What if there’s nothing to fix? What if you could just, you know, be yourself - whatever that looks like today?
When I told people that this week’s guest was none other than adrienne maree brown - the excitement level was off the charts. adrienne maree brown is the author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, among other works, and she’s instrumental in opening conversations about bodies, power, grief, and change (personal and collective).
This week, it’s all grief - and it’s all love. There is nothing to fix, and there is plenty to change.
In this episode we cover:
We're re-releasing some of our favorite episodes from the first 3 seasons.
Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
Related episodes:
Book bans, grief, and love: what do these have to do with social movements? Malkia Devich-Cyril
Is There Any Good News on Climate Change? With Bill McKibben
Coming Home to Yourself with Alex Elle
About our guest:
adrienne maree brown is the author of wildly influential books including Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us and Pleasure Activism, plus the novellas Grievers and Maroons. She is a social media meme queen, writer, podcaster, musician, and movement facilitator based in Durham, NC.
Find her at adriennemareebrown.net and on Instagram and Facebook.
About Megan:
Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief
Additional resources:
Boundaried in Love with Prentis Hemphill and adrienne maree brown
“The Pleasure Dome” by adrienne maree brown, Bitch Media
Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here.
Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You're Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
Books and resources may contain affiliate links.
When you're avoiding grief, it always feels like it's going to be way too much to experience, and I can't promise that it isn't. You know, not everyone survives grief, but I do know that for most of my life, when I have turned towards grief, I have been able to move through it, and it has been a way to love my people.
This is it's okay. That you're not okay, then I'm your host, Megan Devine. This week on the show, Adrian Marie Brown That is Right, Everybody, meme queen and author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, among other books, joins us to talk about grief, love, the past, and the future settle in Everybody. This very special guest is coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together. This show is not a substitute for skilled support, for a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, So I have followed today's guest on Instagram for a long time. Her meme selections are stellar, and if you know her, you know what I'm talking about. Adrian Marie Brown is the author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, among other works, and she's instrumental in opening conversations about bodies, power, grief, and chain, both personal and collective. When I told people that I was going to talk with her, the excitement level was off the charts. So let me set this episode up for you. I was feeling a little nervous before our time together, so just before our meeting time, I listened to a meditation from Prentice Temple, which I will link in the show notes from a conversation that Prentice had with Adrian. In that meditation, Prentice guided people to breathe through the sides of their ribcage to explore their width, and just that phrase explore your width was so helpful and so grounding to me, and it actually turned out to be the perfect precursor to this conversation taking up space in ourselves and in the world. I mean, if you think about like breath work or breathing meditations, we often think in terms of grounding and stretching right that vertical access. But how often are we encouraged to really explore our width, the true breadth of our presence and our experience. In this conversation, Adrian and I move back and forth between the personal, the body's experience of grief and the communal, the collective body of grief. We move back and forth in time too. Ancestral grief is kind of unspoken, like not out loud, but it is in there in mentions of black history and family stories. We sit in the present with all of its heartbreak and its choice points, and we visit the future, the long game, the very far off world. It all just reminds me so much of the cadence of prentices meditation, like contract expand time space, taking up space. As you will hear Adrian say, it's all grief and it's all love. There is nothing to fix, and there's plenty to change.
Now.
We didn't even get to touch on pleasure activism or emergent strategy of Adrian's popular books, but it's all in there. It's all a part of who she is. We do discuss her fiction book, Grievers, which is a story that explores a pandemic through the eyes of her protagonist Doone. It's a gateway to talking about love and grief and legacy and imagining what's possible. I don't want to give too many spoilers away for that book, so be sure to pick it up at your favorite bookseller. Also, don't miss Adrian's vision of education in the future that we get into in this podcast. If we could just do that, just be that vision that she shared with us, so much would change. And I'm getting ahead of myself as I often do when I'm super excited about what's to come. So all of that and much more coming up right now in my conversation with Adrian Marie Brown, Adrian, I am so thrilled to have you here with me, with us.
I'm glad to be here.
I was telling you before we got rolling that I've spent the morning listening to you and watching you on video and just I want to start from just appreciating thank you, you and your presence in the world. It meant, ah, I didn't mean to start crying right from right away. But here we are, but like, but here we are. I mean, this is this is kind of the medicine of you and your work that kept coming to me as I was sleeping in your language and your word and your presence.
You know, Megan, I have to tell you that I was looking at my calendar today because today is a day that I would also say, like, I'm not really okay, and I've been like very emotional. I recently lost a good friend and just kind of spun my whole life around, you know, as it does. And and then I looked and I saw I was like, oh, it's okay, you're not okay.
Okay, well here we are.
And then I was looking into you and and your losses and your life and your work, and I just, you know, deep bowels to you for what you've been building with your grief and your heart.
That's what we do, I think that's what we do.
That is what we do. Yeah, And that message is so simple right that it's okay to be okay. One of the one of the things that I drew from you was that question of what if there was nothing to fix?
What if there's nothing to fix? You know, my friend I always mentioned this. I got this from my friend spent A Kondawala, who was one of my teachers in my somatic journey, which was basically ten years of learning to return to my body. And part of what's not okay right now is my body. And part of what I've been noticing is I'm like, oh, I keep trying to put my body on a back burner while I go through life. And even though I know that's not how anything works, you know, there's a way that I do that. And then it's great that you're telling your reminding me that I that there's nothing to fix, because whenever I then turn my attention back to my body, I'm like broke, broken, broken, broken, you know, nothing is functional. And then it's like, oh, no, there's nothing to fix. There are ways that I can be more gentle with the living creature that I've been tasked with stinging through this lifetime. And you know, bodies and back burners just don't really mix. So there's something I have to do. I have to shift the metaphor for how I'm being in my body right now. And yeah, then nothing to fix is actually a big part of it. It's like, yeah, I'm grieving, Yes'm I'm my life is very full. Yes, I'm a little uprooted as part of life.
