Who Is Girl Out of Order?

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I cannot believe I am recording my inaugural podcast for Girl Out of Order. If it sounds like I'm screaming, it's because I am screaming. Girl, I cannot tell you how long this dream has been on my heart. And I just have to pinch myself that I am finally taking the big leap and launching my Girl Out of Order podcast.

The purpose of my first podcast is twofold. First of all, I'm going to introduce myself and tell you what the heck I think I'm doing running a podcast and why you should even give me a listen.

The second and much more important part of this first podcast is to cast the vision of what a Girl Out of Order is, and where we're going to go in this podcast.

My head, heart and spirit are so full of ideas, and vision. And I'm just beside myself. And frankly, if I'm being super honest, I'm not really even sure where to start. So I'm taking imperfect action, and I'm just jumping. So bear with me because I gotta be real.

The Girl Out of Order podcast is going to be authentic, no one will ever be able to make the claim that I am fake or mass produced or overly edited. On the contrary, I'm going to bet that there will be people who wish I was a tad bit more edited, and a little bit more controlled. But that's exactly the point of the Girl Out of Order podcast, I am done editing myself, and mass producing some kind of woman that fits other people's expectations.

I'm here. I am beautifully broken. I'm a wonderfully chaotic blessing.
And I'm just going to be real, start to finish.

And if I ever let you down in that regard, if you feel I am being inauthentic or not real, like I've promised, call me the hell out. Because I'm doing this for one reason…I want to serve you. I want to serve beautiful, strong, amazing, exceptional women who may not even know that about themselves.

So if I do that by overly editing and packaging my message that I am failing right out of the gate. Because we're in this together. I have by no means arrived, I am in progress. I am in process, and I am perfectly imperfect. This is going to be a journey we take together. Yes, I'm your teacher. I'm your guide. But only in so much as you're joining me on this journey.

I have a lot of things on my heart to share. I have a lot of purpose that has come out of a tremendous amount of pain in my life. I want to be an inspiration. But I want this to be a mutual relationship where we inspire each other. And we form a community without comparison, where we form a community in which we don't let our sisters rest on their laurels or sit in their shit. Where we love them well, and challenge them to grow. That's what Girl Out of Order is about.

What does it mean to be a Girl Out of Order? Well, as you know from my introduction, I'm a lawyer. And I'm not just a lawyer. I'm a family law/divorce lawyer. So that's like the lawyer who's chosen quite possibly the most exhausting and heavy area of law possible. I actually didn't even choose it. It chose me.

I went to an interview as a stay-at-home mom wanting to dip my toes back in the legal profession. Thinking I was interviewing to be a part-time Personal Injury Attorney. I didn't really want to practice personal injury law, but I wanted to do something part-time. Because inside of me, I had a little bit of restlessness. I'd been home for 10 years with my daughters and I'll get into that in a little bit.

So I wandered into this interview just hoping that I could remember my name and not use the word party. During my interview. Yes, that was one of my greatest fears. The interview went amazing. I won them over somehow and in the middle of the interview found out it was for a family law attorney position, to say I was a little bit shocked and taken aback is an understatement. When I look back now I cannot help smiling and laughing and high-fiving God because he knew, he/she, whatever you want to call it, higher power doesn't really matter.

God to me. I'm gonna use the word God, deal with it, because that's me being real. I know that God had an absolute clear plan that I could not possibly see. Frankly, I couldn't even really see one step in front of me. So I got the job, I got a job as a three day a week, part-time family law attorney with absolutely zero clue what I was doing. And it was baptism by fire.

So I'm a family law attorney. And yet I'm done with that being my everything, it is a consuming profession. And because I give absolutely every part of me to what I do in this profession, as a family law attorney, I'm just breaking down. And there's such a huge part of me that is ready for what is next. And I'm going to describe it this way. I think this is the best description of my vision for my future. And this podcast is a part of it.

I have spent myself being the hero, mostly for broken women and helping them find their voice and their identities again. And now I want to transition to the other side of that process. And I want to now inspire, encourage and really fiercely challenge women to become their own damn heroes, their lives are their own, their healing, they're growing, they're reinventing themselves, I don't need to be their hero anymore.

I need to teach them and train them how to do that for themselves. So I'm moving from the destruction process to the reconstruction process. Maybe call it process, maybe call it part of the process, however you refer to it, I want to start focusing the majority of my energy on the rebuilding, the reconstruction, the reinventing, you're going to figure this out pretty quickly.

I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of most words that begin with our “RE”, reinvent, reemerge, I have like three or four pages in my journal of “RE” words. I don't know why. I'm still trying to figure that out about myself. But you'll quickly pick up on that.

So what am I about as a Girl Out of Order? I'm a lawyer. So I super love words, really, really deeply love words, but I love playing on words. So we've all seen if we've watched any kind of legal shows that have courtroom dramas, where the judge deems you out of order, if you haven't, go with it, trust me, it's a thing.

And as a female attorney, even in 2021, I'm still looked at as “out of order” if I raise my voice, or if I get intense, or if I say the exact same damn thing, that the male attorney right next to me just said, in the same tone of voice, I'm out of order. He's strong and powerful. And what a great advocate and zealous advocate for his clients.

