A Renaissance of Our Own: The Stories We Tell Ourselves with Rachel Cargle

Published Jul 3, 2023, 7:00 AM

Can grief be an opportunity for growth and self-understanding?

The answer, of course, is yes: but it’s a bit more complex than that. This week, author, philanthropist, activist Rachel Cargle on survival optimism, the resilience narrative, and why questioning the stories you tell yourself - with curiosity and kindness - is a powerful path of healing. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

  • How was grief modeled for you growing up, and how does that affect later grief?
  • Can your memory of childhood grief be…. entirely wrong? (or at least, inaccurate)
  • Can you do grief wrong? 
  • The difference between curiosity and judgment
  • Is it ok to feel relieved when a sick person dies? 
  • Rachel’s new book, A Renaissance of Our Own

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A sessions: your questions, answered.



Related episodes:

Gabor Mate on why we celebrate trauma, aka: resilience 

Illustrator Aubrey Hirsch on the power of storytelling as an act of healing

 

Notable quotes: 

“It's a practice of kindness to ourselves when we acknowledge and lean into the both/and… So when I feel shame about the relief I feel because I no longer have this sick mother to worry about, I can actually rest with that relief because I know that probably in about 2.5 days I'm going to be on the floor crying about the fact that she's not here. It’s both/and.” - Rachel Cargle

 

“(As) I really look at my childhood and have to dust some things off, (I’m) also cleaning off the spaces where good things are. You're not just going to the box of bones and figuring out all the hard, terrible things that happened in your childhood.” - Rachel Cargle



About our guest:

Rachel Cargle is a writer, entrepreneur and philanthropic innovator. Her new memoir, A Renaissance of Our Own, centers the reimagining of womanhood, solidarity and self. In 2018 she founded The Loveland Foundation, Inc., a non-profit offering free therapy to Black women and girls.  She’s also the founder of Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre – a literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons.  For more on her many endeavors, visit rachelcargle.com.

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist and bestselling author Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. She helms a consulting practice in Los Angeles and serves as an organizational consultant for the healthcare and human resources industries. 

The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her celebrated animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world.

 

Additional resources:

Rachel’s book - A Renaissance of Our Own

 

The Loveland Foundation, Inc. - houses a collection of Rachel’s social ventures 

 

The Great Unlearn, a self-paced, donation-based learning community

 

The Great Unlearn for Young Learners – an online learning space for young folks launching in 2022

 

Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre - an innovative literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons.

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Apply for one of her limited 1:1 consultations here

 

Or join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A sessions: your questions, answered.

 

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.

 

Get in touch:

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of It’s OK that You’re Not OK. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, tag us on social with your thoughts, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right. 

 

Follow the show on TikTok @itsokpod and use the hashtag #ItsOkPod on all social platforms

 

For grief support & education, follow us at @refugeingrief on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, and follow Megan on LinkedIn

 

For more information, including clinical training and consulting and to share your thoughts, visit us at megandevine.co

I started to question all the narrative I'd been telling myself, Like what else have I been moving through the world? What stories do I usually tell when people ask me about my life? And how true are they? And I got the chance to ask my mom a lot of questions about what I understood to be true about myself, about her, about my dad, about my family, and some things just absolutely were not true.

This is It's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, The Incredible Magical, Rachel Cargle on the time travel portal that grief opens up in your life and the opportunity for healing, growth, and curiosity alongside whatever pain you're in. Settle In, friends, Rachel Cargle coming up right after this first break before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey, friends, I get to talk with the most amazing people because of this show. It is a lot of work to bring these conversations to you. But every time I sit down in front of the microphone and get a chance to connect with someone whose work, whose being I have loved and admired from afar, It's just so special. Rachel Cargle is a writer, entrepreneur, and philanthropic innovator. Her new memoir, A Renaissance of Our Own is a reimagining of womanhood, solidarity, and self and explores one of my very favorite topics, how we are in relationship with ourselves and with each other. In twenty eighteen, she founded the Loveland Foundation, a nonprofit offering free therapy to Black women and girls. Rachel is also the founder of Elizabeth's Bookshop and Writing Center, a literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate, and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional, cultural, social, and academic canons. Honestly, Rachel has created so many things and opened so many important and powerful conversations it would take me most of the show to list them all. I want to get right into this conversation, but some of the top themes in our conversation this week, Rachel and I get into this really nuanced discussion of childhood grief and how it intersects with any new loss in your life. I hear this sort of stuff a lot, right, like when your parent dies, or a friend dies, somebody close to you dies, and people say, oh, you're only having a hard time now because you have all of this unhealed grief and trauma in your past, right, And it's always said with that sort of smarmy, snarky, condescending tone. Right, it's such toxic shaming trash. Rachel and I really get into the difference between judgment and curiosity here and how, yes, older grief really can come back around, but it's not wrong that that happens. It's not a sign that you didn't work hard enough to process your life. We get into what Rachel calls her childhood's survival optimism and how that relates to a really sort of surface unnuanced idea of resilience. We talk about her father's death when she was a child and her mom's recent death and why Rachel says she feels grateful for the chance to understand herself in this new time of her life and that it's terrifying at the very same time. We get into a lot of both, and in this conversation, I bet this episode is going to give you a whole lot of aha moments. I want to hear about them, I really do, so be sure to comment on social media posts with clips of the episode and leave a review of the show wherever you get your podcasts. Reviews are a great way to tell me how the season's guests are affecting you, and it encourages others to listen. So this is like a win win for everybody. All Right, on with the show with this week's guest, Rachel Cargle. Rachel, I am so excited to have you here with me today, so thank you for making the time.

