We’re on break, creating all new episodes for season 3. In the meantime, here’s one of our favorite episodes from the past year. See you soon.
“Getting people to feel angry with me makes me feel less alone, less helpless. (It) makes me feel like, okay, there’s a whole team of us. We're all gonna do it.” - Writer and illustrator, Aubrey Hirsch
The world is such a hot mess: every day a new disaster, a new human rights catastrophe. It can just feel… endless. Illustrator Aubrey Hirsch joins us to talk about outrage and trauma and community building - it’s like the greatest hits of modern culture. But mostly, she joins us to talk about art - specifically, the ways that storytelling helps us band together and work towards the world we all want.
PS: Listen all the way through so you don’t miss Aubrey’s slightly sinister but ultimately functional ideas on hope.
In this episode we cover:
Click here for the episode webpage.
Notable quotes:
“I feel very helpless and I don't wanna feel like that because I know that to be f*cked is a spectrum and we can be more f*cked than we are now or less f*cked. It's not a binary. I want us to move in the right direction (less f*cked), and I want to be a part of that movement - even if my action comes too late for some.” - Aubrey Hirsch
About our guest:
Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories, and This Will Be His Legacy, a flash fiction chapbook. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared widely in print and online in places like American Short Fiction, Vox, TIME, The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Toast, and in the New York Times bestselling anthology, Not That Bad. Her essay on trauma and surviving gun violence is a must read. Find it here.
Additional resources
Aubrey occasionally teaches comics for “non-artists.” Check her TW @aubreyhirsch for announcements. She publishes new comics and essays on Roxane Gay’s substack, The Audacity.
Aubrey’s written on so many topics relevant to human life. Find a long list of awesome essays on her website, https://aubreyhirsch.com
Get in touch:
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For me, I find it really helpful. And that's a huge part of where most of what I write comes from is from a place of anger. You know, I'll get upset about something and then I'll say I need to like write about it. Like a lot of the time, what I'll be thinking is why isn't everyone screaming about this all the time? And then I wonder if it's because maybe people don't know, And so then I feel like it's my responsibility to try to make something that people will look at and then come and join me in, you know, please join me in the scream fest. Yes, this is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week on Hereafter, writer and illustrator Aubrey Hirsch joins us to talk about well, a lot of things. She joins us to talk about anger and trauma and gender it's like the greatest modern hits of outrage on today's show. But mostly she joins us to talk about art, specifically the ways that storytelling helps us band together and work towards the world we all want. This is a good one. Friends. 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. And one more note hereafter with Megan. Divine is currently on break between seasons. We'll be back before you know it with a whole new season with even more incredible guests. In the meantime, here's one of our most loved episodes we'll season. So. I first consciously encountered Aubrey Hirsch's work in her essay on surviving gun violence that was in Roxane Gay's newsletter The Audacity. I say consciously because I'd seen Aubrey's work before, and I bet you have to. From her comics on reproductive rights to her essays on breastfeeding in public, Aubrey's work distills complex issues down to a few emotionally powerful frames. As you'll hear her say in this conversation, using the medium of comics allows her to bring social issues to life in a way that feels more immediate, more visceral, and honestly more human than news stories or sound bites or statistics can usually do. Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories, and This will be his Legacy, a flash fiction chatbook. Her stories and essays and comics have appeared widely in print and online in places like American Short Fiction, Vox Time, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and in the New York Times best selling anthology Not That Bad. In today's episode of Hereafter, we talk outrage about the state of the world and the powers of activism and storytelling to help bind us together in the service of the world we actually want. Aubrey, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you here. So I saw your gun Violent Survivor essay and basically stalked you after that because honestly, people know that I will I will cry at least once in every episode. But like that essay was the first time I saw my experience of being a trauma survivor reflected, like the way that surviving something life threatening and terrifying, the way that that lives in a person out in the world. So thank you for that. You're so welcome, Thank you for having me, And what a nice thing to say. Thank you. It really means a wat to me. That was a very very challenging essay to write, and I have heard from many people who have said something similar, and it just it feels so good, you know, after you work so hard on something, to hear that it means