Episode 177 (Transcript): Going Off-Brand

Episode Transcript

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

Many thanks to listener, Rebecca Wright, for her help in making this transcription.

---

CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of this week's episode is “Going Off-Brand.” 

SH: Hello, Cynthia. 

CW: Oh, yeah.

SH: We’re back.

CW: We're back for season eight. And we're starting out by talking about going off brand. And I love that we landed on this as our title, because is there any bigger brand in my life as an LDS woman than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints?

Like I don't wear, like, I won't wear sweatshirts that say Gap because I'm like, nobody's getting free advertising on this body, but when I look at like - 

SH: but you walk around looking like a Mormon woman, right? 

CW: Yes. Yeah, right. I had the kids, I had the minivan, I baked the bread. I even had a sewing business. I mean, my goodness, I just kind of fit this mold, brand, whatever we're calling it. 

SH: Well, there's a, there's a certain area of Mesa, Arizona that if, when I'm in that area the hairstyles are all the same. And I think, “Oh yeah, this is the Mormon part of Mesa.”

CW: Are you kidding me? 

SH: No. The first time I observed that to someone who lived there, they said, “Oh yeah, this is Provo South. We call this Provo South.”

CW: Provo South. 

SH: And I mean, it just is like, people all look the same. I can't even totally put my finger on it, but man, you can tell that they are Latter day Saints. So we're a brand for sure. 

CW: We're a brand for sure. And now I kind of want to have a whole frivolous conversation about like the external branding, like how we look or something, but that's not what we're showing up to -

SH: It's not what we're talking about today. 

CW: Yeah. I mean, but, you know, really quickly, I was once at Machu Picchu, right, at 8,000 feet in the air, in the Peruvian Mountain, in the Andes Mountains. Hello? Is that right? 

SH: Mm-Hmm. The Andes.

CW: What's the name of that? What's the name of that mountain chain? Anyway, and my husband was wearing a BYU hat, but only had the Y on it. It didn't say like BYU, it just had the Y right? And this other guy came up to us who also had a Y hat on, and he was like, “Oh, Yale?” 

SH: Yeah, that's what I was going to say, could have been Yale. 

CW: Yeah. And we were like, no, B Y U, like the other Y. Anyway, it was just really funny. But still, it just got me thinking that we can be picked out in a crowd. 

SH: Absolutely.

CW: You can't escape our branding. 

SH: No, we can't. And we know that these things imprint very, very deeply in a lot of ways in our lives and in our, like in our psyches, right? The quote “Mormon brand” is a thing. And so when we talk about going off brand today, we're going to be talking about in our spiritual lives more than the outside brand, but it's still – I think either way it would feel like a radical concept. I mean, ask a Latter day Saint woman how hard it is for her to wear a sleeveless top. Like it just feels wrong to you, right, if you've worn garments for many years. And so it's like, it takes some getting used to when things like that change, and it's the same in our spiritual lives. It takes some getting used to when you start to give yourself permission to maybe look at things or practice things differently than you have before. So that's what we're talking about today. 

CW: Hooray. 

SH: We're talking about putting on the sleeveless shirt of your spiritual life, okay?

[Laughter] 

CW: The proverbial sleeveless shirt, or maybe the literal one. You do you. 

SH: You do you, Cynthia. 

CW: That's awesome. Well, why don't you go ahead and officially intro our topic today so we can jump in.

SH: Okay. We have eight pages of notes. We're going to go really fast. 

CW: Oh, sorry about that, listeners. We might go a little long today, but we also haven't been in front of our mics for two ish months, so . . .

SH: Good luck getting us to shut up. 

CW: Uh huh. 

SH: So anyway, I've talked so much on this podcast about how our family has moved so much.

CW: Yes.

SH: And so you would think that I would be an expert at that, like you'd think I would have learned to do it better. But actually, the last time that we moved as a family, we set our movers high count box record. 

CW: You mean for your family or this company? 

SH: For this company. 

CW: Oh! [Laughter]

SH: They'd never moved anyone with as much stuff as my family had. 

CW: Oh my goodness!

