Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to tackle a pretty big topic. I want to talk about happiness. But I want to talk about happiness as it relates to what this podcast is really about, which is about taking our agency and using it to shape our stories, to quote unquote write our stories, even if we're not literally writing a book and writing a story. I want to talk about what it means to shape your story as it relates to happiness. So what role does happiness act play when it comes to shaping our stories? Are we shaping our stories in such a way where happiness is paramount or does happiness even matter for a meaningful story? This is what I want to unpack today. And I got inspired to talk about this topic because of something that I saw on Instagram. I was just sort of casually scrolling Instagram at the end of the day, as I do sometimes to decompress after getting my kids to bed, and I saw a reel that Adam Grant had posted. Adam has, you know, almost three million followers. You may already follow him, but he is an organizational psychologist. He's an author who's written a really popular book. He has actually written a couple of books, and he was interviewing another psychologist and they were talking about happiness as it relates to being a parent. So of course this caught my attention because usually when I'm scrolling Instagram, it's because I'm so exhausted from a day of chasing my two young kids around that I just need something really mindless and passive to do, so that's usually why I'm sc Instagram. So this was me that night. I had just gotten my kids to bed. It had been a really good but a full, exhausting, tiring, long day. Then bedtime you parents out there, No bedtime is always a struggle, no matter how good the day has been. Like if you have a great day, bedtime is horrible because the kids don't want to go to bed because they're having so much fun. And if you've had a really hard day, bedtime is horrible because the kids are like completely melting down and have lost all sense of calm in their bodies and are just regulated and just you know, it's just a nightmare and it kind of no matter how you swing it. And my husband and I have gone around the block over the years with bedtime. We used to have these really long bedtimes that were like extremely frustrating, and we would trade off. We would argue over, you know, who is going to do bedtime tonight, and sort of like barter with bedtime. It would be like, all do the dishes for a month if you do bedtime tonight. And then more recently we started working with a parent coach, which is like a whole other episode I could talk about that, but this parent coach helped us to do a better job of setting boundaries with our kids, and it was so incredible and amazing, and bedtimes became much lighter and easier to handle. And yet still even with the boundaries in place, even with our better bedtimes that are no longer two hours long but that now are like twenty minutes, even still bedtime is just sort of a thing at the end of the day. So I had just done this bedtime routine, I had just gotten the two kids to sleep, I settled into my bed. I'm scrolling Instagram, and all of a sudden, I'm watching Adam Grant interview this other psychologist asking him questions about parenting and happiness. And one of the things that I heard this psychologist say that I guess you could say was kind of triggering for me, was that you ask parents if having children has made them happier, and they will tell you yes, But when you actually look at the data, the truth is having kids doesn't make you happier, that happiness tends to improve when your kids are grown and leave the house. And so I just saw the short clip of the interview. I didn't watch the entire interview. I still haven't watched the entire interview, but I was just noticing how this conversation that the two of them were having was feeling kind of triggering to me. And I imagine this would be triggering for most parents, because you have like such adoration and love, like an unspeakable, unexplainable amount of love type of love, unconditional love for your kids. They in every way that you can imagine make your life better and richer and more incredible. And so to hear someone say kids don't really make you happier is a wild thing to hear someone say, and you kind of want to I immediately went to the comments because I was like, I want to see what other people are saying about this. So this is what we do on Instagram, right, we go straight to the comments. We're like, am I crazy? Or are other people also feeling this way about this content? And sure enough in the comments, there's a lot of parents saying, you know, I don't know about you, but my kids make me infinitely happier. I'm happier now than I was before. And then there are other people in the comments saying like, why are all the parents here getting so defensive? So it just got me thinking about the nuance of this topic and of this idea of happiness. I want to expand the topic of happiness beyond just having kids, because this isn't really an episode. It's not a podcast about this, and it's not an episode trying to convince someone who's on the fence about having kids to have kids, or someone who's chosen not to have kids to have kids, or anything like that. I feel like, you know, if you have decided that you do not want to have children, then more power to you. Please don't have children, because it will. You know, even even wanting kids, it has rocked my world and challenged me in ways that I couldn't have imagined, even like desperately for a decade, more than a decade, like begging God to give me children. Even still having kids has really surprised me with how challenging and difficult it can be. So it's not about convincing someone to do something that they don't otherwise want to do. But I do want to talk about the nuance of a word like happiness and talk about like, is how happiness even really the goal? Because if you have these two different perspectives, parents in the comments saying yeah, sure, life has changed so much since I've had kids, and I have less freedom, you know, I travel less and I do less fun things with my friends, And yet I would pick this a thousand times over. There has to be something there. And it really got me thinking about this idea even in my own personal experience, because yeah, in certain ways, when you measure my life before kids versus now with kids, in certain ways my life was quote unquote better back then, and yet my life is richer, deeper, more fulfilling, infinitely more like just full, just fun and full and wonderful now than it was back then. And yet I also am not denying that it's also exhausting, and I'm not denying that it's also really frustrating, and I'm also not denying that it's also confining. You know, I miss probably more than anything else, maybe two things I miss more than anything else from pre child life. One is freedom, and that includes like spontaneity, because I just don't have that in my life. I feel like when I had one child, I had a little bit of it still where Matt and I could kind of pick up and just be like we're just going to go out for the day and just you know, like get the car seat and pack the diaper bag and we're just going out for the day and she'll nap on the go and no problems. And then when I had two children, I really felt that sense of anchoring, like you can't just pick up and go. There are too many logistics, there's too much you have to bring. It's too challenging, it's too complicated. It's not the same. It doesn't have that same lightness and freedom that it did back before we had children, and so I felt that anchoring happen when I had my second child. So freedom. And then the other piece of that is community. And this is something that I really want to spend a minute talking about on today's episode because I think it plays a massive role in happiness. And I think our culture does a really, really terrible job of facilitating community, particularly for parents, and particularly for parents of young kids. I think our culture does a terrible job of facilitating community for young parents. And because of that, parenting in particular motherhood, or if you're the primary caregiver of your children, that can be an extremely isolating experience. And as I was thinking about what makes people happy, why does happiness matter? Why are we even talking about happiness the nuances of happiness, I was thinking, gosh, like, that's a big piece of this, a big piece of why I might say I feel less happy at times now than I did before, Because before having kids, I could facilitate my own community. I could get out of my house and go to a yoga studio, I could go to a church community, I could go to an outing. I could go to a restaurant, I could go to a bar, I could go meet people. I could just go to a concert, a venue, go out, walk around the town, go shopping, go to the mall, whatever I wanted to do, and be in community with other people. And then having children. And I'll get into this later in the episode because I want to talk about this as a kind of separate topic. But I have felt as a mother the way that our culture feels about mothers bringing young children into those spaces. I mean, some of the spaces are just an automatic