You know, there's something really subtle in here, that idea that there is nothing to fix, but there are things you can change.
Yes.
I think that's where a lot of people get hung up. Right, If there's nothing to fix, then this is just what it is and there's there's nothing to shift. How do you navigate that subtlety?
Well? I think one thing is that I'm like everything that is is there's some kind of balance already happening because all these things coexist. You know, I was putting my food away before coming to talk with you, and I was like having the thought that the same god or creator of the miraculous and the beautiful and the wondrous and the mermaid, jellyfish, whatever, you know. I went to see The Little mare Maid this weekend, so I was just like, oh my gosh, you know, the same goddess of the ocean and stars and everything magnificent is also the god of like mosquitoes and bug bites and cancer, and like trying to old that when I don't like that something is happening, or when I feel discomfort or grief or rage, that there's something beyond my comprehension in terms of the order of all things. And I think that, particularly when it comes to human beings, so much of what our speed up to is learning how to harmonize and learning how to be in relationship, Like if I was, if I was, you know, trying on for the moment, like well, why humans, Like why would you make humans? Why why would humans need to evolve? What is the purpose of something that can reason? It would be to have a species that gets to play with choosing right relationship and really putting a lot of intention and energy into what it means to have this gift of aliveness and sentience, like ultimately moving towards love, not in the simply romantic sense, but in the really massive, interconnected, my celial way, like love, love, love, you know, that big, big, all connectedness. And so then when something happens that I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. Why how does my friend just die all of a sudden that just doesn't make any sense. I can't I can't reconcile that with miraculous nature of all things. But then, since my friend passed, I have been feeling his presence and his clear, energetic message to me is about the interconnectedness of all things and the peace that exists just beyond the flesh and the completion. There's just like, oh, there's just completion to each experiment, and it's not in our hands necessarily. So yeah, I'm kind of sitting in that place where I'm like, there's nothing to fix, but there are things to learn, and as we learn them, we don't have to keep learning them over and over again. Oh, we learned with polio how to navigate that in the human body.
You know.
One of my favorite authors is Octavia E. Butler, and in one of her novel series, they have figured out how to harness cancer, which is very important to me. You know that they've harnessed it and figured out how cancer just becomes this generative for it. And I'm really interested in that because I have so many people in my life who are in that dance with cancer, and so many who it feels like, are being stolen because of cancer, and we're living on an earth right now that has a lot of conditions that seem cancerous and cancer producing. So I'm like, what do we do with that? You know, for me, imagination is the place where I build that bridge between looking at the world and seeing that things need to change, but also looking at myself and saying, there's nothing to fix here. I am the outcome of the world I was born into, and I am the alchemist for the world that I want to generate.
I love this. You just unlocked something for me in like sovereignty and agency, right, that you can look at just speaking personally here and not collectively globally, but like personally, you can look at I am a product of all of my experiences, all of my relationships, everything that I've learned about myself to my self and myself to the world. And it makes sense that I am anxious around here. It makes sense that I lose my temper. It makes sense that this, this, and this right. Yeah, it's not that those are things to fix, but it's about having that gentleness with self. Yeah, to say, I am a product of everything that I have lived, And where can I bring agency and sovereignty?
Yeah? And what conditions would I want to shift? Right?
So, I was born into a generation that was spanked and highly disciplined, and where I was told to be very quiet about what I was feeling, and my parents were very loving and supportive and encouraging and inviting my magic. And still generationally that's how children were situated, and there was a very clear set of norms that I was supposed to occupy. Now, my sister is raising three kids who are all hitting their teenage era, and it is fast to see what we have all made subtle and not so subtle shifts in how we're aunting and parenting and grandparenting and adulting around them that encourage them not to be quiet, not to sit on their discomfort, not to worry about physical punishment or really any kind of you know, they're not punitive. They're not being raised in a punitive environment, and it means that things happen which are shocking. Sometimes, you know, they'll say stuff and we're all looking over my dad or look at my mod like, I mean, how are we going to deal? That's intergenerational moment. And then we all survive that moment and we're like, oh, it's okay. They're just being true to themselves and they're not hiding that they know about these things they know about the world, and they get to celebrate, you know, the aspects of themselves that they're most excited about, and then they're going to create next level conditions for the generations that come after them. So it's always more and more freedom hopefully in the journey.
Yeah, and that idea that we get to see evolution happen in a way that there is always an unfolding relatedness if you like, I keep having this this image of like if you get in that driver's seat of your own life, which is such bump bumper stick er talk man like sorr, but if you if you get to that right, like, it isn't about I think sometimes, especially when we're talking about grief related to death, it's like you needed to learn a lesson here, which like what kind of rude, reductive bullshit is that what I hear you really saying embracing is the the multiplicity of it.
