we're funny as well yeah like i think you're in a on facetime there's like a buffering element to it yeah so you kind of pause more and you make more mistakes whereas in person it's just all over the place it's just like an actual natural conversation yeah 100 okay do you want to talk to us about what we're going to be talking about today we're talking about rejection we are yeah

as always it's a relevant subject to us this is particularly relevant because this episode the crux of this episode is based on something that happened to us just yesterday an email an email which is actually like i don't even a nasty day a nasty email i don't know if we're ever going to be able to get it to land in the way that it did like reading it for the first time i was confused reading it yeah i mean so okay so let me set the scene something huge happened yesterday something absolutely hilarious happened so much so that i texted you to be like look at what i've just sent like hello like look like i was like msn nudging you to look at your phone yeah like

please notice notice me yeah honestly poke um even that word just like triggers like a poke it's like oh you picked that ugliest like facebook why did they do that it's like don't touch me get your dirty paws off being poked is like really fucking annoying do you know what i mean like the actual the action of like receiving a poke is horrific yeah it's almost like why is that seen as a playful thing it's not playful it's i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna snap your neck you've jabbed my arm also if you know anything about me i bruise like a peach and and when someone poking my arm they should change it to jab you should be able to jab that's

what tiktok should do a jab yeah jab um right yesterday a wave anything but a poke ooh nudge is fine poke i'll be sick yeah excuse me mark zuckerberg get your hands off i'll go zuckerberg mark zuckerberg so yesterday everything was going to plan right the day was just daying normally yeah it was everything was just going on as normal the earth was turning you guys were there living your own lives and we were here living ours at the The day was just daying normally. Yeah, it was. Everything was just going on as normal. The earth was turning. You guys were there living your own lives and we were here living ours. Yeah, what were you doing at the moment of this email? I wonder what you guys were up to.

You had no idea that the most embarrassing, humiliating, mortifying thing just happened to Sefi and Wing. Basically, everything's going smoothly. An email came in to our manager about an event coming up and our gorgeous manager freya so lovingly replied saying hey what about sephi and wing they would be amazing they would love to come they would love to be a part of this event like thank you so much thank you so much the person replied capital letters guys n o nothing else n o no they said panicked no scared literally no not even like oh i don't think they would like just literally just straight no just quickly

before you get that in your head i have to say no don't let everyone do it no in capitals no so i was confused when i received it like it wasn't a thing that i was like i was like wait what are they saying you didn't immediately understand you kind of had to like spell out explain it to me like i'm five well i get confused reading an email thread like why is it all coming up in a weird i know it's really fucking annoying um but that was pretty embarrassing and hilarious and i just love the passion behind it so yeah so do i to be rejected um so explicitly it doesn't often happen i think like that and it just got me thinking about what i wrote down yesterday. Initially, I wrote normalizing rejection. Yeah.

And kind of the idea that ultimately you're always going to be rejected. So there's no point being embarrassed about it because it kind of isn't a choice. It isn't something that you can like volunteer or like opt in or out of. It's something that is going to happen. It's inevitable. It's totally inevitable. It's a is going to happen you will be it's totally inevitable it's a part of life you will be rejected and so you can't i think for me i've like lived in a paradox of like but also my dog is kind of growling and i'm sorry one sec lizzie's chatting away in the

kitchen that's all right is it what we're this is a it is what it is it's a weird episode it's cross-continental we don't know what we're doing it's not cross-continental oh no cross-country run we're still in the anyway um right yeah i feel like i have been living kind of with this false idea of like i can if i work on myself in a certain way i can make it so that i don't get rejected when it's actually like no if I work on my like mindset a little bit I can work on not being so devastated by rejection yeah because it's not the rejection exactly it's not the rejection that you have a choice over it's just how you handle it so I wouldn't mind having a little conversation on that if you're free yeah I know I think that sounds great lovely yeah I think it's like normalizing it in the way that's like not necessarily being like you shouldn't be upset by it but it's like yeah you

will be upset by it it is upsetting yes yeah it is rude also i think we had the weird balming thing that we always have from being a duo exactly where it was do you want seffy and wing yeah no it wasn't do you want one of them yeah do you want persephone deacon no it's like no yeah that hits very different and i don't even know her yeah it's like oh that's a concept they can handle it yeah even though just to be clear if you're thinking of sending us a horrible message we very much can't handle it oh no we're not we're not a concept and we are real but but even now recording like because we're in the audio version of this like i can't see you i kind of feel like i'm living within the goes out saying