I'm excited to be chatting with you as well.

So I've known your work for a while, and one of the things that has drawn me in recently is you speaking about your mom's illness, the last few weeks of her life and her death. So if it's okay with you, there are so many places we could start our conversation, but I'd love to start with your mom.

Yeah, my mom. She passed away on November fourth of twenty twenty two, and it has surprisingly been such a big heart of my work. You know, obviously it shows up in the day to day, in our bodies, in the way that we can pay attention or not what we pay attention to grief and death. Particularly in my experience, the death of a parent just completely gives you a new lens, a new calibration in the world. So since that time, it has been just an unfolding of a new version of myself, that is a woman in the world without her mother. And it's been such a particular experience so far.

You wrote the way she raised me was an ongoing invitation to see what I was capable of.

Yeah, that's very true, and I feel so grateful for that because I see all the ways it shows up for me now. I've been talking a lot about the gifts of grieving, and there's the obvious devastation and excruciating experience of moving through life after loss, but I've also seen so many gifts of it, including seeing all the ways that my mother is in me without her being here, Because then I'd be like, oh, you know, it's something she just said recently, or something she just reminded me of, Or I noticed that I rest my hands the way my mom rested her hands. I noticed that I make the same noise my mom used to make when she would yawn. When I yawn, sometimes I look in the mirror and I see her face in my face, and it is really cool, particularly the quote you mentioned about how she really always pushed me to see what I was capable of. And I'm seeing now the ways that I do that every day, and that was planted by her.

So many good structural, foundational self things, it sounds like, really came through your relationship with your mom.

Yeah, you know, my mom had a disability, so she never worked, not that disability means not working, but with her particular disability as well as her raising me and many other children who weren't necessarily my siblings, but people she just cared for or she ended up adopting, she stayed home. And that meant I spent a lot of time with my mom. And I'm realizing as I talked to more and more friends that wasn't their experience. I don't remember ever having a babysitter. I don't. I can't name or have reference to any one time of being babysat by someone, aside from like spending time with my grandma or my older sisters keeping me for something for my mom to go out for a run. So I really spent a lot of time with my mother, for better and for worse, And some of the for better is that we had a lot of time for her to seed into me the things that she found to be important, and I really value now getting to see the fruits of that within me, as well as the things that she seated in me that don't resonate with me, and me being able to say, oh, that was mom, Okay, I can let that go. That isn't that's not mine to carry.

Yeah, to see the me and the not me.

Yeah, Yeah, that's something particular. That's a particular gift that comes with losing someone, because grief is also an identity crisis of who am I when I'm not in direct relationship with that person here and now in the same way I've always been. And I think there's some beautiful realizations about who we are to ourselves as well as the celebration of who we were to the person that we lost. And I think that that has been a really wonderful unfolding as well to witness how.

Was grief model for you growing up?

It wasn't. It wasn't at all, And I'm really struggling with it now. I lost my father when I was eleven. I was closer to my dad than I was to my mom at that time. And it also is an adulthood where you recognize how much you romanticize things, and so I think I romanticized my dad a lot, because of course I was with my mom all the time, and I was like, Oh, my dad's so much more fun. And I'm sure he got to be the fun one because he wasn't doing all the day to day things with me. But I'll say that after he passed, I just didn't have time to grieve. I remember he was sick for a long time before he passed away too. It wasn't sudden or anything. And when he passed he was at a hospital and they called the house to say that he had passed away. And I answered the phone and they just told me. They didn't ask for my mom or anything. They were just like, hi, this is the hospital calling to say that Larry Brooks has died. And I was like, okay. I was eleven years old. My mom was upstairs sleeping in the bed. As I said, my mom had polio, so she couldn't run downstairs and pick up the phone. I was going to be the one who was going to pick up the phone regardless. But just thinking of that now as an adult, how hard that must have been me. And I remember still going to soccer camp the next day and thinking I want to go, and my mom taking me and letting me go, and how life just went on after that. Really I didn't have time or space to grieve. There were so many other fires that my mom had to be putting out. I was always the most functional of anyone else in our home, and so I was either being a involuntary co parent to a lot of the kids she was raising, or I just wasn't getting the support that I needed because I was the most functioning, so I was the least to be concerned about, and so I really didn't have the guidance that was necessary as a child to acknowledge feelings, feel the feelings, and ultimately grieve. And so right now at thirty four, with my mother passing, I'm invested in this also being a space to be in relationship with the feelings that never got to have a voice or a space during my father's passing as well. So that lack of that lack of model of grieving, I am now redefining or I should say, defining what grief will look like for me in my life and in my body and in my world and in my work. And I feel very, very very grateful to have the time and space and intention to that, because I know so many of us who are grieving don't.

Yeah. As I was sort of reading through your collected works and articles and listening to you speak getting ready for our time here together, you said something about that you're only now starting to look at the pain points of your childhood. And this is true, right, like new fresh loss intersects with older losses, and I like, as a therapist, I mean think sometimes the language can be really shaming and punitive. We're like, oh, that's coming up because you didn't deal with it, instead of Wow, that's interesting. Like all of these channels of love and relatedness, they go back and forth in us, like curiosity instead of condemnation for the things that we had to survive and the models that we saw. But I love what you said about this, this childhood loss and childhood grief coming back and intersecting. You said, the consciousness of this in the midst of grief has thrust me into an unexpected era of reckoning and healing. I'm honored and grateful for the chance to understand myself and it's terrifying all at the same time.

You know, we have so many moments like this in our world. Imagine how we must have felt learning how to walk.

Imagine terrifying and exciting to school for.

