Good Life Project - Finding Grace | Samira Rajabi

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

What if social media and tech could be a powerful ally in the process of recovering from trauma? That's exactly what today's guest, Samira Rajabi (@srajabi), discovered. A scholar of digital and social media, trauma and international relations, Rajabi teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work on personal and mass-scale societal trauma, and how social media and technology can actually be powerful tools for recovering, meaning-making and finding belonging and safety in the aftermath, is truly groundbreaking.Rajabi's own experience of being othered early in life left her in search of a clear sense of identity and belonging. But it was a diagnosis of a brain tumor, followed by 10 surgeries, that led her to reexamine nearly every part of her life, values, relationships, choices, how she chooses to experience each moment, and reclaim a sense of grace and acceptance with whatever her life brings.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So the first time I saw Samira Jabi, she was speaking on stage at TEDx in Boulder, Colorado. I was blown away by her story, her graceful, wise, kind, straight up funny presence, especially given the fact that over the last few years, she'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, endured 10 surgeries, and on any given day might find herself leaking spinal fluid while teaching students at the university. I kind of had to know more. And as I dove deeper into the work she has devoted herself to for her professional life, I was even more convicted. She had to be on the podcast. So I reached out to her. She is a scholar of digital media, trauma, social media, international relations, feminist theory, and communication. Samira is currently an instructor and director

of digital influenced pedagogy at the University of Colorado. But it was her take on trauma, both personal and mass scale societal trauma and how social media and technology can actually be powerful tools for recovery, for meaning making and finding belonging and safety in the aftermath that really opened my mind and eyes and left me with hope. It is such a powerful lens, especially when so many others are focusing

on how social tech is isolating us. Samira offers a radically different frame, a way to tap technology to come together and to heal. In today's conversation, we cover much of this, as well as her deeply personal journey of discovery, of being othered when she was younger, finding her own place and voice and identity, and then enduring her own trauma and learning to embrace and celebrate each moment of life as a gift. So

excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming,

or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So as you mentioned, so your family is from Iran. What generation came here? So my parents came from Iran just before the revolution. Got it.

So my dad wanted to come for college. So like early 70s? Yes. Well, mid-70s. Okay. Like really close before the revolution. Yeah. So I can't remember what year my dad came, but he came early 70s.

He went to University of Texas at Arlington. Wow. And he also kind of like was this like self-made rug salesman. He wanted to be an engineer. He put himself through school for engineering. But in the meantime, he would call antique stores and say, hey, I have a van full of rugs. Are you interested? And he would drive wherever people

were. He met a neurosurgeon named Luther Martin, who was in South Carolina. He was a neurosurgeon, but he and his wife owned an antique store. We now call his wife Miss Helen. And she's like, I call her my fake white grandma. But she's our family now. And so he drove to South Carolina, and they helped him open a rug shop. And then he went back to Iran. He met my mom, married her, and brought her back to America instead of a honeymoon. That's amazing. So then do you still have a bunch of family back in Iran?

Yeah. So both sides of my parents' family, extended family, is almost all in Iran. Actually, I don't know if you noticed in the TEDx event, Andrew, the host, tried to say hello to my relatives who immigrated to the U.S. three days earlier. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they'd been here before, but they were coming for good the Thursday before the event. What's it like to have family members coming to the U.S. now, immigrating to the U.S. now? I think I'm a lot more nervous for them

than they are for them. Because I think being the kid of an immigrant, you get this certain... Because I think I see it more than my parents see it. I see a little bit more of, like, ethnocentrism and hesitation around kind of this what-are-you question or who-are-you question

that my parents either don't see or choose not to see. And I think for people who are coming, they're so excited about coming to a new place and being in a new place that there may be less tuned into the kind of racial and ethnic politics that I think I'm hyper aware of. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because you're kind of in effect sandwiched between two generations of immigrants, like in the generation above and the generation, I guess, not really behind you, but sort of like just came over at a later time. I'm so curious also, why Texas as a starting point for your dad? I don't know. Yeah.

I know how he ended up in Colorado was that he had kids by that point, and he wanted to find the best public schools he could find. So he had an engineering brain, and he made a chart of public schools, which ones were the best, like varying criteria. And that's why he moved to Colorado. But he was in Texas maybe because of college, I think. And he worked for Texas Instruments early on. He always talks about how his first job, like you have to do the hard work at first.

And he would like sort, you know, screws and different like little engineering, I don't know, equipment. And then he ended up living in South Carolina because of the Martins and the rug shop. Oh, that's amazing. So is that where you ended up? Did you grow up in South Carolina? I grew up in Denver, actually. So they were back here by the time that you were- Yeah, so they started in Texas.

They went to South Carolina. They had kids. Their kids had to go to school, so they brought them to Colorado to do so. Got it, so everyone came back here for the school. Yeah. What were you into as a kid? I was so nerdy as a kid. I really liked Star Trek.

So I just was the kind of kid that like really wanted to have friends. Like I was not very popular. I had an eye patch and not like a pirate eye patch, like a nude plastic patch that snapped onto my very thick red glasses that had ABCs and 123s printed on them. So I was not cool in the traditional sense of the word. And I was maybe like an early hipster maybe. But my parents had – we had a family friend and there were two daughters that always came over and they loved Star Trek. And I wanted them to love me the way they loved Star Trek. So I decided I would love Star Trek.

And I got to a point where I would write the people on the – like the actors on The Next Generation, I would write them fan mail. And like I had autographs that would get mailed to me. Like I would go to the library and look up the address and like a star map book. I think that qualifies you as both a Trekkie and definitely within the category of nerds. And all the awesomeness that comes around with being that person. You ended up then going to – I guess you started out in Boulder undergrad. Yeah. So I went to University of Colorado for my undergrad.

And it was actually the last place I wanted to go. I thought I got to get away from my family. Yeah. I got to make my own path. I applied to a ton of colleges, and I didn't actually apply to CU initially. I got rejected or waitlisted everywhere, and I was like, oh, crap. And I remembered that they had an extended deadline for in-state students with a certain GPA. And so I applied late and got in.

Otherwise, I had not gotten into college. Yeah. What was it about you wanting to like absolutely not stay local? Was it the typical kid thing or was there anything else? I think it was – there's this pressure in Iranian families. I think you've heard about it in previous interviews of like you have to be a doctor or a lawyer and you have to be a certain way. And I think – I didn't feel like I had that kind of brain. I knew that I had an interesting mind.