The multiplicity and because there, you know, I always feel the dout that it's like there's dual and then multitude multitude multitude, right, So I'm like, there's patterns and I do think we're meant to learn from patterns. So I'm like, there's probably a massive pivot we do need to make in response to cancer, and a massive pivot we need to make in response to suicide, and a massive pivot we need to make in response to massive gun violence. Because these patterns of death are teaching us something at a species level about how committed we are to protecting the miracle of aliveness. But at an individual level, my job is to climb out of any of these constructs I've been placed in and really figure out what to do with the humanity that I have been given right, which is you know, infinite and also finite because I will not live forever, and so my life will just be what I do in this period of time for the folks who are aware at this level, you know, I often think like, who knows what happens at the next level, and that mystery actually gives me spaciousness, you know, it helps me to be like, there's something more that happens beyond the body. But while you're in the body, you can do a lot of things, and not every single thing. I keep thinking about this because most of my adult life I has spent in social justice work very explicitly hands on trying to figure out how do I support frontline organizers to bring about justice for blackness, for reproductive justice, for the climate, for how do we get in there and fix this society right? So for me to say there's nothing to fix, it's very radical inside, you know, it's hard for me to rocket right. And what I have come to is the organizing can't be about manipulation. It can't be about forcing someone else's hand. There has to be something about living fully and becoming compelling to others because of how I can connect with others. And so that's what I'm sitting in now. You know, a lot of my work now is creative. It's song, it's fiction, it's poetry, it's spells. But it's like, what is the truest sound If I was a bell, what is the truest sound that I can make? That's the only sound I need to focus on making. You know, that's mine, And I think everyone has something like that. But the constructs of gender or race or class or what nation you're born into, there's all these things that I think shape us to I don't have a shape. They confuse us. They confuse us about understanding what our particular purpose is, what our callings are. I think a lot of life, especially I'm in my forties now, so I think a lot of getting to this point was figuring that out, like what is my bell? What is ringing in me? And then now hopefully I get some time to ring as loudly as possible.
I love this idea that there is a true sound and a true shape, right, Like if we think about the way that sound waves travel, and somebody's going to tell me I'm incorrect in my metaphor here, but right, you know that that it's all those ripples, right, It's all that those ripples go out and you get echoes back, right, and that echo back tells you about the shape you're in and the sound you're making.
Yeah, right, I mean we're like the bad part of us. I think that, like all the other creatures that exist, we can learn from them. I'm like, aren't we also at least emotionally ecolocating?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, because I like, I mean this, one of the phrases in it's okay that you're not okay? Is you know life is an a vending machine. It's call and response that's right, right, and that is that echo location of where can I come into right relationship with myself? And so much of your work is about care for self and boundaries for yourself. One of the videos that I was watching before we met you talked about your sobriety in self sabotage or sobriety from self sabotage. That's right, and that that is that that's a boundary, it's you can you tell me what you mean by that.
I think that there's a lot of things that I've started to understand or sabotaging behaviors in life like ways that you're like, oh, here, I'm trying to move towards this, this is what I want, but I'm doing exactly the opposite, or I'm doing something that's going to have the effect of moving me in the opposite direction. And some of those are things that we think of, oh, drinking, you know, I'm drinking to the level of alcoholism, or I'm high all the time, or I'm taking things that really have a negative impact on my body, or I'm not stretching, or I'm doing these things. I'm like, this is sabotaging my goal for being healthy and mobile and present, etc. And I think for a long time I've been like, well, you only get sober if you're drinking, or if you're using drugs, or if you're doing something like that. But for me, it's more of like a whack a mole. My sabotaging behavior will just adapt and adapt and adapt and adapt and adapt. Right, So I have to sort of step back and look at the larger pattern and say, oh, I say I want to be writing all the time, and I just changed, change, change, change the things that keep me from writing. And it can be stuff that looks great, like being very productive and scheduled, you know, But I'm like, if I'm overly scheduled, I can't the muse can't get in the door, you know. But if I'm overly high, the meuse can't get in the door. But if I'm externalizing all my interest into other people, the way that I used to fall in love and date was really to like take my heart and just put it in someone else's box and just be like take care of that. Oh my god, you're not taking care of that, and just sort of yelling from outside the box about what they weren't doing. So there's all these modes that I'm like, if I look back, I can see this larger pattern of self sabotage. And so if I see it all as a pattern, then I can be like, hold on, this is a whole situation. If I'm going to be sober from it, it means I have to really be very attentive and mindful in my life, which doesn't mean there's any one particular behavior that I'm avoiding.
It's why am I doing this?
And I really look at the cause of my behavior, the choices, and like you said, the agency, the sovereignty inside of it. Like if I'm getting high, which I do love to get high, but I'm like.
If I'm getting high, it's like did I write today?
Is there something I'm trying to avoid feeling that I actually probably should write about? You know, I'm a songwriter and one of the things that happens for me is sometimes I'll get high and then I'll start singing, and.
Then I'll realize how I'm feeling.
Once I'm like halfway into a song and I'm like, I'm devastated about this thing, but I needed to almost like back into it. I'm okay with that. That's still moving in the direction I need to move in. So I just have to really be in touch with like I want it as often as I can be running towards that, that true sound of myself and not away from it. And that's very it's very internal. You know, I'm the only one who knows which direction I'm going in, but I when I am heading in the right direction, I tend to get the feedback from the world of like a vibrancy that people feel in me, or you know, people will say I'm coming through in the work, and you know, there's the feedback loop of the world will be like, yes, yeah, yes, that's it, you know. And when I'm off, the feedback from the world is often like we're not getting enough from you, we can't really feel you, or like how.
Do we get more.
There's something that you said when you were talking about sobriety, Actually I want to go back to addiction for a second, Like since we're borrowing addiction language here, like effective and effective in air quotes, but effective addictions treatment is you have to identify why you're using what you're using, what purpose does it serve, what does it save you from, what does it numb you from? And if we can't identify that and come into a different relationship with it, then it does turn into the whack a mole exactly.
Right, exactly.