something, even to one person, really just makes it worth it. So thank you. You're welcome. You have worked everywhere, including one comment called Medicine's Women Problem about being ignored and misdiagnosed for years with significant health issues. You've covered reproductive restrictions and misogyny and harassment and the me too movements. So so much of your work has this unifying theme of telling the truth about really shitty things, really difficult things. In a lot of ways, your work is really also about telling the truth about things as a way to I'm totally editorializing here, but like to upset the social order, right, like to kick things over and to start talking about things that we really need to be talking about. So you're an illustrator and obviously a fantastic writer, But what is it about that combination of narrative and imagery, specifically for talking about these kinds of issues. What does illustration let you do that, Maybe writing alone doesn't. Yeah, it's such a good question. This is something that I kind of discovered as I was working my way into comics, is that I think comics are a fantastic medium for discussing difficult things. I think part of it is sort of like I like to call it, like the spoonful of sugar effect, where if you're writing about something that's really difficult and maybe heavy, maybe challenging, but there are pictures to look at, it can feel like a bit more accessible. It can offer people kind of a way into it. You see a comic, you recognize a visual form. You know this is not going to take a ton of your time. You're not going to have to sit with this for too long. And also you know there's things to look at. What comics allows me to do when I'm talking about social issues, especially is to take statistics and kind of like bring them to life because within the piece you can have like infographics, and it's just it's sometimes it's more impactful to see what one fifth looks like than to just read that number, or you know, read one fifth, but rather like to see it in a pie chart, to see it in a graph, I think just gives people a different way to access the material, and it can make things like that hit harder. We're such visual creatures, right, Like that is the way that we get a lot of our information. Like, you can pack a lot more information into an image than you can in words, right, And there's an immediacy to that. And I think also like that immediacy is how we feel things, especially the topics that you usually talk about. I think that's right. And also, you know, people will see something it'll resonate with them. And I think because of things like Instagram, because of how text messaging works, we're so likely to be sharing pictures with each other that it's a lot easier for people to send like a panel of a comic than they would, say, like a paragraph from a news story. And then you know, it just helps more people get their eyes on in can raise awareness about like a whole slew of problems in the world. Yeah, nobody's going to read a whole paragraph, right, It's not shareable from a graphic perspective. And it's also like the full catastrophe is just it's so overwhelming, the sheer amount of atrocities and things to be outraged about and things to talk about like that. Overwhelm is so intense and no one's going to read all of that stuff, but you make a comic and it opens different doors. Yeah, I think that's right for me. I find it really helpful. And that's a huge part of where most of what I write comes from is from a place of anger. You know, I'll get upset about something, and then I'll say, I need to like write about it. Like a lot of the time, what I'll be thinking is, why isn't everyone screaming about this all the time? And then I wonder if it's because maybe people don't know, And so then I feel like it's my responsibility to try to make something that people will look at and then come and join me in, you know, please join me in the scream fest. Yes. Yeah. And then when I know I'm onto something is when during the process of rees searching, I become more angry, you know, like I thought I understood the scope of the problem, but in fact I did not. It's a lot worse than I thought. And then that's really that's a powerful moment for me and my process is when I get when I start getting more angry then it makes me more excited about the thing that I'm working on, and it really does kind of help neutralize my terrible feelings when I can feel like I'm doing something. Tell me more about that relationship between rage and creation and that last element that you just put in there, that it actually makes you feel less overwhelmed by the terrible things tapping into that. I think you said anger and I said rage, but I mean either one. I'm going to go with rage. It's you know, we're at a moment in the world right now, especially with all of the attacks on reproductive rights that are that are going on, where I find myself often like sitting around thinking what are we going to do? And I feel very helpless. And I don't want to feel like that because I know that to be fucked is a spectrum and we can be more fucked than we are now or less fucked. It's not a buyinary and I want us to move in the right direction and I want to be a part of that movement. But then on the other hand, you know, I'll read a new story about a woman who is right now, you know, bleeding in a hospital in Texas because they won't terminate her