Like I knew I knew how to think, but I didn't know how to think in terms of being a doctor or being a lawyer or being an engineer. And I felt like even though I was a great student, had great GPA, was super involved in high school, I felt like I was always failing. And I don't know if that's an anxiety I got culturally or I put on myself, but I thought the only way to get past this is to get away from it. And even though that terrified me, I just thought, I got to run out of here. I got to get away from this constant failure. Even though when you looked at me on paper, there was no failure there. This is like largely in your

head. Probably. A lot of perfectionism. Absolutely. And I have long let that go. I think you kind of have to at some point or else it just tortures you for the entirety of your life. Well, and there's not a perfect. I don't even think there's a normal anymore. So I not only wanted to be normal, I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be interesting. Like in high school, I was not a popular person, but I was a useful person. And I let that stand in for popularity. So I would find every cool student or perceived cool student at school and I would make myself necessary to them. Oh, you're going to a party?

Let me drive you home. Oh, it's your birthday? Let me bring cake for you for the whole class. So I would go out of my way to be useful to people. Because you wanted to be accepted? Yeah. What was it that made you feel like you wouldn't be accepted but for doing, being useful? I think that I just, I went to a predominantly white high school. There was not a ton of

diversity. And I think it was a way, looking back at the time, I don't think I would have considered it like this. But looking back, I think it was a way, looking back at the time, I don't think I would have considered it like this. But looking back, I think it was a way for me to perform whiteness and to fit in and to feel accepted in society. It was right after 9-11. My family was, you know, were secular Muslims, but we were raised with Islam as a cultural ideal that permeated a lot. We were Iranian. It was really hard. And I remember one conversation where it was like, hey, maybe we tell people that your nickname Sammy is short for Samantha. I was like, but that's not my name. So I think I internalized a lot of that. And I also

felt like I was not impressive in an academic way where I was going to be a doctor or a lawyer or these fancy jobs that the rest of my siblings aspired to and were achieving already because I was the youngest of four. And so I just, how did I fit in? How did I make myself like worthy as I was useful? Yeah. I mean, to be a family and, you know, an Iranian family immediately after 9-11 in this country, I'm always fascinated by that experience because it is – I'm a New Yorker. I'm a long, long, long time. So I was in the city when that happened.

So I know the profound trauma and heartache that I experienced just from being a New Yorker. But what I don't know and what I've since learned over the years is that there was another ripple for not just for people from Iran, but not just even the Middle East, but just basically anybody whose skin wasn't white in this country. That while I and a lot of people were internalizing, grappling with whatever experience of suffering we had, there was a whole different type of experience for you and your family and basically all of the people of color that was, I'm guessing, not instead of, but in addition to what so many other people were suffering.

And it was, there were two traumas, right? Because I, first of all, I grew up thinking I was a white lady. Iranians are in this weird, and Middle Easterners in general, this weird cultural category where INS classifies you as Caucasian, but socially nobody treats you with the privilege that white Americans tend to innately get, right? And so it's this weird, there's a scholar who calls it racial hinges, that we're on the hinges and the door to whiteness opens and closes as necessary. And so if we're coming and asking for protection from hate crimes, then we're white. But if we're asking for privilege that white Americans tend to get, then we're not white. And so it's really interesting. And a lot of scholars trace kind of like legally how that happened through immigration law and a lot of other things

but at 9-11 it was two traumas because my sister was living in Pennsylvania and I was you know 14 years old and I'm seeing the news in high school you know standing outside my locker and saying a plane went down and I'm like okay well my sister's in that region I don't know what's going on so right so just the initial worry we all have when something big happens is like don't know what's going on. So, right. So just the initial worry we all have when something big happens is like, do I know what's going on and do I know anybody hurt by this? Right. But then also the trauma that happened to this country, I consider myself an American. I was born in America. I was devastated and couldn't, like everybody else, couldn't peel myself away from the story and the suffering that inflicted and how it unmade this

idea of safety that I had grown up with. And then to then walk through the world and be like, well, it's people like you or your relatives have names like the names they're talking about on TV. So you guys did this. And then feeling like, are they right about us? Are they not? Do I need to be afraid for my safety now? Because somehow, because of somebody else's actions, I'm somehow implicated in this thing all of a sudden. So there was just the trauma of the actual event and being an American, feeling it, and then the trauma of somehow feeling implicated in it just by virtue of like existing the way I exist in my body. And that was the first time I actually realized like, you are not white. You could, you know, put highlights in your hair. You can wear the same outfits. You can wear the same jewelry.

You can go by Sammy instead of Samira, but there is something different about you. Yeah. I mean, how do you grapple with that at that age? I mean, were you talking to your family? Were you talking to your friends? I tried talking to my family a lot. I think my parents and I have a fundamental disagreement on this, right? So Iranians that grew up in Iran are raised with this story of Iranians descending the Caucasus Mountains and this original Aryan myth. And I call it an Aryan myth, right? So that already tells us where I land, right? But assimilation as a narrative has been so important to so many immigrant populations in trying to fit in, right?

So I think it's also really confronting for me to say, like, no, it actually opens up this space of possibility for us to recognize that we are part of these communities of color, right? And that we can recognize the power in our culture and our heritage. And my parents are super proud of their culture and their heritage, but it was, it was like, you just have to try to fit in, right? And that, that was not something I was interested in. I didn't want to fit in with people who made me feel kind of crappy about who I was at a baseline that didn't feel right. And I remember calling my dad my first year at CU Boulder and being like, Dad, I'm upset. I hate this. I'm not white enough for the white people. I'm not brown enough for the brown people. I have no friends. And there are 30,000 people here. How do I have not like a single friend? And he, I mean, he gave me the speech he always gives me, which is like,

okay, do you, do you want to be the kind of person who follows through on your word and goes to college? Like you said, you were going to go to college or do you want to not? I was like, oh, I guess I'm going to follow through. And he's done that to me a couple of different places. I'm always glad that he did. But I recognize that I had to find spaces for myself to carve out, like, what my identity was and try to learn to understand it. And I joined student groups and diversity organizations. And I asked a lot of questions. But it took a lot of reading and studying and self-reflection. And I still think it's a thing that's in process.

Like, how do I identify? How is it safe to identify? Do I get to claim person of color? Do I not? And what does that do? Does that make me more visible? And what does that visibility even do? Is that good?

Is that bad? Yeah. It sounds like, I mean, just looking at your facial expressions, like you're still in this inquiry. Oh, all the time. 24 seven. Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting also is that, so clearly this has been a conversation that's happened, that's been happening in your head and over time in your work.

