This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and other professional helpers that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week part one of a two part special New Year, Same Grief and the Math of Suffering. It's all about facing the new year with hopefully a little bit less dread with special guest, historian, author, and Queen of awkward conversations Kate Bowler. This is part one. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, Well, I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time together. 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, So a lot of the questions that we got for this week's show could be boiled down to one thing. How do I find hope in the year to come? Knowing what I know about life right now, these last few years of hardship upon hardship in our personal lives and the wider world don't exactly make hope or even optimism that easy to access. The closing of one year and the entrance of a new year is just not that easy to navigate with any kind of excitement about what's ahead. I always aim to open these shows without being a downer, but so far I have not succeeded. There are hundreds of beginnings and endings in any given twelve month span, both culturally and personally. Beginnings and endings happen all the time. This whole idea that the year ends in December and begins a new in January of the Gregorian calendar is just one of many transition points. One of my favorite things about today's guest is the ground she covers with her brain. She's like this amazing ven diagram of religion, self help, health, kindness, the minutia of being human, all stitched together with this deep view of culture and religion. She definitely gets what I just rambled about, that the new year's don't always match the calendar, and even when they do, the new year isn't always that fresh start you long for. Dr Kate Bowler is an author, historian, and one of my favorite people in the world these days. She received a Master's of Religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Duke University. She's an associate professor at Duke Divinity School. Her latest book, No Cure for Being Human, grapples with her diagnosis of stage four cancer at the age of thirty five and the intersection of blind optimism and the lack of control inherent in being a real, live human with limitations. Dr Boehler made the whole country you get used to speaking frankly about suffering through her popular podcast Everything Happens, which is truly awesome and you should listen to that too. In today's episode, Kate and I talk about all manner of math. Before you stress out about that, it's the math of human suffering. Don't stress out about that either. Going to be great, all right, everybody. I am so glad to have my friend Kate in the studio well studio zoom with me today. So, Kate, thank you so much for being here. Hello, my dear, thanks for having absolutely so. You are the one person that I wanted to talk to you for this end of the year. New Year's not really a special but the New Year episode because there's there's so much in all of your work, your whole body of work, all of your books about trying to live into the future when the present is so crappy, when you know what you know about things so right, like, how how do you have any sort of optimism or hope in the future. Now we're going to get to that. I want to jump right into some listener questions because I think that's going to be the best, the best way to access the brilliance of your mind and your expertise here. So you okay with that if I jump right in with the question, All right, let's go, So listen. Question number one, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year that you shared with your person? Yeah, that's right. The second anyone uses the word new, there's immediately the knowledge that we have to then move on without maybe the life we thought we'd be here, the person we thought we would have. I think that's such a such a gorgeous, honest thing to say, because with all the focus on um the year's resolutions and like twenty you know, it's always like it's gonna next year's gonna be the best year yet. And and for many of us, especially when it comes to love, is like for for that love there needs to be a moment to acknowledge it's sometimes the best days of that love are behind us. It reminds me of some of the people I've met who create almost like a like a funeral for the year, for the for the thing that came before, some because it was the person that they were, the love that they had, but just something that honors the immensity of being feeling like you're like filled to the brim of details of something you're scared about forgetting, just being honest about those fears, Like maybe I'm scared of starting something new because I don't want to let go. I love that idea of of having a funeral or having some sort of ceremony to mark the end of the form of relatedness that came before. Yeah, maybe it's not just like the countdown to the new year, but just having a moment to count down the cut the one that's just coming to a close. You're right, I think we have this aggressive futurism that prevents us from being honest. Aggressive futurism is a fantastic way of looking at it. Yeah, there's a there's a word I want to pick up on. In this listener question, they write, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year you shared with your person. And I think this is a really good one because in your books and on your Instagram you touch on acceptance a lot. So can you talk to me about your relationship with acceptance. Oh, it's horrible, Honestly, I am accepted. It's truly a nightmare. I I've been living with incurable cancer or form for a long time, um longer than I wanted to, and I kept thinking that life was going to be a series of challenges that I would overcome and then I could put things behind me. But part of trying to figure out how to live, it seems, is figuring out what maybe just to have a thicker category for acceptance, to