Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / What is Self-Expression? | Thinking Out Loud
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- Kimberly: What is self expression? I was told that my own personal business was someone else's right to share. My news was their news to tell. At the same time, I was asking them, please stop giving me your two cents. I didn't ask. Please stop playing middleman in my relationships. I don't want you inserting yourself into these relationships. The response? I'm allowed to express myself. Okay, when did my business become your personal content? when did your opinions become more important than my request my personhood? When did having the freedom to express yourself Become the same thing as having unrestricted access to someone else's life. We see this everywhere. We see partners making jokes at their significant other's expense and calling it humor. We see parents talking to the coach and teachers about their child, sometimes advocating for them, sometimes unintentionally turning their child's life story. Into a story they get to tell everyone else. We see this in friendships, it's either me or them. we see people inserting themselves into relationships that aren't theirs, like they're third wheeling it along and they're making it their personality. We see people sharing information that wasn't theirs to share. When someone says, please stop, the response can become, I'm just expressing myself. Where's the line? Between responding to something someone posted and turning it into a witch hunt, between supporting your child and isolating them, helping your friend or partner and sabotaging their relationships. between telling your story and making someone else's life your content. I think sometimes what gets called self-expression can become something else. You make someone else's life the subject. It can become my opinion is the truth. This my statement is a fact. My feelings justify my behavior. Suddenly, self-expression becomes a rebranding of entitlement. Not because people aren't allowed to get their feelings hurt, angry disappointment or confused. They are. Having a feeling doesn't automatically give you ownership over another person's story. having an opinion Doesn't automatically make you entitled to deliver it. Being allowed to speak doesn't mean everyone else is required to listen. What is self expression? Maybe it's having an opinion, making statements, telling stories, creating, questioning, agreeing, and communicating What you think and feel. without requiring another person to surrender their autonomy in order for you to express yourself? What happens when someone's self-expression repeatedly shuts down everyone else's? What happens when the people around you become dependent on your opinions because they stopped being allowed to develop their own? All in the name of self-expression. I think not, nay nay. Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we begin, a quick note this podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and explore life's great areas, especially in relationships. and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Take the conversation about postpartum psychosis that's been going around. First, I want to say clearly I am glad we're talking about it. I am glad people are talking about postpartum. I'm glad people are talking about psychosis. I am glad we're talking about how serious it can be. I am glad we're talking about the signs. I am glad we're talking about how someone's mental health after giving birth can become a medical emergency. Whether we see it or not or understand it, these conversations matter. I understand why sometimes we feel like we have to use another person's story in order to make ours mean something in a conversation. I don't remember seeing or hearing that person say, Hey, I'd like to be part of your campaign of awareness. Maybe they have. Maybe there are conversations happening that I don't know about, and I don't know everything that's happening in this case. That's my point. I don't need to, and this is what I mean by that. I can have a conversation about postpartum psychosis without pretending I know what happened to someone else. I can say, I don't know what is happening in this particular case, but when I experience psychosis, this is what it looked like for me. That is a conversation that is bringing awareness, that is sharing an experience and giving a different lens. Nobody else's privacy has to be sacrificed for my story to matter. I thought about this before. I remember seeing something similar during the conversation surrounding a high-profile celebrity court case in 2022. I understood why people wanted to talk about the larger issue involved. Domestic violence, abuse, trauma, manipulation. the way people interpret conflicting stories. The way people twist the stories, all of these conversations can be important. I didn't like how these conversations sometimes became dependent on the names of the people involved. I didn't like the witch hunts from the beginning before it had to go to court. Because suddenly it wasn't enough to say this happened to me. It became Look at what happened to this person. Let me tell you what this proves about my experience. Those aren't necessarily the same thing. A person's story can be information, it can be data. It is still a person's story shaped by their circumstances, their perspective. And what we may or may not know about the situation. We have to remember. That causation and correlation aren't always what we think they are. one person's experience may help us understand an issue. It doesn't automatically prove every conclusion we want to draw from it. Maybe social media has trained us to believe that a story isn't compelling unless there's a name attached to it. That awareness isn't awareness unless we can point blame to someone. That argument isn't legitimate unless there's a villain, allegedly. That our experiences isn't important unless we attach it to a public case and invite everyone else to investigate. Heck, build conspiracy theories. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's what we need to do to be valid. You can talk about your issues without naming the people involved. You can say, I don't know what happened in this case. I know what happened to me. sometimes I think that's the more responsible thing to do. I also want to leave space though for people in the middle of their own PTSD trauma journey that sometimes just being able to talk about it even if it's not Therapeutic. They need a space. sometimes people are desperate, and the only place they have is social media. I hope we can create a world where we stop putting things on social media because people have people that are safe to tell these stories to in the raw, in the way that they need to say it before they can start putting it together and making it make sense. sometimes the honest thing is it never will make sense. I know what happened to me. When I experienced a psychosis, my symptoms were relatively low on the spectrum compared with what some people experience. I could feel it happening. I could recognize that something was wrong. I can feel All of a sudden my brain snap and I had no capacity left. It was like my gas tank was empty and somehow my car is still moving. But if I keep pushing, the engine's gonna bust. I wasn't okay. I was able to get help. I remember feeling exhausted, completely depleted, ready to snap at any moment. Because I knew my tank was low constantly. I was fighting to keep it together. There was a point where I wasn't sure I wanted to be alive. At the same time, I was honest with my husband. But also, he had created safety and foundation for me to be honest to him. And I told him, You are putting dangerous ideas in my head because he kept telling me that our daughter needed me. And I understood what he meant. He was trying to remind me that I mattered. He was trying to give me a reason to stay. What he didn't understand was in that moment, telling me that my daughter needed me could also sound like, your daughter needs you, so you don't get to leave. I was fighting for my life. I needed to be okay. I needed to believe that my child would be okay if I needed help. I needed to go to the hospital. I needed to be away from my baby, not because I didn't love her, but because I needed to take care of me so I could take care of her. I needed to get my own oxygen mask on. I needed someone else to take care of her while I took care of myself. That needed to be an option. Full stop. Full stop. The amount of times I have heard stories from women who said that their partner, when they were not okay and they needed help, responded with I should be able to trust the mother of my children with my children. yeah, that's why I'm telling you I'm not okay. I'm obviously trustworthy enough because I am communicating. I haven't gone so far gone. Makes me unbelievably mad. Which that's a whole different topic because some people can see it happening and some people are in la la land and there's nothing they can do about it. that's where a partner needs to see the signs. I digress. Those are totally different conversations. One person is seeing it, seeking help, trying to get keep their shit together, and another person completely lost it. And we act like this one where someone's completely not there. Is how all psychosis are. it's a spectrum. back to my point. I needed the people around me to be careful with how they talked with me because I wasn't okay. Most of the time I didn't feel heard. And that's where it sucks because I'm so good at articulating myself that people don't think I'm losing it. And I'm sitting over here. just because I can realize you're not a safe person and get the hell away from you, doesn't mean I didn't need help. Doesn't mean I didn't need a safe place to land. I think a lot about my psychosis. and how much it got minimized. truthfully, my husband, he even admitted that he wasn't listening. And it wasn't because he didn't love me, and it wasn't because he didn't think my words matter. He was afraid. He was taking what worked before and trying to apply it to a situation neither of us had experienced before. We were in completely different territory and we had to find something else that worked. And that's something I've thought about a lot since then. When my second baby came along, there was another moment where things felt different. My baby rejected breastfeeding. And that sounds like such a small sentence to some people. For me, it wasn't. breastfeeding was incredibly hard. And now I know it's because every time I would breastfeed my baby, I would have a dopamine depletion, when I couldn't soothe my baby because breastfeeding had been the only way I was able to soothe her, my body had been the solution. My breasts had been the magic trick and suddenly they're not working and I'm being screamed at by my baby. I can't fix it. And it brought me back to my own childhood being screamed at and not being able to fix it, being stuck in rooms, being screamed at because I couldn't read fast enough. that's not my baby's fault. it's not my fault, and at the same time I Admitted I wasn't okay to my husband. And I couldn't figure out how to soothe my own baby not right away. Like I know how to later on, but when you're in the middle of a panic attack, when you're in the middle of your PTSD. You forget your left and right. Even if you know But my husband had already figured out what he could do and he was very good at not having the magic of the titties. he didn't need it. He found ways to comfort her. And for this time when my psychosis was coming back, it was different. I could ask for help without feeling guilty. I could rest. I didn't feel like I had to be at every a doctor's appointment. I took my nutrition seriously. I didn't rush myself to bounce back and I'm still trying to come back even though it's been ten months postpartum and that's okay. Because this time I have my mind. This time I'm kinder to myself. This time my husband has experience. This time my husband knows he's capable. And despite all the conflicting messages the world gives parents about what we're supposed to do, that is the point of my story. Not someone else's story. Mine. And my husband consented to me telling this. He literally edits the show with me, Because his life is not mine to publish simply because I'm married to him. My life isn't someone else's to publish simply because they know me. This distinction matters