noe for kids, like a bar, for example, but even a mall. If you're a mother of young kids, I know you have felt this where when you bring your young kids into a space like a restaurant or a mall where other people are there, you feel the sense that all eyes are on you and they're expecting your kids to act in a way that kids just don't know how to act. And they're expecting your kids not to make noise or not to bother them, or not to be an inconvenience, or not to be too loud or whatever. And that feeling that you have as a prime very parent is extremely overwhelming. And makes you much less likely to come and participate in those spaces. And so then motherhood or parenthood becomes extremely isolating and that can play a role in our happiness. So those two things, freedom and then community, have been the two things that have been the biggest adjustment for me coming into motherhood. And yeah, of course those things would have an impact on happiness. So if you're asking moms, you're asking dads, and I mean, I know this can be a really different experience for moms and dads too, depending on how the household is set up, where sometimes moms have a whole different experience of motherhood than dads do of fatherhood. For a lot of dads, life goes on as normal after you have kids. You still go to work, you still you know, you might have small adjustments to make, But for a lot of dads the adjustment is not as big as it is for moms. And so it might depend on who you're asking. Are you asking mom if her happiness or quality of life has changed? Or are you asking dad if his quality of life has changed? In our house, it's been very fifty to fifty. Matt has at different points been the quote primary parent or the stay at home parent while I have continued on working, and at other points I've been the state at home parent. Well, Matt has continued on working, and we've kind of tag teamed those things. And even you know, Matt and I have had a lot of discussions about this because we're moving into a season where he's stepping into more of the primary breadwinner position and I'm stepping into more of the primary parent position. And yet Matt, because he's been the primary parent and he has the awareness of what it looks like to be a primary parent, he also knows how to support me without me having to say to him like, hey, could you do this or could you do this? Matt knows how to step in and support me as the primary parent in ways that make my quality of life a lot better. During the day when he's gone for let's say eight hours, it's not always eight hours. Sometimes it's ten and sometimes it's six, but he will do things like make lunches ahead of time the night before, or like prep the breakfast, or you know, get the laundry moving, or or he comes home and he does bedtime. Since I've been with the kids all day, so there are things that he can do as the primary breadwinner that helped to support me as the primary parent, and he has an intuition about those things that he wouldn't have otherwise had if we hadn't have traded off the way that we have in our relationship. So again, I'm just bringing this up to say, like, there are a lot of things that impact the happiness of a parent, and this is one of them. Anyway, I don't want to spend this whole episode talking about the idea of having kids or not having kids, but I bring this up to say there are a lot of different things that could impact how happy someone is as a parent, and one of them could be how supportive their partner is. How much does your partnership been in help with household duties or do they see it as their responsibility or are they waiting for you to kind of make them a list and give them their honeydew list for what's theirs to do? You know, do you have a partner who travels all the time, that's another big stressor on the parent who's home. So so many different nuances here to why a parent might report that they were happier before they had kids then after. But it's not really the main thing I want to talk about. The main thing I want to talk about is how are we even defining happiness and what is it that really makes us happy? Because I think that we have these cultural ideas of what makes us happy, that we'll be happy if we can get what we want, if we can achieve what we want in our life, then we'll be happy. And this is assuming that we even know what we want. And as I was thinking about recording this episode, I was thinking a lot about my dad, who, if you have been listening for a while, you know, is no longer with us. I lost my dad last October. My dad and I would have very let's call them robust conversations, intense, lovingly intense conversations about this topic because my dad was cut from a little bit of a different cloth than me. I mean, I think in a lot of ways we were similar. But my dad's favorite book of all time was M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The first sentence of that book I can recite from memory because it's been recited to me so many times in my forty one years of life, which is that life is difficult. That's the first sentence of M. Scott pex The Road Less Traveled, which was my dad's favorite book. Life is difficult, And my dub would always say that life is difficult. Life is difficult. Life is difficult, And I think as a bit of a rebellion to that wanted my dad to see, or wanted him to acknowledge, or wanted him to accept that life could also be beautiful, and life could be so full of you know, pleasure and joy, and that you could have the things that you wanted to have, and you could go out there and create the reality that you were wanting to experience. And I lived my life from that place of maybe sort of trying to convince my dad or convince myself that this other way of being was also possible. That you could go out and you know, manifest the experiences that you wanted to have, and you could travel everywhere and you can meet these amazing people and you could experience pleasure and joy and happiness. And yet the more life I've lived, and the more you as I've been on this planet, the more I realize that my dad and I were both right. In other words, life is difficult, and also there's so much pleasure to be found yes, life is difficult, and also you can go create the things that you want. Yes, we are the authors of our stories. We are the creator of our own reality, our own existence. And also part of how we experience meaning and joy in our lives is through moving through the difficulty. If you think about the write your story framework, even it's the problems in the story that create the tension that transforms the hero. The hero transforms because of difficulty, because of tension, and without that tension, I've said a thousand times, the story falls flat and it's just uninteresting. It doesn't really grip us or engage us. And so yes, in some ways my life life has become more challenging in many ways, actually my life has become more challenging and difficult since having children. And yet at the same time, when I look back at my life pre children, especially by the time that I had met Matt, I'd had a couple of years of doing pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whoever I wanted. I'd had a few years of traveling wherever I wanted to go, to really beautiful locations, to you know, creating a life of pleasure and ease and spontaneity and freedom and fun and people and you know, having these incredible experiences, and I was so happy. I had all the happiness that anyone could ever ask for. I had privilege, I had money, There was flow in my life. I was, you know, falling in love with Matt. There were so many beautiful things about my life at that time, and I wouldn't change a single second of it. And yet when I look at how my life has transformed since having kids, I realized that the happiness that I had achieved back then satisfies only to a certain extent. It is fun, and it is satisfying, but only to It'd be like eating, you know, the same meal over and over again for the rest of your life, even if it's your favorite meal. It's a delicious meal, but at some point you just go, yeah, I'm interested in some contrast. I'm interested in something a little bit different, and having kids for me has provided that contrast. It's provided you know, even think about what I said before about how having my second child kind of anchored me. It created this necessity to sit still, stay still, create routine, do the same thing every day, which was in contrast to my life before, where I was just flitting around from place to place all the time. I mean, I never had any reason to be tied down. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And having children gave me this anchor that forced me to experience contrast, and experiencing that contrast has taken me deeper. It has changed who I am. It has made me a better person. It's made me stronger. It's taught me so many things about life and about how the world works. It's shown me things I never would have been able to see without the contrast. So yes, in certain ways, surface level ways, having kids has made me less happy, I guess, And yet it has also opened up my world, expanded my world, expanded me to become someone new that I never could have become without my children. Now. One comment that I will often get if I post something like that online, which I have before, talking about how my kids have really challenged me and opened me and expanded me and made me someone better, people will say, well, can't you do that without having kids? Yes, of course, there are so many experiences in life, but beyond having kids that can also expand you. One experience that expanded me in my life was travel. So travel also at a time in my life, provided a contrast that I hadn't experienced before. I grew up in a fairly altered environment. I guess that's fair to say. I grew up in the suburbs and in the church and in a small community that was relatively safe and loving and just exactly the kind of space that you would want your children to grow up in. And yet I hadn't really traveled many places or experienced the world until I was in my twenties. And then I wanted to go to Europe, and I wanted to go to China, and I wanted to go, you know, see the world and travel all over the place. And I did that, and it provided me experiences that were in contrast to what I had experienced before. It provided me experiences like going, you know, an extra couple of hours without a meal, for example, when you're traveling, you don't always have access to food immediately right there. You don't always have access to the food that you want to eat. There are so many experiences in our lives that can provide us with that contrast that don't have to be having children. It could be travel for you, It could be an experience that we would otherwise call negative, like maybe you're diagnosed with a terminal illness or with a serious illness. When I was in my mid twenties, I was told that I had dietary fructose intolerance, which is an intolerance to the sugar called fructose, which meant, according to my doctor, that I could never eat fruit, never eat most vegetables, never eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. And I had to go on a long journey of first, you know, cutting all those things out of my diet and then sort of finding other health practitioners who could help me figure out like what was really going on with my body. And that whole journey was it pleasurable? No, you know, I spent years eating like only five foods that I could eat without my stomach hurting or without like just being in severe pain or without feeling like extremely lethargic. And that whole journey was extremely frustrating and upsetting and felt unfair at times. And you know, I went through my whole mental process with it. And yet at the end of the day, it also was an experience that helped me grow and helped me expand, and helped me become the woman who I am today. So if we're living our lives only sort of seeking happiness only, sort of seeking the things that we know are going to give us pleasure or make us happy. And this is Victor Frankel's whole thing too, man search for meaning, which is a lot of where this Write your Story framework came from. This is Victor Frankele's whole message is that what you are craving is not just pleasure. What you are craving is not just happiness. What you are craving is meaning. And a life that is rich in meaning becomes a life that has the capacity to handle pain and suffering with grace and with relative ease. A life becomes a life that has the capacity to handle frustration like a bedtime where your kids are not listening to you and it takes you an hour to get them to sleep. Your life has the capacity to hold that because it also has so much meaning and so much richness and so much love inside of it that it just can hold all of that challenge and difficulty. And I think the older I get, the more I realized that my dad was really onto something with the idea that life is difficult. You know, life serves you up difficulties. The nuance I would bring to this conversation that I didn't have to bring when I was in my twenties sitting arguing with my dad about this is this, You don't have to go out and stir up your own difficulty in your life, because life will dish it up for you every life, every person I've ever known, no matter how privileged, no matter how wealthy, no matter how insulated, no matter what, every human being who walks the face of this planet, who lives a life, will encounter difficulty. Now, the measure of difficulty you encounter may be different depending on where on the planet you live, depending on how many resources you have, depending on a lot of different factors. But the level of difficulty that you encounter also matches the level of the capacity you have to expand and to grow. So the more we insulate ourselves from difficulty, the more we limit our own expansion. Difficulty is inevitable, and I do agree with M. Scott Peck and with my dad that life is full of difficulty. Difficulty is going to be dished up to you on a silver platter at many different times in your life. And it's going to come in a bunch of different packages, and it's going to look a bunch of different ways. The factor of how happy, truly happy you are in your life is not a matter of how little difficulty you can receive. It's a matter of how you respond to the difficulty. So this isn't really a conversation about kids or no kids. Again, this is not an issue where I'm like trying to convince anyone to have kids who doesn't want to have kids, or anything like that. It was just an experience I had as I was sitting there in my bed after the difficulty of getting my kids to go to sleep, watching this reel that's talking about how parents are less happy than those who either choose never to have kids or those whose kids have launched into the world, that that's when happiness spikes. That I just thought, what a sort of pointless conversation about who's happier people who have kids or people who don't have kids, Because you know, if we're talking about kids, that's one thing for the most part. Yet you have a choice about whether you want to have kids or not, or most of us do. In the modern world, we have access to resources like birth control that can help us to make those choices whether or not we want to have kids. And yet there are so many instances in life where things happen to us that we do not have control over that could impact our quote unquote happiness. You know, is someone happier with cancer or without cancer. Is someone happier, you know, with ailing parents or without ailing parents? Is someone happier in a happy relationship or in a tense relationship. And yet there are things in our lives that we just don't have control over. We don't have control over who our parents are, We don't have control over whether or not we get an illness. So if we're waiting for life to be in the perfect set of circumstances so that we can experience happiness, we will be waiting a really, really long time. And if instead we're able to see our lives through the lens of life, is going to dish up lots of difficulty to me. And you know what, the joy is found in creating the capacity to hold the difficulty. Whatever the difficulty is, whatever package it comes in, however it shows up in my life, whether it's because of my children, whether it's because of my health, whether it's because of my relationships, whether it's because of my job, whether it's because of my finances, whatever it is, however the difficulty shows up, my joy in life is not dependent on those circumstances, but it's dependent on how I choose to see the difficulty. Can I hold the difficulty? Can I receive it? Can I receive what's trying to show me, what it's trying to teach me? Can I become the kind of hero who transforms enough to transcend the difficulty on the other side of it? And in order to become that type of person, I may need to be someone who faces difficulty every single day with grace and compassion in my life. I may need to be become someone who faces difficulty every single day with truth in my life. And I can speak from experience having two young kids that having kids at three and four and every age before. I can't speak to older kids because I haven't had older kids yet, but having kids at every age leading up to three and four has added tremendous complication, chaos, noise, difficulty, challenge to my life. And it's a challenge that I would never trade for a million years. It has made me infinitely happier. It has made me so much stronger, It has made me a better person on all fronts. It has changed me from the inside out. I'm a completely different person now than I was before having children. And it doesn't have to be children. But whatever difficulty you are facing, maybe the conversation shouldn't be how do we avoid this difficulty? But maybe it should be how do I face the difficulty with discipline? How do I face the difficulty with compassion? How do I face the difficulty with softness? How do I fully receive what my life is trying to offer me through this difficulty? Maybe it shouldn't be about how do we avoid the pain? How do I avoid the heartbreak? How do I live a life where I never have to face anything challenging or difficult, where I never have to experience that contrast, where I never have to do anything I don't want to do. That's one way we could live our life, or we could live our life through the lens of life is going to dish me up lots of difficulty. What am I going to do with it? How am I going to show up