We decided that as the tough one, she should play bass while I, the desperate-for-attention one, would be on guitar, and that my little brother, Stephen, the malleable one, would play drums. “Only until we find another drummer,” I promised him, as I attempted to plug my guitar into the wrong part of my amp. Stephen has played the drums since he was five, and is the kind of younger brother every bossy older sister dreams of: talented and endlessly enthusiastic with a very high threshold for pain.
The great tragedy of Crotch was that underneath our sneers and our bravado, we were two sweet girls who desperately wanted boyfriends. But we had issues—issues that we decided were best worked out while drunk, and sometimes naked, on stage. Paula and I, baffled by our lack of gentlemen callers, chose to express our disappointment by writing and singing songs like
Sew Me Up I’ve Had Enough
and by yelling things into the microphone between songs that one evening would inspire an audience member to rush the stage holding a chair over his head with intent to beat us with it.
In spite of ourselves, we quickly acquired quite the following. In less than a year’s time we also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a film about the record industry; wrote, directed, and starred in a music video that got on national television; recorded an EP, got a demo deal with Columbia Records, and even learned a couple more chords. And we did it with full-time corporate jobs and no idea what we were doing. It was fun with a capital “F.”
There’s nothing as unstoppable as a freight train full of fuck-yeah.
If you’ve ever known what it’s like to be in your groove, and are having trouble finding your way right now, think back to your attitude and what your priorities were when you were totally lit up about life, and use them to help give you the clarity and the kick in the rear end you need now.
Here are some nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from the Crotch days that I still find useful:
1. JUST SEE WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH
Life is r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s. It so seriously is—we have no freakin’ idea what we’re even doing here spinning around on this globe in the middle of this solar system with who-the-hell-knows-what out there beyond it. Making a big fat deal out of anything is absurd. It makes much more sense to go after life with a sense of, “Why not?” instead of a furrowed brow. One of the best things I ever did was make my motto “I just wanna see what I can get away with.” It takes all the pressure off, puts the punk rock attitude in, and reminds me that life is but a game.
Yes, we have bigger responsibilities and more pressure as adults, but come on folks, I guarantee you there are countless people with waaaaaaaay more to whine about out there than you who are totally kicking ass because they decided to go for it instead of sitting around in the wet pantload of their own excuses. Take a new approach to what you’re doing and try this on:
I just wanna see if I can start my own successful business; I just wanna see if I can get myself out of debt and make one hundred thousand dollars more this year; I just wanna see if I can lose a hundred pounds; I just wanna see if I can sell one of my paintings for fifty grand; I just wanna see if I can meet my soul mate.
Take the pressure off and get back in on the adventure.
2. LOSE TRACK OF TIME
Have you ever been doing something and suddenly realized that hours have gone by without you noticing? What does that for you? And how often during your day does this happen? When you’re so lost in what you’re doing that you lose all sense of time, you have officially entered the Vortex. You want to get your ass in there as much as possible, so
look at your life and figure out how you can make that happen.
First, figure out the things you get lost in in your business and your personal life. Then figure out how you can be doing more of those things more of the time. Hire someone (no excuses) and delegate the tasks you hate doing. Partner up with someone who’s good at, and enjoys doing the things you’re not that into, so you can be freed up to do more of what you want. If you have to, make massive changes in your business and your personal life to include more time doing what you love. Figure it out. Don’t just hand your life over to your circumstances like a little wuss. You can take your life wherever you want it to go, so grab it by its nether regions and make doing the things you love a priority.
3. KEEP BEING THE BEGINNER
One of the best things about starting a band when you have no idea how to play your instrument is that you don’t care if you stink because you already know you do. Then once you learn how to play, you get all serious, you become overly critical and hard on yourself and don’t let yourself have nearly as much fun anymore. The trick is to let the Beginner live alongside the Expert, instead of pretending you don’t know who she is when she tries to sit with you and your new, cooler, more experienced friends in the cafeteria. The Beginner may be an idiot, but she knows how to party, and if you don’t let her play with you anymore, things risk getting rather droll around here. So hone your skills; take your craft seriously; learn what you need to learn; invest in yourself; practice your ass off; fall down; get up; keep going; get really really really really good at what you do, but don’t lose the fun in the process. Because, like, what’s the point of doing all that work then? The only thing you need to do is do the very best you can. Once
you’ve done that, the only other thing that matters is that you enjoy yourself.
4. LOVE YOURSELF
And the bluebirds of happiness will be your permanent backup singers.
It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
—RalphWaldo Emerson; American poet, essayist, visionary, giver
One day while driving somewhere with my family, we stopped off at a store along the way and told my niece, then five years old, that she could get herself a little sumthin’. She came up to the register with a six-pack of orange Tic Tacs and charmed her way into getting the whole thing, instead of being told to put it back and just buy one.
So we get back in the car and I ask her if I can have a pack, my only intent to teach the greedy little piglet a thing or two about sharing. “Of course,” she says and hands it over. She then asks, in her
itty-bitty five-year-old voice, if my brother and my mom want one too, and hands them over. My niece then takes her remaining three packs and places them on the seat next to her in a pile saying, “And when we get home, this one’s for my brother, this one’s for my sister, this one’s for my mom.” Then she sits there, with none left for herself, and smiles, more excited to give them away than she was when she was told she could buy them for herself.
I shot a confused look at my brother, Stephen, her father, and he mouthed back “freak.” When Stephen and I were her age, we cherished nothing more than the tortured cries of the other. He set my gerbils free in the backyard. I stole his Halloween candy and ate it, piece by piece, sitting on his chest while he screamed. Who was this saintly creature in the backseat and where did she learn that?