have almost like a higher tolerance for the the uncertainty of of having things that I love that I can't get back to and not ever going back to that like durable and destructible vision of myself I thought I would have. So I was diagnosed on US thirty five and I'm forty one, and I feel so grateful every time I hit a new year, But at the same time I need a minute to think, um, what what are the things I cannot change? It's that gorgeous serenity, prayer. But then how can I find like a little bit attraction, a little bit of like change wig wiggle ability to move because gosh, I'm not fully built for acceptance. I need a little bit of something thing that I can like totally kick the dust off of and move around. And I think in a lot of ways we weaponize acceptance, right, it's just applied from the outside as this end the goal that you need to get to in order to be palatable to the others around you, Like you just need to accept that there are some things that your body can't do anymore. Yeah, it's great. Really, I think I spent most You're right, I spent most of managing trying to not accept most things, because I mean, I think that living at least for me when I think about the context of like I'm I'm a professor, so I have to figure out how to keep changing and moving forward. I've got complicated medical care in which I very frequently have to yell at people when I'd rather use my nice nctwor voice than like, if I don't constantly push against acceptance, it goes into stagnation and despair, and so sometimes not accepting things It's been a really important part of me staying alive and also just learning how to evolve and change, because I'll never get to be the person I was before. Some things are unacceptable, right. I love how you caired that the Kate that like acceptance in some ways is giving up and being passive, like sort of pitting it against self advocacy, right, just as you said right there, Like with my medical needs, I can't just accept that this is my condition and this is what needs to happen. That I need to ferociously advocate for myself, and sometimes that feels the opposite of acceptance. I'm a bigger fan of allowing rather than acceptance, because I think acceptance comes with this connotation that you're cool with it. Right, we go back to if we go back to our question, our listener question here, how do I accept that I'm leaving the last year I shared with my person? So the understory there is that their person died in and we're facing a new year without this person. How do I accept that I'm leaving that year? Well, some things are unacceptable. It's not okay. You don't have to be quote unquote good with that in order to be healthy. And human and that's right. It's like so much of the experiment, right, is just living with unacceptable truths. Yeah, what a strange thing. I always love it when people say that. There's that lovely quote from the mayor of East Town. It's the Kate Winslet character, and she says, you know, at some point, like you don't I don't know if she said you don't accept it, but it's like, but at some point you just have to put groceries in the fridge. It didn't have that sort of like shiny neo Buddhist everything's fine with me. I am the ocean, and it's a stuffordness to that that I really, I really respect. Stay tuned for more coming up right after this break. So there's a related question that kind of goes back to what you were talking about with marking the end of one period before you enter the next period. And so the next question ready, Okay, it's going to sound almost like the first question, but there's a slight angle change here. So question too, how do you go into a new year knowing that your person won't be there for it? If my person died this year, now I have to start saying they died last year and it makes them feel so far away from me. So something kind of inherent in that question is the passage of time that gets um sort of crystallized once we switch from December thirty one to January one, Like now I have to say my person died last year, or if your person died in you can't say they died last year anymore. Mm hmmm. Yeah. It kind of gets to the math of suffering that gets applied to all those of us who suffer, which is that there's the kind of a rough calculation in the listener. It's like when someone says, how when when you know someone died, they're like, well, how old were they? Like immediately there's a sense that our our grief is rendered invalid with the passage of time, or our love doesn't sometimes even in ease, and our grief increase over the course of so that I do feel like there's with with the passage of time comes the feeling of leading to justify either moving on or whatever that means, or not moving on and whatever that means to to an audience. And there's like a there's a jury out there who gets to decide, and I have not found that there is a really easy way to describe what suffering has meant over time. Like you know, for instance, even if I just said, oh, I was diagnosed six years ago, truth is, it was three years after that that was probably the worst moment of my life. You know, it wasn't the diagnosis. It was the facing a different life for death, surgery and trying to still have problems that made sense to anyone after they thought that it was all over by them. And so I'm like a big fan of bad, bad math, like where we just assume we can't add up other people's lives because I I know I can't. I love that. I remember that was actually a line in your new book that stood out to me when I was reading it rereading it again yesterday, The math of suffering, Right, It's such a beautiful way of looking at it, because you're right, like the inherent in this question that this listener sent in was I'm going to have to start defending the fact that I missed them or that I am quote unquote still grieving, because I'm not going to be able to say, oh, it was just earlier this year that they died, or it was just last year that they were here there is this um judgment that enters