in light of the difficulty? How am I going to allow my character to develop inside of this difficulty. And again, as Victor frankl would say, it's not happiness that you're looking for, it's not happiness that you're craving. It's meaning that you're craving. And meaning comes through facing the difficulty in our life with an open heart, with an open mind, with an open spirit, receiving what the difficulty is here to show us. I said, I would circle back to this later in the episode, and I do want to spend a minute talking about how our culture avoids supporting parents and young families, because I think there's a parallel here to how our culture sees happiness versus meaning. I think as a culture, we trend toward the idea that if I can just control my circumstances, I can be happy, I won't ever have to face difficulty, and I'm going to live a great life. I think as a culture, we have just sort of bought in to that narrative. And like I mentioned in last week's episode, we have the privilege of buying into this narrative because we live in a culture where, for the most part, we have been insulated from extreme difficulty. We haven't had wars that are fought on our soil. In my lifetime, we are a very wealthy country where there are a lot of broken aspects to healthcare and other part you know, politics and whatever else. And yet we live in an extremely wealthy country where if you're really sick, you can go to the doctor and the doctor's going to take good care of you. So we have access to these resources and privileges, and this life that we lead gives us the illusion that we have control over our circumstances and that we can create a life where we experience mostly happiness, pleasure, and joy. And yet I believe, and I know Victor Frankel believes that if you had a life where all your circumstances were only happiness and you experienced no contrast, you would actually never experience real joy, and you would never experience true compassion, and you would never experience real love, because those experiences come from going down into the depths of difficulty. That's just where they're born from. You know. Beautiful art is born from challenge. Love and compassion and bonding is born from going through difficulty together with someone and supporting one another. That's where love is born from, is from seeing one another in our wholeness and not just seeing the good parts of someone, but also seeing the dark parts or the difficult parts of someone and accepting them in their wholeness as they are. And so without those aspects of life, without that contrast, we don't even get happiness. Happiness is just sort of like a airy fairy idea. It's just sort of like a surface level thing that doesn't really exist. And so I think this idea of our culture not supporting young families is a parallel to what we believe about meaning in life, what we believe about how life operates about, you know, the rights that everyone has to sort of like their own space and their own happiness and controlling their environment. I was mentioning the feeling of going into a restaurant or going into a mall with young kids and how you get the side eye from a lot of people. I always like watch people's faces because you can tell people who have either had children, or people who are grandparents of young children, or people who have been around young kids will give you a look when your kids are losing it or melting down in a restaurant or in a mall. That's like a look of understanding. They're like I've got you. You're good, You're doing a great job. Sometimes they'll even come over and like put their hand on your shoulder and say, like, great job, mama, you're crushing it. But most people give you this kind of look out of the side of their eye, like that kid is crying. Get them out of my space. Immediately, that kid is crying. It's bothering me. I can't hear myself, think, I can't talk, and so you know, you need to clear out of here, and it creates this really isolating experience, says a young parent. This is not me complaining about this at all. It's just me speaking to an aspect of our culture that I would really like to be part of reshaping or reshifting. And I think it's going to take a shifting of our entire paradigm, not just a shifting of you know, how people respond to in a restaurant, but the paradigm that chaos, messiness, murkiness, confusion, noise, whatever it is, it's all part of life, okay, It's all part of what it means to be human and what it means to be in existence. And our obsession was sort of cleaning that up and making sure everyone's experience is always perfect, and no one's inconvenienced, and no one has to hear a noise that they don't want to hear. That obsession that we have with controlling our circumstances is blocking our happiness. I'm convinced of this. It's in the way. And when we can remove the block to happiness, we will begin to experience contrast, which will mean being inconvenienced. You know, hearing a noise that you don't want to hear, your experience not being like perfectly curated in every kind of a way. And yet it will open up parts of you that you didn't know were there. It will expand you into someone that you didn't know you could be. And when that space exists, think of it like opening up a room in a house. That space exists, and there's more room for more happiness, more joy, more pleasure to just rush in. There's more space without experiences of frustration, complication, chaos, inconvenience. We don't have access to that space. And what we're doing when we face a difficulty or we face a challenge with compassion, with discipline, with character, When we show up and we face a challenge and we say, I don't know what to do. I don't know the solution here. I'm hurting, I'm in pain, but I'm here anyway. I'm showing up. My heart is open, I'm in my life with my whole heart. When we show up and we do that anyway, we are slowly but surely opening more space for joy, opening more space for pleasure, opening more space for happiness. And I think when we can really get that as a culture, the feelings of like being in public and being an inconvenience or a frustration will just automatically shift. I think when we can really get that as a culture, public spaces are just going to automatically shift, and they're automatically going to have more space for not only young kids, but also elderly people. You know, we live in a culture that sort of like segregates elderly people to over there. And I have felt this as a mom too, where because you're in such a vulnerable position as a mom, it's like, yeah, we don't really want to deal with that. We don't want to deal with your breastfeeding or your vulnerability at all, So why don't you just stay at home during this vulnerable time of your life? And you can rejoin society when you don't feel it's so vulnerable. We are so terrified to experience vulnerability, to look at vulnerability, to have vulnerability be a part of our lives. We're almost like shoring it up and shutting it out of our lives so that we don't even have to think about it. We can just go about curating our experience, making it perfect, making exactly how we want it to be. And then when you know, as a mom, when you're back on your feet, when you bounced back after your postpartum time, then you can rejoin society as long as your baby doesn't cry, and as long as you don't have to breastfeed in public. It's just such an interesting thing to me watching that reel. And again I've not watched the entire interview, so I'm not making a judgment about the real more about the comments and about this idea that we have that we could curate perfect happiness in our lives. I think it's a trap. I really think it's a trap. I think it's a path that you know there's no harm in walking down the path to curating happiness. I think our life on planet Earth will shatter that illusion eventually anyway. So if you are walking down a path where you're hoping to curate perfect happiness, I think you know you can have aspects of that in your life and it's fine, and life is going to show up and probably shatter that illusion at some point along your journey anyway. So it's not like I have to correct that or something. But I just want to say, if you're someone who's listening to this who has already experienced either motherhood and the way that that's completely just demolished who you thought you were and it's changed your life completely, if you're feeling sort of like under the weight of that, or if you're up against a totally different challenge and you're asking yourself like will I ever be happy again? What I want you to know is that your happiness that you can experience in the future is in direct proportion to how you face this challenge that's in front of you. This challenge that's in front of you is opening up space. It's opening up more space inside of you so that more joy, more pleasure, more relief, more grace can eventually wash it. I hope you find that encouraging. I hope you find it inspiring. I hope it maybe slightly shifts the way that you look at your life, rather than thinking how can I accumulate the most happiness possible? How can I face the difficulties in my life with great joy? I hope it helps you, and I'll see you back next week on the Write Your Story podcast

Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to tackle a pretty big topic. I want to talk about happiness. But I want to talk about happiness as it relates to what this podcast is really about, which is about taking our agency and using it to shape our stories, to quote unquote write our stories, even if we're not literally writing a book and writing a story. I want to talk about what it means to shape your story as it relates to happiness. So what role does happiness act play when it comes to shaping our stories? Are we shaping our stories in such a way where happiness is paramount or does happiness even matter for a meaningful story? This is what I want to unpack today. And I got inspired to talk about this topic because of something that I saw on Instagram. I was just sort of casually scrolling Instagram at the end of the day, as I do sometimes to decompress after getting my kids to bed, and I saw a reel that Adam Grant had posted. Adam has, you know, almost three million followers. You may already follow him, but he is an organizational psychologist. He's an author who's written a really popular book. He has actually written a couple of books, and he was interviewing another psychologist and they were talking about happiness as it relates to being a parent. So of course this caught my attention because usually when I'm scrolling Instagram, it's because I'm so exhausted from a day of chasing my two young kids around that I just need something really mindless and passive to do, so that's usually why I'm sc Instagram. So this was me that night. I had just gotten my kids to bed. It had been a really good but a full, exhausting, tiring, long day. Then bedtime you parents out there, No bedtime is always a struggle, no matter how good the day has been. Like if you have a great day, bedtime is horrible because the kids don't want to go to bed because they're having so much fun. And if you've had a really hard day, bedtime is horrible because the kids are like completely melting down and have lost all sense of calm in their bodies and are just regulated and just you know, it's just a nightmare and it kind of no matter how you swing it. And my husband and I have gone around the block over the years with bedtime. We used to have these really long bedtimes that were like extremely frustrating, and we would trade off. We would argue over, you know, who is going to do bedtime tonight, and sort of like barter with bedtime. It would be like, all do the dishes for a month if you do bedtime tonight. And then more recently we started working with a parent coach, which is like a whole other episode I could talk about that, but this parent coach helped us to do a better job of setting boundaries with our kids, and it was so incredible and amazing, and bedtimes became much lighter and easier to handle. And yet still even with the boundaries in place, even with our better bedtimes that are no longer two hours long but that now are like twenty minutes, even still bedtime is just sort of a thing at the end of the day. So I had just done this bedtime routine, I had just gotten the two kids to sleep, I settled into my bed. I'm scrolling Instagram, and all of a sudden, I'm watching Adam Grant interview this other psychologist asking him questions about parenting and happiness. And one of the things that I heard this psychologist say that I guess you could say was kind of triggering for me, was that you ask parents if having children has made them happier, and they will tell you yes, But when you actually look at the data, the truth is having kids doesn't make you happier, that happiness tends to improve when your kids are grown and leave the house. And so I just saw the short clip of the interview. I didn't watch the entire interview. I still haven't watched the entire interview, but I was just noticing how this conversation that the two of them were having was feeling kind of triggering to me. And I imagine this would be triggering for most parents, because you have like such adoration and love, like an unspeakable, unexplainable amount of love type of love, unconditional love for your kids. They in every way that you can imagine make your life better and richer and more incredible. And so to hear someone say kids don't really make you happier is a wild thing to hear someone say, and you kind of want to I immediately went to the comments because I was like, I want to see what other people are saying about this. So this is what we do on Instagram, right, we go straight to the comments. We're like, am I crazy? Or are other people also feeling this way about this content? And sure enough in the comments, there's a lot of parents saying, you know, I don't know about you, but my kids make me infinitely happier. I'm happier now than I was before. And then there are other people in the comments saying like, why are all the parents here getting so defensive? So it just got me thinking about the nuance of this topic and of this idea of happiness. I want to expand the topic of happiness beyond just having kids, because this isn't really an episode. It's not a podcast about this, and it's not an episode trying to convince someone who's on the fence about having kids to have kids, or someone who's chosen not to have kids to have kids, or anything like that. I feel like, you know, if you have decided that you do not want to have children, then more power to you. Please don't have children, because it will. You know, even even wanting kids, it has rocked my world and challenged me in ways that I couldn't have imagined, even like desperately for a decade, more than a decade, like begging God to give me children. Even still having kids has really surprised me with how challenging and difficult it can be. So it's not about convincing someone to do something that they don't otherwise want to do. But I do want to talk about the nuance of a word like happiness and talk about like, is how happiness even really the goal? Because if you have these two different perspectives, parents in the comments saying yeah, sure, life has changed so much since I've had kids, and I have less freedom, you know, I travel less and I do less fun things with my friends, And yet I would pick this a thousand times over. There has to be something there. And it really got me thinking about this idea even in my own personal experience, because yeah, in certain ways, when you measure my life before kids versus now with kids, in certain ways my life was quote unquote better back then, and yet my life is richer, deeper, more fulfilling, infinitely more like just full, just fun and full and wonderful now than it was back then. And yet I also am not denying that it's also exhausting, and I'm not denying that it's also really frustrating, and I'm also not denying that it's also confining. You know, I miss probably more than anything else, maybe two things I miss more than anything else from pre child life. One is freedom, and that includes like spontaneity, because I just don't have that in my life. I feel like when I had one child, I had a little bit of it still where Matt and I could kind of pick up and just be like we're just going to go out for the day and just you know, like get the car seat and pack the diaper bag and we're just going out for the day and she'll nap on the go and no problems. And then when I had two children, I really felt that sense of anchoring, like you can't just pick up and go. There are too many logistics, there's too much you have to bring. It's too challenging, it's too complicated. It's not the same. It doesn't have that same lightness and freedom that it did back before we had children, and so I felt that anchoring happen when I had my second child. So freedom. And then the other piece of that is community. And this is something that I really want to spend a minute talking about on today's episode because I think it plays a massive role in happiness. And I think our culture does a really, really terrible job of facilitating community, particularly for parents, and particularly for parents of young kids. I think our culture does a terrible job of facilitating community for young parents. And because of that, parenting in particular motherhood, or if you're the primary caregiver of your children, that can be an extremely isolating experience. And as I was thinking about what makes people happy, why does happiness matter? Why are we even talking about happiness the nuances of happiness, I was thinking, gosh, like, that's a big piece of this, a big piece of why I might say I feel less happy at times now than I did before, Because before having kids, I could facilitate my own community. I could get out of my house and go to a yoga studio, I could go to a church community, I could go to an outing. I could go to a restaurant, I could go to a bar, I could go meet people. I could just go to a concert, a venue, go out, walk around the town, go shopping, go to the mall, whatever I wanted to do, and be in community with other people. And then having children. And I'll get into this later in the episode because I want to talk about this as a kind of separate topic. But I have felt as a mother the way that our culture feels about mothers bringing young children into those spaces. I mean, some of the spaces are just an automatic