to me. I can tell you my experience with postpartum psychosis without telling you someone else's story, meaning I can tell you a collection of stories I've heard from different people without naming them. Without telling every single detail. And sometimes the details, they distract us. They can make it easy for other people to demonize them or people turning them into martyrs. at the end of the day for me, with many cases when it comes to psychosis, my heart is breaking. At the same time, I am not the same person I was before experiencing my own psychosis. I have a different lens now. I understand that it isn't as simple as sometimes we try to make it seem to be. I can hold compassion for what someone may have experienced without pretending I know the whole story. I can talk about what I learned without turning another woman into a case study. I can say I don't know what happened to her. I don't know what is happening behind the closed door. I don't know what her diagnosis was. I don't know what her family experienced. I don't know what she consented to. I don't know if she could have consented to. I know what happened to me. My story is enough. Your story can be enough too. You don't need to borrow someone else's tragedy to make your point more legitimate. you don't need their names to make your argument interesting. You don't need a villain to make people care. You don't need to send thousands of strangers towards someone in order to say this issue matters. Maybe that's something we've forgotten. Awareness doesn't have to require exposure. A conversation doesn't have to require a target. Your experiences don't become more valid because you found somebody else's experience that looks similar enough to use as evidence for yourself. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is simply. I don't know enough what happened to them, but I know what happened to me, and that's enough. it still can help someone. It still can make someone feel seen, teach us something, start a conversation without making someone else's life the content. at the same time, I get it. You're allowed to have an opinion. You're allowed to look at situations and think something doesn't feel right here. We're allowed to ask questions. We're allowed to disagree with what we're seeing. We're allowed to have conversations about what might have happened. That's not the problem. The problem is how quickly we turn our opinions into verdicts. I watch people divide themselves into camps. I think we're doing what we do best. The all or nothing jam. If you support her, you're telling your children that it's okay for a mother to murder their babies. When did anyone say that? When did having compassion for a someone become an endorsement of every possible action they may have taken. When did saying I think there is more to the story become I know exactly what happened? Why do we get to make those leaps so casually? I've seen women talk about their situations and say they believe there's more to the story. You know what? They're allowed to think that. I don't have a problem with someone saying, I wonder if there's more happening here. What I have a problem with is when the question immediately becomes a conspiracy theory, Brought to you by I don't know. I don't need a conspiracy theory to make my opinion valid. I don't need to know the secret explanation. I don't need to know what happened behind every closed door. I can simply say I don't know. Then talk about what I do know. I know postpartum psychosis is real. I know severe mental health can dramatically affect someone's perception of reality. I know if I was in her shoes, the punishment enough of losing my babies, I know motherhood can become an enormous pressure. I know there are women who are struggling who don't get help enough soon. I know there are mothers who are afraid to admit that they aren't okay because they've been taught that a good mother should be able to handle everything, right? I think we need to ask some uncomfortable questions about that. I wonder if continuing to move the goalpost of what it means to be a good mom we're making it harder for someone to admit that they are reaching their limit of capacity. I think we don't support mothers as much as we like to believe we do. heck, I don't think we support parents as much as we think we do. I don't mean that as an insult to every individual person who tries to help. I see that in the patterns. I hear it when people talk about their experiences. I've experienced it myself. People will support you when supporting you is convenient. When it's Instagram presentable and sometimes leverage after everything I've done for you during your postpartum, you're mad because you don't want me to share your business after everything I did for you and cleaning your home. When did that become a transaction of you hurt my feelings and you keep minimizing it turn into I really hated it when you helped me during my postpartum. what? I see an opportunity to ask a much bigger question. What does it actually mean to support a mother when supporting her isn't convenient? I have asked myself the question in my own marriage. I want to be fair to my husband here. He's wonderful. He's trying his best. He missed the mark sometimes. Both things can be true. there are moments when I should have gone in and got help sooner. There were moments when I needed to be given time and space to get the help I needed. There were moments when my family needed me, but I needed to repair my mind first. I have to face who I was to my oldest daughter when I was falling apart, and that hurts me. It still hurts me. She needed me, and I also needed to feel safe. Those two truths don't cancel each other out. She needed her mother, and her mother needed help. I wanted to be a mother to her, yet I needed to get my mind back before I could fully show up as one. That is a painful truth. It is also a necessary one. My husband and I were both doing the best we could with the capacity we had at the time. That doesn't mean everything we did was right. It means we were learning. We're still learning about capacity, what capacity means for us as individuals. What it means to recognize when someone has reached theirs. What it means to stop asking, how do we make you keep going and start asking what would allow you to be okay? What would allow you to have more capacity? What do you need to even recharge your capacity? maybe that's part of the conversation I wish we were having, not whose side are you on? Instead, what would it look like if we actually supported mothers before they reached the point of collapse? And at the end of the day, the conspiracy theories might be right. Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe there are things we don't know. or maybe the answer is painfully ordinary. maybe this is what happens when a woman is told to keep going and doesn't get the support she needs. Sometimes that can cost children their lives. I might be wrong. I don't know the entire story. I don't need to know the entire story to care about what could have prevented another mother from reaching that point. That's actually what I care about most. I care about reaching the people who need to hear this. If you're not okay, I hope you trust that you're not okay. I hope you ask for help. I know that's not as simple as saying, just go get help. Getting help can be traumatized. Going to the hospital can be terrifying. Taking time away from your baby can painfully hurt. walking away can make people angry. People tell you you're overreacting. You might feel guilty. You might worry that you're failing. You don't know until you try what kind of help will actually help us. I want you to know something. You know yourself better than anyone does. If you're reaching the edge of your capacity, that matters. If you know you need rest, that matters. If you know you need someone else to take over, that matters. if you know you need professional help, that matters. You don't have to prove that you're suffering enough before you're allowed to ask for support. maybe that's one of the conversations we should be having instead. Because I think sometimes we've gotten so focused on expressing ourselves, we've forgotten to ask whether what we're expressing is actually helping people. or even ourselves. Self-expression can be beautiful. It can be art, it can be music, writing, dancing. designing clothes, humor, it can be telling someone this is who I am. It can be saying this is what I believe. It can be creating something that doesn't exist before you made it. It can be telling your own story. It can be saying this hurt me. I survived this. I don't think this is okay. I want something to change and those stories matter. We need people willing to tell the truth about what happened to them. We need people willing to say this hurt me. And sometimes that's how we recognize harm. We need people willing to say, I thought this was normal until I realized it wasn't. sometimes that's how someone else realizes they don't have to accept this. We need people willing to say I needed help and I didn't get it. Another person might recognize themselves in that sentence and seek help sooner. We need people willing to tell their stories so we can stop normalizing things that should never have been normalized. This is a power of self-expression. Your stories can give someone language for their own. Your art can make someone else feel less alone. Your experience can challenge something we've accepted as normal. Your voice can make an invisible problem visible. That's self-expression doing something. Somewhere along the way, I think we've started confusing being loud with being useful. We've started confusing visibility with impact. We've started confusing outrage with action. And we've started confusing having something to say With having something meaningful to contribute. Not every conversation about injustice helps the people experiencing it. sometimes we're just adding to the noise. Noise can make it harder to hear the people who are needing to be heard. It can bury the person asking for help underneath a thousand Of people arguing about what happened. It can turn complicated situations into Team Edward or Team Jacob. It can turn a human being into a symbol. It can turn someone's tragedy into a morality play. Then we walk away feeling like we did something because we had an opinion. Did we? Did we help someone? Did we change anything? Did we make it safer for someone to ask for help? Did we give someone information they could actually use? Did we listen? Did we make room for people whose lives are actually being affected? Or did we make more noise so they continue to not get the help they need? when it comes to self-expression, I don't think the goal should be to stop people from speaking. I think the goal should become more thoughtful about what we're doing with our voice. The definition of self-expression is pretty straightforward. The expression of one's own personality, emotions, ideas, It's about yourself. You don't need other people's content to make your point valid. It's about communicating who you are to yourself and to other people. It's about asserting individuality. It's about authenticity. you can express yourself verbally. You can write about it. Girl, boy, dragon, you can write whatever you freaking want in your diary. And I get it. If you have trauma because people read your diary and they had the audacity to get mad at you. Rude. You're allowed to say whatever trash you want in a diary, we keep talking about ai slop what about conspiracy slop what about opinion slop what about content slop because you can write you can make music you can dance you can paint you can dress however you want you can create you can disagree you can tell your story you can say what you think You can say what you feel, but when it comes to the point of at someone else's expense, maybe that's content slop. nowhere in the definition of self-expression does it say other people's personal business is yours to exploit and market. That's not self-expression, that's something else. I understand the temptation. You see someone else's story, you see how many views they get. You wanna get in it reminds you of something you experience and you wanna talk about it and you wanna warn people and you wanna make sure nobody normalized what happened, I get it. There are times that I wanna be trauma dumping on my channel. But that's not what I'm trying to build. I'm not trying to add more to the noise. I'm