very dangerous pregnancy, and that makes me feel awful because even if we can move in the right direction, it's not going to help her. You know, it's too late for her. And every day it's too late for somebody new whose life is being seriously damaged or ruined by these terrible attacks on our freedoms. And I think there are moments when I find that really paralyzing, and there are moments where I think, Wow, what am I doing? You know, I'm like making my dumb comics. I'm like drawing my little pictures, and it all feels very useless. But then the only way out is through. There's nothing to do but to do the work. And then when I sit down and I do it, I almost always feel better, you know, just by the process of making something. Getting people to feel angry with me makes me feel less alone, less helpless, makes me feel like, Okay, there's a whole team of us. We're all going to do it, you know, we're all trying. And then hearing from people who say this thing meant something to me, or I sent this to my partner, I sent this to my mother, I sent this to my uncle, you know, I put this on Facebook, it makes me feel better, you know, like it makes me feel like at least I'm doing something. And it's not going to help that person that's in Texas right now, but maybe it will help somebody think a different way. Maybe it will help fire somebody up to vote who wasn't going to, or reach out and do some campaigning, or donate to an abortion fund, you know, or whatever the thing is that's going to help us get out of this mess. That maybe it will do something, And that's my hope. Yes, yeah, And I love the sort of unifying force of rage. That's something that you write about a lot about how historically and currently kind of always like women's anger is not okay, right, Telling the truth about these things is not okay. Showing anger is not okay. What's one of the things that pisses me off the most about everything that's happening is that we aren't supposed to be angry about it. And we also don't recognize all of this as loss as a grief issue, right, that there is grief and loss and anger involved in so much of everything that's been unfolding. Always, I mean, I don't want to whitewatch things and be like it used to be better. Well not for everybody, but you know, especially these last several years and just the explosion ofice and violence and backpedaling of basic human rights. The ways that loss, grief, anger, and gender all come together as something that's really a thread through a lot of your work. Yeah, and the connections there is something I've been thinking a lot about too, especially like with anger, because women, we get socialized to de escalate. That's our job, you know, in the face of anger, in the face of outrage, we're there to put the brakes on that and like slow things down and calm things down. And I think it does us a disservice because anger, as much as we're taught to repress it, ignore it, that it's negative, that it's somehow bad, it's there for a reason. You know, it's there because if something's gone wrong, you need to get angry before you can address injustice. And the fact that women get socialized to suppress their anger is part I think of the reason why so much injustice can be done to us, because you know, everybody tells us, you know, be quiet, calm down, don't be hysterical, and we hear that all of our lives it's impossible not to internalize it on some level. So what we've got is storytelling and rage and banding together and for me, you know, really tapping into not only the anger, but the loss and the compassion in there. And compassion is such a word that gets screwed around with so much, and I think it also gets weaponized, like have some compassion and understanding for over here and the other like no wrong use of the word etymological badness. I wish that the people who are creating so much arbitrary suffering would understand the suffering. Yeah, I mean that empathy gap is like the biggest source of injustice in this country. You know that the fact that so many you know, Republican can be against gay marriage until their kid is gay and then all of a sudden, you know, it doesn't require empathy because it directly affects them and it changes their tune. If there was a way that we could make this directly affect every single person, I don't think we would have a problem. But yeah, if you can't have empathy for other things that you know aren't directly affecting you, but are directly affecting other people, it's very difficult to have conversations with people like that. Yeah, you're purposely shutting down your relatedness to others, your ability to see yourself in other people's experience. And honestly, I mean we do that because we're afraid of those feelings. Right. I don't want to know what it's like to be this person because then I have to feel that, right, you know, for me, everything comes back to our aversion to feeling and our aversion to grief, right, Like, we don't want to see the people we care about suffer, right, And that includes refusing to see the suffering of others because that would tap us into our own humanity, and those emotions are too big for us to really take in and really handle. Very generous perspective, Yeah, some days I get to be generous while also holding white hot rage in the other hand, you know, And it's just for me, this is part of rage. Right. It's like we have so demonized emotion and we're so