The first time. You know, we don't always remember those feelings, but it's things that we've had to come up against. And when we're younger, the exciting part of it gets more attention, Like you're going to school for the first time, you're walking, and it's celebrated. But as you get older and there's less celebration of firsts or the less we often give us ourselves less room to grow or develop, to be new, to learn something new. It becomes this judgment, like you said, this lack of curiosity, this condemnation for how come you didn't know? How come you haven't figured it out? And so I really started having a consciousness about how my childhood might have played into things, maybe about a year before my mom passed, so I was able to ask her a few questions that gave me, you know, gave me some tools to continue to build my pathway towards my healing, which I'm certainly still in the beginning phases and in the midst of now. But I've been thinking about a quote that says, you know, death isn't an end of life, It's a part of life. And so this cycle, this moving towards another part of life and it not just being this end date also is making me think about obviously the visual of it seeing my mother actually away, but also the journey towards healing, and how much I would have loved for my mom to continue healing up until the very moment. It's worth it up until the very moment for you to have clarity, for you to have consideration. And I'm grateful for being ushered into this journey. I'm grateful for what my mom was able to add. I'm grateful for going through her stuff and finding small things that you know, just this morning I was going through I'm back in Ohio in my hometown. This is my first time back since my mom passed, and this is my first time going through a lot of the documents, and I found a college transcript from my mom when she was in college. And what I found was and my mom didn't graduate She only did one semester and her grade in early child development, which is what she was studying. But it was like an early child development course, and it's what my mom loved. Like my mom loved kids. If you were under the age of seven, you were her favorite person, regardless of who you are, where you were. And even in the week of her passing, she kept going in and out of consciousness, and whenever she'd come out, she'd say, where's that room with all the kids? Like, I really think her heaven is just a room full of kids, because she kept mentioning that, and I think she was kind of going in and out of it or like previewing it, and so I really think that that was her thing. But anyways, on her transcript, she got an F in early childhood Development. And what I love about that is that my mom still stayed true to the thing that she loved even if the authority that be didn't give her a good grade in it, and it also or she didn't do the work to get a good grade in it. But also how hard she pushed me about grades and things and how I want to be like, we have some things to talk about. You actually got an F. You and you like, were fine and you moved on. And so these this healing comes from knowledge. It's a framework that I use in my anti racism work. Knowledge, empathy, and action equals all. That's what I use that formula a lot. But also this knowledge of who my mom might have been at this younger time is pouring into my empathy towards her, because lately it's been a lot of anger, a lot of the grief anger, a lot of just anger from things that I'm learning that happened or didn't happen for me in my childhood. And it offers me this level of intimacy that is a material of my healing, and it's necessary and I could only touch that once she passed away. These are things that she would that my mom's privacy wouldn't have allowed her to necessarily share with me. But that as I know this, I understand my mother more, which allows me to understand myself more, which allows me to heal. And so that's again one of the some of the goodness of grief is that you have access to this person in a way that you might not have ever had before, and it gives you I feel closer than ever to my mother, I really do.

There's that thread of both and yep that I've been watching unfold as you been talking about this and listening to you now talk about this, that like all of these things get to be true at the same time.

Hmm, yeah, they have to be.

They have to they have to be because they are right like this, this is enough for like discussion, like exactly, there's this allowing that this is actually the way that things are, that both and is the state of existence.

It's a place for us to be kind to ourselves. It's an opportunity for us to be gentle with ourselves. And when we condemn ourselves to say, but it's this, we can say, and what else is it? And where else is their goodness? And where else is their relief? And where else is their possibility? It's it's really a practice of kindness to ourselves when we give enough nuance and breath to a conversation to be both and and that also allows us to lean into one or another whenever we want, knowing that there's the ebb and flow that you'll go to the other side at some point. So when I feel, you know, whatever shame I feel about the relief, I feel because I no longer have this sick mother to have to worry about and have a loop of concern in my head at all times. I can like actually rest with that relief because I know that probably in about two point five days, I'm going to be on the floor crying about the fact that she's not here. So yes, it gives a bit of kindness to ourselves to be able to move through what grief is when we acknowledge and lean into the both.

And yeah, I feel like so many people their first experience of allowing the both andness of life comes through an experience of loss. I feel like your kindness to self and your choosing of yourself predates your mom's loss. Though, Is that? Does that feel accurate?

I think so. It's so funny. I'm happy that I'm here during this conversation with you because it gives so many touch points for my childhood and for my grief in particular. And I was just going through a journal from college from two thousand and seven of mine, and I was like, oh, what was I thinking about? I kept a note of how I was feeling when I'd wake up in the morning, and I'm like, oh, I feel so sad today, Oh, I feel really good today, And so there seemed to be intention there around not just acknowledging the feeling, but recalibrating me towards something that might put me at a more comfortable, content easeful space. I wouldn't have had that language then, but I have it now, and I think that I did as a mode of survival, as a mode of survival, being hyper self aware in order to know what I need to meet my needs.

Yeah, you once describe your younger self as having survival optimism.

