Magic Eye: Ideas That Changed Me
#1: How Girls' Teenagehood Involves a Loss of Self
I’m going to write a short series of posts about ideas that have had a big impact on me. These ideas have often been comparable to the Magic Eye posters that everyone seemed to have on their walls in the 1990s, which, if you found the right way of looking at them, revealed an image that it was then impossible to un-see. In fact, Magic Eye produced a book called ‘A New Way of Looking at the World’. The ideas I’m going to write about are those that not only changed the way I looked at the world, but they also made it almost impossible to un-see the new reality they revealed. And so I’d love to share them with you.
The first idea I’m going to look at is one that I came across in October 2020, when I was reading two books, one after the other, while writing my third book In Her Nature: Dana Crowley Jack’s Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (1991), and Lyn Mikel Brown & Carol Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (1992). The idea is deceptively simple, as are many game-changing ideas. In fact, it wasn’t until I was well into the second chapter of Meeting at the Crossroads, that I suddenly stopped and thought ‘hang on a minute; that was REALLY important’ and turned back to this passage, in the introduction:
