Lots of smart, high achieving people learned to greet pain with stoicism: by being mature and responsible, even as kids.
But what happens when you can’t maintain the facade of having your sh*t entirely together? Do you ever get to be less than Super Human?
In this episode we cover:
Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
“I live with a constant fear of liking anyone or anything too much lest I lose it.” - Laurel Braitman
Related episodes:
Connection Is the Best Medicine: with Dr. Rana Awdish
Elise Loehnen: The 7 Deadly Sins and the Crown of Sadness
Follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @refugeingrief and @itsokpod on TikTok. Visit refugeingrief.com for resources & courses
About our guest:
Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author - her new book, What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, is out now. She’s the founder of Writing Medicine, a global community of writing healthcare professionals, and the Director of Writing and Storytelling at the Medical Humanities and the Arts Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Find her at laurelbraitman.com and on IG @laurel_braitman.
About Megan:
Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief
Additional resources:
Writing Medicine - Laurel Braitman’s global writing community for healthcare workers
Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here.
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I don't think the opposite of life is death. I think the opposite of life is having a void of feeling anything at all. I think we are scared of death for the wrong reasons. You know what we should be scared of is shutting ourselves down to the experiences that give life meaning, the painful ones and the joyful ones.
This is It's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, New York Times best selling author Laurel Brateman on what looks like bravery but is sometimes just your overachieving self trying to manage a whole lot of pain. If you have ever been complimented on your ability to handle things really well, I think you're really going to like this episode. Settle in everybody, so much cool stuff coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here 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, somehow I did not know about Laurel Brightman until just recently. This is the power of social media. Friends. Somebody sent me one of Laurel's posts and I was like instantly smitten and spent way more time than I had available going through her Instagram. Laurel is smart. She's a writer. She helps people navigate really difficult things, largely through her writing workshops for doctors and nurses, And as is the case with almost everyone I've met who works in such difficult territory, she is hilarious, like my favorite kind of funny, with like dry wit and visual puns. Also, much like me, Laurel works very hard and has excelled at everything she's tried. She made a life out of being the brave one and the strong one, the most accomplished and reliable person.
In the room.
When she was a very young child, Laurel Brightman's dad was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Her family dealt with it by stuffing their lives full of adventure and with frank, though some may say blunt discussions of death, as Laurel says, all through her childhood, her dad was teaching them how to live without him. Her new book, What Looks Like Bravery explores that upbringing and the long reach of those early lessons on stoicism and survival. Laurel Brightman is a New York Times bestselling author and she's the founder of Writing Medicine, a global writing community for healthcare workers. She's the Director of Writing and Storytelling at Stanford School of Medicines, Medical Humanities and the Arts Program, which is a very long title for a very cool thing, where she helps students, staff and physicians communicate more clearly and vulnerably for their own benefit and that of their patient. That all boils down to. Laurel spends her professional life helping other professionals listen to themselves, stepping out of that like ultracompetent professional robot land that so many smart people live in, to a place that not only allows them to be human, but truly deeply needs them to be human. I have quite a few things to say after our conversation happens, so stay tuned for that, everybody, and let me know if you saw yourself in any of what Laurel and I discuss. You can let me know in the comments on social media, or you can leave a review of this episode in your podcast app. You can do both, but I do really want to hear from you all right, enough out of me. Let's get to our conversation with author, teacher and all around awesome sauce person Laurel Brightman. Laurel, I'm so glad to have you here with me today. I'm like ridiculously excited about it.
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
There are so many different places where we could start, but I am going to start us off in the deep end if you don't mind.
My pool only has a deep end.
Yes, bless you, this is why you're here. Okay, so you have said quote. I think that the low thrum of anxiety around loss is the biggest, most shaping force in my life. It's the river that creates the grand canyon that is my personality. One. What an awesome thing to say. But can you tell me what you mean by that?
Oh? Sure, of course. Not going to be able to do it with my mouth as well as I do it with my fingertips, because that's why I'm a writer. But I'll tell you what you know. I live with a constant fear of liking anyone or anything too much lest I lose it. And I think that's probably true for so many of the people you've had these conversations with maybe you your listeners.
I don't know.
On Once you know that someone or something or some place can be taken away from you with no warning and no reason at least that you can understand, then how on earth are you supposed to not have anxiety after that? I mean, I think in a lot of ways, it's it's the normal rational approach to lived experience that is touched by loss. That said, my house isn't on fire every day, as someone I love isn't dying every day, or rather they are, but very very slowly. Yeah, you know, And so you can't live like as if you're on a nine one one call day in day out. It's too exhausting, and I think you miss so many of the things you might otherwise appreciate or enjoy. So I live in the tension of those two things, like knowing, oh my god, the clock is sticking. What am I doing? Where the people I love? Is it going to be okay? And also you know they're like, well, you're probably not going to die today one day, sure, but maybe not today. You know, you can go to the post office.
I love the complex linguistic math we have to do to ourselves when you were like, we know that life, as you know it can change at any moment, and in this moment, that's not what's happening.
Yes, and life is mostly the moments in which nothing is happening, but the ones in which something happens are so extreme and do kind of carve a grand canyon into you. That's how it feels to me. How then, are you just supposed to live like a normal day where you like watch the Real Housewives and like eat a frozen pizza.
You know?
I mean those moments are really important, that the stuff of life, and I want to enjoy that. I want to do both.
Yeah, we should have a time share in the psyche where you get to have the feelings around knowing that everything you love will change or die and being able to stick a pause button on all exactly. I don't remember if it's in your book or if it's just in some of the stuff that I was reading as I was getting ready for our conversation, but that, oh, I think it was something that you learned at the Dougie Center about like avoidance is not a bad thing, and like distraction is not a bad thing. I think that we think about that so much like, oh, don't be in denial around your feelings, turn and face them like bitch please. You get to have a pause button.
For things exactly, and maybe you need to like watch Paddington Bear nineteen times before you're ready to have a difficult feeling. Like I think distraction is also the lifeboat, you know, Like you can't live in the pain or the fear or the regret all the time. You know, you need to leave that country and go do other things so that you're strong enough to not push it away forever. I think when you push it away forever, you get into trouble because it motivates your behavior in other ways that then you're not aware of and can lead you down some twisting paths that maybe aren't the best for you. At least that's true for me in my case. Like I couldn't feel difficult feelings for like seventeen years.
I wasn't ready.
I didn't have the emotional wherewithal the emotional intelligence. I hadn't grown up enough. I didn't feel safe enough in myself to let myself feel some negative feelings, so I needed to distract myself. You know, you just hope your distractions aren't too bad for you, I would say, you know, and you can survive your distractions long enough to do some of that work that might be coming for you down the road.
Yeah, I think there's something to I can't believe I'm going to use the phrase unpack this, but I think there's something to unpack in here. There is a tendency both in the ways that we talk to ourselves and in the way that sort of the self help industry encourage us to talk to ourselves. Like the way that you're doing things is wrong, and the coping skills and the coping behaviors and the coping mechanisms that you learned were wrong, right, And so much of your book is about grief, obviously, and it's about the ways that you learned to engage with your emotions and your experience as a child and how those unfolded for you as you grew. And what I just heard you say was like, I didn't have the emotional intelligence or the skills to deal with my feeling And it's like, but wait a second, you learned how to deal with feelings as a child. In this really like this is the blunt truth, This is the blunt reality, and this is how we're going to deal with it, like you learned to greet pain with stoicism and responsibility. Yes, And what I read in your book and what I know of you from listening to you and watching you for the last like ten days, is that has shifted into something that feels more useful and less restrictive. Does that feel accurate to you?
One that is so beautifully said, I wish you had written my book.
I'll write your review, But seriously, like this, this core part of self that learned how to be in relationship with hard things wasn't incorrect. It's shifted though.
Right Absolutely. It served me for a variety of ways to borrow my parents, particularly my dad's coping mechanism for difficulty or loss or fear or anxiety, which was nothing to see here. You're going to outwork this, you're going to out achieve this, You're going to out excellent this pain, and in doing so, everything is going to be as okay as possible. At least that's the message that I heard. Now I know that I and this is part of what the book's about, is that I misunderstood I think in a couple of fundamental ways, because as teens and young adults. That's what we do. And I was too scared to find out the truth for a really long time about what I didn't know. So, yes, my coping mechanism for difficult things now is very different. I also don't think there's one thing, and I think it's changing. And if we did this interview ten years from now, I might tell you something different. But right now my response to pain and loss and the fear of it is a lot messier. It's not like I'm not a hard working dog, Like I really am a dog who needs a job. That's the core part of.
My personal colleage brain border colleague.
Yes, yes, like I am that person at the dinner party that like if you do not give me something to chop or carry out into the other room, like I'm gonna annoy you, Like it's just gonna be better for all of us if you just let me chop the cilantro, you know. And so that's how I deal with hard stuff too. That's never going to change. What my challenge is now is that I want the engine that powers me as I go after the things that I want, or as I deal with a big disappointment which come all the time in life in various shapes or forms. Is that I don't want to meet it with a kind of stoicism that is also a lie. I want to meet it with Okay, Laurel, like you are allowed to be freaking gutted and heartbroken right now. This sucks, this thing that's happened, And if you want to work your way through it, fine, but let the engine be not that it will take the pain away, but that it gives you something to do while you're hurting.
I think that's the core of everything, right, is that we don't do anything so that difficult things aren't difficult, or so that painful things don't hurt. Right, Like we've got that such a reductive equation for life, right do X in the face of why so that nothing bugs you? And that's just like that is the wrong formula.
Well, and it's so disappointing. It sets you up for such failure because then you go do the thing and you're like, why do I still feel like crap? I must have done it wrong? Yes, And I think that is you know, you were talking about problems with like American sort of self improvement culture. I think that's where it gets toxic. Because people will be like, well, i read the eleven books on grief, and I've gone to therapy and i did a grief group, and I'm still miserable. And it's like, well, yes, welcome, welcome to the experience of humanity.
You know.
It's not to say that doing those things and helpful and great and helps you in a bunch of other ways. But nothing works as an analgesic on emotional pain, literally nothing except time and love and everything else. But the pain is still there, you know. It's just that it starts to run alongside everything else in a way where maybe it's not the only thing that you feel, but you feel other things alongside it. And I think if we were a little bit more honest about that, you know, we could get rid of some of the shame that comes with grief, the like, oh, but I did the things, and I still feel bad? Why, you know, Like I was so confused about that, you know, Like, but wait, I studied for the test, Like why did I still get an F? You know? Not fair?
Not fair?
I remember bush years ago. It was soon after my partner died, and I met a couple and they knew what had happened, and one of the partners said, you know, my husband's mom died when he was a child, and he didn't grieve it properly. And she said it with that like snitty din't grieve it properly, And so now he's just such an emotional person. And I probably bid a hole in my lip biting, like biting my lip to stop from like smacking her down. But we just have such a deeply ingrained and reinforced idea that you deal with shit so that it no longer bugs you, so that there's no emotion, so that there's no anything, and like that sort of I almost said imperviosity, which I am quite sure is not a word, but that imperviosity to the realities of being human, Like it is not doing us any favors.
No, no, no, it sets us up for pain upon pain, right, Like then not only do you feel bad, but you feel bad about be feeling bad, which is the absolute worst, you know. And I think all of it can be true. There can be things that you can do that are helpful to you when you're suffering, but that's not lie to yourself that they are a panacea.
Yeah, as I was reading your book, I kept thinking about like the ways that we look at all of our former selves, and can you look at things and say, I did the best that I could with the information that was available to me at the time and the developmental level that was available to me at the time, And can I look at the way that those things still shape me and make some choices about what I do with that now. Yeah, there's something really powerful to me in there about treating yourself with both honesty and kindness and making choices about how you want to be and who you want to be moving forward from this point.
Absolutely, for me, the project of adulge I still feel very new at despite being forty five and solely in the center of it, is that the process is one long befriending of past selves and just sort of sequential going back in time and making an uncomfortable peace with the versions of you that you once were, and hopefully extending a bit of that empathy into the versions of yourself you haven't met yet. And that was one thing, you know, my parents, for all the kookie things they did, that was one thing that they did teach me was that there are so many versions of us that we haven't met yet, and to leave room for them at the table of our identity, that we will be always surprised about the people that we are yet to become. And so I believe that fully, But I don't always believe that about my past self. So I try to extend to my past self the same kind of curiosity that I often extend to my future one. It doesn't always go so well, but I try.
I love that though, that that kindness to self. I feel like that that offering of kindness to yourself, your past self, your future self, your current self, all of this stuff. Like that kindness is part of what you teach when you're teaching Writing Medicine. Does kindness play into that work?
Yeah, thanks for asking about that. Yeah, so Writing Medicine is the organization that I started during the pandemic to support healthcare workers around the world and their loved ones to communicate no more honestly, vulnerably meaningfully about the stuff they were seeing during the pandemic, but also their lives generally. And yeah, the work of that has really been helping people who are pretty high achieving and judgmental of self and have very high expectations for themselves, particularly on the job. But also in life, to give them a protected space to feel the difficult feelings which they're often have no time for on the job or in a high stakes patient care situation. And usually that comes with a degree of self forgiveness. So medicine is a field in which often vulnerability is punished, Like financially, you can lose your job, disincentivized to apologize for apologizing to someone lest you be legally responsible. I found legally responsible. So you know, there's a high cost to being vulnerable in medicine. I think that's why I'm attracted to it because even though I'm not a physician, I felt the same way in my life. So yeah, a lot of the nurses and doctors and students and other healthcare workers I work with, like that's what's sorely needed, is a place for kindness and compassion. And you know, when I hear the words like self care, be nice yourself, it just kind of makes me like throw up in my mouth a little, Like, yeah, I hate those words. I never knew what anyone said when they were talking about it. For me, the gateway is to find compassion for someone else that like reminds me of myself in some way, and it's so selfish, but it works and then I'm able to mirror that back sometimes if I'm lucky. But just like trying to conjure yourself like kindness to self and a meditation or something like has never ever worked for me.
No, well one, that's like the hardest thing to do, you know, the meta loving kindness meditation where you're supposed to you're supposed to start with something easy love to self and end with something difficult, love to someone who you're having a hard time with. I'm like, that is backwards, right, true, because altering that kind of compassion and kindness to yourself is really really hard. It's like, no, you don't understand you don't you don't know me the way that I know me, right, Like the ways that we disqualify ourselves from our well of compassion, right because we know too much completely this conversation about healthcare workers and writing medicine, like this is what we were talking about a minute ago, right with like the way that we are trained and in the medical profession literally trained to meet any kind of human emotional, physical difficulty with stoicism, logic, and action. There is absolutely a place for that. And if we refuse to allow people to be human in the face of human challenges, Like we're losing a lot.
Absolutely, we're losing.
So much by not allowing people to be human in these human professions.
There's a hand surgeon at Stanford who I really admire, and he has a dual practice. He works in California and he also works in India, and his work in India is iervedic by practice. And he told me that in ancient iervedic medicine, the students training to become physicians, the first year of their training they had to become the healthiest versions of themselves emotionally, physically, and spiritually, and only then were they allowed to proceed into their clinical training. How beautiful is that? Can you imagine if healers were that dedicated to self healing, like we would live in a different world. Like if you went in for your like annual obigiin appointment and you had a conversation about spiritual, emotional, and physical health. I mean, I can't imagine anything more beautiful than that.