the chat at the change of the year, right, And I really love what you just said. They're about I'm going to commit myself to bad math. I just paraphrase what you said, but as a person who has a hard time with math in general, I love I kept thinking like, oh, we need a new applied mathematics, the mathematics of suffering. That only the person at the center of that equation is the one that gets to say what time means or or what suffering means, and how we judge that, because there there is so much judgment about how you're suffering, how much you should be suffering, what the worst times were for you. It's really interesting that you brought that part up that you know, when you tell your story diagnosed six years ago with cancer and people are like, oh, that must have been such a terrible time for you. And what you just shared was that actually that sucked, and my equation of suffering actually had a different high point I think to the part of the fear, at least for me, of having someone who has had a chronically terrible, terrible, wonderful but pretty terrible, chronically terrible life is not just sorry, It's just that the more things happen, you know more that there's this kind of creeping fear that if people don't understand, then I'll be left alone. If people don't understand, I won't have the community and the support and the friendship. Like if I can't make other people understand my suffering math, then I'm no longer translatable as lovable, carriable, intelligible. Then you get untranslated in a way. And it's been hard to manage the fear that persistent suffering creates. And that that's something I recognize in other people, is the feeling untranslatable anymore. It makes me think of survivalist mammals. I know that you can hang with my tangents here. I'm really into it already, right, Yeah, So while you're describing like this, this fear of being untranslatable, that I'm going to have to explain what it's like to be me clearly enough so that people stay with me. That drive for connection and being seen, it is so fundamental to our our existence as human animals. This is why excommunication is such a powerful tool. If you look at you're going to know this one better than than I do. With your history and your background, which ones, Kate, are the tradition on the East Coast where you were, the whole community gathers around you. And if you're done taking about shutting shunning, Yeah, can you describe shunning for folks who don't know what what I'm rambling about here? Describe shunning for me? Kay? Well, it is a powerful tool of social cohesion and lack thereof, where if someone violates like a sacred or special tenant of the community, that they will be kind of exiled by no one acknowledging or speaking to them. And so like I have a family member was shunned for having an organ at our wedding I doo within a in a service that prohibited these instruments, which is very funny now, but it was very sad at a time. But it's it's the it's the ability to render somebody invalid by not socially seeing them. And it's really really powerful because we need each other so and that that shunning that we're talking about, it belongs to specific spiritual and religious traditions, but you can also find it showing up in pop culture. Totally outing my nerd here, but I believe eve On one of them, one of those Star Trek shows. Gosh, I'm going to get so many messages about this for not knowing which part of the start right which Star Trek Clia I'm quoting here. Apologies, my brain is full of everybody. But there is an episode where I believe it's a it's a klingon shunning excommunication thing, where like the person who did the socially unacceptable things stands in the middle and everybody makes a circle, looks the person in there in the eye, and then crosses their arms in front of their chest and turns their back. Right. That's what I think of when I think about shunning used as communal operational force, right, Like this is how we keep people performing the way that we want them to perform. And what you described in talking about like I want my suffering to be translatable. I need people to hear me and understand me and see me, because if you can't understand me, then I lose connection and community. And if I can't be translated, I can't be seen. Yeah, And that is its own form of sort of communal shunning. I think that's why as a historian, I I'm so excited about sort of studying religious and cultural cliches, because I think that's exactly the reason why I found them so interesting. Was it felt like if I can study the cultural scripts, like the stories people tell about suffering, like you know, everything happens for a reason, or you know, God never gives you more than you can handle, that kind of thing. If I understand the script, then at least I understand what I'm off script. Because I have felt I've just you know, having a chronic problem. I have found it so little of it actually creates the kind of social understanding that I'm looking for. If I say something like, oh, yeah, it's pretty terrible and it stayed, really it's pretty much stayed pretty awful, there's really no. It doesn't suit the American culture of optimism. It doesn't give anyone the exit, the cultural exit ramp that they're looking for. I think um social cohesion and cultural scripts tell us a lot about when we're in and when we're out, because we certainly feel it when we're out, and I think the temptation is to bend yourself to fit the social construct so that you don't get shown, so that you don't feel alone if you've lost your person or you have a really impossible diagnosis or chronic illness or injury. You know, you need your community, and the temptation I think is like maybe I'm the wrong one. Well, part of the way that I see a lot of my work, Kate, is that like, you're not the one that's wrong. The culture is wrong. And you and I, you know, work at different angles or different starting points for this same challenge, which is it's it's the culture that