And I feel like really just in the last three or four years, this is also a conversation that has expanded much more publicly across society at large in this country and other countries. And I feel like similarly, people are just starting to ask the questions. They're starting to move from not being afraid to ask the questions, even if they have no idea how to even begin to figure out what the answers are, if the answers are, you know, like how they might feel if the answers come down in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable. I feel like at least we're sort of like reaching a point where there's a more widespread openness to asking the questions, which I hope is a good thing. I think it is because like they wouldn't be questions if we already knew the answers. I hate asking questions I already feel like I know the answers to. That's not real curiosity, right? Like, I don't know. Like, we ask a question because you

want an answer. And yeah, the answer might surprise you and it might make you uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable like 95% of the time. And it's because I do ask the question and I do end up making myself look dumb some of the times and ignorant some of the times. But the reason I'm willing to stake myself for that is so that the next time I'll feel less ignorant about the question I'm asking and I'll feel more stable and grounded in the question I want to ask. And if we don't ask each other and we don't help each other teach, then it's like the burden falls on a handful of people and it's not fair and it's not right. And it's nobody's responsibility to educate everyone. It's our responsibilities to educate ourselves and each other together. So I just think we can, like, yeah, be uncomfortable. Yeah. How do you go from that place of being not afraid to ask a question

where you have no idea if you're going to be right or wrong, do it publicly, stumble. How do you get to that place from the way you described yourself coming out of high school was sort of like, you know, perfectionism or working towards, you know, like being perfect always is almost, it's the diametric opposite of that state of mind. Was this a gradual shift for you or did something happen? I think it was a lot of things happened. I had a lot of different traumas happen in my life that were so confronting to me and all of these things I took as truth in the world, my physical safety, my emotional safety, my health for different traumas caused all of those things to come into question. And so it was like, what you think you know, you don't know. I also, graduate school changed a lot because that is the space

where everybody is trying to look the smartest and be the most perfect and nobody has any idea what's going on. And if we all just admitted that, it would be so much easier for all of us. And during my master's program, I went to East Africa as part of this cultural project so we could all do research and volunteer and do work with various communities depending on our research and different sustainability projects. And one of the people that was hosting us, and I remember the exact moment, she was a white woman from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, who had opened an orphanage in East Africa, but it wasn't an orphanage that would take in anybody. It had a Christian ideology behind it, which is fine. But it would turn away people that weren't willing to come into that ideology.

And you're a baby. Like, you don't know, right? And she gave us a speech about what love looks like. And everything she described as love was love for her and her community or people who could fit within her and her community. And I felt so far outside of her definition of love. And I felt myself getting really, really angry listening to her speak. And I remember somebody who was on the trip also said like, okay, then what is love? And I didn't have any better answer, but I knew what didn't feel right. And I started at that point to almost feel my way through the world rather than try to know

my way through the world. And then I came back and I thought, I had this like a little bit of a savior complex, which I'm a bit embarrassed about now, but I was like, I'm going to get a PhD and I'm going to know more and I'm going to discover the answers and I'm going to be able to help people the way they want to be helped. And I'm going to listen to them and I'm going to be the person that listens. And then I got a brain tumor and I was like, oh shit, maybe I'm not going to do that. And maybe I'm going to die. Maybe I'm not going to die. But again, everything about my world and what I thought I knew and the way I thought I could learn to know shifted right out from underneath me. And so life became a kind of like, make it as you go situation. But I think I'm not the type of person that thinks bad things

that happen are like some sort of secret gift that have a secret hidden lesson. But having to learn how to navigate that taught me to navigate things in a new way that I didn't have before. And to be truly curious, not kind of pretend to be curious, but really, really want to feel my way through the world and to lead with empathy rather than, I don't know, my husband had me listen to the, what is the audio book, like 48 Laws of Power or 47 Laws of Power. Yeah. And it's, it. And it's great in articulating your needs of what you want in the workplace. The whole time I was listening, I was like, no, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to manipulate an outcome for myself.

I want to be human. And I want to give the other people around me permission to be human because we are. And I see it with my students. When students come to me, I teach at CU, and they ask me for help. They ask me for support. And I say, yes, they look so surprised that I was so willing to see them as human. And I was like, yeah. And when I make a mistake or I'm stuck, you show up for me.

That's what it's about. And I don't know what the outcome will be. And I know it will probably be more work for me, but it's okay. I don't know. Yeah. It's really, it's a matter of letting go of the model of a future that you kind of like said, this is how it's going to unfold. And sometimes willfully, sometimes not willfully, but saying, okay, so I'm in it. Let's see where this goes. Yeah.

You know, with a sense of, you know, it's like Buddhist, like hold it lightly. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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So you end up, you do your undergrad at CU in Boulder. Entrepreneurship and biz? Mm-hmm. Which, was there an aspiration associated with that? Get a degree that's not pre-med or pre-law. Got it. And's my family and but the whole time I was like railing against everything I was doing in there which was so weird I love the entrepreneurial spirit and I love creating and building but I was like but what about corporate social

responsibility I was always this like bleeding heart how are we going to help people how are products going to help people and those aren't the first questions you learn to ask in business school. It's what are the profit models? What are the operations models? How do we build our supply chains? And I could build a damn good supply chain for you right now, but I don't want to. Now, I love that. So it sounds like you had that sort of like the heart of an advocate and an activist from pretty early age. You end up going, you said you did your grad work. That was in Denver, then back in Denver. And you start focusing on, I guess, media, social media, communications, international communications. What is that sort of the extension of I need to get involved in figuring out how

people interrelate to each other and how do we do it better? Or was there something else kind of driving that? So actually what happened, and it's not a thing I ever really talk about, is I went through sort of like a physically challenging time and just navigating my body as a woman at CU's campus. And at that time I actually remember I was reading the book The Kite Runner, and I remember there's a horrible story of assault in that book. And I just remembered seeing all around me all of these women having stories, myself having gone through stuff and there were resources everywhere. Here's a place you can talk

to. Here's a little triangle in this professor's office that says they're safe to be a friend, right? So whether it was stuff I was going through or stuff I was watching other women go through at all different levels of this like spectrum of abuse women go through in the world. I was like, man, we got resources. We're so lucky. We're so lucky. And then I'm looking at this story and I'm so struck by the story in Kite Runner where women are being assaulted and then they're being blamed or women are being abused, just day-to-day abuse that women face and they're still being blamed. And so like, just going through the world as a woman in a body, I was like, okay, this is not fair. What's happening all around me to

women? And also what's happening in this book is not fair. And I had friends that were going on mission trips to Africa, and they were going to these communities where rape was being used as a weapon of war or communities adjacent to those communities. And so it was like, my first question was like, what are you going to do to help women? And it was always more about like, well, we're creating community through this gospel, which again, I don't have a problem with that. What I had a problem with is like, are we going to ask people what they need or what they want or what they care about or what they're passionate about. And it was those things, right, being a woman in the world, seeing people suffering just because they're women and seeing the resources I had access to and thinking,

oh, God, what if you didn't have this, right? And the shame will eat you alive. And so it shifted everything I cared about. It shifted everything. Like it was like I tried to get a regular job after college. I became a wine rep and I did it. I recruited for the job for like a year. I went to fancy wineries and I did all these interviews and I did the job for three weeks and I hated it.