It's been very frustrating for me to admit that it would be so much easier if it was like, one, clear, this is the problem at least for me. I the grass is always greener. But I think it would be easy your friends like this is just the one thing. Instead, I feel like I'm dealing with this very wildly clever seductress that's you know that I'm like, what are you doing?
And then like, if you're anything like me, like then you get like, at least, okay, I'm going to just speak about myself when I get in there. Then the addictive behavior turns into endless self analyzation over why am I doing these things, which is for me, another way of not doing the thing that my heart most wants. That's right, that's right, like the brain, the complexity of the brain that gets in the way of all the things.
So I think there's also something that's like I want to demonize or I want to make things good bad, even though in a major way, in a philosophical way, I'm like Oh, that's not how anything works. But I want to be able to make things good bad. It feels like it'd be easier to manage. And so it's particularly hard when I recognize that I'm usually self sabotaging out of an urge to protect myself and there's something that it's taken care of in me. So when my friend passed, he was an art lover and he always had like gorgeous framed art in the house and all the walls, and I was like, well, I'm not drinking, you know, I'm not numbing myself. But then I noticed that I had spent a lot of money on art, like in a very short period of time. And it wasn't like you know, originals or anything. It was like just framed pieces from museums. But it's still like for my budget, not in it right, And I was like, oh, this is how I'm numbing now, this is how I'm doing it this time. And as soon as I could see it, I was like, okay, pause, you're grief shopping. And you could have just as easily been grief drinking or grief smoking, or grief fucking or grief something else, but this time you chose grief shopping and there we are, right, so now I.
Can see it.
And the hard part in that is just like what if you went directly to just grieving instead of the coping behaviors around it? And you know how hard it's like, well what if I what if I can't come through it? You know, it always grief when you're when you're avoiding grief, it always feels like it's going to be way too much to experience.
And I can't promise that it isn't.
You know, not everyone survives grief, but I do know that for most of my life, when I have turned towards grief, I have been able to move through it. And it has been a way to love my people, you know, more all the way. You know, I think of it like I'm loving.
You all the way.
I'm loving you into this other realm. Same with rage, you know, I'm like, there's just so much more there when you turn and get into it. So I understand why we run, But you know, I'm trying to stay, to learn and fight, learn, learn to stay and fight, stay and be in it.
And that that is an expression of love, I think is a really powerful part of that. Right, It's love for yourself, and it's also love for the people and the anything, the anything that has left this realm.
One of the books I'm working on, or one of the series of books I'm working on, is the Grievers series, and so much is being unveiled to me, this stuff I know, but as I'm writing it, it's like, oh no, but for real, like the way we think of the realms or the way we think of life and death is not quite it, and there's just so much more overlap and interplay and dynamic. I don't quite know how to say it, which is part of like I'm in the process of writing.
This is the challenge of writing, is that you're supposed to be able to talk about what you're writing when you don't know what it wants to be yet.
And I'm like, it's not quite there yet. But there's something around this feeling I have had for most of my life that the air is thick with presence is not wrong, That presence is connected to everyone I've ever lost and everyone that has ever been quote unquote lost, and that maybe I can find them, and maybe I can find more if I can trust. And I'm like, oh, it's not just a sense, but it's it's real, it's just you know. This is why I love the metaphor of my cilium and mushroom, because I'm like, I'm walking through the forest and I don't see them my cilium, but it's everywhere and it's connecting everything that's around me, and I'm like, I think that maybe those that we think of as ancestors might also function that way amongst us.
Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing. There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing. My thirty day Writing your Grief course is not like that. The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now, writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful. You can read all about the Writing your Grief course at Refuge in Grief dot Com backslash WYG that is WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample prompt from the course and get writing your own words in minutes. My thirty day Writing your Grief Course is still one of the best things I've ever made for you. Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken the Writing your Grief Course refuge in grief dot com, backslash wyg, or you can find the link in the show notes. I want to get into Grievers, the book a little bit here, so I'm really glad that you brought it up. I can't remember if you wrote this or if it was a review of your book that I read, but it says the premise of Grievers is a crucial one that perhaps in our morning we do not just grieve the dead, we also grieve the realities of our own lives, which, in spite of everything, we still desperately want to live.
It's right, that's right, That's what it is, you know. I think often I don't even realize how much I have planned until it's taken from me. Until I'm like, I don't get to do that plan, I don't get to grow old with that person, I don't get to love that house.
You know that it's gone.
And then all of a sudden, I'm clear, I'm like I had a whole life there, and it kind of is played in some ways. It plays out it's like this parallel thing that walks along your life. You know, I had like topic pregnancy, and there's this parallel life in which that is a child in my life, where you know, there's just parallel lives, parallel things happening, which I think also thick in the mood and thick in the space. And so for grievers, there was a desire in me to explore what it would look like if, like the way it feels when grief happens, that everything stops and nothing makes sense and you kind of just have to move into that. What if it happened to everyone at the same time. We're in such a quick time that everyone had to just stop and then you just had time to be with your grief. Because that's the thing I hunger for a lot, is I don't want to do or anything but feel my grief and think about the life I was going to live and cry and eat cake and.
You know, do the things.
And you know, I wrote it before COVID, but then with COVID, COVID has unveiled a lot to me about where that's what that story was coming with in that way, because now I feel like we live in a delusional world, you know, where it's like, oh, the grief happened, and we all stopped, and then we just started again, and the losses are still happening, but we're just moving as if they're not. And it's one of the many delusions you know right now we live in current like multitude of delusions. But yeah, it was fun. It was a fun thing to write about, even though it was hard.
