Join Gem for the final episode of the series, "What Happens When... You Learn to Trust Yourself?".

After visiting a Scottish castle, Gem reflects on the looming presence of oppressive systems and the work to deconstruct the ways we've internalised them. They share their experience of re-learning to trust themselves and how deepening their understanding of things like patriarchy, colonialism, children's rights, body liberation and queerness have been and continue to be vital in that process.

Thank you so much for listening! I'd love it if you'd consider sharing and reviewing this podcast!

Find out more about me and my work at www.gemkennedy.com and @thegemkennedy in all the usual places.

Helpful links:

For more conversation on these themes, check out my interviews with Sophie Christophy, Adele Jarrett-Kerr, Artemis D. Bear and Dr. Charlotte Cooper on previous episodes of Queers and Co.

Sophie Christophy: https://www.facebook.com/schristophy

Akilah S. Richards: https://raisingfreepeople.com/

The Body is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor

Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement by Dr. Charlotte Cooper

00:23

Okay, is this working? Yes, so I've just finished walking around a big castle, and it was really interesting. It's a really beautiful place. The walled garden was really pretty and, yeah, it was cool. And at the same time, I think, because it's still owned by an incredibly wealthy family... I feel different about going to like National Trust or English heritage places, because oftentimes they're not always, but often they're under the ownership of English Heritage or National Trust, and so your money is supporting conservation or, you know, keeping things in good order.

01:11

I have really complicated feelings about coming to a place that is like a massive, privately owned estate, and paying for it, and I feel like that's kind of overshadowed my experience. And I have no idea what this has to do with the podcast, but I'm just talking in the hope that I will end up moving into the thing that I actually want to talk about in this episode.

01:38

Yeah, on the one hand, you know seeing a garden is really beautiful and at the same time, when their main messaging is that they are a modern business and like are a landlord to lots of different farms and lots of different houses, it just makes you wonder how well looked-after those people feel and the idea of paying to go like paying to essentially make someone richer, I have complicated feelings about and I don't know what that has to do with trust. Maybe it's just... maybe there's something about trusting myself that being there, I really wanted to be like, "Wow, this is so cool", and the building is beautiful and the history is interesting. And at the same time, there's like zero recognition of things like colonialism and wars and white supremacy and capitalism. And, you know, there's mentions of people who did heroic things in battle, but, like, who were those battles against? For example, in South Africa. It's really complex.

02:54

04:16

So I guess it's that, that difference between what is portrayed like the facade of something is glamour, you know, an aspirational lifestyle, and actually, what it's built on is deeply problematic and other people's misery. Like, how well have staff members been paid? How well are people being treated in the pursuit of essentially gaining more money? And maybe the reason that that comes up now is because when I think about trust and what happens when you have to relearn to trust yourself, or what happens when you learn to trust yourself, a lot of it is undoing these... all of the internalized beliefs that we have gathered over the years from existing in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal society. And to be very clear, there are still obviously going to be areas where I still haven't uncovered the full extent of how those systems have embedded themselves within me, like how I've internalized all of that stuff. So I'm definitely not sitting here and saying I have undone the things or, like I've done all the work. It's an ongoing process to just be aware of how that stuff shows up, and to be curious and to try, because I think it can be really easy just to experience shame for having internalized that stuff or not being able to see where it comes out and so it can mean that people just avoid engaging with it because it's too shameful or it feels too scary, and so it's like a constant turning back towards, "Where are my biases? Where are things that are still to be uncovered, that I haven't fully worked through yet?"

06:17

So thinking about trust, all of these systems... existing in a patriarchal society, growing up under capitalism, not having been taught about colonial history, for example, at school, going to school, which in itself is for many people, I don't want to say all, because some people enjoy it, but for many people, going to school is in itself an oppressive experience. For many people, childhood is an oppressive experience. Children do not experience the same rights that adults do, and so growing up with all of those things, adding in things like diet culture, that kind of additional separation from your body, or that there is something inherently wrong with your body, and you must spend your life in pursuit of trying to fix it. And then as soon as you maybe, if you're lucky, get to a point where you have attained a particular body that society deems acceptable, then the standards will change. And so off you go again, if you're if you're taking part, you know, off you go again in pursuit of whatever becomes the new aspirational body to have.

07:30

All of those things separate us from our sense of trust, our sense of self, and being able to navigate from a place that is connected to what we feel good about, what we want to do, what we enthusiastically consent to, and what we don't. And I think a lot for me over the years has been about trying to get back to a sense of connection, with my sense of trust or with my sense of self, to be able to actually navigate from that place, instead of from a place that is conditioned and manipulated, I guess, by all of these different systems and structures that we exist within.