misunderstands suffering. It is our entertainment and the stories that we tell ourselves and what we believe is the most helpful thing to do for somebody when they're suffering. That's where the problem is. It's not in this person who asked this question about you know, how do I go into a note a new year knowing that my this is a year my person will never see the implications or the connotations inside that is like, I'm going to have to justify this, and I think this also what we're just discussing also points to why it feels so important for people to justify their right to suffer, or their right to be in pain, or their right to be having a hard time. That doesn't match the Disney stereotype or the you know you got through the like that transformation narrative, right, you and I have act about this before that transformation narrative, for like, if you do your suffering correctly, then you come back a bigger, stronger, wiser person, and the bluebirds fly from your brain and and everything works out exactly as it should. And I think we know that that's not true, and that need to explain our suffering, translate our suffering. I love that phrase that you used to talk about that we feel like we're failing a cultural script and we're going to be left even more alone, but we also know that we need to tell the truth about our own experience. Right, So that's that's an interesting point of discomfort culturally and personally and professionally, right, Yes, trying to rewrite those scripts. And it really does take more people willing to tell the truth about their math, suffering, their suffering of I mean, you said it's so much better, and I can't remember what it was, but it was awesome. It really does take people talking about the reality of suffering to start changing those bigger conversations so that we don't feel like our math is getting questioned every time we turn around and every time there's a year change. That's right. This is just the first half of my conversation with Kate Bowler. We had so much fun talking together, and yes, we had fun talking about this really serious stuff. That's what we do together. This conversation was so much fun and so interesting and had so much useful stuff in it, we decided to split it into two parts. This is part one. Part two is coming your way next week. Don't miss it, friends. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description here and think, I do not want to talk about all that pain and stuff. Well, here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here, we talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone should listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leiver review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more here after. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O Here After with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Kimberly Cowen, Tanya Jujas, and Elizabeth Fosio. Edited by Houston Tilly Studio, Support by Chris Yuren and music provided by Wave Crush

This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and other professional helpers that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week part one of a two part special New Year, Same Grief and the Math of Suffering. It's all about facing the new year with hopefully a little bit less dread with special guest, historian, author, and Queen of awkward conversations Kate Bowler. This is part one. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, Well, I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time together. 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, So a lot of the questions that we got for this week's show could be boiled down to one thing. How do I find hope in the year to come? Knowing what I know about life right now, these last few years of hardship upon hardship in our personal lives and the wider world don't exactly make hope or even optimism that easy to access. The closing of one year and the entrance of a new year is just not that easy to navigate with any kind of excitement about what's ahead. I always aim to open these shows without being a downer, but so far I have not succeeded. There are hundreds of beginnings and endings in any given twelve month span, both culturally and personally. Beginnings and endings happen all the time. This whole idea that the year ends in December and begins a new in January of the Gregorian calendar is just one of many transition points. One of my favorite things about today's guest is the ground she covers with her brain. She's like this amazing ven diagram of religion, self help, health, kindness, the minutia of being human, all stitched together with this deep view of culture and religion. She definitely gets what I just rambled about, that the new year's don't always match the calendar, and even when they do, the new year isn't always that fresh start you long for. Dr Kate Bowler is an author, historian, and one of my favorite people in the world these days. She received a Master's of Religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Duke University. She's an associate professor at Duke Divinity School. Her latest book, No Cure for Being Human, grapples with her diagnosis of stage four cancer at the age of thirty five and the intersection of blind optimism and the lack of control inherent in being a real, live human with limitations. Dr Boehler made the whole country you get used to speaking frankly about suffering through her popular podcast Everything Happens, which is truly awesome and you should listen to that too. In today's episode, Kate and I talk about all manner of math. Before you stress out about that, it's the math of human suffering. Don't stress out about that either. Going to be great, all right, everybody. I am so glad to have my friend Kate in the studio well studio zoom with me today. So, Kate, thank you so much for being here. Hello, my dear, thanks for having absolutely so. You are the one person that I wanted to talk to you for this end of the year. New Year's