Yeah, I mean this idea that our healthcare providers are human and that you are not. They're not automatons, they are not machines, the way that the system treats a lot of healthcare providers and healthcare workers like you're not a machine. And there's also something in there about that equating professionalism with I'm going to use impervious again, right, that the highest skilled providers in any of these human professions are the ones who have shut themselves off from their emotions.
Oh toxic. So I gotta say I also think that this is a deeply gendered fear because women, for so long were considered to be emotional or more emotional, and that's considered a liability and makes us less serious and less professional. Therefore, characteristics in the workplace that could read as more feminine also by extension punished. And it's not just in medicine, you know, you see it in finance and law, and it's so many of especially the high paying fields where quote unquote women's work traditionally was allowed to be more feelings focused and therefore it's undervalued. And I that just the older I get, the more fury that fills me with.
Yes, the endless, endless fury. So earlier this season, Alice Lunan was on talking about On Our Best Behavior, the Seven Deadly sins and what the price women paid to be good, And we were talking about that in that episode, that the reason why people are so uncomfortable with gay men or with trans folks is because they're being too feminine and we hate women right like so much comes down to our hatred of women and femininity and anything that is seen as sort of softer and closer to the earth, and of course any of that stuff loops us right back around to closest to the earth is closest to death, and we are terrified of losing what we love, and instead of having the skills and the structures to engage in that sadness, that fear, that grief, instead we demonize it and say it's beneath us and rise up into our brains and our logic centers, that historically masculine, unemotional professional thing where stoicism is the way that we're supposed to respond. And this is where we get over achievement as a way to get yourself out of sadness, which is completely your field.
I don't know if it's my field that it's my face wor coping mechanism, but yes, one hundred percent, you're so right. You're so right.
You've said this in a lot of different ways, but the one that I've seen the most often is perfectionism, and overachieving is often a cry for help. So can you tell us what you what you mean by that?
Yes. Yes. One thing that I learned volunteering is a facilitator for grieving kids. You know, was an that it came up in our training that a way of coping with a laws or a big disappointment or pain in some way, particularly for kids, often could be acting out in the ways that we think of as acting out, maybe behavioral issues, starting to struggle in school. But for many kids, they act out by overachieving, by goodie two shoeing. And I'd never heard that before, and I felt so seen by that. And the problem there is that those kids are rewarded for a coping mechanism that may not be serving them. They're less likely to get help because the opposite is true. You know, they will get blue ribbons for what they're doing, which is in many ways burying what needs to be looked at or what they don't want others to see.
Yeah, this, I am so good at things. Look how well I'm handling this And you're right, Like, we get rewarded for that, We get rewarded for excellence and responsibility and being so mature, so mature for your age, that you're able to withstand this and listen to this and have this conversation right exactly. Yeah, and that definitely carries through things.
Yeah. I think it's true for adults too, And I just think I learned it through meeting and starting to understand some of what the kids are going through. But I think there's a thousand times true and almost every workplace, and you know, you've spoken to many, many deeply successful people on this podcast. I think for many very successful people in the public sphere, you know, you just have to jostle them a tiny bit, and there is such underlying trauma there. I mean, yeah, it's funny, but I mean every superhero, right like, is an orphaned kid, Like they lost to parent, their village was destroyed in a nuclear accident. I mean, it's really the origin story of so many of our larger than life stories that we read as kids that I think so many of us internalize, like, oh, well both my parents died, I guess I gotta go save New York City now, you know, I think That is great if you want to save New York City.
But what if you.
Don't, like, what if you just want to play video games? That's okay too.
I love that because there's also like there's also this transformation narrative for hard times, right like, sorry, your kid was killed by an accidental fentanyl overdose. So now you have to start a foundation, right like, now you have to do this, and like you have to like come back as a force of nature because this is like whoo, I just want to have a snack and a nap man.
Like exactly podcast right, like you are you did take the worst things that have happened to you, and you did turn them into gold for other people. I'm trying to do that too, you knowactly, I see it. Also, I'm trying to do it in my small way and at least try to be self aware. And I don't want other people to feel like they have to write a book if you know, they lose their house and their parents and their marriage whatever else happens to them. Like I agree with you. I think we put unbearable pressure on people once they've had a terrible thing happen to then become an advocate or yeah, start a foundation or become a superhero in some way, shape or form. And I think, my God, like, we're really going to ask more of people after this terrible thing happened. Like it's so tiring to just think about at the same time, taking a tough thing that happens in your life and forging meaning from it and then realizing that you have meaning that might help other people. Like, to me, that's the sacred work of my life. You know. I want to take any lesson that took me way too long to learn and maybe save someone else five minutes of suffering if I can. Yeah.
The big difference there is personal choice for anything. When we're talking about meaning making or career paths or what you do with the things that happen to you. It's like, if somebody tells you you have to do this because this is the path, fuck off, right. But if this is something that you choose for yourself, then that's amazing, right. Really everything comes back to can you sit with yourself and ask yourself what feels like the path here for me? What feels like kindness and curiosity, and what feels like the way that I want to survive this? How do I want to move with this, given that this is mine to live right, personal under choice is everything. Hey, before we get back to this week's conversation, Laurel and I both believe in the power of writing as medicine. You can find a link to her writing medicine workshops in the show notes if you work in medicine, but if you'd like to explore your grief from any kind of loss and a self paced writing course, may I suggest my original thirty day Writing your Grief course. It's not like most grief writing workshops. There are no prompts like tell us about the funeral and what's your first memory? All of that stuff. The prompts in Writing your Grief are deeper, they're more nuanced. They're designed to help you come into conversation with yourself through whatever kind of loss you're living. You can get started right now at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is WYG for Writing your Grief, or you can just click the link in the show notes. Okay, let's get back to my conversation with Laurel Brateman. What I love about your your work both in writing medicine and in your writing life and your speaking life is that you know you you keep bringing people back to listen to yourself, give yourself the space to say ouch, if ouch is what is, and listen to yourself for long enough that you can ask yourself what you need next. It seems like such a small and simple thing, but it is not small and it's not simple.
It's so hard to find out what you actually want out of your life. I don't know if I don't think it's just me, you know, I think particularly two of you had some hard driving parents, or you're the child of immigrants, if you put extreme pressure on yourself anyway. And also, I like you love the people whose expectations charted a path your life. Like to untangle what other people want from you, want for you, and what you want for yourself if you love those people is a really complicated thing. It took me so many more years than I thought, just just to kind of figure out how to hear my own voice in my head, which is a lot of what the book is about. How do you figure out what your voice sounds like versus all the other voices in your head that you've picked up from god knows where and may not be servy you anymore.
That does mean getting into the messy stuff, right, It does mean feeling that I want to go back to the overachieving, perfectionist driven Lisa Simpson. Right, Like they're basically we're in my head, we're describing Lisa Simpson.
My husband calls me her mighty granger.
But yes, the same, same same man, same things. Where I want to go with this is like I have conversations about difficult things all the time. I script them for other people. Here's what you might say in this situation, like here's this, and I'm not very good at this stuff in my personal life twenty four to seven, Right. I love to make spaces for people to have these conversations. And the times where I have to do this stuff, I'm like, oh well no, right, I do this for a living. I don't want to have to do this. And I think one that self disclosure thing is important to say, and two, I just don't think that there's ever a time when facing these kinds of things that that we've been talking about. I don't think there's ever a time when it's something you're excited about doing hunder percent.
And I'm the same as you. I think that I can have a professional life dedicated to writing about and speaking about difficult subjects so that I can avoid it in some of the most intimate relationships in my life and tell myself like, oh well, I took care of that, Like I spent all day talking about grief, Like I don't need to check in with my husband about how he's doing about his dead mom, Like not at all, not at all. We're just we're just gonna watch something. I think I can be so much more callous with self and others because I spend so much time working on these things and talking to people, and for you, it's easier to hold space for people we don't know very well around difficult subjects often and hard things that have happened in their life, because you get to have like one really great, meaningful, deep conversation and then you can go back to doing whatever you want to do anyway.
Right exactly, there's a distance, like it's it's a safe distance in which to touch into emotional, vulnerable, intimate things and then you get to dip out. I think this is just a really a really cool point for me personally, right that, like, just because you do something for a living doesn't mean that you're an expert in it in all areas of your life. I guess my point here is that everything is a work in progress, and there's a commitment here to coming back to like, ah, crap, I have to do this thing for me at least. It's like, I know what's on the other side of facing this. I know what's on the other side of opening this conversation that feels daunting and scary. I know what's on the other side of this because I've seen it in other people and I've lived it in myself. And even though currently I'm feeling really avoidant and really not into it, it's knowing the depth and the goodness on the other side of it that makes me want. Well, want is the wrong word that makes me push through that hesitancy. Is that something that you feel in your own life and work? Or Am I the only weirdo in the room right now?
No, one hundred percent. You know, I tried for a very long time, like not to love anyone or anything again for a variety of different reasons. Right people, place, person, animal. It didn't work. And I want to love others and things and places badly and I couldn't opt out, so then what's the option. The option is then you have to have the difficult conversations. You have to talk about the stuff that you're dreading talking about, because the alternative is that you lose the thing anyway. And those weren't terms I was willing to put up with. So I joke about avoiding difficult conversations and such, But when it comes down to it, you know, I will do anything to save what I have left, anything, And if that's to have a messy, gut punch of a conversation, I know. Am I going to enjoy it? Maybe not? But I'm sure is how going to do it? Because the alternative, the alternative is losing the relationship or the place, or the creature, et cetera.
Yes, one of my favorite quotes from you is when people ask me what scares me most, it's always love. Yeah, It's true, right, which is what we're talking about. Right, This entire messy endeavor of being human is like love is terrifying, horrible.
Why would anyone do it? I truly believe that it's awful. It's like having a parasite in your heart and mind at the exact same time, mixed with being on drugs. Like, why why I hate it.
I'm gonna tell the people I love you are like a parasite in my heart. I can see my whole line of Valentine's Day cards for us.
It's that.
Sorry, not a sexy metaphor.
Oh oh, but it is. There's actually in some Moroccan tribes, they don't say I love you with all my heart. They say I love you with my liver because the heart, the heart is seen as fickle and changing, and the liver is seen as more constant and dealing with more toxins and more like just having to process more. So I love you with I love you with my liver, right, Like that is something to cross stitch and put on the wall. But this is really what we're talking about, is like that all of this messy, painful stuff that even the pros would love to avoid if we could, the other side of that is what we actually long for.
Right.