08:16

And when I think about the different phases of my life that I've been through in terms of working through different levels of stuff to come back to myself, or to feel connected to my sense of self, those have all been really difficult. You know, there's just this constant, constant amount of stuff that needs to be or doesn't need to be, no one has to look at it. You don't have to do that if you don't want to. But there's this ongoing, for me, an ongoing pursuit of peeling away, or stripping away, the things that I've accumulated, a bit like having a massive clear out essentially over and over for quite a long time. And just when you feel like you've got rid of all of the stuff, you're like, oh shit, there's a whole other room I haven't even looked in yet. Yeah, and I guess some of those things that come to mind, or maybe where it started for me, first of all, was having children, and really being very conscious that I didn't want my children to grow up with the same kinds of issues around food and around body image that I did, and initially thinking that the way for me to do that was to be thin and to somehow resolve my issues with food. And then, you know, really kind of as if I hadn't pursued thinness enough persisting to pursue thinness, but in a different way that was trying to demonstrate a healthy relationship with food, but actually, you know, was still deeply disordered. And it wasn't until I found out about body positivity and fat liberation and all of the politics around that that I really was like, "Okay, this is a thing that I really need to figure out or improve on in order to be able to pass on more positive messaging to my children".

08:44

But even before that, as I'm saying this, I'm like, it's all so... it's kind of jumbled. There's lots of different strands, I guess. So, rewinding for a second having children and then having a child who was due to go to school was the thing that really set me on a course of like, doing something different, becoming involved with the home education community and learning more about children's rights and the history of patriarchy. And if you want to know more about that, then check out the work of Sophie Christophy, because it's excellent around all of this stuff. And becoming involved in those communities and having those conversations made me realize 1. that there was a reason that I had struggled in school around how oppressive school is and how children don't experience rights in the same way or don't experience rights full stop often. And knowing my eldest and knowing that we were quite similar in a lot of ways, and feeling very worried about her going to school and what kind of an impact that would have on her, and then finding home education as an option. And basically, it was not easy, like changing my whole way of working, the job I did, everything... There's just some guy staring at my car... I would say finding home education was really fundamental to setting me off on a journey to figure out a lot of this other stuff, because learning about unschooling, learning about the process of deschooling, where we're kind of going through a process that is shedding a lot of the stuff that we internalise through the schooling system and re-evaluating and reconnecting with what it means for us to learn and how we learn best, and how we are lifelong learners, whether we like it or not. And realizing that you don't just finish learning at the age of 21, or 18 or 16, or whenever it is that you finish any kind of formal education, and that that should be and is, without even trying, an ongoing process.

10:25

Realizing all of that really helped me then to feel like my life on the course that it is is not over like I used to look forward to retiring. I used to think, then, when I was retired, that my life would be more exciting, or that then I could do the things that I wanted to do that didn't feel possible, and I realised how much of a con that is and, you know, took action accordingly, continued to follow the threads of what felt like true for me, what felt like things I wanted to pursue and things I wanted to do with my life.

12:58

And so all of these systems, I guess I'm trying to untangle... it's a bit like a chicken and egg thing. There isn't this one moment where I was like, "wow, I have to return to trusting myself". There were these kind of reiterative moments of realising that there were so many ways in which I didn't trust myself and had become very separated from what my yes and my no were or like how I actually wanted to live my life. So I would name, for example, home education and learning more about children's rights as a massive one for me. And that also then led to me learning more about body positivity and fat liberation by having coaching with another parent in the home ed community, and me essentially expressing that I had experienced disordered eating for as long as I could remember, and her telling me that I was not alone in that, and as much as I theoretically knew that there was something about hearing it from someone else and having disclosed it to someone else that really set me off on this big quest, essentially, like a whole... avery intense hyperfocus to learn all the things about, like, the origins of fat liberation, the origins of fatphobia, that kind of stuff.

14:12

And then that led on to me being able to reconnect with my sense of queerness. I came out as being bi when I was 14 to both my parents, and had a lot of internalised stuff around what that meant. Didn't grow up with any representation of queerness around me. A family friend had a gay son who was older than me, and I remember just being like amazed whenever he would come to our house, which was very, you know, maybe like, three times across my whole childhood, but feeling so, so excited or so, yeah, just so excited by the prospect of a queer person being in my midst. Because it just was not something that was accessible to me. Growing up under Section 28 at school, where no one talked about what it meant to be queer or trans, it just didn't exist. And so, you know, if you were lucky, you might get some kind of a TV show like Tipping the Velvet. I don't know if anyone saw that, and I remember watching it in secret. It was the only gay representation that I had come across, and I guess it was a sort of, there was a drag king kind of vibe, and I just found it so incredibly exciting and thrilling. But also, you know, I felt sad because it felt very inaccessible. And at university, feeling again like the LGBTQ+ community was not accessible to me. I was in a straight passing relationship from the age of 18, and I wouldn't change that, but it's just another way in which I, as I kind of figured these things out about myself, realised there are so many parts of myself that I have shut down or minimised and suppressed because I felt like they weren't deemed acceptable by society.