SH: Yes, they had to keep - I don't know if you've ever had a corporate mover, I mean like a professional, but they use these colored stickers that go on your boxes.

CW: Oh! 

SH: And so everything, like, if you're green, this is one of the ways that the moving company keeps track of all your stuff. Everything has a green sticker on it. Well, they had to keep starting over with new colors on [00:05:00] this move because we had so much stuff, Cynthia. 

CW: This is fascinating. 

SH: I know. It was terrible on the other end, unpacking all of that stuff. Let me tell you that I have collapsed more moving boxes than probably anyone else that I'll ever know. But we were really attached to our stuff and I've thought a lot about why that is. And I think in part, It was because we did move so much, we loved taking our world with us, right?

It was comforting to be able to rebuild our home wherever we were, and to have it kind of feel the same. Also, I was a working artist and it takes stuff to make stuff, so I'm going to defend all of the stuff that they had to pack in my studio until my dying breath. I had to have a lot of stuff. So we were not, We were not really well positioned to lead the kind of nomadic lifestyle that we led.

But when it came time for my husband and I to move without children for the first time, a significant down size was necessary. And so in between when the moving estimator came to assess how long a move is it going to be, what size of truck, all of that, in between that and the day that they actually loaded the truck we dropped over 5,000 pounds of stuff.

CW: Oh my gosh. 

SH: We got rid of so much stuff, Cynthia. 

CW: Wow. 

SH: And then when we got to Arizona, we still had approximately 50 percent too much stuff to fit in our house. 

CW: You were proud of yourself and then you weren't. 

SH: We were so proud of ourselves and then the movers kept bringing things off the truck and they were all looking at each other going, “Where are they going to put all this stuff?”

CW: I'm so sorry. 

SH: Where do you even want us to set this stuff? Yeah, it was terrible. It was a horrible realization that we ended up needing this giant storage unit for like the next 10 years that was so packed to the rafters, we could hardly close the door on it. So, the shedding has continued. We're out of the storage unit now, I'm proud to say, but we still have a storage room in our house that's packed to the rafters and we're still going through stuff.

I have to say, I have never regretted getting rid of things. 

CW: Really? 

SH: I've never gotten rid of something and then later said, “Dang, I wish I still had that thing.” 

CW: I love that. 

SH: Yeah. I just feel lighter. And it's like the older I get, I want to feel more in control of the things that are in my home and the things that I surround myself with and the things that I choose to keep, right? It's like I feel somehow - now without so much stuff with all my stuff stripped away -  I feel more in touch with the essential parts of myself and of my life. And I feel like that's a big part of the work of the age that I am right now is sort of looking at everything in my life and reevaluating what has really mattered to me and understanding what hasn't mattered, and then figuring out what I want to carry with me the rest of the way.

CW: Yeah, for sure. 

SH: But this has required big work, both in sorting through stuff and big work in the interior parts of my life, and that includes my faith life. When it comes to church, for me, there has been a lot of stuff to toss and a lot of stuff to keep. And I'm not sure I'm ever going to quite be done going through and classifying things. Cause also it will change. I expect that that list will continue to change. And you and I have both read Sarah Bessey's latest book Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. 

CW: [whispers] So good. 

SH: It's so good. So I'm going to quote from it a couple of times in today's episode, and I'm going to start with this one. And she says, “An evolving faith doesn't mean we burn down everything that was once precious to us. There is something between everything and nothing. We aren't required to toss everything we were taught. or given as worthless or useless or even toxic as we grow and change, becoming more fully ourselves. There is room to honor and hold space for the precious and the meaningful. Even as we evolve in our beliefs, our homes, and our lives, it's okay to bring things with you.”

CW: If that isn't kind of a theme for what we've been doing in front of these microphones for four years, I don't know what is. 

SH: Exactly. Yes. We're trying to figure out - we're in that process of trying to figure out what things we want to bring with us. So today we want to talk about how a spiritual journey or spiritual life is about more than just living in reaction to the church organization or to the experiences that we've had there. Because I feel like a lot of women arrive in the At Last You Said It space and they're in this period of intense reaction to things. And there's got to be a way to shift gears and start to move forward kind of under your own power, rather than just in reaction to something else.