And then I spent the next year would become my advisor in my master's program. And she had created a radio station called FIRE. And it's Feminist, I think it stands for Feminist Indigenous Radio Endeavor. And it was in Central America. And it was to give women a voice and let them tell their own stories. We're not going to come and tell your stories and take them back to America and sell them. It was like, what matters to you? Go make it.

We'll give you the technical ability and you tell the story. And I thought that that was so cool. And I know like a lot of this stuff about, you know, Westerners dropping into countries is problematic. But I was struck by the fact that there is so much inequity and we're so okay not naming it. And like, why isn't that a part of business school? Even if we are going to think in terms of markets, right? Why are we exploiting places for resources, but not seeing the people as agents of change with the ability to participate, right, even if you're gonna you know wholeheartedly jump in on capitalism there's still a way to be advocates for people yeah um and to to not sweep

in and say i've got the answers let me show you um but also like you said come from a place of curiosity like yeah tell me about your life and how can I help you? And then how can potentially you be the voice of change and the driver, the engine of change? And if I can place any supporting role, but I think there is this, you know, you, you, you mentioned this idea of like, you know, like the Western savior and there is that really, there's a tension of wanting to help, wanting to do something, being in a position of power or privilege, but also needing and wanting to understand what is truly needed and of value. And how do you actually be of service rather than just impose what you believe to be something that will help and make yourself feel good about it? And that's kind of the truth of like every other social interaction too, really, right? I had a professor that put it so starkly in perspective for me because it was a class on women, gender, and violence.

And it's like, well, we can't do anything right. And she's like, it doesn't mean we don't try. We don't stop trying because, you know, we mess it up all the time. You just keep trying and you try to do better the next time. But we all go into every conversation thinking like, right? Every time we ask a question, we're already thinking the answer we might get, right? And a lot of times, like I see it in my relationship all the time. It's like, hey, do you want to like do X, Y, and Z tonight? And when the answer is like,

none of the above, it's like, excuse me? It's like, you asked me. It's like, you can't ask with an expectation of an outcome. It's not fair. Yeah. No, absolutely true. So when you're doing your graduate work there, then, I guess the first level of graduate work there, what was your intention? Like what was your, you're exploring all these different ideas, stepping much more strongly into the role of activism, advocacy, feminism, exploring issues of identity. As you sort of reached the later part of that, what was, did you have an intention? Like this is where, what I want to come out and, and do or focus on? I mean, I was kind of a dope. I was like,

I'm going to find the answer, right? Like I was like a young, kind of stupid. Yeah. And I was like, nobody else has found it. Well, nobody else is me. And I, like, I was an idiot. That's not real. That's not a thing. But when I went, when I actually went to Africa, when I stopped reading about it and I went and I sat with women in the rape ward of the hospital in Uganda, it was like, you're not going to fix this. You can't. It doesn't mean you're not going to be an advocate. It doesn't mean you're not going to be an ally, but you can't fix this. This is a problem at the level of an erased humanity. There is not a recognition of victims around the world as human in discourse, both in the West and in country, right?

Because the problems keep continuing, right? We know that power can be enacted in certain ways, in certain violent ways. And until that balance of power shifts, which is a long-term shift that has to take place in the way we talk about things, the way we do things, and the way power is distributed globally, I can't fix it. I can learn about it and I can make people aware of it and I can try to make it better, right? I can try to make these people's lives better, but I can't fix it. And it was like a slap in the face kind of, but also like a wake up call to like, if we stop thinking about this like lofty ideal of like fixing something and stop thinking about

the thing as broken, but just recognizing like humanity and life are these big complicated messes, then we can actually think about what are we actually capable of doing? Like I can't upturn the way like, you know, years of colonialism and everything in the world has gone, but I can be a good teacher in the classroom and I can make my students aware of the world and I can make them think about the world in a particular way and I can make them think about their bodies and their interactions and their lives in a particular way.

So that's what I do. Yeah. I mean, as we sit here now and you describe that, you seem very much at peace with it. And I wish I could, in fact, fix it, but I understand. I've made peace with the fact that this is the reality on the ground, and I let's go out and fix this, to having this experience when you're actually in country. And then at some point between that and afterwards, you hit a moment of realization where you're like, this can't be fixed. Like, I'm curious what that moment was like for you. I definitely had to grieve it.

And I fought myself on it for a long time. And actually, when I came back to get the PhD, first of all, I had no idea what a PhD was. I was just like, I need to learn more. First, it was like, I can maybe find a way through, but I got to learn more. Right. And then it was like, no, no. People are trying to survive. People are trying to do good by themselves. People are trying to make ends meet.

There's so many competing interests we have in why we do what we do. And I have a mentor that's really great. And she said, you know, maybe the way you change the world is not by, and it was right after I'd lost a lot of jobs I thought I could get and working for the UN and all these other things. And she was like, maybe the way you change the world is not going out and finding what you think is a problem and fixing it, but it's being good to the people around you and teaching them what you know and sharing a lot of love and joy and reality with the people around you. And that was when, like, the grief process, I was able to, like, grieve the loss of this idea of myself that I thought I would have. And just after that, I got a brain tumor. So if I hadn't had that, I think I would have felt a profound sense of loss of myself, even more so than I did as just a regular person getting a brain tumor, because I would have felt like that's the reason I can't actualize this dream. Whereas in reality, it was not a dream

that was meant to be attained. It's not for me to go dive into people's communities and say, this is what's wrong and I'm going to fix it. It is for me to approach different cultures and communities and people with curiosity and say, if there was a thing I could share with the world about you that could make your life materially better, what would it be? That frame is so powerful also because I think anybody who hears that, you kind of think, oh, I can do that. You know, when you think about action on a global scale or something really massive,

not that we don't need people out there working on that. Absolutely. But I feel like so many of us look at the scale and the scope of things that need to be addressed out in the world. And we feel so small and so incapable of making any difference. And when you sort of like you make it hyperlocal and simply start like asking the question like, well, what can I do like today? Like in this moment with one person, like, in my backyard? Yeah. And I don't want to depoliticize the thing either, right?