afraid of emotion and feeling with each other. There are real world consequences for a refusal to acknowledge the frailty of being alive and how things can change in an instant, in less and until we get better at allowing the tenderness of being human. Nothing is really going to change because we refuse to feel with each other, and because we squash down anger and grief and loss, we can't access that ability to feel with each other and make laws and communities that are actually human centered and kind. And you know, you said it much more succinctly and much better than I just rambled through. But until we can feel with each other, we're not going to have the kind of just connected society that some of us dream of. It's really beautiful. Actually, yeah, you're listening to Hereafter with me, Megan Divine and this week's guest illustrator Aubrey Hirsch. As we rejoin this conversation, Aubrey and I are discussing her essay on Surviving gun violence. Now we're going to link to that essay in the show notes so you can read it, and please, really really do go read it. I wasn't exaggerating at the top of the show when I said it was the first time I saw my own experience reflected in somebody else's story. There's something I don't know, just amazingly powerful about the way Aubrey describes the ways that trauma and memory live in your body and mind. So let's get back to our conversation. But I did just want to remind you to go read that essay once you're finished listening to the show. Your gun violence survivor essay isn't illustrated. Is there a difference for you between the things you typically create and illustrate and that particular piece. Yeah, it's interesting because so I write a monthly comic for Rosan Gay's newsletter, The Audacity, And when I sat down to write that piece, I intended to make it comic, and I thought, you know, maybe I will try to make a comic about my experience with PTSD. So I sat down and I started to do my script, which is usually how I start with just the text, and usually I I overwrite it and then pare it down. But I was like, what would have been twelve panels in? And I felt like I wasn't even anywhere near anything that I wanted to say. And the more I thought on it, the more I felt like this was going to need to be much longer than a comic. You know, the text I could put into a comic. So I texted directs and and said what if instead of a comic, I didn't say star and she was like, great, I love it, go for it. And so then I sat down to try to write it. And it was a tough piece to write because there was a lot that I wanted to say and a lot that I wanted to get across. That was really difficult for me to do. But I think I needed that the room. I don't think I could have done that in a much more compressed space. I tried, but I couldn't. You have to follow where the story wants to go, right, And one of the things about telling the truth about trauma and about violence is that we always try to shrink those stories. I want people to go read it, so obviously I'm going to link the wrap out of it everywhere. But the repetition in that piece is one of the things that makes it so powerful, Right that each iteration comes with a slightly larger lens, right, And that is the way that trauma lives in the body. That was the last Thank you for saying that, because that was really the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place for me. I wrote like five full drafts of that essay top to bottom, and every time I wrote it, I was like, this is just not it's not doing the thing I wanted to do, until I started focusing on the paragraph where I talk about how the experience of trauma is actually quite boring and why that is is because you have to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. And then as I was trying to work that into language, I thought, Okay, this is what I need to do. I need to make the essay do the thing and just you're just gonna hear me say it over and over and over again, and here's what's happened, and then hoping that the time that you spend with me in the essay gives you a little bit of a glimpse of like what it's like to be in the head of a trauma survivor Yeah, the repetition of that both as like a creative writing device and making the reader feel it. And this is something that we really don't talk about, not just in gun violence, but in the way that life altering, life changing loss of whatever sort lives in you. And it honestly, it really is boring, so boring, it really really is, And it's this engine that just keeps chugging. Yeah, it's just exhausting. It's boring, and it wears you out, you know, it wears you out. It wears out you know, whenever anytime I have to say to my partner, like, can I talk to you again about the time I was health hostage at a point, I feel I'm myself. I'm so annoyed with me, you know, and he's great, but I feel bored and annoyed because I know he knows he's heard the story before. But like, the telling is the cure. You know, you have to do it. You have to get in there with it when your body tells you that it's time, and so you're going to drag in whoever it is, you know, your therapist, your partner, your best friend, your roommate, whoever is the person who's going to be there for you in those moments, and then you know you're dragging them into the boringness of it all too. I love this. I think we're kind of precious about trauma, right, Like you can't call it boring, you