I've said this a couple of times during the season, But like the people who spend their time in things other people try to avoid, like they're the most joyful people I have ever met. Maybe there's something to this.
It's so true. I once went for My first book was about mental illness and non human animals and what we can learn from them about healing ourselves. And in the process of researching that I did and in graduates why I went to a suicide conference in the middle of winter in northern Germany and I was like, Oh my god, it's going to be cold, and I don't speak German, and it's going to be just days on days of people suicide researchers talking about self harm and everything. I have never had more fun at a conference in my damn life.
Like.
It was so fuch. It was dark all day like, but people were so joyful. Everyone was so much fun. It was great. The suicide conference is like the best meeting I've ever heard in the depths of winter in northern Germany, you know. And that's to me, sums up so much of doing this work. And you know, I'll tell you this, I don't. I don't think the opposite of life is death. I think the opposite of life is having a void of feeling anything at all. I think we are scared of death for the wrong reasons. You know, what we should be scared of is shutting ourselves down to the experiences that give life meaning. The painful ones and the joyful ones.
I can't say it better than that. Right, It's like you're you're either holding back the flood of being human and expending your energy over there, or you are allowing the flood of being human to affect you and being able to access so much more out of that. I mean, that's also one of those bumper stickers that like you have to know deep pain before you can know deep joy. Like, no, that's not how that works. We're not talking about a transaction here, but really just about like the thing that you're resisting talking about is also keeping you from the things you most want.
Yeah, you can't mute one and not mute the other one. It's a package deal, joy and pain. I believe that it's not I think that bumper sticker is wrong. You're right. It's not that I think that you need to experience pain to know joy. It's that I think pain is an integral part of joy, if that makes sense. I think that these feelings are never discreet and the way we learn as kids, like in storybooks, like you're either happy or you're sad.
Or you are anxious, or you're tired, or you want to cry or you want to laugh, like that is a lie.
And I think it sets us.
Up to again be kind of confused and disappointed by the human experience, which feels instead like a big stew of all of those feelings at various times. And I do think real good joy comes with an underlying twinge of sadness because it's so joyful because you know it's not going to last forever, and because you have known different things, or because someone you love isn't there to experience it with you. Like I think it's all colored by both the beautiful and the painful, or it's not the beautiful in the pay it's all it's all colored by both pain and pleasure all at the same time.
Yeah, And it makes me think about now, I can't remember if I read it in the book or if I read it or heard it in some other form, but talking about your mom's end of life experience, and like there seemed to be so much joy and playfulness in it, which probably couldn't have been there if your family wasn't so open with death and dying and all of that. Does that feel.
Accurate one hundred percent? It's also my mom's personality, Like she was just a joker. She was very committed to the prank. She was silly, and I think if in many cases we die like we live, if we're lucky and we have time, you know, I think she was going to go out of this world just like she'd spent her life living in it as least as long as she could, as long as she had capacity and the ability to do that. So yeah, I think if she had had a different personality, maybe it wouldn't have been so silly, maybe we wouldn't have laughed so much. But that's who she was. And I think in my family, like dark humor was our coping strategy in lots of ways, and I think that's true for many people who have kind of seen behind the curtain of mortality and lived to tell the tale. Is it's so ridiculous, the fact that you can lose people for no reason that the only thing to do is laugh. It's like a cosmic joke on us, Like here, humans will make you love one another and then boof, you're.
Gone, you know, aha, to die?
Just yeah, it's crazy, crazy, crazy, I hate it. But what's our.
Yeah, yeah, I mean the option is to which I completely understand, to completely shut yourself down so that you don't have to feel it anymore. And that is an option, right. I just really love for people to understand that you do get to make choices around how you experience and how you live these things, and that I keep coming back to this line from an old teacher of mine, poignancy as kinship, right, that feeling these things intensely and together is how we belong to each other.
Gorgeous. I love that. Yeah, I think it's true. I think it's really true. And I think that just because you laugh about something or you treat something with silliness doesn't mean you're not taking it seriously. I think that's really important to remember that we can laugh on our way out of here and it doesn't mean we weren't grateful for being here, that we're not taking our death seriously, or the death of other loved ones. I think that that's another place where like shame crops up a lot for people. I think, Like I spoke to a woman earlier this year who had lost her husband and son in the condo collapse in Florida that happened not too long ago, and she told me something that I thought was so interesting, Like you know, when people would ask her how she was doing. And I think some people in your show have brought this up too. Actually, is she wanted to say she had a good day, like she was proud when she had a good day, when she could be really happy. She felt like when she was being really happy, she was honoring the memory of her husband and son more than when she was despondent. And yet those were the complicated feelings that other people didn't know how to respond to, you know, it can fused them and took them aback. She felt like she was disappointing people in some way if she said she was doing great, you know that it was offensive to them in some way. And she was trying to figure out how to be honest, you know, without offending people, even though she was the one, you know.
Right like she's the one who wants to work at not hurting other people. It's so like it's so infuriating and fascinating, Like there is a cultural script. Really, there are two cultural scripts. There's one that is like, you have to be in a good mood, you have to be happy to honor their memory, and so if you're sad, you're failing that. And we're gonna shame you and correct you and give you unsolicited advice. The other script is, you clearly didn't love them enough. If you're not sad, if you're not mourning, So stop being so happy because clearly you're unaffected by this, and we're gonna shame you and give you unsolicited advice. Right, Like, you can't win, So if you can't please anybody, then please pay attention to.