So I thought that would be just about as perfect a name for this podcast as possible. But let me be clear, not a legal podcast, not here's your attorney, please do not submit to me family law questions or legal questions of any kind. As much as I love you. And I'm sure those questions are important. It's not my jam for this podcast. And I'll be again pretty blunt. I'm not answering them. I'm just not. It's not what I'm here for. I will lovingly and graciously say at one time. Please seek an attorney. I'm not your girl for that.

So I'm a Girl Out of Order. I'm not just a female attorney, which still is surprisingly difficult to be treated the same even in the year 2021. But I got tattoos and a nose ring. And I'm kind of irreverent and I sort of just don't always toe the line as far as you know, buttoned down profession. What you see is what you get. And in the male-dominated and stuffy profession, like the law, it doesn't always sit well, especially with the men in black robes that make the decisions and respond to me in the courtroom. I live in a small county outside of Chicago. I live in a northern Illinois county outside of Chicago and yeah, it's 2021.

And I think we've got four female judges out of a ton of them. But ironically, despite the fact that the vast majority of cases involves one man and one woman, meaning there's a 50/50 chance of a gender being In a divorce situation, all of our family law judges are men. And I just think that's crap. I think it's unacceptable.

There's no female perspective sitting on the bench. And as a strong and powerful and outspoken, just a little bit irreverent, female attorney, I'm out of order. And I'm super okay with it. Unless it hurts my clients case. But we'll get into that another time. So that's the legal part of it. I thought it was a fun play on words.

But as I started to really dig deeper into what that means, to me, and what it means to be out of the norm, let's put the “order” word aside. Out of the norm. Not fitting the mold. Not really just fitting in.

I started to really birth this vision of reaching women, as many as I can, from every walk of life, my dream, and I'm just going to speak it because if I don't speak it, then it just stays stuck inside. Like I'm constipated. We'll call it dream and or vision constipated. I don't know, gross word, but it's a gross thing to keep your dreams inside.

So I'm going to speak out loud and proud.

My vision, what I truly believe I am designed to do is to get my message out there, across the world. I'm not stopping. I'm not stunting my growth. If it doesn't happen, then it wasn't meant to be. But it sure as hell will not be because I didn't try. And I didn't believe I believe so strongly that this message has to go out into the universe as far and wide as it can.

And here's why. Women have so much more in common than they have differences. But we lose sight of that. We just don't seem to prioritize our commonalities. And I'm going to generalize, so please don't send me a nasty message. I'm owning the fact that this isn't a scientific or data-based comment. But I believe that women are the absolute worst enemies of other women. When I say in my intro, that I don't want you to deny a single part of your beautiful self in the quest to fit in. I mean it.

The sad part is, it is more often than not other women that create those expectations and modes, in which we try to contort ourselves, and it's got to stop. Whether you're on the side of doing that to other women, or whether you are doing the contorting, you're “The Contortionist”.

Have you ever been to a circus? I mean, seriously, what in the literal hell happens when that person puts themselves in a box and their limbs go away? Ways that they should never go. And it makes you want to throw up and everybody goes, oh, oh my gosh, that's gonna hurt. We all have that reaction to contortionists. I'm gonna take anything away from them, because clearly, they got something going on, I can't understand. But think about your gut reaction to seeing something like that. That's what we do every day.

As women. We may do it in small ways. We may do it in spectacular ways. But we can talk ourselves so often into little boxes, in which we were never designed to fit. I want to be a catalyst for releasing women from this devastating pattern in their lives. I have lived it, I still battle it. I'll be battling it alongside you. But I have, I gotta say, what I've been through, in particular since about 2012 has grown me in ways I never ever imagined and honestly didn't even know I needed to be grown.

But today as I sit here in 2021 I'm gonna say this. I absolutely freaking love the woman I am and the woman I'm becoming. That may sound arrogant. You may have a reaction to that where you go, Oh, wow, that's okay, because I see all these things about you, Christine. And then there's these things you need to do. You need to be getting your shit together. We're here. I'm a hot freaking mess. I'm a Tasmanian devil, I have a T shirt that literally says I am sunshine mix of a little hurricane.

I'm not living in self deception Girls, come on, I have so much shit to work on. But if I could sit here and say I didn't have shit to work on, I'd be like walking on the streets of golden heaven because that'd be that would mean my journeys done. If you were still breathing, and if you woke up on the right side of the ground, you have shit to work on.

But what I want to teach you in this podcast, and I know this is going to be awesome. I'm so excited. So excited to see the change that's going to happen. What I want to teach you, and I hope you're listening is that you can simultaneously have a lot of shit to work on and be aware and in process and freaking love who you are.

Wow, if we had to wait till we get our shit together to love who we are, we might as well just throw in the towel and grab a beer and go sit in the chair. Because that ain't never gonna happen. I have spent far too many years perhaps even a couple of decades. Not understanding that and waking up in the morning and hating who I was looking in the mirror and even if I didn't say it verbally, saying to myself, you're so ugly and stupid. Why can't you figure this out? Nobody respects you. Nobody loves you. You can't do this because you need to. You need to do these things. You need to be like her. You need to schedule yourself this way. These are years I'll never get back. These are my kids. My kids childhoods that I will never recover and it has to stop.