Because there's so much structural inequality, and it's built into our systems. But that doesn't mean that we don't try on an individual level. Like, I just taught my students in my class about Black Lives Matter. And one of the things that's really frustrating about the Black Lives Matter movement is that so many people are doing very real advocacy on the ground, online, all over, and we still see Black Americans being shot and people walking away with impunity, right? But so we could say it's not doing anything, but in actuality, it's doing a lot. It's making people feel seen. It's enabling communities to come together. It's enabling people to have a safe space to share and to organize and to create activism, right? Progress is not measurable in outcomes only, right, and in particular outcomes.

And so when we think about, like, what does it do to ask people about what they want the world to know about them and then trying to share that message with them and alongside them and on behalf of them, it does something, right? Because education has to start somewhere and education, understanding is the key to educating each other about the really hard stuff that makes us super uncomfortable. So we just avoid talking about it. Yeah. And it takes a long time for the subtler internal shifts and then to start to ripple out into cultural shifts and then start to ripple out into political change and social and societal change. And it's such an important point, I think, that we tend to measure the really big endpoint metrics and focus on that. Maybe because it's really hard to measure all those subtle internal shifts,

but they matter. They're really, really important because they're the precursors to all of the other stuff. Your brain tumor. Herbert. Herbert. Tell me about when, what happens? So I'm in my first year of the PhD and I'm already starting to realize that that the work I did in my master's is maybe not what I'm called to do anymore and not where my passion is lying but I'm seeing these trends so I'm seeing like what women did in East Africa on cell phones even when they didn't have super high levels of literacy, was they created spaces. They used the cell phones to find ways to connect with each other, to create support

communities. And that was amazing. So I was like, where else is this happening? Where else are people finding each other when they need each other? And at the same time, I get diagnosed with a brain tumor. I'm walking to campus and I fall over and I felt like somebody pushed me. And I was like, see, this is why I don't walk places. And I was like, it's your fault.

You walked. And I'd had a ringing noise in my ear for like a year. And people are like, you have swimmer's ear. And I don't swim, nor do I particularly like the water. But I was like, oh, okay. And so I just ignored it for the better part of a year. And then when I fell down, I was like, okay, this doesn't feel I just ignored it for the better part of the year. And then when I fell down, I was like, okay, this doesn't feel right. Something doesn't feel right. And I've always been pretty good about intuiting what my body is telling me. Even if I ignore it,

I still know it's there. And I called a friend who was a nurse and she's like, maybe you're dehydrated. So I drank like more water in that two days than I think I could probably have drank in the sum of my life. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go to the like on-campus doctor's office. I don't have like the real insurance for them. I have regular insurance, thankfully. And the woman happened to work for a clinic that specialized in a variant of the type of tumor I had that is genetic. And I didn't have that type of tumor, but she knew the symptoms. And she's like, hey, I don't want to scare you, but just to be safe, I'm going to send you to an ENT. And that ENT was like, I don't want to scare you. But she'd worked for a neurosurgeon during her residency who had dealt with my type of tumor, which is a very rare type of tumor.

She was like, I'm just going to get an MRI. And so I spent like a month just with a stomach ache waiting for this MRI, and I knew something was wrong. And I remember just always- Are you telling people around you at this point what's going on? My family. I really hadn't told anybody on campus except professors because I had vertigo, and I didn't know that that's what it was at the time. I just felt like the room wouldn't stay still and that my glasses didn't work anymore. So I would have to sit in a particular seat and I had to take some more breaks than I normally would. And it hit me all of a sudden. And so I finally get the MRI. I remember laying in the MRI machine and being like, if there's something in there, don't let it be cancer. I don't know who I was

talking to. I'm not a particularly spiritual person, but I was talking and they were like, you have to stop moving your face now, please. And because I was talking out loud and my sister and I found it on FaceTime with each other. So she's a doctor and they gave me the CD, which was maybe a mistake on their part. I'm not sure. And I made her go through the radiology films with me on my phone. And we were laughing and joking the whole time because I'd be like, oh my God, there's two giant tumors at the top. And she's like, those are your eyeballs. Like, you're fine. And then she stopped laughing when we saw this like golf ball looking thing. And I was like, what is it? What is it? And her response, because she's goofy, was like, look, Lance Armstrong had a problem with his balls and he won the tour to France. And I was like, I throw my phone on the ground and I start screaming.

I just opened my front door and start pacing outside. And I'm like, I don't want to be Lance Armstrong's balls because that makes sense. And that was how I found my brain tumor. And the doctor confirmed it the next morning. And my sister did some research. She's a pediatric geneticist. So not fair for me to have had her read my MRI. But I actually really regret that I put her in that position. But she had looked up what it was. And it was a benign type of tumor.

But when they grow really big, they basically compress your brain stem. So before you recognize what's happened to you, you stop breathing or you start having seizures. And mine was pretty big because most people that get this tumor are in their 60s and it's usually very, very small, usually a millimeter or two. And mine was three and a half centimeters. And so it was like, all right, our guess is that you have a couple of years before this takes you out. And we don't know how it will happen. Maybe you'll stop breathing, but, you know, your brainstem is Our guess is that you have a couple of years before this takes you out. And we don't know how it will happen. Maybe you'll stop breathing, but, you know, your brainstem is supposed to be in the middle,

and it's a little bit pushed to the left, and that's not good. Meanwhile, I'm, like, on my phone Googling, like, what does the brainstem do? Right. Because I have no idea what's going on. And you're how old at this point? 26. Got it. And so I got nine second opinions because it was,, the size of the tumor was such that like,

they were like, if we radiate it, it might swell and do more damage. And if we do surgery, your facial nerve might not work anymore and you won't be able to swallow and you'll have to put a magnet in your eyelid so your eye doesn't dry out. And I was like, what good is a perfectly moist eye if it's closed all the time, right? And so I just went into this tailspin and it was like, what good is a perfectly moist eye if it's closed all the time, right? And so I just went into this tailspin. And it was like the longer you take to think about this, the more danger you're putting yourself in. And so I was— Because it will keep growing. Yeah. And so I just felt like I was like, I want a new option.