so do i no no i really agree with you it's almost a bit eerie it's like wait i'm actually recording i'm not on the podcast i'm not chatting to you yeah it's like oh this it feels like we're kind of living in a podcast does that make sense i feel like i can't see anymore i'm madame webb it's like we've never done a phone call i've been taking no yeah it does feel really different it feels really weird um but i agree with you like it it's always gonna hurt and i think something we're really good at is like we literally had this conversation the other day where one of us messaged being like again an email sent a screenshot of an email i was like oh like that kind of makes me feel bad that kid yeah and the other one replies being like yeah it's normal to feel a sting like these things sting in life like they do sting they absolutely

it stings and i you can't deny i think the denial of the sting or being like i don't care i don't care look i've never done myself any favors by pretending that i didn't care about something that's never personally worked out for me no never and i think the if you are in that situation where you suddenly feel a sting about something the best thing you can do is be like this just stung me like this just hurt like that that did and also i think getting a couple tears out yeah it's not gonna hurt no it's gonna feel good in fact just get it out like you i think it's like if you feel the sort of like something happened some um guy just rejected you or whatever happened it's like okay i think you might need that's gonna upset you there can't be brush it off

fuck it whatever it's like dude that is actually objectively a painful thing like you put yourself out there and it didn't work or whatever yeah have some tears and that's okay move on and it will happen i think owning the moment is so important because it's so the thing of like when you said like you put yourself out there it didn't work out whatever it's actually a huge thing it's like it's an achievement in itself to be rejected because it means you've done something worth yeah looking at talking about like responding to you've done something you're existing you're a human being on this planet and it could literally be anything it could be yeah like a guy rejected you could be like a job a job a uni whatever like just some a friend even ouch yeah yeah no that's a painful

one it's so painful and i think like don't rush to claim that everything's okay i think like give it the time and the space of um that it deserves yeah that it deserves and like if you can't let yourself feel the way that you feel as a human being on this planet what do we have like if i'm not allowed to feel the way that i feel what do i have on this planet like nothing do i hate myself that much that i won't even allow myself to feel a little bit upset or feel an emotional response to something yeah it's really like heartbreaking why is there only one version of you that is valid and it's the version in the future that doesn't exist yet because you're still

working and it's the version that never gets rejected and um just gets whatever they want and it's just absolutely naturally stunning and never makes a mistake ever it's like yeah you're living in a fantasy land in a lie like that will never exist and if you need that to accept yourself you'll be waiting until the day you die i also i remember i said this like a while ago on the pod because it just really shook me up but it was basically someone being like if you knew you had for example 38 rejections until like the best thing ever happened like you've just got the best life ever blah blah blah if you knew everything you ever wanted was hiding behind 38 rejections i'd start putting myself out there i'd start getting busy i'd start getting going it's like

god i've got seeking out those rejections totally it's like oh i've got rejections to be had and i think that is kind of like a i just think that's such a cheat code of life because that's the kind of that's a bit of a hack for me i think is like if i'm ultimately scared of rejection in life and that is what bloody hell sorry can you hear this loud ambulance yeah they must be bloody loud in amsterdam or something that was extreme if i'm scared of rejection and that is ultimately what is stopping me from like engaging in things relationships experiences that i want for my life the sooner i can accept that rejection is is the right move like it's actually a totally a step in the right direction like the more you get rejected and the more that you fuck up the more you're on the right track

and like closer to the things that you want because if you're not being rejected you're still not moving any closer to what you want yeah in like a very real sense yeah it's actually it's just necessary it's kind of what were we saying the other day that was like a necessary thing in life we were like if you don't feel that then you haven't really lived jealousy or like embarrassment yeah yeah i think it was jealousy maybe yeah it's like if you get to the end or maybe the anger as well just all these things just all of the themes you know yeah um all of the second wing themes yeah if you get to the end of your life and you haven't felt that you haven't really had a human spectrum of emotion yeah you haven't really done anything i assume like like oh no that was it was like if you if

