Photo/Ashley hennefer
Women helping women: Ashley Clift Jennings, Mandi Holden and Sharon DeMattia of Livingthebliss.
Livingthebliss is Reno’s newest girl power movement by Ashley Hennefer
It’s hard to be a woman these days. Before you open your mouth in protest—yes, it’s fair to assume that many women prefer living now than during any other period in history. Modern women can choose to have careers, to become educated, to decide if, why and how they want to start families. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In the controversial article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, written by Atlantic reporter AnneMarie Slaughter, she attributes much of the stress women face in their lives to the unstable economy and a lack of emotional support for women’s life choices. Women 6 | RN&R |
JUNE 6, 2013
seek self-sufficiency and stability, families and freedom. It’s possible to be happy and successful, she writes, but something has to give. And until the world becomes more sympathetic to these plights, women need to prioritize their happiness. But local entrepreneur Ashley Clift Jennings is tired of women sacrificing their well-being for the sake of societal expectations. “It’s time to cut through the bullshit,” says Jennings, the founder of Livingthebliss, an organization that plans events to help women “explore emotional topics collaboratively, using creativity, and lots of love.” “Women often don’t take the time to just grieve.” After several years of working with female entrepreneurs through her businesses Girlmade and Lean Crafting, Jennings felt that women in Northern Nevada were lacking an outlet to express themselves and process complex feelings in the comfort of other women. These emotions, she says, were holding women back from “unlocking their potential.” For Jennings, Livingthebliss began out of personal need. After getting married at 25 and helping her husband raise two children,
she never got a chance to process how she felt after dropping out of graduate school in Washington and relocating to Reno. Her parents’ divorce after 30 years of marriage added to the existing stress. Over time, she wrote on her website, other personal issues turned into “pretty little boxes” of grief that eventually began taking a major toll on her physical and mental health. And so, for Jennings, “there was nothing left to do but to start unwrapping the boxes.”
C om mon thre ad s Jennings says that the word “grief” often confuses people. She and collaborator Mandi Holden, author of the blog Realology, define it as the loss of a relationship—which could be “a relationship with another person that we don’t take time to grieve, or a bunch of little things, or the relationship with yourself,” Holden says. Through Livingthebliss, Jennings and Holden hope to provide women with better tools for dealing with these changes in people’s lives. Holden refers to it as “modernizing the quilting circle.” Traditionally, quilting circles were female-centric spaces where women would, yes, quilt, and discuss their lives. Holden
also dealt with personal issues before finding the strength to connect with others in the same predicament. “I felt like my life was not having a purpose,” she says. “But it’s important to catch that stuff before you move on. Women tend to put those needs on the backburner to tend to others before themselves.” Sharon DeMattia, a fellow organizer, agrees. Daunted by the prospect of getting older, DeMattia—also a healthcare expert and the founder of The Art Inside You—decided to embrace the rest of her life with open arms. But before she was able to realize that, DeMattia says she went through an intense grief process—dealing with the loss of her youth. She found solace and motivation in personal improvement. The Art Inside You means that “art is imperfect, personal and all about connections,” she says. “It’s about owning everything good and bad. And you have to look at it, and you’ve got to own it. It’s a beautiful thing just like all works of art, and we are all worthy of display.” This is a hard concept for many women to understand and embrace, she acknowledges. “We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We’re expected to handle it all, supporting everybody else, let it go. But it’s OK to want to live my