Yourself, right Like, so true.
How you have to survive some is how you have to survive it. I just like I want us to wonder and be curious about the ways that we react impulsively subconsciously to our own experience and to other people's experience, and just be like, whoa like what inherited storyline? Do? I think they're failing because I'm treating them like they're failing for me.
I think a lot about the similarities between when I was single and how people dealt with me, and also when I have had a big loss, and they're kind of similar in both ways. You can't win, And I know this is a grief not a dating podcast.
But oh, they're all the same thing.
True true, Okay, when you're single, people are like you gotta put yourself out there. No one's gonna come into your house and just sweep you off your feet. You got to put yourself out there. And then at the same time, the other huge messages don't try, you'll meet the person when you're not trying. I was like, yeah, sometimes the same people would give me that advice, like separated by one breath, and I'm like, well, which one is it? Like, am I supposed to be on all the apps and going out every Thursday on like multiple dates and whatever and telling everyone to hook me up with their friend at a wedding? Or am I just supposed to wait for the random meet cute at a coffee shop and drop my papers all over the floor, right, Like.
Okay, but we have to add we have to add the third leg to that horrible stool, which is you have to not want someone before you'll meet someone. You have to be okay with being alone before anyone.
Will love you.
Gross, Like what utter trash is this? But it's like I wasn't kidding when I said dating is part of the grief conversation, because this is the same conversation around like who you are is not okay? Please do it? Completely differently in order to be loved, which is the conversation we have around anything, the way you're grieving, the way you're relating, the way that you're doing your job, the way that you're taking care of yourself, the way that you're giving yourself some downtime from the difficulty of being alive.
Who the opinions, Yes, and it looks like everyone else around you has figured it out, which I think is the same. I used to go to the farmer's market and like, look at happy couples, you know, and just it's just something so simple as like two people holding hands, like looking at fall apples, you know, And I would just stand there and it was like mystifying to me. I was like, I can write a book, I can go get a freaking PhD from MIT, But how do I learn to hold someone's hand and look at root vegetables like I just couldn't.
It seemed like.
Visiting another planet, you know, And I felt I feel that way sometimes looking at people who have survived tough things too, like oh, if only I could grieve like that person, or they turned their grief story into a much better book, and so many more people have bought it or you know why why isn't my story a Netflix special yet?
Right?
Like? There is that like I just clearly didn't do this right, right, Like There's so much of that in probably every human undertaking. But I really feel it in dating and I really feel it in grief.
Yes, preaching to the committed choir here, I mean it does also come back to that, like I can overachieve my way out of this, I can overachieve my way into perfection and therefore loveability For me, everything comes down to that, like am I lovable? Am I wanted? And if I'm not, then I won't survive. So again we're back to fear of death, fear of grief. We need each other to survive. And if I am not perfect enough, if I'm not perfect enough to be loved or to overcome things, then I will be.
Alone one hundred percent. That's the deep fear. Yeah, still meets me at like three four am. You know, always, I'm just trying to realize it's in bed with me rather than just like leave bed and go do something else, just be like, Okay, there's that fear that like this bone pain as osiosarcoma, and that the person I love has is in love with somebody else, and if not now, we'll be in the next few months, and you know, the next wildfire is going to take the house again. You know that kind of thing. All of those fears live with you constantly.
I love that image of can I recognize that they're in bed with me? Because those fears really do love to knock at like three point thirty in the morning, you know, when there's you know, not a whole lot else going on. It reminds me of something you've said that hope is a form of courage. And before I let you tell me about hope for you, I want to come back to that anxiety thing, because I think this is actually a great you did this lovely full circle moment that I did not engineer coming back to where we started, which was like fear and anxiety and all of these things, and they've carved the grand canyon of my personality. You can't logic your way out of anxiety when you are scared about things you have already lived. Right, everything that you just named in that long list of three am fearful bedfellows are things that you've lived through. Your dad had bone pain that turned into cancer, or turned out to be cancer. You did have your home and most of your belongings destroyed by wildfire. You have lived through relationship unheaval. You can't just say, oh, those things are unlikely, they're not going to happen to me, when they already have happened to you.
Yeah, this is why we're talking. This is why I write stories, This is why I talk to other people. I think when you know that those things can happen, when they have happened, when some of your worst fears have come true to me, the medicine for that is being with other people who can save me too. It's to realize I'm not alone in it. That's the solution for me. Doesn't take the pain away. I'm still worried. I'm just not worried alone. Like we're anxious here together right now. That's awesome to me. That's the answer. That's that's why we make music and art and everything else is because the pain doesn't go away, but at least the pain is shared.
And there's something really powerful about seeing each other and seeing ourselves, like that power of acknowledgment.
Acknowledgment.
There's a one of my closing lines in Keynotes is acknowledgment. Isn't just the best medicine we have sometimes it's the only one gorgeous? It's true, isn't that great?
It's that.
It's that that we've been talking about through this entire season of the show and like the last ten years of this work. But all of this stuff is about how do we acknowledge ourselves and acknowledge each other so that we can be in this complex mess of things together instead of in this complex, massive things alone.