As my niece so clearly understood, giving is one of our greatest joys. It’s also one of the most fearless and powerful gestures there is. When we trust that we live in an abundant universe and allow ourselves to give freely, we raise our frequency, strengthen our faith, and feel awesome, thereby putting ourselves in flow and the position to receive abundant amounts in return.
When we’re in fear, we hold on to what we’ve got because we don’t trust that there’s more. We pinch off the energy, we’re scared to share, and we focus on, and create more of, the very thing we’re hoping to avoid, which is lack.
We live in a universe of give and receive, breathe and exhale, live and die, suck and awesome. Each side depends on the other, and each is relative to the other—every action has an equal and opposite reaction—so the more you give, the more you receive. And vice versa.
You may be thinking,
that’s so not true, I know some bitches who do nothing but take and haven’t given a damn thing to anybody, ever
, but receiving has a different energy than selfishly taking, just as smothering has a different energy than giving. Smothering and taking are fear-based
and needy, giving and receiving are full of gratitude and surrendering to the flow.
I know someone who has multiple sclerosis who was told by a mentor to give away twenty-nine things for twenty-nine days as part of her cure. She blew it off for a while, but as her condition worsened, she finally decided to give it a try. First, she gave a phone call to a sick friend to see how she was doing. Then she steadily gave away something every day and she almost instantly found herself more joyful and excited. By the fourteenth day she was significantly better physically, her business started booming, and she went on to create a blog that started a movement with tens of thousands of followers who were also giving things away daily. Her blog ultimately led to a
New York Times
best-selling book called
29 Gifts.
If you want to attract good things and feelings into your life, send awesomeness out to everyone around you. Here are some good ways to get in the give-and-take flow, yo:
1. If you haven’t already, pick one or two causes that have real meaning to you and give to them every month. Give however much time or money you can, but do it consistently so it becomes a habit, so it becomes part of who you are. Even five dollars a month counts.
2. Give one of your favorite things in the world away to someone who would totally love it. And if you can, do it without them knowing where it came from.
3. Leave a dollar more than you normally would every time you tip. Or ten.
4. If someone is being snarky, instead of sinking to their level
and being snarky back, raise them up by giving them the love.
5. Smile, compliment, and crack people up as often as possible.
6. Say yes to invitations that you wouldn’t normally say yes to because you hate to inconvenience the person offering. Take them up on it. Give them the opportunity to give to you.
7. Stop and feel in your body how great it feels when you give and receive; raise your frequency and expect more good things to come your way.
8. LOVE YOURSELF
And everybody benefits.
GRATITUDE: THE GATEWAY DRUG TO AWESOMENESS
When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.
—Anthony Robbins; author, speaker, motivator, life-changer
When I was a little kid, my parents made my brothers and sister and I answer the phone in this very formal way, “Jennifer Sincero speaking,” as if, between fighting over who got to play with the Big Wheel and stuffing balloons down our pants, we were all running our own private concierge businesses. Their friends would gush on the other end of the phone about what a polite bunch the Sincero kids were, and I thought nothing of it until the day I made my very first phone call to a friend, and, upon hearing her answer, gripped the phone in wide-eyed disbelief.
You get to say “Hello?” Do your parents know?!
It was as unthinkable
to me at the time as saying the F-word or sitting down to join my parents for a glass of scotch.
My amazement quickly turned to horror when I realized it wasn’t just that one renegade friend who could answer the phone in such a carefree manner, but everyone, and that my parents were clearly playing some big practical joke on us. Our objections were met with the standard, “When you pay your own phone bill you can answer it any way you like.” So the years passed, our indignation slowly getting watered down by habit.
I don’t remember exactly when the mutiny happened, but eventually we all started answering the phone like normal human beings. I’m going to assume it was around the time of their divorce, when Mom had all four of us mostly to herself, either in, or hovering around, high school, and phone rules got bulldozed in her switch to combat mode.
The demand for manners in general, however, was left firmly standing, and no matter how wild and wasted we got, we always remained those polite Sincero kids: “Can I help you Officer? Thank you, Officer. Yes, sir, that is my marijuana.” Not only are the words “please” and “thank you” ingrained in me like the recipe for my Italian father’s red sauce or the knowledge that it’s not cool to kill people, but being polite just always seemed to be such a no-brainer. Aside from the fact that it makes you feel like a good person, people will usually do what you ask them to do if you’re nice about it, and if you’re not, they won’t. Hello? Which is why it completely baffles me when anyone over the age of five is rude, and especially when they refrain from the thank-you part of the conversation when a gesture is made on their behalf, either by me or other people or The Universe in general.
I don’t know about you, but when someone doesn’t say thank you after I’ve hooked them up, it’s as glaring an omission to me as if they’ve shown up without their pants on. And The Universe feels the same way.
You cut yourself off from the supply of awesomeness when you are not in a state of gratitude.
Having gratitude goes way beyond just having good manners, however. Manners are a form of custom, gratitude is a state of
being
. Anyone can whip out their P’s and Q’s whether they’re feeling it or not, but truly being in a state of gratitude is about having an awareness of, and a deep appreciation for, the many miracles in your life.
Think about how it feels when you get to really thank someone for doing something for you. You feel great for receiving whatever it is you received and for sending thanks out to them, and they feel great for giving you whatever they gave and for being appreciated. Which makes you feel great again. Which makes them feel great again—you could basically spend the rest of your lives passing thank-you notes back and forth. And because it makes you feel good to be in such a state of gratitude, it puts you at a very high frequency and connects you to Source Energy, which puts you in a more powerful state to manifest more good feeling things and experiences into your life.