I absolutely did. I grew up in what I now am seeing as a fairly tumultuous place. I had gone through my teenage years, in my early adulthood, certainly with a narrative in my head that woven survival optimism. Of it was fine, I was fine, Things were good, Things weren't that bad. I did this, and that my mother was able to do this, my father was able to do that. And while many of the things that I was mentioning were true, there was a lot of it that I had discarded in order to, as we said, survive all the negatives. There was a survival survival optimism to say, things aren't that bad. I have what I need, I can keep going. And part of healing for me, I found is sitting down with those narratives. Particularly I had one around grief and it's and I used to say all the time that, you know, my dad really was obsessed with me in all the best ways that dads can be obsessed with third children, and he was so loving and so considerate, and so I just thought I was the most interesting, beautiful thing because my father made me feel that way. And so when he passed when I was eleven, all of these years later, I was still saying the narrative like, oh, yeah, my dad passed, but I was fine because he loved me so well, and you know, I didn't have to grieve that much because it was all so good before he passed. And that was a narrative I like not only said, but believed myself. And then someone said to me, Rachel, that can't be true. It can't be true that he was both the most important person in your world and you weren't affected when he passed like that, that's impossible for it to be true. And I thought about it. I was like, Okay, that does sound rational.

So it was like, oh, oh, let me be curious about.

That about that so I my mom was alive at the time, so I reached out to my mom and I was like, Mom, what was I like in the weeks after Dad passed? And she said, Rachel, I had to take you to the hospital so many times because you kept complaining about stomach pain and no one knew what it was. And I was like what. One I could not believe I didn't remember that. Two, I can't believe me and my mother had never talked about it before. And three I was floored because as an adult, I know that my stomach is the number one place where I have a reaction to something. When I'm falling in love, when I'm scared of something, when I'm anxious about something, it all shows up in my stomach. And I work with my stomach now to process those emotions. It's something I learned as an adult. But thinking about how that eleven year old me was working with my body in the same way, my stomach was the thing where all of that grief was being held, and my mom didn't think of it either. You know, my mom didn't have enough understanding around grief, around the body, around somatics, understand, oh, this might be something related to the grief, instead of rushing me to the hospital every you know, every other week. And so these narratives that I had of survival optimism that made me believe that I've done hard things, I can continue to do hard things, and that I will just get through it. While it did indeed help me get through things, there comes a time where you have to address them because these narratives just begin to peel away. It's like this old paint. It's like, wait, there's something behind there that's not true. And so with that, I started to question all the narrative I'd been telling myself, like what else, what else have I been moving through the world? What stories do I usually tell when people ask me about my life? And how true are they? And I got the chance to ask my mom a lot of questions about what I understood to be true about myself, about her, about my dad, about my family, and some things just absolutely were not true. Some things just absolutely were not true. But I had created a narrative. And so while I'm grateful for how that tool served me as a child, because it really did get me through some really difficult truths about myself, that might have drowned me in whatever depression or emotion would have negatively impacted me. It's something that I feel grateful to have the chance to unravel. Now.

There's so much in there, right, because that how you describe that survival optimism and the stories you needed to tell in order to survive what you needed to survive. Like that's the cultural narrative, right, like resilience and optimism and you got this and you're strong and you can survive this, like all of that singular trash right, sort of singular trash as set apart or set in opposition to the both and right singular trash versus it's the both, and like, we do what we need to do to survive, and that doesn't make it necessarily a good thing. It makes us something that we read the room and we knew what we needed and we did what we needed to do to survive. And it's just like there's so many interesting intersections there, I guess is where I'm going. One that you look back now and you see that as something you had to do to survive, but it's something to heal from now, that story and how much that survival optimism matches with what we tell people they're supposed to do in the face of adversity, which is look on the bright side, suck it up, be strong, be powerful, draw on your own strengths. It's one of many things I love about you.

Thank you.

Yeah, the both and is a hard thing to nail. I think when we're talking about any kind of difficulty, right, that we can lean into our strengths and celebrate our strengths and at the same time be on the floor crying so much we vomit. Right, Like, these things are all true, and we get to invite that totality of self.

Interested in knowing our whole selves are right about who our whole selves might be. I'm I'm intrigued by that person might be who gets to process these things, who gets to know the truth about myself, even the hard truths. And the thing about being adults, now, you know a lot of that survivals in childhood where we have no control over our environment, where we have no control over our ability to get through something. But as adults, we have this opportunity to be in relationship with our younger self to say, you're now, let's talk about this. You know you have tools to get through this, let's talk about this, let's feel this. And I've noticed that as I do more healing of my psyche, my emotions, my body, which are all inner related. You know, when I'm caring for my body, I see that my psyche is better. When I care for my psyche, I see that I can, you know, care for my body better. And one thing I've really been enjoying is that I have become more and more able to touch base with things that gave me joy as a child because I've dusted off a bit of my childhood and I can see some of it, I can access some of it. And I mean, I'm not a therapist at all, but what I've learned from my own personal journey is that as I really look at my childhood and have to dust some things off, you're also cleaning off the spaces where good things are. You know, you're not just going to this box of bones and figuring out all the hard, terrible things that happen in your childhood. You're also remembering that childhood rhyme that you used to say. And you're also you know, finding I don't know stories you used to write. And I have a really I've been feeling very grateful for how I'm able to tend to my inner child. You know, one of the things that it makes me think of is my mom was a poor, black, disabled woman who had many children to care for, and so I certainly didn't get the type of care that would have been as full as if she had more resources. And so what that means is that, you know, some of the activities that I did, I couldn't do all the activities that I wanted, or we couldn't afford some things, or my mom just did what she thought was best without taking much consideration in what I wanted per se. So I really wanted to dance when I was younger, like do dance classes, and I really wanted to play a stringed instrument, and they just weren't options. So now I have been going to tell practice and I found adult ballet classes and things that used to be anger points for me, like, oh, I'm so mad that I didn't I had this type of childhood. I'm so enraged that my mother didn't have the emotional capacity to do X Y Z. Now with this type of knowledge and empathy, as I mentioned, that's coming into me, I can say, you know what I'm gonna let that anger go because I can see that she really did her best. And now I'm an adult and I can provide myself with some of those things. How can I do that? And it feels like I'm in relationship with my mom for that too. I played soccer a lot when I was younger, and my mom she she came to watch me, Like I said, she had polio so she couldn't run, so her watching me run was something for her. She loved to watch me run up and down the field. She would say that often, and since she had crutches on rainy days or early mornings when it was dewey, she couldn't get to the field. And my mom position petitioned for the city to build a sidewalk from the parking lot to the soccer field so that she could watch me play. And they did. And I recently ran into an old friend who's like, Oh, I'm coaching a women's extracurricular soccer team in the city. You should join. It's like, oh, my gosh, I would love to join. And that has now become something between me and my mom, Like I feel like my mom is on the sidelines with her sign the way that she used to the way that she couldn't always. And it's nice to carry myself and be in relationship with my mother in a way that just couldn't have happened when she was here.