actually trying to help make the noise make sense. And sometimes other people's stories give us language for our own. I get it. But we need to stop using inspiration with plagiarism. You don't need someone else's story. To make yours matter. Yours does. Even if it just matters to you. It matters. And what if we didn't need to make other people's stories the subject at every dinner meal? What if we could say, watching this conversation reminded me of something that happened to me, and then tell your story? What if we could say, I know what postpartum psychosis looked like for me. maybe that was the beginning of postpartum psychosis. Wow. I don't need to shame myself for something I had no control over. I don't. I can't go back and fix what happened. I can, learn from what happened. what I learned was Taking care of myself is a non-negotiable. Taking care of my capacity is a non-negotiable. getting my own oxygen mask on before I put it on anyone else is a non-negotiable. And I think we can say, I don't know whether this person was failed by the people around them. I know what it felt like when I needed help and the people around me didn't understand what I was saying. that's also valid. Now we're talking about something we know. Our experiences, our perspective, our lives. That's powerful enough. Self-expression doesn't need a victim. It doesn't need a villain. It doesn't need a witch hunt. It doesn't need someone else's private life to become the evidence that your feelings are legitimate. Your story is already evidence of what you experienced. Their story might have inspired you to share yours. And maybe that's where I want us to rethink about self-expression. it's not I have the right to say whatever I want about whoever I want. Rather, I have a voice, and what am I going to do about it? Back to the question. What is self-expression? Maybe it's not simply I am allowed to express myself. Maybe a better question is, what am I doing with my voice? And yes. You are allowed to have questions, to be angry, to disagree, to tell your story, to create, to speak. other people are allowed to have boundaries around how their lives are shared too. And I think that's the part we sometimes forget. your freedom to express yourself doesn't require someone else to give up their autonomy. Your story doesn't require another person's story as evidence. Your pain doesn't become more legitimate because you found someone else to blame. Your voice doesn't become more powerful because you made someone else's life louder. Maybe instead of asking, am I allowed to say this? You should sometimes ask, is this mine to say? am I helping someone understand something, or am I helping everyone else become angry? Am I creating awareness? Or am I creating a target? Maybe most importantly, what do I do with my voice? What do I want my voice to do? I don't want us to become afraid of self-expression. I love self-expression. I love people making art because they have something inside of them that needs somewhere to go. Someone finally saying this happened to me. when people say I thought I was the only one. And they find connection. They find people who get it. I love people who want to tell their story and what they thought they had to be ashamed of. l and instead they find out they don't need to be ashamed about who they are at all. I love it when people create something beautiful. Despite the pain that came with it before. I love the person who can say, this isn't normal, and I don't want the next person to think it is. Because when we do this, we create a space for someone who will need us in the future. It may not be today, it may not be years now, it might be long before we posted that, and we might not be around anymore. That kind of self-expression can change lives for generations. It can give people language. It can give people permission. It can make someone feel less alone. It can help us recognize harm. It can help people ask better questions. It can help someone build something better. That's a voice being used. Maybe that's the distinction I want to leave you with. You don't have to be silent to respect someone's privacy. You don't have to know every detail of someone else's story to talk about an issue. You don't have to find a villain to care about injustice. You don't have to turn someone else's tragedy into content to make people care. You don't have to borrow someone else's life to make your own story matter. sometimes you can simply say, I don't know what happened to them. However, I know what happened to me, and maybe that's enough. Your story is enough. Your experience could be enough. Your art could be life-changing. Your questions could be what leads to a domino effect of change. Your voice doesn't need to become louder. I mean, unless you're a loud talker, I get it. Maybe it just needs to become more intentional. And if we could take one thing from all of this, self-expression isn't about having something to say. It's about choosing what you do with what you have to say. And I hope we start choosing carefully. Not because we're afraid of being wrong, not because we're afraid of offending someone, and not because we're supposed to make ourselves smaller. because other people are people too. their lives aren't props. Their pain isn't evidence. Their private moments aren't automatically our content. Their story doesn't belong to us simply because we know it. Before you hit post, before you share the screenshot, before you tell the story, before you add your opinion to the pile, maybe just pause and ask yourself, is this my story to tell? Is this helping? Am I adding understanding? Or am I adding noise? And sometimes waiting to post it until the next day gives you all the clarity you need. for me what motivates me and my self expression is this. What do I want my voice to leave behind? Because we have every right to express ourselves at the same time What we choose to do with that right matters. Whether you leave a comment, tell your story, make something, change your mind, have a conversation or simply sit with those questions yourself. I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, self-expression isn't simply having a voice. It's choosing how you use it. I'll see you in the next episode.