can't laugh about it, Like it is this very serious thing, and it's such a serious thing that you have to be able to tell the truth about it. And part of the truth is it's repetitive. The reach of trauma is very long, very long. Yeah, And you know, after a time, there's nothing creative about it. There's nothing generative about it. There's nothing that's entered hating about it. It's just about the work, you know, and it working on your trauma, surviving your trauma, processing your trauma, healing. It just becomes like brushing your teeth. It's boring, but you have to do it. You know, you have to do it all the time because your teeth are going to grow new plaque, you know. And the same thing with your brain. Your brain is still going to tell your body something's wrong. You've got to keep doing it over and over again, even when it's not interesting or exciting or new anymore. Yeah. And the relationship with the story also changes, right as you change, and new experiences come in and your new outrages come into it. One of the big pieces of that essay is how all of this stuff, I mean, you and I just spent a while talking about feeling with each other, and a lot of that essay is about every new act of gun violence that hits the headlines brings you back to I know what that feeling is. I don't know that person's experience because I'm not them and I'm not in that same thing. I know what after feels like. Yeah, I know what after feels like. You know, every time these things happen, people on Twitter are making calls for empathy, you know, to say, like, how can we be letting this happen? How can we let seven think about it? You know, here as a child on the floor terrified because there's a man with a gun standing two feet away, pot think about what that feels like. And you know, and like I don't have to, you know, well, then I can't stop thinking about it. You know. It's this constant state of retraumatization because every day there's some new terrifying gun violence thing happening, and there's people, you know, shouting at you on Twitter to put yourself in their place. And obviously they mean well, and they're good reasons to do it, but for people who are survivors of gun violence, it's quite triggering and it does make me think about it, you know. And when I hear people interviewed on the news, I see the shaking, I hear the terror in their voice, and it reminds me of hearing my own terrified voice and being surprised by the sound, like, Oh, I didn't know my voice could sound like that. It just it's all the little things, you know, that that can kind of like yank you back into a moment. Yeah, because time is nothing right to the nervous system and to the body, you can go back to that moment so easily. I mean, this is this is the work of therapy and storytelling, right to get to a point where when your body and your nervous system responds to new stimulus, a new shooting, a new tweet yelling at you to think about this person or put yourself in their shoes. All of the work that we do is so that those moments don't destroy you. Yeah. And I like to talk about it too, like it's about you got to beat the path to and from you know, you got to beat the path in because that's also your path out. And if you don't do it, and you just let it become this like crazy swamp of overgrowth, you think you're walling it off, but you're not, because sometimes you're going to get teleported back there against your will, and you're not going to have a way out. You're going to be stuck in there with everything around you that you haven't thought about and you haven't processed. But if you can make your safe routes in, that's your exit strategy. Also, you gotta do it. Yeah, you gotta do it. I mean we spend some time just now talking about what happens when you don't allow things that hurt space to hurt and space to breathe and engage with them. Like, if you don't do that, we get authoritarian angry in a bad way. People who need to outsource their pain onto others. Right, So we do this for ourselves, right, so that being reminded when the body remembers, when the nervous system remembers, that it doesn't destroy you. And also so that we don't suppress this truth so much that we destroy others. You don't get through this life without some kind of hardship and being able to talk about that and tend to yourself in that, Like that is the work. Yeah, So you sometimes teach comics. What is there about storytelling that you feel like people might find helpful? I think sometimes the personal pain and outrage at the world is so big that we're like I can't even begin so advice or anything for the power of storytelling or people who want to start messing with it. What do you get you mean, from the perspective of a storyteller, like how it can be helpful? Yeah, well, I mean I think, as we've been talking about this whole time, it's like communication. It's just it's everything. It's how you heal yourself, it's how you heal society. It's how you build relationships and maintain them. You know, our connections, everything we are is about community, hitting with each other and you know, hearing and listening and being able to tell your story. Being able to tell your truth in a way that other people can connect with, I think is really important. And also it's really rewarding. It's so over warding. I have this experience over and over and over again where I'll think something is so personal to me, it's