And I kept thinking if I'd go to more doctors, I'd find a better option, which is not how that works, I learned. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need them.

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Charge time and actual results will vary. So where do you go from there? I went to Arizona to a doctor who ran an acoustic neuroma. That was the type of tumor I had. He ran an acoustic neuroma center, and he was the only person that didn't, you know, blink when I said, my intuition is telling me not to radiate this thing and I want surgery and nobody feels like they can give me surgery and give me a good outcome. And he was like, I can. And where most doctors see, you know, 10 or 11 of these a year, he saw more than anybody else because he ran this center

that specialized in this tumor. And he also looked like a doctor from like a soap opera. Like he was in his seventies, but he looked like he was in his forties. And he had like- Just like, I trust you. Yeah. Like when he smiled, I was like, was that a, you know, a sparkle that came off your teeth? Like, what was that? And he was so honest with me about what he could and couldn't do. And he was respectful to my parents when they'd ask questions. And he held my hand for a second. And even though he was like this superhuman to me, he was also superhuman. Like he was super real, like a real human to me. And so I went to Arizona and I got brain surgery. And then unfortunately, I got a spinal fluid leak.

Like I got a very rare complication and they only took half the tumor because they wanted to preserve my facial nerve and then it grew back. And so I got more complications. So what ended up, what I wanted to be a one and done surgery and call it good and find the best guy ended up being 10 brain surgeries over several years to try to fix a problem that defied all logic. And most spinal fluid leaks, you get what's called a shunt. It's like a drain that runs from your skull base to your stomach, and they drain your spinal fluid that's leaking, and it gives your body a chance to heal.

My body couldn't tolerate it. So they put me in a shunt and I couldn't stand up and I couldn't leave the hospital. And I was on bedrest for weeks and stuck in the ICU. And so they had to just keep trying to patch up my brain, but my skull was like, nope, not having that. So I just did surgery for a long time. Yeah. I mean, as you're going through these years, and it's like every time you do surgery, then there's something else, and then there's something else, and something else. When you go through something like that, in your mind, is there ever a point where it's like, okay, I'm just done. It is what it is. Or are you just like, I'm taking this to the end?

There was a very clear moment where, so they have to do something called a radionuclide test to see if your spinal fluid is in fact leaking or in the process of getting so much brain surgery. Because what happens when you have a spinal fluid leak often is that spinal fluid comes out of your nose and mouth and that's gross. But it's what happens. And sometimes when you go through a lot of surgeries in the inner ear and in the skull base and in the brain, it can mess up some of the other sinus functions. And so they were like, is it allergies? Is it something we messed up in your wiring? Or is it spinal fluid? So what they do is they give you a spinal tap. They put this like nuclear something liquid in you. They hang you upside down with what are essentially

tampons up your nose that like measure how much comes out in your blood versus in the spinal fluid. And I don't really understand the science of it, but they would take me to the hospital. They put these things up my nose and they give me a spinal tap, hang me upside down for a while, have me run around the hospital to try to get my intracranial pressure up. And then they measure at the end of the day. And I had gotten the, they're called pledgelets, put up my nose. And it's not a comfortable feeling. I kept asking the nurse if she was trying to mummify me and scramble my brains. And she didn't laugh at all. And I was like, she doesn't even like me. And I was there with my mom and the man who is my now husband. And I got a massive headache. So I had chronic pain. I have chronic pain from all of the surgeries I'd had. And I was not

handling it well. And they couldn't find the doctor. And then it turns out the doctor that was going to run the test was out of town and there was a scheduling error. So they were looking for another doctor who could do it. So I suddenly felt like this plan that we had is not working. And I'm in this like pre, it's like a pre-procedure area. So a lot of patients in a lot of different curtained off areas. And I got a headache. I started screaming and crying. My husband is playing my headache meditation, which is all about like, you know, release yourself to the uncertainty of this outcome. It might hurt for a long time, but it might not. And we don't know.

And that's good enough. That's where we land. So I calm down. And when the nurse comes back in and gives me an update, I was like, I just want to let you know, if we don't do this today, we don't do it. This is the last time I'm doing this. This is the last time I'm going through this pain. And I meant it. I was like, if we don't get results to this test, we're not doing this test again, which means we're not doing any more procedures.

I can give you today, but I don't have the energy to come back and do this again. And then actually right then a doctor appeared. And he's like, I can do this. I can do this right now. And while I was gone, another woman in another room handed my mom a necklace that said, be brave and keep going. And she was like, I heard your daughter say that she's done. And I don't want her to be done. I don't want her to give up. And to me, it wasn't giving up. And I still have that necklace. I have it. I actually keep it in my wallet with me. But it wasn't giving up. It was saying, this is okay.

Where we are, we did our best. And that was my best. That's all I had to give. I didn't have anything else to give. And that has to be okay. And it ended up the last brain surgery, we don't know if it worked. We don't know if I have an active spinal fluid leak or not. Probably 50% of my days, I spend wiping something off my nose, not knowing if it's allergies

or spinal fluid. The doctor can't confirm it. He can give me a, it's probable that we got it, but we can't be a hundred percent sure. And I just said, okay, whatever life I get, I'm going to, I'm going to take that because I don't want to keep doing this. And it's enough. It's enough on my family. It's enough on my body. It's enough on my spirit. And I don't, I don't want to keep feeling like this thing that's broken that needs to be fixed. I'm fine. And I have pain and I have symptoms, but I also have a big, beautiful life that I get to be in because I, I was willing to say, okay, that's, that's, okay, that's where we call it good. Yeah.

Well, while you're going through all of this also, what was it like around you, sort of the interactions? I mean, it sounds like your family was right there with you, your boyfriend, now husband, was right there with you. Your boyfriend, now husband, was right there with you the whole time. At the same time, you're young when this is going on, guessing a lot of the friends were similar age around you. And that can cause some interesting things with the relationships between you and others, even people who genuinely love and care about you, just having no context for how to navigate the relationship while you're going through something, especially where there is no clear, like there's no clear

end. There's no clear, like we're good. Curious what that dynamic was like while you're It was really hard. I remember with my family, I, before I went into the first appointment with my family, with my parents, I've always been the person that's like more willing to be vulnerable, I think, than a lot of them wanted to be. Because I mean, my dad is a poet. He puts his vulnerability into his art, right? And you know, my mom expresses herself in her own way. But I was like a live out loud, let your freak flag fly. And I knew that for them, a lot of life and for a lot of Iranian Americans is about how you're presenting outwardly. And so I kind of, I was like prepped for this thing that I saw happen when I was a kid where the doctor would

be like, are you feeling sad? My parents would jump in to answer like, why would she be feeling sad? She has a good life, right? And I was so nervous about that dynamic that with my family, I was like, these are the ground rules. I am in charge of this appointment. But then when I'd go into the rooms, I'd like devolve into a nervous ball. I was like, does anybody have any questions? Why don't you care? And so like, I knew I was struggling emotionally. With friends, it was really hard. And I actually learned a lot about relationships where people came back into my life when I was sick. And then they disappeared again when I got well. And I do appreciate what they were for me in that time. But as I got better, there was a clear line where they wanted me to stay sick.