There's such continuity in the way that you talk about all of this. I also remember reading that you said when you were when you were a kid, sort of writing was your power, right, your ability to tell stories and to be a writer was your power. And I feel like there's there's so much weaving through what we're talking about around storytelling and narrative and voice and the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell each other, and how much authority right, authority, all their ship right, sovereignty, sovereignty, authority, author who gets to write the story of your life? And which voice is speaking at any time? Like it's just like, as as a fellow writer, I just I think that's such fascinating and beautiful territory when you allow the entire story to show up and then it's terrifying, it's terrifying and it's terrible and honestly, like, what else is there? Right? Because if you're not telling your own story, whose story are you telling?

Yes? While you were speaking earlier about the way that society insists that we just move past it, get through it. While you were saying that, I was I was thinking to myself, like, to who's end and does that benefit? It benefits capitalism because we're getting back to work, And benefits patriarchy because we're getting back to taking care of our homes and our children. It benefits, you know, just every standard that is meant to benefit other entities besides ourselves and certainly besides our own healing. And so I think it's really wonderful to take a pause and when we're moving through a hard thing, to ask ourselves to what ends does this? Who does this benefit? How does it benefit them? And what of myself do I have to quiet in order to meet that need or in order to meet that expectation. It makes me think of a friend. A thing my friend Dana Sue Cow used to always say, is who's benefiting from the insecurities you have? You know a lot of things like oh, I'm so insecure that by that I have hair on my legs. And so now there's some razor company making millions of dollars off of something that really isn't a concern.

Or Yeah, these manufactured insecurities.

Factured insecurity, and I think I'm seeing that play into my grief of who benefits from the way that I show up in this space, the way that I engage with this feeling, and what role has this feeling had in other spaces, in indigenous spaces, spaces from places on the continent of Africa where I know my ancestors come from. What does the ancestral connection with this particular experience that I could be in relationship with. Yeah, like you say, being curious and asking questions that invite us to know ourselves better.

Hey, before we get back to my conversation with Rachel Kargle, I want to talk with you about that both and we've been getting into. Grief can cause such like emotional whiplash. Right, you feel relieved, and then you feel guilty for being relieved, and then you're not sure how you feel. It's really tough stuff to navigate. If you've got questions about how that both and works in your own grief, come talk to me about it. Once a month, I hold a live video Q and A for patrons. Visit patreon dot com. Backslash Megan Divine to get your questions answered once a month every month. Link is in the show Notes Friends. All right, back to my conversation with Rachel Cargle. There's so much picking to be done at the institutionalized structure around emotional reality, which is a big mouthful, but like who benefits from us pushing through grief faster, pushing through discomfort faster? Like why I spent so much of the you know, the first ten years of my career doing this grief work, talking about individual grief, and like, you don't care about the bigger stuff when your kid dies or your sister gets sick. And I remember when my partner first died. I mean I had been doing social action stuff and working in sexual violence and questioning some of these things, and then Matt drowned, and I was like, I don't give a fuck. I don't care about the systems right now. And it took years before I cared about that, or or before I cared enough to come back to my suspicious, questioning nature of the underlying systems around everything. And it is true that I think sometimes in really fresh grief, the structures that impact you in your grieving or in your healing aren't super relevant it doesn't mean we aren't being impacted by them though, Like this push to get better faster and to be strong and to be resilient. I love flipping that around the way that you just did to say, like, who benefits from me getting quote unquote better faster? Who is served? Who gets their needs met? If I repress mine?

Yeah, that exactly. I really like what you said about how long it took you to get back to that. One of the things that I have been leaning into is that I am grieving. So I'm going to use it as a platform to be as thoughtful as I need to in this moment because death, loss, change causes us to question reality again, and we don't get that often because usually we're in the you know, in the run of it. We got to go to work, pay our bills, take care of our kids, move through. We're on this life escalator that really isn't much space to get off, and grief is a stop. Grief is a large halt to that. And so it's an opportunity in that it's a moment where we really do get to ask questions and take a pause to things that we usually don't get to to do. So and it's certainly been that for me, around work, around relationships, around friendships, around space. What I understand is home. You know, all of these things. And I really find that as one of the gifts of grief as well, that it put a halt to this trajectory that I might have forever been on if there wasn't this jolting to say, wait, what really matters? How do I really want to spend my time? How do I want to die? How do I want to be surrounded or not surrounded in hard times like these? And I have been making shifts based on what that pause required me to consider, required me to question. And I hope that all of us who are grieving can alchemize some of those feelings we have to turn into some answers to questions we've either been asking ourselves quietly in the back of our mind, never got to ask ourselves, or are recognizing, like, wow, this is something I really need to consider before I hop back on this escalator.

There's a line that I read of yours who I am right now can be home for me. It's actually a much longer passage. And of course I'll link to the Instagram post where you talk about that. But that's what I'm reminded of as you speak about this, like it's not that you needed air quotes here for everybody, Like it's not that you needed your mom's death to wake you up to other things that you wanted or needed for your own pacing or your own concepts of home. And at the same time, your mom's death has shifted your focus and shifted things. So it's not like I think again we get gain like it gets sort of flattened in the outside world around. Oh see, you needed it. You needed it as a wake up call to know what was important, which is like, oh, but I really appreciate how you speak about it as this, Like here is this thing, this event that happened, and I can bring my skills of curiosity and reflection and self inquiry from a place of kindness into even this, especially this, especially this, and find out who I am now as a person whose mom is no longer physically present in this way, how does home change? What does home look like? For me? Like? These are such fantastic questions. There are such fun quest questions, and I'm so thankful to you for asking them and asking them publicly and encouraging other people to ask them because we just don't. We don't have enough spaces where we are encouraged to have that both and and to ask ourselves those questions, especially kindly. Right, I think it's like easy to like flip into interrogation. Look, murder was a little budget Like, No, everything you do is just steeped in so much kindness.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that might rebuttal to what you said about what people might say, like, oh, you need this thing. It reminds me of what we do about the pandemic, and people say like, oh, because of the pandemic, I was able to do this, which I understand. It's hard, especially with people who lost someone during the pandemic. Of course, there's no desire to hear any good that could have Yeah no good, Yeah, no good. And I get it, and I honor that. I honor that feeling. And when we have a loss, we are a different person. So there have to be new answers, there have to be new questions, there have to be new some things. And throughout our lives, mostly other people have decided that, and sometimes it's the person who passed who decided. In my case, my mother who decided so much about what I understand about myself. You know, when my mom first got her diagnosis, I remember wailing and wailing, laying in the lap of a woman, the woman I was dating at the time, and saying, how will I ever read if the person who taught me how to read is dying? How will I ever walk if the person who taught me how to walk is dying? It felt like her leaving took away everything I understood about myself and the world, and in her passing this pause to say who am I to me is profound and terrifying as well, both profound and terrifying to say, who am I? With everything she gave me and with everything she couldn't, Who am I with everything I know about myself now and everything she reminds me about myself? And there is this newness emerging that requires questions, and I hope that we don't shy away from those questions because they offer us some calibration towards where we're going next. And So, while you didn't need a loss to make you think you're a new person, and that makes you think not necessarily the loss itself, but the fact that you are different, because that person is no longer physically there with you. It's a call to make new considerations.

Yeah, I love that you just used to the word call, because I was going to go with call and response, right, like that sort of external structure of this linear healing model, right, the future self, the highest self, the healed self, like that destination point.

And I am so happy that you brought this up because I've been evangelizing this so much, this idea of your chosen self, that it's not this higher, better self. You weren't previously a lower, worse self. It's just the you that you continue to choose. And so every day that can be either reinforced, it can be changed, it can be shape shifted a little bit, it can be edited a bit. Because you're getting new information every day, You're having new understandings about yourself every day, so that should and will continue to change. But the only self that needs to be that energy needs to be put towards is your chosen self, who you choose to be. And maybe in your grief, your chosen self is someone who's a little more reserved and spending a little bit more time to yourself, and maybe it's someone who's all of a sudden becoming a bit more community centered since you have had a loss. Whatever it is across the spectrum of possibilities, the fact that you chose it is what makes it the best self.

Sovereignty, authority over your own life, being the author of your own life, and choosing.

And I say your best self is your highest service. When you step into your best self, you are now primed to be kinder, to be gentler, to have more capacity, to be more honest, to be more grounded, and so trying to be all of those things in little pockets to people please will never be as effective as just settling with yourself, considering what your values are, moving with your intentions, and you will certainly show up better for the world when you have really settled with your chosen self.

And that's so counter to the messaging that we get right of like, serve others, serve others, serve others, And you really do need to choose yourself in order to be of the most service to the world and creating the world that can also serve you. Right, both and both and all over the place. I want to make sure we have a little bit of time to talk about your new book and I think the both and is actually a really great transition here, because writing writing a book is a really long process. So I'm guessing that the creation, the writing, the editing, all of the before launch stuff with a book like that came during your mom's illness. I don't know how it intersected with her death, but how has this grief experienced, this loss experience And I'm saying that rather than only the death of your mom, because so much has fed into that and mixed with that, how has that both ended with the birth of your new book.

I signed this book deal in twenty eighteen. It's been a lot time of me working on this book, and it was in the midst of the book that I had that first moment of I want to call it consciousness, but I don't really like that word because it seems so inaccessible or something. But my first moment of deeper consideration about who I'd been, who I was, and who I want to choose to be. And so in the original manuscript where a lot of those survival optimism narratives that I had written, so I had to go back and change them, and I also engaged with the topics a bit different. So the book is arranged in various chapters that speak to different ways of reimagining. The book is a memoir and a manifesto talking about reimagining, and it's reimagining love, reimagining education, reimagining feminism, and looking at all of the ways that I approached these aspects of life a little different with my own values and intentions, and every single one of those were so informed by what my mom either told me about myself or told me was right in the world based on her own religion of Christianity, and so there was a lot of having to comb through the narrative and see what I had come up with myself out of survival and what was actually true. Another thing that was particularly related to my mother and the book is that in coming to a lot of these conclusions and understandings about myself, there were some things in the book that I knew my mom might feel shame about. Particularly, I have two older sisters who both still since when I was in high school to this day, have been their whole lives have been ravished by addiction, and my mom always was very disheartened by the distance I had to take from my sisters in order to be okay, and so I think I also had a lot of anxiety about how she might feel about reading what I felt about my sisters, her children, her children. And a few weeks before my mother passed, I sat by her bed in the hospice center she was in and I read her a little chunk of the book that was clear enough for me that was like, there wouldn't be too much tension in what I read to her. And the one thing I will say is I read it to my mom, and my mom says, wow, that was so much better than I thought it would be, Like, Okay, thanks, Mom, I'm actually a writer and I do.

So one.

It was that funny aspect of her really still not having any clue what I do in the world or how I do my work, but also the fact that she passed just a few weeks after it and just a few months before the book's published date. They talk a lot about authors who usually can't get the book out until the person who they're really addressing in the book has passed because there's all of these anxieties about if they read it, how they'll feel. So I think that definitely came into play. That was a truth for me. For sure, because I don't know if I could move with the confidence that I do with the book if I knew that my mom would have to read it but also deal with however other people feel about it is written in the book. So I'm grateful that I don't have to have that experience that was giving me a lot of anxiety. But I also wish that she could be here for the excitement of the book coming out. There's that both and as well. But I will say going back to that first story about her still not really knowing about the work that I do, the fact that I have the desire and the capacity to write about grief in the way that I do, to share it with my readers, to be in conversation with my readers. This is the first time it feels like my mom is in my work, knows she's she is my work right now for the first time in a way that she never was. She's in it how me and her engage in my dreams, in my body, in the seemingly supernatural things that go on in my world that seem in relation to her. This is the first time that I feel like my mom is deeply engaged with my work and I love that.

That's really cool. I hadn't thought about that. I really dig that, you know, as somebody who will probably not publish a lot of things until after my parents die for those those same reasons. I love that though, that there is a way now that you can be seen, you know. I think sometimes we think that like death ends a relationship, and what you're describing is like new rooms in that relationship open up all the time.

All the time, and it's to shape shifts. And that's also why grieving has to be done, because that's where the relationship continues. If you skip that, you're missing out on opportunities to continue to build that relationship. You know. I had like a deep breakdown moment the other day because I was thinking about so many things about my mom that came up and could only have come up during her passing. And one thing that I was just like crying and crying and crying about is that my mother didn't really like to travel. She didn't travel much. The only stamp in her but she got her passport a year before she passed, and that's because I invited her to come visit me in Jamaica. And she has one stamp in that passport, which was her visiting me in Jamaica, and my mom had never been out of the country before. So I remember during her dying, I was so stressed because I'm like, this woman doesn't even like to leave the city. She must be terrified to die. Like it's rib like, just think, just think about how excruciatingly scary that must have been for her to sit on that bed and be like, I have no clue where I'm going. Yeah, that's in the sentence. I have no clue where I'm going outside of her beliefs and where she hoped she was going, but we just don't know. And so you know, I had this deep wailing cry of sadness for her, and then I had this moment of like, oh my gosh, I'm so proud of her. She did the one thing we are all terrified to do, we are all terrified to die, and my mom did this badass thing of like doing it. I know my mother and well enough to know that she literally had a moment to be like, you know what, I'm just gonna go, like I gotta let this. Like she had been fighting it so hard over her last few weeks to the point where I was like, Mom, just go. You are hating every moment of this. We are hating every moment of this. We're so proud of everything that you've done. Just go. Like many people, she passed the one night I decided to stay the night at home instead of stay the night on the floor of the hospice like I had been doing. And I remember I was here at my house that evening with a lover of mine and I remember holding on to her torso we were like kind of sitting on the couch and I was like kind of hugging her, and I remember just feeling so dizzy. I felt like I was in some sort of wild vortex. And I'm like, it could have been anything. It could have been the exhaustion, it could have been the grief. But I think my mom was dying in that moment like that if we look at the timeline that was about the time, and I just feel like she was. There was some part of her that was still like sticky to me, kind of sticky on me, that was keeping me. Like I feel like I went into this like the spin of it with her, and just the depths of both of the feelings, the depth of grief that she was terrified of it, and the depth of pride that I have for her to do that, and her having died, and you know, now she doesn't have a body that she can't walk with. I hope my mom is doing cart wheel and running and doing all of these things that she never got to do. And I'm so happy for her, Like I'm so happy for her that she's not dealing with the things that she was dealing with here, and you know, the things about the living that constrain us. You know, how she might have felt about having a queer daughter, how she might have related to me based on whatever are the rules of the world she didn't want to break or she didn't want me to break. Those no longer apply. So that means that I can have a particular joy in my relationships. I can have a particular conversation with her that if I had it with her before, she would have felt so much shame about what her sister might have felt or what her mother might have felt. And I feel like this is such a beautiful, excruciating shape of us that I don't take for granted and that I actively participate in because it is something different and it's something new, and it's something that I'm grateful for, the shapeshift of a relationship from her being here physically to not.

You get to have a totality of relatedness. Right. As devastating as this is, there is the end of that sounds so like such a blessing, like such a liberation. Right, And to come back to your book like that's a renaissance, right, that is a relationship renaissance, yes, for me and thriving exactly. Yeah.

Yes, the title of the book is a renaissance of our own memoir and manifesto on reimagining. And if the book hadn't been on the deadline that it was, I think I would have had a chapter called Reimagining Grief because there is such a difference in how I have been able to approach it that seems to not follow the guidelines of society of science. Even that invites me to have a different reallylationship to my grief and my mother.