Yeah, you wrote, I didn't want grievers to feel optimistic. I wanted it to feel realistic. Yes, which is a cool distinction. So what's that distinction for you, optimistic versus realistic?
Well, you know, I've spent a lot in my life being a very optimistic person. Like I would facilitate and I would come in the room and be like, we've got this, you know. And I think sometimes, especially when you're writing about the near future, writing about the future, there's a way what to be like it's going to be all right, y'all. And instead I wanted to say, what if, what would it look like to just be realistic about what's coming, what's coming for most of us in most places, I think all of us, in all places is a certain degree of devastation just because of the decisions we have made as a species. Devastation is coming, and it's going to come like COVID did. It's going to come in the form of viruses. It's going to come in the form of the climate catastrophes we've been experiencing. It's going to come in the form of economic fallout.
You know.
I'm looking at all these kids now who are like graduating and coming into a world where there's no real clarity about what a path could look like for them to work, and there's this thing on thing on thing on thing, while we're all being distracted by this sort of intentionally uninformed foundation, you know, fundamentalist.
I don't guess, not fundament I don't know what it is.
It feels like the looney tunes of it all is happening, and it's like literally our news cycle is obsessed with the looney tunes of it all, and so it's like no time gets spent on the actual, true devastating conditions that are unfolding. So part of writing for me was like, what if I just tuned into the realist in me and was honest about, like everyone's not going to sort of take care of each other right away. People do want to climb in their bed and stay there for months. Folks run away in fear and try to avoid this thing. That's what really happened during COVID, That's What's really happened many times in my life where I was like, I thought everyone was going to run towards each other, but we ran away. And so I wanted to write something that gave space for that running away and then say, what does having an analysis and what does having a commitment to the collective do inside of that instinct? And I'm still exploring it, but it was really beautiful for me to get into grievers and give doom room to be and then room to long for others, because that also feels really important to me that like, whenever I go through grief, the people around me are no longer enough and for a while that's just true. It is like you're all fine, but you're not the person that I want, and I need to go through that experience and kind of now, you know, get to the place of like I accept that this is true. It doesn't feel normal. It's never going to feel great. There's just missing, you know. I think it's Elijah at the table, like leaving an open seat. Right, it feels like I have my life at the table of my life has many open seats in it, and so that you have to go through that and then decide, Okay, what can I still build from here? How can I still risk forming new friendships and new relationships with people when I know how hard it is to lose them? And I wanted to write a book that gave me room to explore that, to explore, Yeah, what's left?
I love that image that at the table of your life there are many empty seats, so that that practice of leaving the door open and a table set for Elijah knowing that he may never come. Yeah, but we're going to We're not going to pretend that that absence isn't there.
Or that doesn't have a big impact, and it doesn't exactly, no one else should sit in that chair. So I might, you know, have to make a bigger and bigger and bigger table. And I've done that, you know, but it amazes me even now this year, I'm making new friendships that are really on bass stick and thrilling and beautiful, and it's humbling to be like, damn, now, I know what's going to happen.
I'm not a kid anymore. I know I'm going to.
Lose you or you're going to lose me. Life's going to fuck this up. I'm still down for it, you know.
I think that's like to me, that's the central commitment of being human, right, like knowing that this world will break your heart and choosing to love it anyway, which is a paraphrase from some poet that I have completely forgotten. Yes, but that coming into it with a soft body and an open mind and an open heart saying I'm going to do my best to keep myself at my growing edge with good boundaries and good roots, and love this world as best I can, knowing that this choice will break my heart.
One of the songs that I'm working with right now has the line of.
Little life That's worth your grief.
And I just keep sitting with that. It's like, that's the instruction is Okay, for whatever reason, this person has died, and I'm here, and so I have to live a life that's worth grieving for this person and not like do everything they were trying to do, but I have to really do everything I'm supposed to do.
You know.
I feel like I got to take this seriously and that's humbling. But like I wake up, this has been my daily practice for a little while, just waking up and being like, O, hey today, how do I make it worth my grief? Like how do I do it? And it's surprising how small the answers are, Like it's not actually getting everyone on Earth to recycle or whatever, you know, some of the large scale goals I have, But it really is like really being present to the beauty of the world around me, really showing up fully in a moment of connection. I am learning so much about communicating honestly what I want and need in a given moment. That's been like the holy grail of my life. And it's just been like that's an unattainable non exist that's just not a thing that doesn't exist. And it's like, oh no, I had a friend to teach me this year that it's okay to have tension in a conversation, which as a facilitator and a mediator, you would think I would be like the you know, super skilled at that, and I'm like it's great for other people love it. But for me, I'm just like, you know, I must fix this tension that is Lula, right, And instead of being like right, nothing they fixed. There's real tension. We have a disagreement, we might fight, and we might go apart. All of that is okay because otherwise we're wasting our life with this like bubbling thing rumbling under the surface.
Yeah.
The amount of energy it takes to pretend you don't know what you know and not name what's in the room like that, that is expensive energy.
Yeah, it is. It's extensive.