so weird and dark and strange, and then I'll write about it and I will hear from so many people who will say me too, and like it. Just it feels so good to know that you're not alone. And whether you're sharing that experience with strangers or just the people who are close to you, you know, if you're just journaling for yourself to go back and revisit your your past self, if you're writing something you know for your children to have, if you're just writing something to your sister or to a wider audience, I think you can. I'll get that feeling of recognition. I don't know if you found. I did do a comic about my experience getting robbed at gunpoint called The Language of Trauma. That's about how memory and trauma work or don't work. And what I wrote about in that comic was my experience of not talking about this for so long that by the time I finally addressed it, it was like I couldn't remember it, Almost like I could remember certain things like the look of the floor tiles, I can remember the smell of the soap, but I couldn't give you, like a narrative account beginning to end of like here's what happened, you know, mancument, Here's what he said, Here's what I said, Here's what my sister said. That it was like it was just gone. And part of what made it difficult for me to talk about was that I was worried that if I talked about it, honestly that people would say, like, well, that's not trauma, Like you can't be traumatized if you don't remember the thing that happened to you, Like, that's just not how we're You're fine. It really freaked me out, But then you know, I did the research, I learned about it. I presented the comic, which is less about my experience and more about the science. But I heard from so many people telling me the same thing happened to me. You know, I tried to put it out of my head. Now I have these blank spaces, and it was really healing for them to read it, and then that was healing for me to hear. You know. It can like make this beautiful cycle good instead of bad. Yeah, which is the opposite of what we think. Right you talk about the hard things and you bring everybody down. And the reality is when you tell the truth about your own experience, you let other people feel seen. Two. And this is really where we started as well, right, Like, when we tell the truth about our own experience, in whatever form that takes, we find community and connection, which is the opposite of sort of the good vibes only culture, which is like nobody wants to hear about your pay and like, you know, only smiley phases, happy people have friends, like all of that crap. Like the reality is or the truth here is Like telling the truth about things is the way forward, and that's how we connect, and that's how we make community, and that's how we build cultures and societies that treat each other with respect and kindness. Yeah. And I'll hear from people all the time who will say I read this, I recognized myself, and I sent it to these people that I want to know me better. Yeah, you know, and like something like that. I feel like it's so meaningful to me, you know, just to hear that, like my experience can be a way for two people that I've never met to connect more fully. Yeah. That's the stuff that makes you feel like, oh man, that was worth it, that was worth doing the hard thing. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean this this fits really nicely with my usual closing question for everybody is like, knowing what you know, knowing what you've lived and what you've experienced, what does hope look like for you? And I think you started to answer that question, but let's let's do it anyway. What does hope look like for you? This is really like an important question for me to think about right now, because, as I said, I have been feeling really hopeless. Part of what hope I have is I think about, and I just wrote something about this too, how political power in our country is often like a pendulum, right And I feel very strongly that all the terrible things that are happening right now to women, to LGBTQ people, particularly trans people, is because of progress that we've made. You know, it's backlash. It's saying, oh, now you've gone too far. You know, you're you're out of your place now, and we're going to put you back in the kitchen, you know, back in the clothes you belong, and back in the relationship that you don't want to be in. Whatever it is we're sending you back. Now. You've come too far. And I am hopeful about the backlash to this backlash, because this backlash has been so much crueler and more devastating than I would have imagined that I feel like the stuff we're going to get on the other side is going to be amazing. You know, it's just gonna We're gonna make the people who are making us feel this way feel this way, and I'm looking forward to that. Yes, I love like, I love this because this is also that is a hope that I share as well. Like my functional hope is you know when people say things are getting so much worse, that they're not getting so much worse, They're getting so much more visible. Right, So a lot of the violence and oppression and everything else we're seeing has been going on for a very long time. It just could get hidden because the structures we're holding, and the structures are no longer holding. And I feel like that dissolution is very hopeful. So I love your definition of hope. Yeay, functional hope for