not really a special but the New Year episode because there's there's so much in all of your work, your whole body of work, all of your books about trying to live into the future when the present is so crappy, when you know what you know about things so right, like, how how do you have any sort of optimism or hope in the future. Now we're going to get to that. I want to jump right into some listener questions because I think that's going to be the best, the best way to access the brilliance of your mind and your expertise here. So you okay with that if I jump right in with the question, All right, let's go, So listen. Question number one, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year that you shared with your person? Yeah, that's right. The second anyone uses the word new, there's immediately the knowledge that we have to then move on without maybe the life we thought we'd be here, the person we thought we would have. I think that's such a such a gorgeous, honest thing to say, because with all the focus on um the year's resolutions and like twenty you know, it's always like it's gonna next year's gonna be the best year yet. And and for many of us, especially when it comes to love, is like for for that love there needs to be a moment to acknowledge it's sometimes the best days of that love are behind us. It reminds me of some of the people I've met who create almost like a like a funeral for the year, for the for the thing that came before, some because it was the person that they were, the love that they had, but just something that honors the immensity of being feeling like you're like filled to the brim of details of something you're scared about forgetting, just being honest about those fears, Like maybe I'm scared of starting something new because I don't want to let go. I love that idea of of having a funeral or having some sort of ceremony to mark the end of the form of relatedness that came before. Yeah, maybe it's not just like the countdown to the new year, but just having a moment to count down the cut the one that's just coming to a close. You're right, I think we have this aggressive futurism that prevents us from being honest. Aggressive futurism is a fantastic way of looking at it. Yeah, there's a there's a word I want to pick up on. In this listener question, they write, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year you shared with your person. And I think this is a really good one because in your books and on your Instagram you touch on acceptance a lot. So can you talk to me about your relationship with acceptance. Oh, it's horrible, Honestly, I am accepted. It's truly a nightmare. I I've been living with incurable cancer or form for a long time, um longer than I wanted to, and I kept thinking that life was going to be a series of challenges that I would overcome and then I could put things behind me. But part of trying to figure out how to live, it seems, is figuring out what maybe just to have a thicker category for acceptance, to have almost like a higher tolerance for the the uncertainty of of having things that I love that I can't get back to and not ever going back to that like durable and destructible vision of myself I thought I would have. So I was diagnosed on US thirty five and I'm forty one, and I feel so grateful every time I hit a new year, But at the same time I need a minute to think, um, what what are the things I cannot change? It's that gorgeous serenity, prayer. But then how can I find like a little bit attraction, a little bit of like change wig wiggle ability to move because gosh, I'm not fully built for acceptance. I need a little bit of something thing that I can like totally kick the dust off of and move around. And I think in a lot of ways we weaponize acceptance, right, it's just applied from the outside as this end the goal that you need to get to in order to be palatable to the others around you, Like you just need to accept that there are some things that your body can't do anymore. Yeah, it's great. Really, I think I spent most You're right, I spent most of managing trying to not accept most things, because I mean, I think that living at least for me when I think about the context of like I'm I'm a professor, so I have to figure out how to keep changing and moving forward. I've got complicated medical care in which I very frequently have to yell at people when I'd rather use my nice nctwor voice than like, if I don't constantly push against acceptance, it goes into stagnation and despair, and so sometimes not accepting things It's been a really important part of me staying alive and also just learning how to evolve and change, because I'll never get to be the person I was before. Some things are unacceptable, right. I love how you caired that the Kate that like acceptance in some ways is giving up and being passive, like sort of pitting it against self advocacy, right, just as you said right there, Like with my medical needs, I can't just accept that this is my condition and this is what needs to happen. That I need to ferociously advocate for myself, and sometimes that feels the opposite of acceptance. I'm a bigger fan of allowing rather than acceptance, because I think acceptance comes with this connotation that you're cool with it. Right, we go back to if we go back to our question, our listener question here, how do I accept that I'm leaving the last year I shared with my person? So the understory there is that their person died in and we're facing a new year without this person. How do I accept that I'm leaving that year? Well, some things are unacceptable. It's not okay. You don't have to be quote unquote good with that in order to be healthy. And human and that's right. It's like so much of the experiment, right, is just living with unacceptable truths. Yeah, what a strange thing. I always love it when people say that. There's that lovely quote from the mayor of East Town. It's the Kate Winslet character, and she says, you know, at some point, like you don't I