And then I think about, like you can literally see it in your mind. If you are busy holding a door shut, what else can you do with your body? Right, You're just holding that door shut all the time, you know, and you're in one place holding it, And I'm like, I want to run around, I want to go do things. I want to leave my house. I want to write books, I want to do yoga. There's a billion things I need to do with these bones. So I cannot stay and hold this thing shut anymore. And in families, I think that that changes everything, right, I think that in the evolution of a family, you know, a family can exist for a long time until the family starts to say the truth out loud to each other and let the truth be there. It's like the family is stuck in a certain traumatic pattern. And I think in a friendship the same thing. It's like, if a friendship can't handle here's the truth of our dynamic and the awkwardness, and there's this money shit over here and the attraction stuff or whatever it is, you got to just be able to say the things. And now, not everyone seems to want to live this way, you know, and I acknowledge that too. But for me, I'm really interest of the wholehearted life, Like I'm really interested in like going all in and then passing that along that I'm like, I can testify that, you know, I said, you watched that interview the style like you where I talked about I feel like one of the freest people to ever live, and I can testify that that doesn't mean you have only good days, but it means that in general, you can really feel a certain kind of piece with your life because you're like, I am fully in it and I'm not caging myself in any way. So if there's external people who are still trying to put limitations on my freedom. What they come up against is this thing I'm cultivating from within that is so expansive and uncagable. And then I'm in relationships with other people generating that right, and I think, I don't know, that just feels very especially right now, it feels very important when there's so much backlash and so much like people are so angry about all the ways that we're just being ourselves. Like you're only angry because you haven't given yourself permission to do it too, I think.
You know, agreed, Yeah, yeah, I mean that's classic, right, like attacking the thing that makes you feel things you don't want to feel, right, and you would not be hooked by somebody else's being if there wasn't a place to get hooked.
Exactly, you exactly, Yeah, I always say that.
I'm just like, yeah, I'm like, if you're really scared about my queerness, you should probably explore your own desire, you know, if you're really challenged by my fatness, you should really learn a little bit more about loving your body, Like because none of it has any yet, this doesn't have anything to do with.
Me, and all of that, Like, there's such a there's such a wide net here of that. This is why we tell people you have six weeks to get over this grief. You can't be this way for long. And that is all just that projection of like I have generational backlogs of pain that was never acknowledged, and you being sad in front of me is really harshing my buzz. Yeah right, like yes, whoa.
Yeah, well, and you know, I keep thinking about these like imaginary dream schools of the future and imagining these situations where like, oh, you go to school, and like you really learn a lot about managing your emotions, and you learn a lot about being in healthy conflict, and you learn a lot about being in community and finding what your alone time needs are and meeting them, and like that that's what school was about, you know, at least for the first five ten years of it. And then and then you can be like, Okay, now I want to specialize in and learn the like math and the spelling and all the other whatever's, you know, but first I need to know how to human because like that's such a big part of what I'm going to be doing my.
Whole life and relate.
Yeah, I find myself really humbled by the next generation of kids that are coming up who have gone through the pandemic had to really figure out like how to be in homes and relate and socialize or haven't figured out, you know. Like it's just like it's so clear, and I'm like, oh, relating is the core skill set and they're hungry for it. We're all longing to belong to things, you know, And I'm like, what if that was what education was at first? It was just like, here's how you learned to belong to yourself and you know, to the people you love.
Yeah, Like, what kind of world is possible when we start there as a foundation. But I feel like this is my eternal question and has been through my whole life, Like what will we create for ourselves and with each other if we just stop being repressed stupid jerks. I probably don't phrase that in the kindest, most welcoming way, at least, you know, not inside. It's my way. It's it's it's you know, it's the inner.
It takes care of both their rage and the vision.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's name. What's true, Like, y'all just stop being mean jerks to yourself, to each other and to the rest of the inhabitants of the planet and the planet herself, and then let's see what we can build together. But like you gotta stop being jerks first, which is a whole other thing. I love that you brought up this like optimism for the younger generations. I want to bring us back to Dune and grievers for a minute here, But you wrote, Dune felt like the right window doing as a character. Dune felt like the right window to talk about grief because so many young people's lives have been shaped by grief. Yeah, you kind of touched on that a minute ago with like this generation that was young during the pandemic. But how do you see so many young people's lives have been shaped by grief. What does that look like?
Well, I think that we're in this really interesting period right now where young people are very aware of the circumstances that they're in. Like all the young people I know are like I know that the police kill us, and I know that the climate is in a crisis, and I know that love doesn't last forever, and I know that they're homophobic and transphobic people.
And you just know so much more than I remember knowing.
At because it's all being said out loud, it's all being.
