Hi team,
Welcome to your first free newsletter of The Good Chat 2.0! We’ll start with a personal life update, before moving on to a (unexpectedly emotional) voicenote on difficult interactions with harmful men, and finish with a recommendation of something to watch.
Okay lets gooooooooooo!
Life update
I swear to god this last 8 weeks (since I got back from London after my £2,000 COVID trip to isolate in my sister bedroom) has been the first time Jordy and I have really been able to settle in to our new home. The house is finished, we have all our basic needs sorted – Doctors! Vets! Bank! Medicare card! – and we can just sort of… live here, which has been a pretty wonderful experience given we were totally uprooted from January 2022 to July 2022. I’ve been working on a big project (that I think you can probably guess!) and I’m terrified about it, but I’m trying to stay calm and remain tethered to my instincts. Jordy and I have also been wedding planning big time. We are getting married in Western Australia in February 2023 and though we’re having a fairly small, casual wedding (we’d be happy to just go to a registry office but our families have never met so that wasn’t an option!) there’s always more to organise than you think there will be. Thankfully, it feels like we’re now starting to get it under control and I’m actually started to feel excited about it. We’ll be getting married on this coast:
We first considered a civil partnership but there’s really not that much between them, apart from the symbolic – especially given that no fault divorces are now legal. I also do like the idea of reclaiming marriage for myself and changing it to what feels right for me as an individual and as a woman. We’re doing things differently because wedding traditions and expected procedure really feel so arbitrary to me: why are you expected to do something that doesn’t feel authentic just because a load of strangers have done it, especially when it’s rooted in patriarchy and your sublimation? I also feel like the more rules there are, the more I’ll spend the day just worrying about getting things right instead of just… living.
Here’s the main amendments we’ve chosen:
- No religious ceremony, an inclusive celebrant (our soon to be sister-in-law Katie) and to write our own vows. No ‘obey’ here, thanks. And not even any “until death”. I get the idea of loving someone until you die, and I truly hope I am fortunate enough to love Jordy until I die, but I also love the realism and respect of the idea of “as long as this relationship continues to serve us and allow us to bloom and grow” more. A relationship should be something that adds so much to your life, not something you’re obligated into because of marriage. Blair Imani spoke about this when she got married and it resonated with me so much.
- A small group of guests with only people we really love and care for attending
- We’re not changing our names because neither of us want to!
- We are not having bridesmaids or groomsmen, no groups split by gender, just a wedding party of a billion of our mates who can attend horseshoeing around us as we get married
- My dad isn’t walking me down the aisle to ‘transfer me’ to Jordy, in fact we’re not having an aisle, just scattered guests standing on the beach watching. My mum and dad will accompany me.
- I’m not wearing white because I would literally never wear white in regular life?
- We’re not pooling our money and will keep our finances independent as we always have - we have different lives and hobbies and we make different incomes!
- No official speeches
- Instead of a formal reception we’re just having a big family pasta lunch at Jordy’s house where our families can bond, and we’ll have pictures of those we love and have lost on the table with us. This makes me want to cry.
- We’re also having a big pizza party afterwards with all our favourite music including an emo/rock section with Limp Bizkit, Offspring, Blink etc
- The dress code is ‘outshine the bride’
Jordy has been brilliant organising the wedding alongside me, and it’s just another sign that I’m marrying an actual partner. Im also over the moon because ethical and sustainable designer and my pal Lora Gene is making my dress from scratch and that is so incredibly special to me. My party outfit is by Rezek with a bow from Aura bridal wear and will find some second hand shoes. I tried the bow and outfit on recently and loved it!
Soon I’ll be travelling back to the UK (god help me, the flight is just too much) for December (can’t believe it’s the end of the year wtf), to attend a very special wedding, and to do the work I was meant to do in September as well as some school talks and other jobs. I also can’t wait to spend some quality time with my family over xmas, though I am a little nervous about seeing the UK because since I left, I’ve witnessed friends and family struggle so much with the cost of living and the instability. It really feels like so much is crumbling and the impact it’s having on people is heartbreaking.
Jordy is heading to WA for Christmas, and Pea will be spending 10 days with her new friend Emily (someone I met through Instagram) who will be baby sitting her and looking after her over Christmas. Pea will also be hanging out with this little piece of fried chicken who is Emily parents dog (Ahhhhhhhhhh!) and they will both be having Christmas dinners together.
Finding Pea a babysitter was so hard. Since September we called almost 30 dog resorts in Victoria and every. single. one. was booked out with long waiting lists. I guess it’s because this country is so huge and many people who travel home from a city go into a different state which means no animals allowed. Also, COVID hit Melbourne/Naarm super hard and so this Christmas is a special one given many people missed the last two due to infections and previous lockdowns. Given all this, we are so so thankful we found Emily. What a relief. It’s an unbelievable trust exercise to leave your dog with someone (especially for their first hot hot summer in Australia with snakes and spiders!), but we trust her and are so happy for Pea to make a new friend.
Finally, on work bits, I am taking an online facilitation course here in Melbourne by The Man Cave and I really want to complete child safeguard training. I’m keen to do more facilitation and workshops as I miss working with young people so so so much, and prevention really is the best form of harm reduction. This is something I’m going to be working towards in 2023 and it makes my heart warm to think about being able to do that more.
I also have a brand new role coming up that I’m wildly excited about, and I’m going to be announcing it first here, very soon. I’d also love you guys to inform that role going forward and I can’t wait to see what ideas you have for it. Mysterious, I know…!
Finally, I’ll be relaunching my art shop Gina’s Ink Girls with new branding and will be able to fulfil orders in Australia and the UK, which is exciting. That’s coming soon.
That’s all the personal updates for now folks, so let’s get on to….
Thought of the month
I had a challenging interaction last month with a man who was pretty dangerous, fired up, who was clearly in crisis with him masculinity and who couldn’t view me as fully human. I saw it as an opportunity to disrupt his perception of ‘people like me’, but I shouldn’t have. I should have drawn a boundary but I didn’t. It affected me for days afterwards and I felt really hopeless - an experience which I feel emotional about. The main questions I’ve been asking myself are: Why do I see each interaction as an opportunity because of my job? Why do I feel pressure to represent feminists and gender equality work to harmful men? How do I get to a place where those kind of confronting and difficult interactions don’t leave me unsettled for days?
Listen below.
Questions for you: how do you handle the impact of difficult conversations? What do you do to restore yourself after? Is every conversation an opportunity? Is it fine not to challenge misogynistic men’s perception of this movement?
Recommendation Station
I recently watched the first episode of the Stormzy special with Louis Theroux and I thought it was a really brilliant portrait of a man who is starting to value vulnerability. We don’t have a lot of role modelling vulnerability, growth and unlearning from cis men in the public eye, yet Stormzy is quite open and happy to demonstrate what it means to re-evaluate his masculinity and offer vulnerability in the public sphere. I really value him for that, because we need more of it if young men are to challenge their prescriptive ideas of manhood. Give it a watch tonight with ya dinner.
That’s all folks! I hope you enjoyed this first instalment of the free monthly newsletter. This is what it’s going to look like in your inbox each month, and I’ve so enjoyed writing it.
Hugs,
G x
@emmalouisegoodman for close friends :) thanks!
@amyfiddament for close friends! Thanks Gina - love the newsletter and all the work you do xx