Absolutely. I was in Montana yesterday talking to many nurses and doctors, and I spoke to a nurse at a community clinic and Montana and she asked me, she said, listen, we're trying to work with all the nurses to empower them to have difficult conversations with their patients around social determinants of health, so things like access to food, domestic violence, and the nurses, turns out, are not scared of asking the difficult questions. The reason the nurses didn't want to ask the questions is because they had no solutions for them, and they felt if they asked patients difficult questions that they couldn't fix, that the patient might leave feeling frustrated and might never share their experience again. And I thought that was so incredible and it surprised me. And you know what I told her, I don't know that this is a solution, but I think what you said about acknowledgement is really true. I think we need to be heard. And I wish right that a community health clinic could solve all of the problems that are social determinants of health in the United States. But it's a big problem. These are problems that took hundreds of years to develop. But if you will walk into your clinic visit and your nurse is able to have a real, authentic conversation with you about the challenges in your life, I don't think most rational people are going to expect the nurse to fix all of them. What they will feel is that that nurse was interested in them and their life, and they will feel seen and acknowledged, and that is the first step towards fixing anything.
Yes, I think that's about deciding what the goal is.
Right.
If the goal is you have to fix this problem for them, then you're right, we shouldn't bring it up because we can't fix it. But the goal in human ing is not fixing it, it's in acknowledging it, it's understanding. Yeah, there are some limits here, and I want you to know I see them. And how can we work alongside those limits? How can we work alongside the limits of no access to food or domestic violence in the home, or you just lost your job, or your dog is sick and probably going to die sooner than you want, Like just telling the truth about things, which is interesting because we come back to the way that your family system was trying to approach your dad's illness all those years of let's just tell the truth about it. So we're taking that and we're adding some skill to it, We're adding some kindness to it. And what do we do now together that we can talk about these things directly? So knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what does hope look like for you? Does it factor into anything at all?
Yeah? It's bravery and courage to do the things that scare me most, and trusting, believing, trying to convince myself that it usually turns out okay, usually turns out okay, and to believe that even though I've been deeply disappointed by life in some ways, I've also been wildly, wildly surprised in a good way, and those ways outnumber the moments of pain for me always.
I love that that human definition of hope, right, like that there is something that keeps us going. There's oh gosh, I can't remember if it's roomy or e fez, but something keeps me joyful.
I cannot say what exactly exactly, and I you know, I'm a reform goodie two shooser, but I will say it's okay. To not be okay is part of that, Like that, that's an act of hope, right that, Like even when things are tough, that it's not going to work out as a happy ending, it's you know, I spend a lot of time writing a found in the book, like there's no such thing as happily ever after, but there's happily sad and sadly happy, and that's enough for me. That's an ending to look forward to.
I love that it's been so good to spend time with you, to hang out with you. I feel like our minds operate in such beautifully and sometimes vexingly the same ways. So we're going to link to your book. We're going to link to your website, and we are going to link to Instagram because you, as you have said that you are trying to do more on Instagram. We're going to put all of that information in the show notes. Anything else. You want people to.
Know, you're not alone, You're not alone.
And say the thing that's cool that scare you, it's not terrible, it's perfect. And that is what we're going to leave with a messy, imperfect, but classically perfect ending. All right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions to carry with you right after this bring. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. Now, there were so many mic drop moments in this week's show for me, but I want to give you a little behind the scenes disclosure. First, I was not in the best space before we got rolling. I was feeling some trust me old, old and familiar patterns of loneliness, feeling left out of the cool kids party. I was like kind of behind the emotional eight ball before we got started. But within just a couple of minutes of meeting Laurel, I felt like we were old friends. She said so many of the things that I had been feeling. I mean, smart, overachieving, well spoken people share many of the same concerns and thoughts and sore spots and doubts or whatever. I don't know what you want to call them, but it's definitely something that I've noticed over the last couple of seasons. Some of the smartest, most insightful, creative and driven people I've met, usually women, We've all had this like outside looking in thing, kid on the sidelines, wondering if and when the cool kids we'll let them in sort of thing going on. And I think that's really the magic of conversations like this, creating spaces like this to have these kinds of conversations. So many of the things that we think of as our own special kind of weirdness, they turn out to be something that even the cool kids share. And sometimes it turns out we actually are the cool kids, which.
Is pretty neat all.
Right, how about you, everybody, what stuck with you from this conversation. Everyone's going to take something different from today's 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 conversation affected you. Follow the show at It's okaypot on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video clips from the show and the hashtag It's Okay pod on all the platforms, so not only I can find you, but others can too. None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That is it for this week. Remember to subscribe to the show. Leave a review. Your reviews are very special to me, and I love to read them. They help me to remember that it's not just me in my little closity sound booth speaking out into the void, but that y'all are actually out there, and you're listening, and you're thinking things, and maybe you're having cool conversations of your own. So leave a review, leave a comment, Let me know where you're at. Coming up next week. I'm not entirely sure. We are waiting on some last minute scheduling, but what I can tell you is that we are coming up towards the end of season three. We have one or two more special guests coming before the end, but it is coming. Follow the show on your favorite platforms so you don't miss an episode. 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. Music provided by wave Crush. Today's background noise provided by the very, very hungry hippo of a dog who is relentlessly but very politely reminding me that it is time for her dinner.