Who's your inner goddess?
Despite the warning I got from Alexa early Friday morning that the snowstorm widely predicted to hit the Jersey Shore later that night had been upgraded to a blizzard, and – not to mention – dark and threatening skies – I went to get my face peeled at lunchtime.
I’d bought myself a package of a couple of peels that were on sale around the holidays because in 2022 that’s what women of a certain age do. We spend time and money trying to undo any signs on our face that we’ve lived a life.
I’d rescheduled the appointment so many times already because of work that I thought if I called again, the woman who answers phones and makes appointments would stick her arm through the phone and throttle me.
My usual aesthician wasn’t available so another young woman led me down the long hallway to her room and when I sat back in her reclining chair she noticed the gold pendant I always wear as she pulled my hair back with a headband.
“Is that Medusa?” she asked, using a warm cloth to wipe my face to prep for the treatment.
“It weirdly is,” I said, and told her about how I’d fallen for one of those online quizzes and ended up buying myself an expensive (for me) necklace around this time last year. The question that caught my eye on Instagram was, “Who’s your inner Goddess?” and it made me pause in my scrolling one night and then I thought, “Okay, I’ll bite,” and clicked the link.
I answered the like, five questions and then the site, which I already knew was trying to sell me something, gave the equivalent of a virtual drumroll and announced that after taking my answers into its algorithim, my inner goddess was: Medusa.
WTF. Medusa? She’s not even a legit goddess. I kind of love Greek mythology and if watching the movie Clash of the Titans scores of times as a teenager in the 1980s and then when my kids were young makes me any kind of classical historian, then I knew Medusa was pretty much a monster. One of a trio of three scary sisters known as Gorgons who could turn folks into stone with their gaze, Medusa had a headful of writing snakes and seemed pretty angry and irrational until Perseus lopped her head off. What exactly did this say about my answers to those silly questions?
I clicked out of that site and went back to my life but kept thinking about the Medusa charm. I was just beginning the process of interviewing for a corporate job that I knew would be a real reach to get but if I did, it could be transformative. There was revamping my resume and writing compelling cover letters and interviews and cognitive assessments – a whole mountain of challenges ahead. But I set my mind to it and opened my resume in a Word doc and got to work.
As I went through interview rounds and spent an entire weekend relearning 6th grade math for that skills assessment, I started to think about treating myself to something if I actually got the job. Buying something that would be meaningful and represent the power I felt as a divorced, 50-something, former stay-at-home-mom who had successfully turned her life around and set it on a new path.
I thought, of course, of Medusa. Her power. Her fierceness. That she was a goddamn warrior who could stop trouble in its tracks.
So when I got the job offer, after screaming and texting my four kids and best girlfriend and actually getting on my knees and thanking God for the strength I needed to do all the shit, I ordered the necklace and have rarely taken it off since. She’s my good luck charm. My talisman. My secret weapon to ward off evil spirits.
As my skincare gal started to wipe the chemical onto my face that makes it sting and itch like crazy while it eats through a few layers of epidermis, she told me how she was Italian and that the legend there was that it was the hardened blood of Medusa that formed the red coral that used to grow in abundance in the waters around the bottom of the country’s boot.
“She’s pretty badass,” she told me as she held a little fan to my face to help with the burning, and I agreed.
***
I’d been super freaked out by the impending blizzard, less by all the snow that was predicted and more due to the PTSD of all the challenges I’ve had to manage in my dozen years without a man to do my dirty work. Fallen trees. Lost power. Burst pipes. Garbage days. All mine to contend with. When the power went out for about 24 hours a few summers ago, not being able to start my generator brought me to my knees as I heard the motors of all the other generators thrumming across my neighborhood.
If the blizzard knocked out my power, I knew I’d be a goner. I wouldn’t be able to mentally overcome being alone in my cold house. I bought a weird amount of firewood at my local Acme as I ran around doing last-minute storm errands after work but it wasn’t until later that I realized I only had three more Duraflames left in the big box in the basement. (Oh! Add making fires to the list of things I have had to learn to do for myself.) As the snow began to fall Friday night and I settled on the couch to finish bingeing the latest season of Ozark, I decided to hold off on making a fire, just in case I’d need the Duraflames to actually keep me warm and not because I wanted to feel cozy.
By noon the next day the sky was still so dark and the snow continued to fall and get blown into undulating mounds across my patio by the gusts of wind that blew past my sturdy little house. I could hear neighbors’ snow blowers and see my neighbor across the street start to dig his family out and knew I’d have to bundle up at some point and start to go the same. I had to take the dog out super early that morning and when I opened the door the snow was right up to the lip of my doorstep and my not-small pooch had to bound across the hidden grass like a snow dolphin, hoisting himself up and over the thick blanket that had fallen overnight. I knew at the very least, we’d need a path from the front door down to the street and then the foot of the driveway and my car probably needed to be cleared as well.