don't know if she said you don't accept it, but it's like, but at some point you just have to put groceries in the fridge. It didn't have that sort of like shiny neo Buddhist everything's fine with me. I am the ocean, and it's a stuffordness to that that I really, I really respect. Stay tuned for more coming up right after this break. So there's a related question that kind of goes back to what you were talking about with marking the end of one period before you enter the next period. And so the next question ready, Okay, it's going to sound almost like the first question, but there's a slight angle change here. So question too, how do you go into a new year knowing that your person won't be there for it? If my person died this year, now I have to start saying they died last year and it makes them feel so far away from me. So something kind of inherent in that question is the passage of time that gets um sort of crystallized once we switch from December thirty one to January one, Like now I have to say my person died last year, or if your person died in you can't say they died last year anymore. Mm hmmm. Yeah. It kind of gets to the math of suffering that gets applied to all those of us who suffer, which is that there's the kind of a rough calculation in the listener. It's like when someone says, how when when you know someone died, they're like, well, how old were they? Like immediately there's a sense that our our grief is rendered invalid with the passage of time, or our love doesn't sometimes even in ease, and our grief increase over the course of so that I do feel like there's with with the passage of time comes the feeling of leading to justify either moving on or whatever that means, or not moving on and whatever that means to to an audience. And there's like a there's a jury out there who gets to decide, and I have not found that there is a really easy way to describe what suffering has meant over time. Like you know, for instance, even if I just said, oh, I was diagnosed six years ago, truth is, it was three years after that that was probably the worst moment of my life. You know, it wasn't the diagnosis. It was the facing a different life for death, surgery and trying to still have problems that made sense to anyone after they thought that it was all over by them. And so I'm like a big fan of bad, bad math, like where we just assume we can't add up other people's lives because I I know I can't. I love that. I remember that was actually a line in your new book that stood out to me when I was reading it rereading it again yesterday, The math of suffering, Right, It's such a beautiful way of looking at it, because you're right, like the inherent in this question that this listener sent in was I'm going to have to start defending the fact that I missed them or that I am quote unquote still grieving, because I'm not going to be able to say, oh, it was just earlier this year that they died, or it was just last year that they were here there is this um judgment that enters the chat at the change of the year, right, And I really love what you just said. They're about I'm going to commit myself to bad math. I just paraphrase what you said, but as a person who has a hard time with math in general, I love I kept thinking like, oh, we need a new applied mathematics, the mathematics of suffering. That only the person at the center of that equation is the one that gets to say what time means or or what suffering means, and how we judge that, because there there is so much judgment about how you're suffering, how much you should be suffering, what the worst times were for you. It's really interesting that you brought that part up that you know, when you tell your story diagnosed six years ago with cancer and people are like, oh, that must have been such a terrible time for you. And what you just shared was that actually that sucked, and my equation of suffering actually had a different high point I think to the part of the fear, at least for me, of having someone who has had a chronically terrible, terrible, wonderful but pretty terrible, chronically terrible life is not just sorry, It's just that the more things happen, you know more that there's this kind of creeping fear that if people don't understand, then I'll be left alone. If people don't understand, I won't have the community and the support and the friendship. Like if I can't make other people understand my suffering math, then I'm no longer translatable as lovable, carriable, intelligible. Then you get untranslated in a way. And it's been hard to manage the fear that persistent suffering creates. And that that's something I recognize in other people, is the feeling untranslatable anymore. It makes me think of survivalist mammals. I know that you can hang with my tangents here. I'm really into it already, right, Yeah, So while you're describing like this, this fear of being untranslatable, that I'm going to have to explain what it's like to be me clearly enough so that people stay with me. That drive for connection and being seen, it is so fundamental to our our existence as human animals. This is why excommunication is such a powerful tool. If you look at you're going to know this one better than than I do. With your history and your background, which ones, Kate, are the tradition on the East Coast where you were, the whole community gathers around you. And if you're done taking about shutting shunning, Yeah, can you describe shunning for folks who don't know what what I'm rambling about here? Describe shunning for me? Kay? Well, it is a powerful tool of social cohesion and lack thereof, where if someone violates like a sacred or special tenant of the community, that they will be kind of exiled by no one acknowledging or speaking to them. And so like I have a family member was shunned for having an organ at our wedding I doo within a in a service that prohibited these instruments, which is very funny now, but it was very sad at a time. But it's it's the it's the ability to render