Hi, Permission Granted 👋
Hey there,
Welcome to Permission Granted, a newsletter for those of us figuring out how live our lives the ways we want and also the ways we need. For some of you, this is new. For all of you, welcome here.
Permission granted.
One of the reasons I founded The Assembly was to counteract the information whiplash that dominates our lives. Do this. Don’t do that. Eat this. Never eat that. How is any reasonable person supposed to navigate this and feel okay, let alone good?
We’re not here to make new rules. We are here to share stories and experiences that make us feel real. That happens when I’m sweating in a room with 30 other women. It happens when I listen to someone admit the challenges of starting a business, a non-profit, a family, a movement. It happens when someone else's tiny, magical life rituals become my own.
I force writing to be a daily habit even when it comes out as garbage, because I know it works for Jo Piazza. She’s written eight books. I peddle my legs in downward dog for as many minutes as I can when I wake up because Dara Hart says it puts her whole day on the right track. She does it for a full 11; I've only gotten to 6.
This works when we learn from each other. When you start to notice it, so many women shape their stories by permission. This past week, the two female entrepreneurs I listened to being interviewed about work, Jenn Hyman of Rent the Runway and Christina Tosi of Milk Bar, both talk about permission. Major inflection points in their career came when someone else granted them permission.
The conversation we want to have is about the different ways permission plays out in our lives. The permissions that are internal and those that are external. The permission we give the ones we love. The permissions we don’t give, which is often another way of allowing ourselves to speak up for what we need. The permissions we are allowed to take because of our privileges and the permissions that others can’t.
How does anyone else make this work? How is she doing it? Permission to live as fully as we can is about how we hack our lives and hack our days or maybe just hack the next hour.
Sometimes this email will come from me, sometimes it will be written by others. It will leave you with something to read, something to think about, something to try. I’m happy you’re here. We have permission to do this together.
Molly
P.S. Selected Assembly events (like the return of The Class by TT) are included below. As always, check our schedule page for everything else.
Permission Granted
…to have a real conversation
When people ask you how you're doing, what if you pretended they actually care about your response? This episode of "Hey, Cool Life", a micropod from writer Mary HK Choi about creativity and mental health, is about how to take that question as a chance to bear witness and ask others to do the same.
Why "Tell me about your life" is a much better ice breaker than "What do you do for work?" according to Terry Gross (who knows).
"Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver listened to the world and nature every day, and told us how to honor the "wild, silky parts" inside everything.
"That no one will ever love me just as I am." Samin Nosrat speaks her fears into a microphone. Talking about what we're scared of take courage, honor that.
Burnout (millennial or otherwise) makes us want to retreat inward. Instead, it should make us talk more about how the dominant burnout narrative leaves people behind and about what it is doing to our brains.
"Can you describe your wildest dreams to someone else?" Like everything else, this takes practice too.
And finally, you woke up today. That deserves confetti.