After sitting on the couch writing and reading well into early afternoon, I finally got up and bundled myself like the kid in A Christmas Story – tall snow boots, a balaclava I found in my son’s room under my hat and long down coat – and headed outside. I stood in the driveway and thought: no way. There was absolutely no way I was every going to get through the waves of snow between my door and the street. When I started to dig, I realized that although the snow was super powdery it took about three shovelfuls to get through the stratum as I moved my way towards the street. I had cued up a podcast involving some deep thinking and lots of talking to play as I worked and the speakers droned on through my headphones and my thinking filled instead with self pity and resentment. Woe was me. I felt that weepy feeling of pressure behind my eyes and plunged my shovel into a mound of snow where it stood upright while I went inside to warm my frozen fingers.
I stood on the beach towel I’d set down in front of the door and yelled at myself to snap out of it. All I had to do, I told myself, was just shovel a path for me and the dog and then I’d be back on the couch cozy and warm with a book. I stopped the droning podcast and instead, put on a playlist of music my baby daughter had made for me after we went to visit her big sister in Raleigh over the holidays. It’s all she-power, up-tempo songs by female artists like Kaycee Musgraves, Remi Wolf and Olivia Rodriguez and I put the volume up to full blast and went back out to the snow.
Two hours later – after I’d cleared the driveway, and the path to the dog poo-poo pail and trash and the cars, which I ran for a while to get the ice off the windows (sorry environment!), and then I dug into the thick blanket leading up to my front door from the street and walked the dog around the block and started to feel the cold of my sweat-soaked top as my body started to cool down – my phone rang. It was my neighbor to say her brother, also a neighbor, was going to clear the long sidewalk around my corner house with his snowblower and I told her how thankful I was for that kindness. I stepped into the hot shower when I got home and laughed to myself thinking about how the universe has got me. I had stopped feeling so sorry for myself and danced my way through my snow shoveling, singing along with Kacey for all the neighborhood to hear as I went about my work with a little shimmy.
I spent the rest of the day on my couch in front of a roaring fire with a heating pad on my back and neck warmer I heated up in the microwave draped across my shoulders and finished up my second book of the day with my dog curled around my bare feet. My long hair, which had twisted its way into a giant rats nest of a knot from all the shoveling had been brushed smooth and was in a big knot on top of my head and I could smell the Trader Joe’s cocoa butter I’d spread all over after the shower. I posted a video of my snow removal handiwork on social media and felt clean and sore and happy.
When I first started wearing my Medusa, it was to ward off external evil spirits. Bullshit men. Financial insecurity. Acts of God. I wanted to be protected from the steady stream of challenges that always seemed to find me. But now I’m thinking that my inner warrior is even more effective at stopping my internal demons in their tracks. The raging self-pity and searing resentments that infect my thought process and kidnap the stories that I tell myself late at night in bed or standing knee-deep in snow on my driveway.
I just needed to unleash my inner Gorgon and tell her to walk up to the fear and doubt welling up inside me and tap them on the shoulder to get their attention. Let them see her, in all her power and fierce determination. Let them look her in the eye as she stops them dead in their tracks.
Want to share what you just read?
Use the buttons below to share with friends.
SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
Need to channel your inner goddess? Here's where I found mine.
I had been reading two books this week in tandem and finished both yesterday. The first Claire Keegan's slip of a novel, Small Things Like These. A little more than 100 hundred powerful pages filled with a story set right around 1985 Christmas in a small Irish town and a coal merchant's discovery that forces him to look at his past. The leaders of the Catholic Church truly need to do some soul searching.
I also finished Erika Schickel's memoir, The Big Hurt. She's two years older than me and is divorced and comes from divorce and distracted parents in the late 1970s so her story really resonated. She also blew up her marriage after an affair with the writer James Elroy and she hails from a tony New York City literary family, so there are fun tidbits of gossip in there as well. Her mom was childhood BFs with Carly Simon's older sister. The book was kind of all over the place but Erika writes about trying to stuff her unwieldy story into some kind of structure, and I think she did a pretty good job.
Here's a recommendation I keep forgetting to make: Sodastream. My daughter bought me one for Christmas even though I kind of told her I didn't want one and now I don't know how I lived without it. I drink so much more water now and barely have any recycling now that I'm not guzzling plastic bottles of Pellegrino I bought by the caseful at Costco.
Driving home from my face peeling I heard an interview with the host of the Sunday night show, Calm it Down, which is also a podcast. It sounds super meditative and thoughtful and that it could calm down even the most wound-up brain.
A friend sent this video to our group chat late last night and it cracked me up. We might have hurricanes here in Jersey but nary an earthquake or alligator in sight.
Wow. Thanks for reading. Seriously, you're the best.
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
*|IF:REWARDS|* *|HTML:REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*