somebody invalid by not socially seeing them. And it's really really powerful because we need each other so and that that shunning that we're talking about, it belongs to specific spiritual and religious traditions, but you can also find it showing up in pop culture. Totally outing my nerd here, but I believe eve On one of them, one of those Star Trek shows. Gosh, I'm going to get so many messages about this for not knowing which part of the start right which Star Trek Clia I'm quoting here. Apologies, my brain is full of everybody. But there is an episode where I believe it's a it's a klingon shunning excommunication thing, where like the person who did the socially unacceptable things stands in the middle and everybody makes a circle, looks the person in there in the eye, and then crosses their arms in front of their chest and turns their back. Right. That's what I think of when I think about shunning used as communal operational force, right, Like this is how we keep people performing the way that we want them to perform. And what you described in talking about like I want my suffering to be translatable. I need people to hear me and understand me and see me, because if you can't understand me, then I lose connection and community. And if I can't be translated, I can't be seen. Yeah, And that is its own form of sort of communal shunning. I think that's why as a historian, I I'm so excited about sort of studying religious and cultural cliches, because I think that's exactly the reason why I found them so interesting. Was it felt like if I can study the cultural scripts, like the stories people tell about suffering, like you know, everything happens for a reason, or you know, God never gives you more than you can handle, that kind of thing. If I understand the script, then at least I understand what I'm off script. Because I have felt I've just you know, having a chronic problem. I have found it so little of it actually creates the kind of social understanding that I'm looking for. If I say something like, oh, yeah, it's pretty terrible and it stayed, really it's pretty much stayed pretty awful, there's really no. It doesn't suit the American culture of optimism. It doesn't give anyone the exit, the cultural exit ramp that they're looking for. I think um social cohesion and cultural scripts tell us a lot about when we're in and when we're out, because we certainly feel it when we're out, and I think the temptation is to bend yourself to fit the social construct so that you don't get shown, so that you don't feel alone if you've lost your person or you have a really impossible diagnosis or chronic illness or injury. You know, you need your community, and the temptation I think is like maybe I'm the wrong one. Well, part of the way that I see a lot of my work, Kate, is that like, you're not the one that's wrong. The culture is wrong. And you and I, you know, work at different angles or different starting points for this same challenge, which is it's it's the culture that misunderstands suffering. It is our entertainment and the stories that we tell ourselves and what we believe is the most helpful thing to do for somebody when they're suffering. That's where the problem is. It's not in this person who asked this question about you know, how do I go into a note a new year knowing that my this is a year my person will never see the implications or the connotations inside that is like, I'm going to have to justify this, and I think this also what we're just discussing also points to why it feels so important for people to justify their right to suffer, or their right to be in pain, or their right to be having a hard time. That doesn't match the Disney stereotype or the you know you got through the like that transformation narrative, right, you and I have act about this before that transformation narrative, for like, if you do your suffering correctly, then you come back a bigger, stronger, wiser person, and the bluebirds fly from your brain and and everything works out exactly as it should. And I think we know that that's not true, and that need to explain our suffering, translate our suffering. I love that phrase that you used to talk about that we feel like we're failing a cultural script and we're going to be left even more alone, but we also know that we need to tell the truth about our own experience. Right, So that's that's an interesting point of discomfort culturally and personally and professionally, right, Yes, trying to rewrite those scripts. And it really does take more people willing to tell the truth about their math, suffering, their suffering of I mean, you said it's so much better, and I can't remember what it was, but it was awesome. It really does take people talking about the reality of suffering to start changing those bigger conversations so that we don't feel like our math is getting questioned every time we turn around and every time there's a year change. That's right. This is just the first half of my conversation with Kate Bowler. We had so much fun talking together, and yes, we had fun talking about this really serious stuff. That's what we do together. This conversation was so much fun and so interesting and had so much useful stuff in it, we decided to split it into two parts. This is part one. Part two is coming your way next week. Don't miss it, friends. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description here and think, I do not want to talk about all that pain and stuff. Well, here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here, we talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone should listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leiver review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more here after. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O Here After with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Kimberly Cowen, Tanya Jujas, and Elizabeth Fosio. Edited by Houston Tilly Studio, Support by Chris Yuren and music provided by Wave Crush