16:04

And the teenage me didn't give a shit, in some ways, was really rebellious in terms of questioning authority and, you know, I had a whole like goth and emo phase where I really was very interested in different models of society and different ways that things could work. Yeah. So the the queerness, kind of rediscovering that part of myself, then led on to learning more about gender and figuring out what my actual gender identity was, or how I felt about gender, because, again, it wasn't something I'd ever felt like I could explore.

16:40

And then from there, there's been, not only in these kind of quite distinct spheres of my life, you know, like sexuality, gender, how I feel about my body... Through all of this, there's been this kind of underlying thread of like how to trust myself, and then finding out, after all of these things, that I'm Autistic and ADHD, and realising that through masking and the way that I have or the way that I had been existing in the world, there were so many ways in which I was subconsciously adapting myself in order to pass or in order to fit in.

17:21

And so obviously all kinds of different groups, like marginalised groups, mask for different reasons, essentially to feel safe and not necessarily consciously, but that experience of masking as an Autistic and sort of developing into a version of what I thought the world wanted me to be really was not compatible with building a sense of self-trust. So when I've been thinking about, how do I trust myself, there are, you know, it's things like allowing myself to express important parts and important aspects of my identity and who I am.

17:59

And even thinking about the previous podcast series that I've recorded, listening to them now, and seeing how masked I was in my speech, how sort of measured and how, in a way, I guess I was sort of subconsciously performing how I thought people wanted me to be. It wasn't intentional, but you know, this is what it means to do x and now I'm literally sitting here talking like I would talk to a friend, or like I would talk to myself when I'm alone. And on the one hand, that's really scary, but it feels so important.

18:34

There can be co-dependent behaviours that come into this situation as well, because when you don't trust yourself, you look to people around you to try to give you the answers, or to try to show you how you should and shouldn't be. And so again, over the years, I can definitely see how subconsciously I was in codependent relationships of all kinds. Like, you know, I don't just mean romantic relationships. Was in codependent relationship with other people, and how, again, like it was a sort of proxy, or, like a substitute, for my own sense of trust.

19:19

And I think when you are a neurodivergent person and marginalised in other ways, it's really easy to outsource your trust to other people. Never mind when you're growing up within systems that do not want people to trust themselves. Like the worst thing for capitalism or for white supremacy or patriarchy, is for individual people to have a sense of agency and autonomy. And that the more autonomous, the more able to express ourselves we become, the more of a threat we are to systems that thrive on people feeling disconnected from themselves, feeling that they have hopes and dreams possibly, but they can't actually connect with them or action them because they're not in alignment with what society expects from them. And that idea of feeling like... of being kept small and feeling like there are only a certain amount of things that you have access to or that you can control within your life. And just to be clear, I don't think we can control all aspects of our lives, obviously, but there are choices that we can make. There are always choices, no matter how hard those choices might be to find or how hidden. There are choices like staying in a marriage where someone is deeply unhappy is a choice. And not to say that there are easy alternative options, or that, you know, it's not challenging, but persisting in situations that make us unhappy, there is almost always an alternative, even if it's a change in... even if it's kind of making a plan to move into something else, or changing the way that we think about something, or making shifts in what we are experiencing and how we support ourselves with that, there is always something that can be done. And I think while we feel powerless and disconnected from our sense of trust in ourselves, we're much more likely to live lives that are not autonomous and do not feel full of agency.

21:33

I think also, age has something to do with reconnecting or feeling a sense of connection to ourselves. I definitely, and again, I don't want to say for everyone, but for me, certainly, as I've gotten older, as I've realised that there is no golden ticket. There is, like, no one that's just going to knock on my door one day and say, "Hey, you know this, this money you've been working really hard for, here you go". Like so many people have dreams of winning the lottery, and live their lives as though "One day when I win the lottery...", but like, what if you were to accept that no one is coming to give you... unless you know this is also subjective, isn't it? Some people are going to inherit a lot of money, or some people do have future sources of income that they are aware of, but for the rest of us, if you know that unless you take action, things are not going to land in your lap, and you are not entitled to things, and you could die tomorrow, I feel like that's... being aware of those things, and actually taking action accordingly is so important.