Set out loud, and it's all on the Internet, which they find ways to access, right because because we're obsessed and addicted to the internet, they can't, you know, they can't really avoid that. And I think it's just like the world is shifting into this place that is harder and harder to survive, right, which is anytime there's a global shift towards fascism, young folks have to start to figure out will I join with those who are reductionist and limiting, or will I push against that and try to be free at the risk of my safety, potentially family, potentially belonging. Right, So all of that is happening concurrently. Plus they know more than they've ever known before of what all else is happening concurrently. Right, Like when I think back when my parents, you know, I'll talk to them sometimes they're like what they knew was happening in the world was very local, you know, it was very much like, this is what's happening in my house, this is what happening in my school and in my town. And then some national news you know, would come in and it wasn't like there wasn't crisis and grief inside of all that folks were struggling and suffering. But I think there's a really different experience of struggling and suffering when it's local and like at the level of the village versus when you are nine trying to hold all the global grief that is out there in addition to figuring out who you are. So, you know, I have a lot of young people in my life, and I really am astounded by how they're just like this is this is the world, and they're so smart, and there's so much that's going on that's really interesting. Like all the kids are on the spectrum, all the kids have ADHD, all the kids are sensory overload, all the kids are like developing all these other ways. You know, something is evolving inside of their bodies, minds, and ways of being in response to these conditions, and we're in the middle of it. So I think we're going to look in the next twenty thirty years and what it means to be a human being in relationship is going to be radically different because all these new senses and attention and all this is shifting, right, which is cool if you're a futurist, but is challenging if you're living in the moment, and it's challenging if you're like, I'm fourteen and I can't handle my emotions. And I have a lot of kids in my life who have parents who have split orho are not together, and patriarchy is falling apart. So if one of those parents is someone who's embedded in patriarchy, that's also some of the kids are having to deal with very intimately, is the spinning out kind of I don't know who I am that a lot of men are going through right now that I mean, there's just levels on levels and levels right and so it was really exciting to me to write this character who's like trying to figure out gender and trying to figure out sexuality and trying to figure out you know, both of Dune's parents are organizers and social justice people, but Dunes like, I don't know, I don't know, yeah, you know, like I'm trying to figure out how to exist. And I also keep imagining a future in which we don't orient around jobs, but we orienter around interest and creating and making, and that necessitates having a different relationship to the earth. One that's like, Oh, the earth is abundantly nourishing us and provides everything we need to have a home and to have food. And if we live that way, we can actually spend most of our life creating. Right, we don't live that way. We spend most of our life trying to earn a living and pay taxes. And I keeping like, I want the whole theoretically, at least, I want the whole economy to fall apart. I want all of the nation state boarder stuff to fall apart. But even for me, I'm like, what does that actually look like in practice? How do you practice becoming part of something that is not a nation state or a global economy? Where do you fit in? And I'm trying to answer that through one person, one story, you know, one set of perspectives, one place, because Detroit. You know, my mentor, Gracely Bugs, is a Detroit elder and she's an ancestor now, but she was an elder and she always said, Detroit is what the rest of the country has to look forward to when it comes to economy, when it comes to civilization, We're living in a very uncivilized time. And so I'm really interest I'm like, Okay, if that keeps coming apart, what are the new things that we form in order to hold on to each other.
I think that can get when you start looking at the whole machine, it can get really really overwhelming. Yes, right, And it's that that parastaltic motion, right of like the contraction to the intimacy of the self and the body, and the expansion to the systems, the systems that we have created, and also the systems that are Yeah, and how do you how do you contract expand back and forth with those understanding the interrelatedness and not getting flooded by one or the other. Yeah, And that's that is such a tricky place to be.
I mean, I have found it to be very much tied to my emotional wellbeing in a given moment. I can tell now, like for the past couple of days, I've been feeling like not this not okayness that feels like in my body, in my attention, i feel grumpy, I feel like complaining more, and I'm like, oh, I'm trying to take in way too much. When I'm trying to take it all in, my system does intelligently get overwhelmed and it creates things to try to bring me back. It's like, get back here to the body. Just pay attention to this, handle this right and emotionally, if I'm able to tune in and be like, what is something that I can actually put my hands on a place where I actually am in relationship?
Okay with my.
Sisters, Can I just tune into getting that flowing when we spend that time together and get our little sister thing flowing, I'm like, all is right with the world, and it can be that simple. Or with a dear friend, I'm like, let's really drop in and sometimes just say what's happening in the world and how we're feeling about it, you know, because sometimes I too try to say to people I'm depressed about the entire state of the world. That's a real state I get into. I feel responsible. I feel like I haven't been a good enough organizer because if I was, we'd be free by now all that hits, you know, and then I need to have people in my life will be like, take a deep breath in, let it out, you know, notice where your ego is in this particular emotional cycle, and then like, what is something you could do that would be self caring? What if something you could do that would help you attend to your home. When's the last time you ate a vegetable? Are you hydrated? Like just really breaking it back down into like, oh, right, then I can remember that there's no one human who's responsible for the whole thing, but actually it's the multitudinous nature that is the miracle of it all. And I'm like, can I allow people to be making their own life decisions? And can I be responsible for mine? And you know, when I imagine this nation, I do imagine the US what we're calling polarization now actually formalizing into some splitting. You know, I think a lot of us were young. When we were younger, there was the USSR, and now there's not. Everybody's kind of split up and doing their own things, and some of them are fighting, some of them are not, you know, they're doing their own things. I think the US is heading in that kind of direction right where I'm just sort of like there's a center that cannot hold when people are allowed to go so far off the deep end of not dealing with facts and science and like you know, relationship and stuff. And I'm like, we're here for that time period. Part of our job is to figure out what are the new lines, what are the new borders or ways of thinking about our safety? What are the ways of identifying that are beyond a two party stratified system that allow us to actually find each other, find our people? What are the new ways of relating to the earth that allow us to you know, I think so much of this time period is about safety, and so I think about that a lot. It's like, what is the safety that we can access in this moment and what is a safety that we can start to codify and civilize around. So once my mind starts attending there, I'm like, Okay, write a book, write a story, write an essay, write some ideas down. When my brain starts generating again that I know, I'm okay. When I start thinking, oh, there's nothing to do, it's just there's hopeless. We're all going to die, I'm like, yeah, we're definitely all going to die. Put period on that sentence. What's the next sentence? Because we're not dead yet.
Yeah. That's a perfect segue into our closing question, which is knowing what you know and living what you've lived. What does hope look like for you? But I don't want you to jump into answering it yet, because I want to pull out what I hear in everything that you just said, and for me, everything that you just brought in. How we deal with all of that is coming home to this body and this moment and tending to the organism. And that is true when you get a tough diagnosis, or when someone dies, or the world is not the world that you wanted to live in, Right, how will I tend the organism in this right? That all in a way, I mean not to put too much heaviness on it, but it's like all of the burdens of the world and all of the complexity in the world, we only have agency or a sense of hope when we can come into our own intend that organism, yeah, and listen for what is needed now in this moment, in this space. Right, Then it's human. Then it's manageable.
Yeah.
I feel like hope is a function of scale for me. Right that It's like sometimes if I take the broadest view, I can feel very hopeful. A lot of times that one overwhelms me and I need to come into the smaller scale and then I can feel hope. Sometimes the human scale is still not quite right. But if I step into my backyard and I watch how the blue heron in my backyard moves across the pond and then moves across the pond, and then moves across the pond, and the geese come flying in, and there's just these hummingbirds that'll come all of a sudden, there's something that unlocks. I'm like, oh, And this may not seem hopeful to all your listeners, but for me, it's like, if humans are not here, the earth continues, and it will be absolutely stunning. If some humans are here and are figuring out how to be in relationship with the earth, that actually gives me a ton of hope as well. Right, I feel like we're at a kind of rock bottom in a way, at least in the US right now. And I think anytime fascism is on the horizon or in the periphery, it's we're in that rock bottom of humanity place. But for me, the hopeful thing is, well, then we know that there's an up from here, right, We know that there was something better behind us. We know that there's something better ahead, even if it's our own extinction. And I think I say that with all the heaviness and all the gravitas of it, right, which is not my number one top hope. My number one top hope is that we find right relationship with this and then we get to meet the aliens and everybody's kicking in space and it's just like so freaking awesome and the Earth is healthy. Like that's top hope, but like it's on the list, right, it's on the list of possible viable futures that will be okay. There's no future in which it won't be okay.
And it goes back to that radical truth telling, right, Like this the situation that we are in personally and collectively, it's fucking dire. Yes, yes, and until we can see that and say I see you. Yeah, Like all we've got is blind, illogical, faux optimism or a collapse into despair, which is not super helpful.
And then you know, I choose. I'm like each day, I'm like, I can still generate, right. I think of the generative impulse inside of humans as the thing we must protect. So even if I'm like sometimes I can always protect it myself and I protected and a child around me, I'm like, Okay, you are still pretty geeked out to be here and figure out how to walk like you are freaking.
Jazzed about this.
Let me just tune into that, right because the rest of this will come later. They'll still be love, there'll still be connection, they'll still be good cuddles. That is available right now today. You know, I can read a great book of poetry. I can make myself an incredible meal. You know, the miracle is available each day, and I have to bring my attention to it. That's my mindful this practice right now.
I love that and it reminds me of so many things from pleasure activism that we're not going to have time to get into today. But it's it's really that that, like yes is the way, and yes it's the future, which is me quoting you here right like finding those pockets, yeah and feeding them.
Yeah, you know something I want to say to you, and then I know we have to go. But I recently got to be in a talk with my friend to Rona Burke, who started the Me Too movement, and she's so brilliant. One of the things she said was, you know, we're winning. So things are so dire in a large part because of the backlash against all of the awakening that we're doing. You know, patriarchy is fighting, White supremacy is fighting. You know, those who want to dominate the earth are fighting, but they're not winning. The culture is shifting. Kids are like, we know what matters. That gives me hope. Also that I'm like, you can try to box our queer magical life force. Uh, it's too late. You already lost the war culturally. And how many times humans have tried to put each other into tiny little boxes and disappear each other. It's never fully worked. We persist that part of us that wants to be free and alive and in touch with the earth and witchy and queer and.
All the things.
It persists and it will continue to do that. That I absolutely believe. So I liked that, you know, on a good day and feel like, oh yeah, we're winning. I wonder you're spinning out. So we're losers, but you don't get to inherit the earth. Thank you so much for this time.
Thank you. So I'm going to link to your website and the books in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want people to know about where to find you or where to look for you?
Right? Now we'll see I'm on Instagram, like if I'm doing anything in the social media realm, I was doing a lot of meme posting, but I haven't had it. It hasn't aligned with my grief self. So we'll see what happens with that. But but yeah, I post like what I think of as the good news of the world in my Instagram space.
Okay, so we'll link to that too, all right, everybody, I will be right back with your questions to carry with you right after this break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. So many things stuck with me from this conversation. One thing I really appreciated was when we were talking about humor and Adrian's use of memes, and she said, quote, memes aren't the form that suits my grief right now. There's so much in that statement, right, like, you get to list to what is true for you, and different losses will take different forms. Even when people expect something from you, you do not have to give it if it does not serve you. Who There's so much more in that that I'm going to carry with me. How about you? What's stuck with you in this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you've found something to hold on to. If you want to tell me how today's show felt for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered, let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you. You can also leave me a review on the pod platforms that have space for reviews. Reviews are a fantastic way to reach me, and they also have the added benefit of encouraging other people to listen. We love reviews. I love your reviews, all right. Follow the show at It's Okaypod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video clips from the show, and use the hashtag It's Okay pod on all the platforms so not only I can find you, but others can too. None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That is it for this week. Friends. Remember to subscribe to the show, share it with your people. It is great for opening conversations, right like you could send a link to your friend and say, let's listen to this and discuss fantastic conversation starters Coming up next week, Steven Cutler, the extremely prolific author on topics like flow state and peak aging, joins me to talk about the limits of the body and why a lot of his work is just a cover for rescuing dogs. Follow the show on your favorite platform so you do not miss an episode more on these topics. Look, grief is everywhere. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone. Get help to have those conversations with trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus the guided journal for Grief at Megandivine dot Co. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio. Logistical and social media support from Micah, Post production and editing by Houston Tilley. Our intern this season is Hannah Goldman. Music provided by Wave Crush and background noise provided by me Vigeting in a slightly squeaky chair because I have had too much coffee