noe for kids, like a bar, for example, but even a mall. If you're a mother of young kids, I know you have felt this where when you bring your young kids into a space like a restaurant or a mall where other people are there, you feel the sense that all eyes are on you and they're expecting your kids to act in a way that kids just don't know how to act. And they're expecting your kids not to make noise or not to bother them, or not to be an inconvenience, or not to be too loud or whatever. And that feeling that you have as a prime very parent is extremely overwhelming. And makes you much less likely to come and participate in those spaces. And so then motherhood or parenthood becomes extremely isolating and that can play a role in our happiness. So those two things, freedom and then community, have been the two things that have been the biggest adjustment for me coming into motherhood. And yeah, of course those things would have an impact on happiness. So if you're asking moms, you're asking dads, and I mean, I know this can be a really different experience for moms and dads too, depending on how the household is set up, where sometimes moms have a whole different experience of motherhood than dads do of fatherhood. For a lot of dads, life goes on as normal after you have kids. You still go to work, you still you know, you might have small adjustments to make, But for a lot of dads the adjustment is not as big as it is for moms. And so it might depend on who you're asking. Are you asking mom if her happiness or quality of life has changed? Or are you asking dad if his quality of life has changed? In our house, it's been very fifty to fifty. Matt has at different points been the quote primary parent or the stay at home parent while I have continued on working, and at other points I've been the state at home parent. Well, Matt has continued on working, and we've kind of tag teamed those things. And even you know, Matt and I have had a lot of discussions about this because we're moving into a season where he's stepping into more of the primary breadwinner position and I'm stepping into more of the primary parent position. And yet Matt, because he's been the primary parent and he has the awareness of what it looks like to be a primary parent, he also knows how to support me without me having to say to him like, hey, could you do this or could you do this? Matt knows how to step in and support me as the primary parent in ways that make my quality of life a lot better. During the day when he's gone for let's say eight hours, it's not always eight hours. Sometimes it's ten and sometimes it's six, but he will do things like make lunches ahead of time the night before, or like prep the breakfast, or you know, get the laundry moving, or or he comes home and he does bedtime. Since I've been with the kids all day, so there are things that he can do as the primary breadwinner that helped to support me as the primary parent, and he has an intuition about those things that he wouldn't have otherwise had if we hadn't have traded off the way that we have in our relationship. So again, I'm just bringing this up to say, like, there are a lot of things that impact the happiness of a parent, and this is one of them. Anyway, I don't want to spend this whole episode talking about the idea of having kids or not having kids, but I bring this up to say there are a lot of different things that could impact how happy someone is as a parent, and one of them could be how supportive their partner is. How much does your partnership been in help with household duties or do they see it as their responsibility or are they waiting for you to kind of make them a list and give them their honeydew list for what's theirs to do? You know, do you have a partner who travels all the time, that's another big stressor on the parent who's home. So so many different nuances here to why a parent might report that they were happier before they had kids then after. But it's not really the main thing I want to talk about. The main thing I want to talk about is how are we even defining happiness and what is it that really makes us happy? Because I think that we have these cultural ideas of what makes us happy, that we'll be happy if we can get what we want, if we can achieve what we want in our life, then we'll be happy. And this is assuming that we even know what we want. And as I was thinking about recording this episode, I was thinking a lot about my dad, who, if you have been listening for a while, you know, is no longer with us. I lost my dad last October. My dad and I would have very let's call them robust conversations, intense, lovingly intense conversations about this topic because my dad was cut from a little bit of a different cloth than me. I mean, I think in a lot of ways we were similar. But my dad's favorite book of all time was M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The first sentence of that book I can recite from memory because it's been recited to me so many times in my forty one years of life, which is that life is difficult. That's the first sentence of M. Scott pex The Road Less Traveled, which was my dad's favorite book. Life is difficult, And my dub would always say that life is difficult. Life is difficult. Life is difficult, And I think as a bit of a rebellion to that wanted my dad to see, or wanted him to acknowledge, or wanted him to accept that life could also be beautiful, and life could be so full of you know, pleasure and joy, and that you could have the things that you wanted to have, and you could go out there and create the reality that you were wanting to experience. And I lived my life from that place of maybe sort of trying to convince my dad or convince myself that this other way of being was also possible. That you could go out and you know, manifest the experiences that you wanted to have, and you could travel everywhere and you can meet these amazing people and you could experience pleasure and joy and happiness. And yet the more life I've lived, and the more you as I've been on this planet, the more I realize that my dad and I were both right. In other words, life is difficult, and also there's so much pleasure to be found yes, life is difficult, and also you can go create the things that you want. Yes, we are the authors of our stories. We are the creator of our own reality, our own existence. And also part of how we experience meaning and joy in our lives is through moving through the difficulty. If you think about the write your story framework, even it's the problems in the story that create the tension that transforms the hero. The hero transforms because of difficulty, because of tension, and without that tension, I've said a thousand times, the story falls flat and it's just uninteresting. It doesn't really grip us or engage us. And so yes, in some ways my life life has become more challenging in many ways, actually my life has become more challenging and difficult since having children. And yet at the same time, when I look back at my life pre children, especially by the time that I had met Matt, I'd had a couple of years of doing pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whoever I wanted. I'd had a few years of traveling wherever I wanted to go, to really beautiful locations, to you know, creating a life of pleasure and ease and spontaneity and freedom and fun and people and you know, having these incredible experiences, and I was so happy. I had all the happiness that anyone could ever ask for. I had privilege, I had money, There was flow in my life. I was, you know, falling in love with Matt. There were so many beautiful things about my life at that time, and I wouldn't change a single second of it. And yet when I look at how my life has transformed since having kids, I realized that the happiness that I had achieved back then satisfies only to a certain extent. It is fun, and it is satisfying, but only to It'd be like eating, you know, the same meal over and over again for the rest of your life, even if it's your favorite meal. It's a delicious meal, but at some point you just go, yeah, I'm interested in some contrast. I'm interested in something a little bit different, and having kids for me has provided that contrast. It's provided you know, even think about what I said before about how having my second child kind of anchored me. It created this necessity to sit still, stay still, create routine, do the same thing every day, which was in contrast to my life before, where I was just flitting around from place to place all the time. I mean, I never had any reason to be tied down. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And having children gave me this anchor that forced me to experience contrast, and experiencing that contrast has taken me deeper. It has changed who I am. It has made me a better person. It's made me stronger. It's taught me so many things about life and about how the world works. It's shown me things I never would have been able to see without the contrast. So yes, in certain ways, surface level ways, having kids has made me less happy, I guess, And yet it has also opened up my world, expanded my world, expanded me to become someone new that I never could have become without my children. Now. One comment that I will often get if I post something like that online, which I have before, talking about how my kids have really challenged me and opened me and expanded me and made me someone better, people will say, well, can't you do that without having kids? Yes, of course, there are so many experiences in life, but beyond having kids that can also expand you. One experience that expanded me in my life was travel. So travel also at a time in my life, provided a contrast that I hadn't experienced before. I grew up in a fairly altered environment. I guess that's fair to say. I grew up in the suburbs and in the church and in a small community that was relatively safe and loving and just exactly the kind of space that you would want your children to grow up in. And yet I hadn't really traveled many places or experienced the world until I was in my twenties. And then I wanted to go to Europe, and I wanted to go to China, and I wanted to go, you know, see the world and travel all over the place. And I did that, and it provided me experiences that were in contrast to what I had experienced before. It provided me experiences like going, you know, an extra couple of hours without a meal, for example, when you're traveling, you don't always have access to food immediately right there. You don't always have access to the food that you want to eat. There are so many experiences in our lives that can provide us with that contrast that don't have to be having children. It could be travel for you, It could be an experience that we would otherwise call negative, like maybe you're diagnosed with a terminal illness or with a serious illness. When I was in my mid twenties, I was told that I had dietary fructose intolerance, which is an intolerance to the sugar called fructose, which meant, according to my doctor, that I could never eat fruit, never eat most vegetables, never eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. And I had to go on a long journey of first, you know, cutting all those things out of my diet and then sort of finding other health practitioners who could help me figure out like what was really going on with my body. And that whole journey was it pleasurable? No, you know, I spent years eating like only five foods that I could eat without my stomach hurting or without like just being in severe pain or without feeling like extremely lethargic. And that whole journey was extremely frustrating and upsetting and felt unfair at times. And you know, I went through my whole mental process with it. And yet at the end of the day, it also was an experience that helped me grow and helped me expand, and helped me become the woman who I am today. So if we're living our lives only sort of seeking happiness only, sort of seeking the things that we know are going to give us pleasure or make us happy. And this is Victor Frankel's whole thing too, man search for meaning, which is a lot of where this Write your Story framework came from. This is Victor Frankele's whole message is that what you are craving is not just pleasure. What you are craving is not just happiness. What you are craving is meaning. And a life that is rich in meaning becomes a life that has the capacity to handle pain and suffering with grace and with relative ease. A life becomes a life that has the capacity to handle frustration like a bedtime where your kids are not listening to you and it takes you an hour to get them to sleep. Your life has the capacity to hold that because it also has so much meaning and so much richness and so much love inside of it that it just can hold all of that challenge and difficulty. And I think the older I get, the more I realized that my dad was really onto something with the idea that life is difficult. You know, life serves you up difficulties. The nuance I would bring to this conversation that I didn't have to bring when I was in my twenties sitting arguing with my dad about this is this, You don't have to go out and stir up your own difficulty in your life, because life will dish it up for you every life, every person I've ever known, no matter how privileged, no matter how wealthy, no matter how insulated, no matter what, every human being who walks the face of this planet, who lives a life, will encounter difficulty. Now, the measure of difficulty you encounter may be different depending on where on the planet you live, depending on how many resources you have, depending on a lot of different factors. But the level of difficulty that you encounter also matches the level of the capacity you have to expand and to grow. So the more we insulate ourselves from difficulty, the more we limit our own expansion. Difficulty is inevitable, and I do agree with M. Scott Peck and with my dad that life is full of difficulty. Difficulty is going to be dished up to you on a silver platter at many different times in your life. And it's going to come in a bunch of different packages, and it's going to look a bunch of different ways. The factor of how happy, truly happy you are in your life is not a matter of how little difficulty you can receive. It's a matter of how you respond to the difficulty. So this isn't really a conversation about kids or no kids. Again, this is not an issue where I'm like trying to convince anyone to have kids who doesn't want to have kids, or anything like that. It was just an experience I had as I was sitting there in my bed after the difficulty of getting my kids to go to sleep, watching this reel that's talking about how parents are less happy than those who either choose never to have kids or those whose kids have launched into the world, that that's when happiness spikes. That I just thought, what a sort of pointless conversation about who's happier people who have kids or people who don't have kids, Because you know, if we're talking about kids, that's one thing for the most part. Yet you have a choice about whether you want to have kids or not, or most of us do. In the modern world, we have access to resources like birth control that can help us to make those choices whether or not we want to have kids. And yet there are so many instances in life where things happen to us that we do not have control over that could impact our quote unquote happiness. You know, is someone happier with cancer or without cancer. Is someone happier, you know, with ailing parents or without ailing parents? Is someone happier in a happy relationship or in a tense relationship. And yet there are things in our lives that we just don't have control over. We don't have control over who our parents are, We don't have control over whether or not we get an illness. So if we're waiting for life to be in the perfect set of circumstances so that we can experience happiness, we will be waiting a really, really long time. And if instead we're able to see our lives through the lens of life, is going to dish up lots of difficulty to me. And you know what, the joy is found in creating the capacity to hold the difficulty. Whatever the difficulty is, whatever package it comes in, however it shows up in my life, whether it's because of my children, whether it's because of my health, whether it's because of my relationships, whether it's because of my job, whether it's because of my finances, whatever it is, however the difficulty shows up, my joy in life is not dependent on those circumstances, but it's dependent on how I choose to see the difficulty. Can I hold the difficulty? Can I receive it? Can I receive what's trying to show me, what it's trying to teach me? Can I become the kind of hero who transforms enough to transcend the difficulty on the other side of it? And in order to become that type of person, I may need to be someone who faces difficulty every single day with grace and compassion in my life. I may need to be become someone who faces difficulty every single day with truth in my life. And I can speak from experience having two young kids that having kids at three and four and every age before. I can't speak to older kids because I haven't had older kids yet, but having kids at every age leading up to three and four has added tremendous complication, chaos, noise, difficulty, challenge to my life. And it's a challenge that I would never trade for a million years. It has made me infinitely happier. It has made me so much stronger, It has made me a better person on all fronts. It has changed me from the inside out. I'm a completely different person now than I was before having children. And it doesn't have to be children. But whatever difficulty you are facing, maybe the conversation shouldn't be how do we avoid this difficulty? But maybe it should be how do I face the difficulty with discipline? How do I face the difficulty with compassion? How do I face the difficulty with softness? How do I fully receive what my life is trying to offer me through this difficulty? Maybe it shouldn't be about how do we avoid the pain? How do I avoid the heartbreak? How do I live a life where I never have to face anything challenging or difficult, where I never have to experience that contrast, where I never have to do anything I don't want to do. That's one way we could live our life, or we could live our life through the lens of life is going to dish me up lots of difficulty. What am I going to do with it? How am I going to show up