you haven't felt jealous you might be like a sociopath like there might it's not really it's not encouraged to to be like oh yeah no i just don't feel that stuff i just don't i don't get affected by that if you were getting rejected and it's like, that just doesn't touch me, just doesn't touch me. It's like some of them are going to, that is just a fact. And if you manage to walk through this life without ever being affected by any of them, I think maybe there's something kind of wrong there. Yeah, because it's totally,

it's the crux of the human existence, is feeling everything good and bad. Yeah, and not being so almost like untouchable that you actually skip out on everything that's human it's like i think there's this weird romanticized version of i'm the main character i'm living my best life nothing can touch me kind of brush it off water products back sort of energy but it's like but that's not human that is not what it means to be born into a human body into a human existence like you are not going to i don't know how you're going to form friendships and relationships and understand sort of films and books and like understand things without feeling that that is exactly the crux

of what all of these songs were written about about all of this stuff that it means to be human. Like that is what it is. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Nature. I've got a gay rooster named Francois. Is so gay. These rams are gay. I'm studying gay animals.

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Find a field guide to gay animals on Spotifyify apple or wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere a cast.com i think it is totally as well in a sense it's i mean as all things are gendered and also a sign of like kind of when you're saying like the main character stuff like it's so the kind of social media discourse of like kind of as well like this kind of hyper individualization where everyone is really preoccupied with how they are presenting themselves how they're being perceived in turn like what you can show of who you are rather than um like yeah living like a human existence and connecting with like how you feel and who you know and who you love and yeah and also gendered in the sense that i think there's just such a huge undeniable emphasis on for young women in particular i think to be unbothered and nonchalant and like cool quote unquote

yeah unembarrassed yeah not embarrassed yeah just kind of unashamed and just like proudly existing which so much of that is really important but i also think it removes the space for people to feel insecure and like tired and soft and fragile and like all of the things that are very much crucial to who you are yeah and it makes sense as well because it's like that sort of unbothered sort of um a sort of thing is a direct response to people that feel like if you take it in the gender angle it's like okay so women have felt like disempowered for so fucking long now of course there is like a natural swing in the other direction of like nothing can fucking get us like um sort of i think it's almost been marked as a feminist thing but actually it sort of discounts your like

humanism at the same point it's like you just whilst yes you are strong woman you're an animal still a human on a planet you really are too like i'm doing the whole podcast thing but it's like this nothing none of this is real like we're animals yeah and it's not necessary to make yourself a robot in order to not feel oppressed and the longer like the more time we spend trying to literally just deny very real parts of ourselves the further we get from that vision of someone who is happy and fulfilled and getting all these amazing experiences and blah blah blah like the more you deny the version of you that is like feeling a bit shit yeah and doesn't really handle that thing very well or like oh i'm not really coping whatever fighting that it's a classic devil snare devil snare like the more you resist it the harder you make it for yourself yeah and the more you

create that sort of polarized version of like the version of you that's acceptable and the version of yourself that isn't i was talking about that like a few episodes ago where i was like i'm in a flop era at the moment which i'm maybe starting to come back to life a little bit maybe yeah she's in amsterdam she's living up yeah the flopping maybe is ending but i was like okay so if i don't show that version or if i'm not comfortable with that don't like sort of allow that to exist it's telling yourself there's only one version that sort of is real and the other one is kind of in the shadows and like it's never really like you can't really see it's like no actually that is just as valid and just as real and actually um I like it in the sense that it is human and it's um not a part that i think is any less valid or um sort of showable i think it's yeah okay that's a that's a version that exists for everybody at

certain points in their life and these things exist simultaneously it's like you can be feeling really good in one area of your life of your life in one you're late you've been talking to me and lizzie that's what we that's like how we talk in one area of your life but then other things are shit and everything is happening all at once like you're not split up you are just one whole being who is complicated and nuanced and everything everywhere all at once i feel it everywhere i feel it in my vagina or whatever she says like yeah you are not one thing and there isn't just one acceptable version of you no it's nice but that's the myth that's the myth that it's like kind of shake it off just like you um move on like this we sort of we move this sort of like weird attitude it's like actually