everyone with a side of rage. Yeah, but of a sinister answer. I wish. I wish I could give you something more positive. But I don't feel like that sinister though, right Like I think, like, is that cynical or is that realistic? Like I don't find that to be sinister. I find that to be functional, Yeah, and realistic. Had just always says to me every time I will say something, she will say that's very adaptive and tell if I can wait? Is that good? Yeah? I don't know what you're telling me here? Am I being insulted? But then I've decided to just own it. And you know, like, sometimes there are things you do that they're not good or bad, they're just adaptive. There's something that you do so that you can live in your environment. And this functional hope, as you call it, this is my adaptation. This is how I live in this environment. Perfect. This is how I live in this environment and don't collapse and also don't go completely ballistic. I love this. I love this for us, and I love this for everybody. I am so glad I got to talk to you today. Me too. This is really fun. Thank you, This is really fun. I love that we also know that we have fun talking about very difficult things. So we're gonna obviously link to a bunch of things, and I will track down that link to that other essay about memory and trauma, anything else. You want people to know where to find you, that's it. I mean, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at Aubrey Hirsch and on Roxangay's The Audacity once a month. Subscribe to Rock Sangay's newsletter and you get a comment from you once a month. Yeah, and lots of other great stuff too. I love that thing. Okay, coming up, after the break, your questions to carry with you, and as always, all the ways you can tell me about what hope means to you. Right now, don't miss that part. Friends, We'll be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. I really loved this conversation with Aubrehirsch. I just I have so much fun talking to people who address the world with intensity. I guess is a good word for it. I just it feels really good to meet other people who feel similar levels of outrage at the state of the world, and people who believe in the power of art and creation to help us band together and fight for a good and just and safe world. So that's what I'm personally taking from today's show, A sense of solidarity right here where we are. That kind of solidarity feels really important to me. What are you taking from the show this week? Did anything stick with you in today's conversation? I mean, we packed a lot of topics into our time here together. What parts made you see something from a new perspective. What parts had you maybe raising your own fiston, solidarity or connection if that happened for you. I'm also really interested to hear. If any of you felt inspired to mess around with creating comics of your own, that would be awesome. I think Aubrey would like that too. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really is a crowd sourced thing. As Aubrey said so many times, it's easier to move towards the world we want if we find ways to connect inside this world we have. Actually, I don't think she said that exactly, but that relationship building stuff is definitely in there in that conversation. Speaking of relationship building, everybody, be sure to check out Refugeing Grief on Instagram and here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from today's show and leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts. Tag us in your own posts on your own social media accounts, and remember to use the hashtag here after Pod on all of the platforms so we can find you. That's the way we search for you with that hashtag here after Pod. We love to see where this show takes you. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming explorations of some kind of difficult things. Give us a call at three two three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find the number in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot coo. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too, right on the website Megan Divine dot coo. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for something new to listen to in their going to see the show description for hereafter and think, I don't want to listen to difficult things, even if amazingly cool people are talking about them. Well, that's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad in here. We talk about heavy stuff, yes, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social worlds on social media and click through to leave a review, Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and yes, please keep on listening, want more. Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone, especially if you're an activist, or if you're in any of the helping professions, or honestly, if you're a human. You need those kind of skills. Find trainings, professional resources and best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus the Guided Journal for Grief at Megan Divine dot co. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Meghan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fosio, Logistical and social media support by Micah, and edited by Houston Tilly. Music provided by Wave Crash and Today is a backgown noise. You'd have to listen really closely for it, but the sound of Luna's two long nails clicking on the hardwood floors