in light of the difficulty? How am I going to allow my character to develop inside of this difficulty. And again, as Victor frankl would say, it's not happiness that you're looking for, it's not happiness that you're craving. It's meaning that you're craving. And meaning comes through facing the difficulty in our life with an open heart, with an open mind, with an open spirit, receiving what the difficulty is here to show us. I said, I would circle back to this later in the episode, and I do want to spend a minute talking about how our culture avoids supporting parents and young families, because I think there's a parallel here to how our culture sees happiness versus meaning. I think as a culture, we trend toward the idea that if I can just control my circumstances, I can be happy, I won't ever have to face difficulty, and I'm going to live a great life. I think as a culture, we have just sort of bought in to that narrative. And like I mentioned in last week's episode, we have the privilege of buying into this narrative because we live in a culture where, for the most part, we have been insulated from extreme difficulty. We haven't had wars that are fought on our soil. In my lifetime, we are a very wealthy country where there are a lot of broken aspects to healthcare and other part you know, politics and whatever else. And yet we live in an extremely wealthy country where if you're really sick, you can go to the doctor and the doctor's going to take good care of you. So we have access to these resources and privileges, and this life that we lead gives us the illusion that we have control over our circumstances and that we can create a life where we experience mostly happiness, pleasure, and joy. And yet I believe, and I know Victor Frankel believes that if you had a life where all your circumstances were only happiness and you experienced no contrast, you would actually never experience real joy, and you would never experience true compassion, and you would never experience real love, because those experiences come from going down into the depths of difficulty. That's just where they're born from. You know. Beautiful art is born from challenge. Love and compassion and bonding is born from going through difficulty together with someone and supporting one another. That's where love is born from, is from seeing one another in our wholeness and not just seeing the good parts of someone, but also seeing the dark parts or the difficult parts of someone and accepting them in their wholeness as they are. And so without those aspects of life, without that contrast, we don't even get happiness. Happiness is just sort of like a airy fairy idea. It's just sort of like a surface level thing that doesn't really exist. And so I think this idea of our culture not supporting young families is a parallel to what we believe about meaning in life, what we believe about how life operates about, you know, the rights that everyone has to sort of like their own space and their own happiness and controlling their environment. I was mentioning the feeling of going into a restaurant or going into a mall with young kids and how you get the side eye from a lot of people. I always like watch people's faces because you can tell people who have either had children, or people who are grandparents of young children, or people who have been around young kids will give you a look when your kids are losing it or melting down in a restaurant or in a mall. That's like a look of understanding. They're like I've got you. You're good, You're doing a great job. Sometimes they'll even come over and like put their hand on your shoulder and say, like, great job, mama, you're crushing it. But most people give you this kind of look out of the side of their eye, like that kid is crying. Get them out of my space. Immediately, that kid is crying. It's bothering me. I can't hear myself, think, I can't talk, and so you know, you need to clear out of here, and it creates this really isolating experience, says a young parent. This is not me complaining about this at all. It's just me speaking to an aspect of our culture that I would really like to be part of reshaping or reshifting. And I think it's going to take a shifting of our entire paradigm, not just a shifting of you know, how people respond to in a restaurant, but the paradigm that chaos, messiness, murkiness, confusion, noise, whatever it is, it's all part of life, okay, It's all part of what it means to be human and what it means to be in existence. And our obsession was sort of cleaning that up and making sure everyone's experience is always perfect, and no one's inconvenienced, and no one has to hear a noise that they don't want to hear. That obsession that we have with controlling our circumstances is blocking our happiness. I'm convinced of this. It's in the way. And when we can remove the block to happiness, we will begin to experience contrast, which will mean being inconvenienced. You know, hearing a noise that you don't want to hear, your experience not being like perfectly curated in every kind of a way. And yet it will open up parts of you that you didn't know were there. It will expand you into someone that you didn't know you could be. And when that space exists, think of it like opening up a room in a house. That space exists, and there's more room for more happiness, more joy, more pleasure to just rush in. There's more space without experiences of frustration, complication, chaos, inconvenience. We don't have access to that space. And what we're doing when we face a difficulty or we face a challenge with compassion, with discipline, with character, When we show up and we face a challenge and we say, I don't know what to do. I don't know the solution here. I'm hurting, I'm in pain, but I'm here anyway. I'm showing up. My heart is open, I'm in my life with my whole heart. When we show up and we do that anyway, we are slowly but surely opening more space for joy, opening more space for pleasure, opening more space for happiness. And I think when we can really get that as a culture, the feelings of like being in public and being an inconvenience or a frustration will just automatically shift. I think when we can really get that as a culture, public spaces are just going to automatically shift, and they're automatically going to have more space for not only young kids, but also elderly people. You know, we live in a culture that sort of like segregates elderly people to over there. And I have felt this as a mom too, where because you're in such a vulnerable position as a mom, it's like, yeah, we don't really want to deal with that. We don't want to deal with your breastfeeding or your vulnerability at all, So why don't you just stay at home during this vulnerable time of your life? And you can rejoin society when you don't feel it's so vulnerable. We are so terrified to experience vulnerability, to look at vulnerability, to have vulnerability be a part of our lives. We're almost like shoring it up and shutting it out of our lives so that we don't even have to think about it. We can just go about curating our experience, making it perfect, making exactly how we want it to be. And then when you know, as a mom, when you're back on your feet, when you bounced back after your postpartum time, then you can rejoin society as long as your baby doesn't cry, and as long as you don't have to breastfeed in public. It's just such an interesting thing to me watching that reel. And again I've not watched the entire interview, so I'm not making a judgment about the real more about the comments and about this idea that we have that we could curate perfect happiness in our lives. I think it's a trap. I really think it's a trap. I think it's a path that you know there's no harm in walking down the path to curating happiness. I think our life on planet Earth will shatter that illusion eventually anyway. So if you are walking down a path where you're hoping to curate perfect happiness, I think you know you can have aspects of that in your life and it's fine, and life is going to show up and probably shatter that illusion at some point along your journey anyway. So it's not like I have to correct that or something. But I just want to say, if you're someone who's listening to this who has already experienced either motherhood and the way that that's completely just demolished who you thought you were and it's changed your life completely, if you're feeling sort of like under the weight of that, or if you're up against a totally different challenge and you're asking yourself like will I ever be happy again? What I want you to know is that your happiness that you can experience in the future is in direct proportion to how you face this challenge that's in front of you. This challenge that's in front of you is opening up space. It's opening up more space inside of you so that more joy, more pleasure, more relief, more grace can eventually wash it. I hope you find that encouraging. I hope you find it inspiring. I hope it maybe slightly shifts the way that you look at your life, rather than thinking how can I accumulate the most happiness possible? How can I face the difficulties in my life with great joy? I hope it helps you, and I'll see you back next week on the Write Your Story podcast