And I don't know if it was because it gave them a way to feel useful, right? And I could understand that from the way I'm wired. But it was unhealthy for me to try to keep people in my life that were invested in me being in a particular embodied state. And I wanted people that wanted to cry for the lows with me and celebrate the highs with me. And so it did help me whittle my community in deliberate ways and to create a community, not just about the people you grew up with or the people who are around or the people who are in your graduate program or your friend group, but

create deliberate friendships. And so I think the friends I've made since have been true and pure and real and committed. And so, but it was really hard thing to navigate. And I think that's actually why I went online and a lot of my research moved to trauma because I didn't want to explain myself all the time. And I was, I felt so much pressure to be strong for everybody and to, to be this like inspirational fighter that everybody kept telling me I was, that I was like, this is, this is killing me. And I actually remember after my last, maybe my ninth hospital discharge, I was driving to work one day and I was listening to the news and they were talking about Donald Trump and the, that like video of him, like the grab him by the pussy thing. And I, between that and trying to be normal and go to work and then try to pretend like that was normal and like, just like

existing in the world outside of the hospital, all of a sudden felt so hard. And my brain was like, drive off the highway, just be done, call it good, enough. And I was like, then this other part of my brain was like, no, this is bad. There's something wrong, right? Like you're suffering right now. And part of it was caused by this like idea that I had to be okay. I had to get okay fast. I had to go back to work. I had to be strong. I had to be inspiring. I had to prove to people that they weren't lying to me when they told me I was brave. And so I pulled over and I called my doctor's office. I was like, hey, do you guys have a trauma therapist or someone you send your patients to? And she saved me. Like she just saved me from

this pressure that I was doing in my research all the time. And that's why I would write about it because I could tell the people around me, like, I don't want to be brave without having to look them in the face and tell them that because that was too scary at that time. It's not anymore. I'm different now. And I'm more well in my body so I can take bigger risks in my life. But at the time, I would go online and find people who understood or try to find people who understood because I was too scared to tell the people around me, like, I don't feel very strong and I don't know how to be strong for you. Yeah. Actually, I was really curious sort of like when the intersection of your like doctoral work around trauma and media and sort of like communal trauma and social media

kicked in. So like hearing sort of like where that really started to come from was kind of fascinating. So you're during this whole window of time, you're going through treatment, you're having surgeries, you're trying to live as much of the life as you can live. You're also in school. You're doing your doctoral work and then your postdoc work. I was fascinated by what you ended up focusing on. So you did your PhD, your dissertation. And I'm about to say something to you that I have never said on this podcast before, which is I read your dissertation.

Oh, my God. I don't think anybody's read your dissertation. Oh my God. I don't think anybody's read my dissertation. I know, I was like, I am now the fifth person. Blown away, blown away by it, by sort of like the lens on, and the idea that there's so much conversation around social media or digital technology and what's taking from us and how it's taking away empathy and taking away humanity and we're spending too much time on it, not enough time with others. And he had this really fascinating reframe

around how these technologies can actually be astonishingly powerful platforms for meaning making and community in the context of some of the deepest wounding on an individual and societal level. Tell me more. Yeah. So when I first found my tumor, I was in a quantitative methods class and I was supposed to do what we call content analysis of the project I thought I had come to grad school to study, which was women as victims of war and how rape is being used. So I was supposed to find news articles and quantify how many mentions of rape and women there were. And I was like, this is the worst. This is dehumanizing. This is horrible. And also I have a brain tumor and I'm too sad. I'm too sad to do this. I can't.

This is a bad project. I made a mistake. And I went to my professor crying and I remember her saying like, okay, go home and think about what you do think you can do. And it was then when I was also trying to figure out how to navigate my brain tumor and I found this guy named Darren on the internet and he had the same kind of brain tumor as me. He was also relatively young. His was relatively big.

And he made like a YouTube documentary of how he went through his tumor. And at the last line of it, he had his email address and I emailed him. And I all of a sudden felt so close to this person who I have not really talked to since. I've emailed him once more in like the six years since. But I all of a sudden was like, oh my God, I feel like I'm part of the world all of a sudden. And that's what those women felt in East Africa potentially when they were saying, I need a community I can talk to and be really honest with. And so it made me look at like, where else is this happening? Who else is doing this? Who else is feeling the world come out from under them? And all of a sudden I saw it everywhere. There was a woman who was killed in

2009 in Iran during protests and people who wanted to grieve her, they couldn't grieve her publicly in Iran because she was considered a protest martyr. So where did they go? They went online and they said, when the physical world takes our spaces, how can we make the world make sense again? One of the ways we do it is on the internet. Yeah, the internet is horrible and it's bad and it's like a little leech that leeches away our attention, but it's also really, really amazing and really good. And I joined this community called Brain Tumor Social Media. They tweet with the hashtag BTSM and all of a sudden I was like, even when I disagreed with people, they saw me in a way where I had felt I had to hide this part of myself that was in so much pain and so much suffering.

And so I think I had this humanity with which I could look at the Internet and recognize that, like, all of the things we're doing are to make meaning. All of the things, the stories we tell, they help us make meaning of our lives, of our relationships, of our bodies in the world. And so if we're to think about what we do when we go online in terms of meaning, whether we're being silly or sharing our deepest, darkest secrets, we're making some new meaning in that way. And that does something that leaves its traces in the world. It's really productive to me. Yeah. I mean, especially in the context of trauma, you know, where fundamentally, you know, like I don't, I don't know the technical definition of trauma, but it seems to me that a big part of that, you know, whether it is, and we all at some point in our lives endure some level of trauma, you know, but it seems like a part of that is always on some level, the world as we know it, and as we assumed it to be in the rules that we've

like assumed in existence, something about that gets shattered. So to me, that is the meaning of trauma. Right. And I guess the, you know, what you're saying is like is once that happens, then it's astonishingly painful. And part of that process is how do we then redefine the world moving forward? How do we put the pieces back together in a way that makes sense to us. Yeah. And when we get traumatized, we often think like, oh, it's a disaster and there's no coming back from this. And how could this have happened to me? And yes, we have to go through those feelings, but it's also maybe a possibility, right? Like to say, if the world I lived in didn't account for me and my body and the pain my body is now going through, what else did it not account for?