Yeah, and that through line right of curiosity for self, the chosen self, authoring your own life, inquiring with kindness but also with like, with your own narratives. Like all of this is that arc of coming closer and closer to that chosen self by being curious about the stories of ourselves and others, and ourselves in relationship with others, and that that is what's possible. Right in the promotion for your book, you have written, I stand as living proof that a life reimagined is possible, proof that with a willingness to do the work, to make peace with the unknown, and to believe that we are worth the effort, there is a renaissance that awaits. Yeah, I think this. This feels like such a hopeful a hopeful place in this both and like devastation and renaissance and choosing yourself. So I think I think it's set s. It's up pretty well for my asked question for us here together, which is knowing what you know and living what you've lived in all of the stories of your life. What does hope look like for you right now?

For me, hope is really rooted in the same things we've been talking about, hope that I have and will continue to have the opportunity to cultivate tools to be well with myself and with the rest of the world that I live in the land, my community, my oppressors, my joys, space place. I think as we lean into our healing. We all have what me and my peers, we've been sitting around eating pasta together talking about what our squishy thing is. When we talk about what we build about building up walls. Those walls are to protect some squishy thing, and that squishy thing usually was created in childhood. And for me, my squishy thing is autonomy. I didn't have a lot of it as a child, and so now that is the that's my squishy thing that I'm constantly trying to protect. And in both I think I'll say psychology because I feel like I've heard it a lot in more scientific academic text, but also in mainstream conversation. It's always like, break your walls down, break your walls down, figure out how to not have walls. And I am now feeling more hopeful than ever for my own goodness and wellness and for my ability to show up in the world, because I no longer feel like I have to break those walls down. I just have to know them. I have to honor them, and I have to maintain them because they were there to protect something and I want to still protect that thing. But I can do it by this self study, this self understanding, this intention of being my chosen self, and so I feel very hopeful by this being broken, the brokenness that came from and continues to exist because of losing my mother. There's only up to go. It's one of those like I feel. I feel like right now I'm in the worst part of my life. I keep telling my friends, if this isn't the worst, I swear I've missed, this better be the worst, or I'm going to be livid. And so, you know, for all the days I wake up in the morning crying, for all the times I fallen to the floor in the kitchen in the middle of cooking a meal because a memory came up, and all of the times that I've pushed people away because I just didn't know how to grieve in community, and all the times that I have, you know, just been undone in the way that life happens. I am tending to my squishy part, and that's the only thing I can control. Nothing else. Really. I can't control what the governments do. I can't control what racism, capitalism, all of these things, how these ways are showing up. I can't control how my neighbor, my lover, my family remember what they do, or how they feel. But I feel very hopeful about the work that I'm doing on supporting and leaning into myself, and there's there's some hope there.

There are so many ways that I want to go with that, but I also want to respect your time, So I'm not going to dive into all of those things, but I so much look forward to listening to you explore those things and share them with the world.

Yes, I will be doing I learned that I also do these things out loud. It feels true for me and natural for me to do that. And that's another thing with healing. You just you accept what's true for you, and you no longer get stressed about how other people feel about them. You just can answer like, oh, yeah, that's my truth. I've really looked into it and I know it's true for me. So I'm just going to keep going this way. And so I think that might be a little bit of hope too, that when you know yourself, when you continue to look into yourself, you can have a truth that you can kind of stand more firmly with.

Yeah, I love all these things. Okay, it has been such a joy and such an honor to talk with you. Now we're going to link to your website, the Loveland Foundation, which we didn't get to talk about today, but we'll be in the show notes, and obviously to your new book and your bookstore and all of the things. But is there anything else you want people to know about where to find you or what's coming up.

No, I'm just working on a lot of opportunities to gather. So I hope people continue to follow and look for ways that we can get together virtually and in person around grief, around generational conversations, around knowing ourselves. I'm looking forward to being and more conversation with people virtually and sharing space in the same room.

Excellent. I cannot wait to see what happens next. All right, everybody, stay tuned. We will be back with your questions to carry with you right after this break. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. Now, Rachel said something, Okay, she said a lot of things, but something that really stuck with me about how we revisit our past, Like usually it's this excavation of awfulness, right, like searching for the places that you didn't get enough or things were terrible. Rachel said, I look at my childhood, and I have to dust some things off. When you do that, you're not just going to the box of bones and figuring out all the hard, terrible things that happened in your childhood. You're also clearing off the spaces where good things are. I love that. It's part of that curiosity we talked about so much together, coming to your own personal story with like not with this like rabid bloodhound approach of rooting out the ways that things shaped you in a negative way, but with a gentleness, an openness, and a kindness and a curiosity about how the story of your life has shaped you. It's such a gentler way of being with yourself, right. I love it. You don't have to be a bloodhound excavating terrible things. You can be a curious, gentle explorer of your own life. How about you? What stuck with you from this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different from the show, but I do hope you found something to hold on too. 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 episode affected you, and remember to leave a review too.

Please.

This season's guests are incredible and reviews are a great way to let me know how this season feels to you. Follow the show at its Okay pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief Everywhere else. To see video clips from the show, use the hashtag It's Okay pod on all all the platforms, so not only can I find you, but others can too. Conversations are important. None of us are entirely okay right now, 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's it for this week. Remember to subscribe to the show and share it with the people you love. Coming up next week, everybody the original climate activist author Bill mckibbon. Follow the show on your favorite platforms so you do not miss an episode. Want 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 accidentally grief, gaslighting somebody or gaslighting yourself, that is an important skill for everyone. It helped to have those conversations with trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay. 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. Show notes and research support from our fabulous intern Hannah Goldman. Music provided by Wave Crush and background noise this time provided by The Big Crows tap dancing on the metal, awning outside my window. Hi Crows,