sometimes we don't yeah sometimes we actually need to you just you actually need to and it's unescapable I don't care what the internet fucking tells you but you can't escape your feelings yeah like you it's not always um yeah thriving move on forget it we're leveling up like it's just absolutely not like there's an absolute myth of um the unbothered sort of um character that the internet sort of wants women to step into at the moment and also like not real again speaking about the internet it's really easy and obviously we're operating from an interesting space here where like we are making content on the internet making podcasts literally as we speak right now but so much of that narrative of like leveling up or like i'm thriving i just would

like to just offer up a little reminder of like it would be really easy to say it would be really easy to tell people that they should be thriving or it'd be really easy to show everyone that you are thriving if you are living in this kind of like elite group of people that get to occupy the space on your phone you feel like everyone else is thriving and everyone else is having the best time and you're living a miserable life because that's what you're being shown is very much rooted in like very tangible class struggles definitely where yeah of course it's easier to be fed the narrative or it's easier to feed the narrative of live your best life everyone oh my god blah blah be unbothered be whatever all of that shit when you're like gallivanting on holiday you're currently on holiday but like

when you're gallivanting on holiday um i was like who oh yeah like it can it kind of i remember saying in an episode once like there's just so much that tells you that like what you are doing is insignificant or wrong or not important or not good enough And I just really think that is so, so untrue. And I think it's just a nice reminder, I think a really important reminder, that just I think socially, we're in a space where maybe we've got our knickers in a twist, she needs to sort out her priorities, like we've got our values mixed up, or we can easily easily interpret we can easily infer that the things that are valuable in this day and age in this day and age like i'm a fucking old woman but we could easily read that the things that are valuable right now are not necessarily um accessible to the majority of

people on the fucking planet and well they're not so i just think don't be hard on yourself for feeling bad when you feel bad and also oh no sorry yeah no it just isn't normal to live this luxurious life it's just not normal and i also think you shouldn't be made to feel bad for that definitely not and also yeah you should so this is why we need the eye contact i don't know when you're finishing no no i'm done we should be a bit more discerning about when someone tells us on social media that they are thriving I think if you're thriving you're not saying that on social media like it's just it's this weird thing like for example there's an influencer that I see a lot at the moment and I have a lot of conversations about this sort of

thing and I think this person kind of exemplifies it but obviously i'm not going to say their name don't get ahead of yourself okay um but you know i mean way okay who they um often often often it's the whole thing is i'm thriving i'm thriving i'm thriving i'm thriving and it's a lot of sort of selling women this message of um this is what you should do to be happy um this is sort of um this is it's selling a lifestyle i guess of an unbothered of kind of um sort of slightly feminist like coded stuff but it's sort of just actually capitalism at work and it just looks so bleak i think it the actual that almost the disparity between like what that looks like online

and then the reality of what this person's life I don't know this person but it's like what this actually is I think the images that we're getting of what are thriving are actually incredibly like isolating and um quite unhealthy actually and like narcissistic so I think it's just being a bit more discerning about like if someone's saying that they're thriving online actually being like is that thriving like what is a society is that telling me that if i keep seeing this image of this person that's so apparently having such an amazing time this is the blueprint of what women should be doing this is someone at the peak of their of whatever this is on my phone all the time it's like actually it looks really really

not um good and actually isn't a message that i think women should be having as like a um as a goal yeah yeah but very vague because i'm not telling you very vague but i'm hanging on i'm hanging on no no well that's it that's the end of that's the end of it so let go just let that go now let go of the monkey bars i think as well like it's kind of the thing of knowing that how you feel is going to change so like things are going to sting at some point like at some point you're going to be receiving information in a particular way like we are always moving through life with like weird stories going on in our head like honestly unreliable narrator over here like we are always moving through life with like weird stories going on in our head like honestly unreliable narrator over here like we have got weird biases going on we've got

we're projecting all the time like we're going to handle and receive information differently depending on just like where we're at how we feel is my hair clean for example is the one that we always use or like am i on my period have i just had an argument am i hungry am i tired am i feeling generally a little bit out of sorts and lost and confused in life probably yeah just generally always coming with an angle always coming with an agenda there's always some sort of agenda going on in here and more often than not and if i leave it unchecked it will sway to the negative i will project that something is like an insult when maybe it wasn't or i'll project that something um means something negative about me when maybe it doesn't and i think having that like lightness or like fluidity with how you respond and receive information respond to and receive information in