And how do I build a bigger, better, more accommodating world that lets people be who they need to be when they need to be that way and doesn't judge them for it or say, I'm not going to look at you when you're like that because it's too hard for me. And because I don't have to, frankly. And so it's really confronting. I actually think I learned it from one of my pain meditations. I think the framework came from, it's on an app called Buddhify. And it was basically the whole thing was like not telling me I was going to get better. Can't promise you that. But it was saying, as you're going through this really steep pain and you can't find your breath and you can't breathe, just know that we don't know how long this is going to last.

And in that uncertainty, it opens us up to the possibility that, yeah, maybe the rest of life is going to be like that, but that doesn't mean it's not life. And so maybe living with suffering, maybe it's okay. It's not what we're striving for, right? But maybe it's okay. It's not what we're striving for, right? But maybe it's okay. Yeah. It's sort of the ideal of years ago, I was introduced to the Buddhist tenet of like roughly translates to abandon hope. And on the one hand, I was like, never.

Like that's, no, like I'm not giving up on whatever this is or a cure for this, whatever. It took me a long time to really understand that that was, it wasn't, that's not what it was. What it was really about was, sure, maybe I'm going to hold myself open to if there's something going on inside of me or in the world that someday it will be 100% resolved. But if this is me for life, how can I get as okay with that as possible? And like, what does that model of the world look like so that I'm able to move on and wake up the next day and the next day and the next day? Yeah, because there's not a normal. As long as we're striving for this idea of what normal is and anything but that is abnormal, then we're placing so much judgment on ourselves. But if we're going to look at the world as like, I'm not the same as you, but I'm something, right? And I'm interesting and I'm

compelling and maybe I'm not what I used to be or not what I once told myself I wanted to be, but I'm a person and that matters and that's important. And I think we all want to loom large in the world, right? Whether it's among our immediate community and our family and our friend group. And there's so many things that tell us to be small. But if we accept ourselves the way we are, like I'm deaf in one ear. I'm too loud. I say like too much. I tell weird jokes.

I'm clumsy as all hell, right? By all, you know, measures, I'm not normal. I've had a brain tumor. I have all these things. Sometimes I start drooling uncontrollably and I don't know how to make it stop. And I, rather than feel embarrassed about it, it's like, okay, this is what I get. So what am I going to do with it? Because I can't change it and I don't want to feel broken. So I don't want to try to fix it. Yeah. One of the most powerful things about the work that you've done over the last few years also is this idea of, okay, when things happen, how do I not only make meaning on an individual level, but what happens when I actually share this? Whether it's an individual trauma that I then share with a lot of people who have maybe been through their version of it or some other thing, but I actually share it. And especially through the vehicle of social media or texting or technology, or whether it's some societal trauma, and we're all sort of like

sharing this moment together. The idea that these technological platforms can actually really be of service to us as we try and reshape that world after whatever it is that we've gone through. Absolutely. Like we have to recognize that all these platforms are owned by people and someone's making money off them. And it's usually not the people producing the content, right? So we want to be conscious of that. But one of my favorite, this is very nerdy.

One of my favorite authors is a guy named Nick Coldrean. He's a media scholar. And he writes about, his book is called Why Voice Matters. And he writes that voice or the ability to express yourself in the world is a human good. And without that, we're not letting people be fully human. And I actually talked to him once and he said, what's amazing about your project is you're not recognizing people writing about trauma or sharing it with a therapist or just a parent or a confidant. They're putting it out there. They're putting it out in the world. And somehow in that process of

sharing and assuming this invisible audience that you could possibly have, you're articulating that your voice matters. You're fulfilling that human good for yourself. And in people interacting with you then in these tech platforms, they're also articulating that your voice matters. And in people interacting with you then in these tech platforms, they're also articulating that your voice matters. And it's such a powerful thing to be seen, to just feel like you can be seen, that you're heard, that somebody is saying,

I see what you're saying and I choose to believe you. I choose to listen to you. I choose to honor what you're saying as true. It's really powerful. Yeah. So as we sit here today, you are, we're in Boulder, Colorado. This is part of our Boulder sessions out here, which has been amazing. You're teaching. You're back at the university where you started, but now you're actually, you're the one who stands in

front of the room or leading a group and sharing all of these ideas and facilitating conversations and opening minds and hearts. what is that like for you? Super scary, actually. It's really scary. Well, I was at Penn for a couple years, and I only taught one class in the two years that I was in a postdoc because they're not really about teaching. They're about your work and turning it into a book, which we did that, done that, moving on, right? And being in front of a classroom and saying things that I don't think anybody else is necessarily saying to students is actually pretty scary because I'm a human and I

get insecure. And what if they don't believe me, right? What if they don't trust in the ideas I share? So then I try to approach the classroom as, you don't have to agree with what I say, but we have to engage with each other's ideas. And I can learn as much from them as they can learn from me. It's also really exciting because I feel like teaching is an opportunity for me to learn a lot from students, to meet a lot of different types of people, but also to say like, if there's one thing I hope students come out of my classes with, it's how to be better humans, how they want to take up space in the world, right? Like we all get a certain amount of space, whether it's based on our privilege or our class and where we are or what our profession is. But it's like, how do we want to take up that space? And how do we want to

let other people into that space? And how do we want to expand that space? And it's sort of like when trauma breaks your world, how do you want to rebuild it, right? And that's what I want students to get. I also want them to get the curricular material, which is my job, but it's actually really scary. It's an exciting scary. I don't mind being scared, but I feel like the stakes are really high for me. So as we sit here now, coming full circle entirely in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? For me, I think living a good life is living a life where you accept yourself the way you are. It doesn't mean you can't aspire for more or for different things, but where you recognize that the way I am, maybe it's fine. And I think that framework changes all the have-tos in life to get-tos.

Like I get to live in this body and I accept it the way it is in the end, so then I can learn to love it the way it is. And that's what living a good life is to me. It's, it's living now in what we've got and recognizing that even when we might want more or different or to change that, that what we've gotten at now might be, might be pretty okay. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. Yeah. I can't believe you read my dissertation. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while

you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode.

And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time.

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