22:40

And the school system really doesn't prepare us for that, because it's essentially a production line of sending people through the same, pretty much, the same journey, and it's designed for there to be winners and designed for there to be losers, and then based on where you come out the other end, you're kind of funneled into a seemingly like narrow range of options. Actually, learning skills like self trust, learning skills like, how do we engage in learning? What do we feel passionate about? How do we follow our own interests? Those things are things that are definitely not taught or supported, and so we end up coming out the other end of the school system, feeling disconnected from our sense of what we want from life or what we enjoy spending our time doing, because all of our time has been taken up with exams, with deadlines, with, you know, working towards arbitrary things that we're not necessarily interested in.

23:46

I feel like this is a bit of a rant, but hopefully somewhere in it, there are some ingredients that help to figure out how to trust yourself. I think for me as well, trust is, you know, it's definitely something I'm still working on. I'm not saying that I like trust myself 100% all the time, but there seem to be some really important ingredients for me that help me trust myself or reconnect with my sense of trust when I feel like I've been disconnected from it. So one of those things is having time and space alone outside of other people's energies actually to be able to be quieter. Like as an ADHD person, my brain is never quiet, but to have less input, and to kind of come back to myself and really tune into what feels good and what doesn't. So time and space is definitely important.

24:49

I think, also surrounding yourself, or even just having one, or, you know, as many connections as you can with people who are also engaged in the same kind of thing. So where you're able to be open about, "Oh, I actually don't feel like doing that thing", or "That doesn't feel good to me, could we do a different way? Or could we do something else?" and not worrying that the people that you're communicating that to are going to be really offended, because they're also able to express what they need or what feels good and doesn't feel good to them. So basically, engaging in consent, having consensual connections with people, is really important to develop self-trust, because then you have the space to tune into what feels good and what doesn't feel good to you, and then communicate it in a safe way.

25:37

And otherwise, for me, a spiritual practice has been really helpful in trusting myself more, because when I am doubting myself often, a card I pull will remind myself to trust myself. So having that kind of spiritual practice, something external to remind me of what I'm working towards or what is helpful for me is is amazing.

26:01

I'm sure there are lots of other ingredients as well. For me, another one is also learning to push my limits around what I can and can't do physically, what I can and can't do sort of mentally and so pushing myself in my work and knowing that even though I feel scared or feel like I might not be able to manage something, knowing that I can or that I will develop the capacity as as I go along. And it's not about jumping in at the deep end necessarily all the time, but just kind of gently encouraging myself to do a bit more or to give something a try and know that if I don't want to do it, or if it doesn't feel good, I can stop.

26:50

Similarly physically through power lifting, I've really been learning how to trust my body and that often my mind can be freaking out around like "You've gone out on this walk now you're two hours walk away from where you're staying and your car. What you gonna do? How are you gonna get back? What if your body is tired? What if you get injured?" And those things could happen. But it's so interesting to notice in those moments that it's my mind that is freaking out about the things and my body is actually okay. So I, you know, just have so much anxiety that then I'm like, questioning and doubting myself, when actually my body, physically is not giving me any signs that it needs to stop.

27:35

So kind of testing limits. And obviously those limits are going to be different for everyone, because different people have different abilities in terms of what they can and can't do physically, where they are and aren't willing to go sort of mentally or emotionally and there are definitely limits for me, like hard limits. It's very similar to thinking about kink, right? Having sort of hard and soft limits. Like, where do you want to push a bit more? Where feels good to to be able to trust yourself, and kind of push and where feels good to trust your boundaries of like no, this is a hard limit for me, and that is where I need to stop.

28:09

So I guess there's some thoughts on self trust and what happens when you learn to trust yourself, or what happens when you don't trust yourself? It's hard, and everything in society is conditioned, or kind of designed to eliminate that self-trust, so that we trust in something bigger, i.e. capitalism, or our sense of connection is essentially outsourced to those places, you know, we're supposed to trust the leader. We're supposed to trust that the government has our back. We're supposed to trust that the police can look after us and make sure that we're safe. And so I guess coming back to where I was at the beginning, thinking about today and what may or may not happen, really realising that it's a very difficult time for lots of people, for lots of different ways, and that this is stuff that is systemic and has been built intentionally over time, and that we all suffer under this, and some people more than others, obviously, for example, Black and Brown people in this current situation.

29:20

Maybe just a couple of questions that come to mind to finish up. If you knew that you could trust yourself to handle whatever happened, what would you do? What are you putting off doing because you don't trust yourself? Where do you put your trust in other people or systems when actually it should be located within yourself?