your life like i don't know really why but for example like the email that we received yesterday of someone being like no i don't want to have a week guys they didn't even say like hi freya like bye they didn't say any no thanks no nothing it literally was just n o in capital letters like it's absolutely mental yeah um and that's really funny to me at the moment but like if i was in a different space or like if they had said it differently or if it was just a slightly different context i think it doesn't hit because it's so absurd like if maybe what would have hit more if they were like hey i don't think they are quite right like they're just they're just awful if she would have just said what she was thinking yeah if she actually had spelled it out but no made it so like okay actually you're mad so hilarious you're actually quite crazy but i

wouldn't be mad at myself and i wouldn't be mad at you i wouldn't be mad at anyone for just reading things in a way that makes you feel a little bit fragile and a little bit like that stung or that didn't feel great or oh i don't know why i just feel a bit sensitive today like i oh yeah you're human you're normal you're so not you're so normal you're so normal congratulations you're normal you're no best thing to be yeah congratulations guys yeah i yeah i just want to just give everyone a little bit of love of just like it's okay it's okay that you felt bad about that like that's okay and you're gonna be all right and also like okay it's actually encouraged how rejected you are someone out there is being rejected and it's probably us so don't

worry about it um and also then and then it's the next day and then exactly you're really really rejected it was three years ago and then it's an embarrassing thing that happened yeah so true okay stunning cool are we done here i think so i think we might be done that was really nice that was nice yeah quite quickly so actually what i was then thinking and what we kind of said in the last episode but it didn't really work because it was a thursday but we were kind of having the conversation of should we do episodes on the monday ideally they'd be a bit longer but sorry guys but we're on 4g here like the 4g the 4g is not 4g ideally we'd have like a normal longer monday episode and then i wouldn't mind catching up again on the thursday

and going through everyone's messages and stuff so about rejection yeah and kind of doing like yeah i think that's nice to have like a weekly theme yeah me too i think that'd be really nice because then we can kind of um dip our toes in on the monday get the general vibe of like where are we at and then we can have a bit more of a conversation with you lot on thursday and we will be doing that as always via instagram and tiktok so message us comment etc over there if you want to if you're on spotify reply to the thing that's literally below like there's like a thing on spotify that's we love to read as well we love to read it in fact don't

stop we literally just dm us send us you can reach us in many ways dm us please but on the instagram is where we normally have like stories that will put a question box up asking for your thoughts on a certain topic so that sounds good to me yeah thank you for four million guys thank you for four million also how would everybody feel about maybe we've been discussing oh quite a while filming our episodes on and putting them on youtube that's not what i thought you were gonna say what did you think i was gonna say i don't know if you want me to say this you you were you've been saying for a while about maybe spending a month or two in brighton i thought that was what you were gonna say well yeah i've been really hyped envisioning a brighton summer i'm getting buzzing for it i'll be so angry if you don't not angry i'll be devastated

it will be so nice i think i've got um some leads you know i've got some i've got my i've got some leads on where oh i really would love it imagine because i really the idea of ice cream on the beach in brighton over summer we have to it'll be so fun let's do it also sephian wing summer exactly i was actually thinking about that i was thinking we should do like a summer series like kind of you know like a podmer situation oh my god but like it's sephian wings summer bonanza and it's like um sort of every day in june you know or something like that i also think we should hold on to and i just think summer is the best time to do it some sort of like food situation like where we're all eating together do you know what i mean talking about recording something with food the other day and we ended

up just finishing our meal before we got the microphone we were so hungry we're like should we make some headway on this before we record because otherwise we're just gonna be and then i was like i'm so sorry but i'm really enjoying this yeah i couldn't stop and then we started the episode so we've just finished a cats and curry it's like but it was really good yeah it was great but thank you for letting us be in a position where we get to like go to the studio and do fun things and stuff it just feels really nice thank you guys it's really nice we love we love we love till the end of time thank you for four million and congratulations to you to be honest for listening so many of those

things and congratulations to harry and also to you yeah Sethi. That was to Harry and also to you, Wade. Yeah, congratulations to us. Congratulations to me. Congratulations. Congratulations to us all. Okay, if you don't hear from us, assume the worst. We'll be right back.