Good Life Project - Megan Devine | It's Still Okay to Not Be Okay

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

There’s something big happening that few people are really talking about in a meaningful and constructive way. A sense of loss, on so many levels, even if there’s also hope and excitement. We hate talking about this stuff, but it’s so important.Whenever I’m grappling with any kind of loss or grief, whether around a person or even just a broader sense of freedom, connection, humanity, or possibility, my go-to person is my dear friend, Megan Devine, who also happens to be today’s guest. Megan is a psychotherapist and grief advocate. She's the author of the best-selling book, It's OK that You're Not OK, and the new guided journal for grief, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed.Megan was on the show back in 2016, but I asked her to come back after a conversation we had about how so many of us are carrying an unacknowledged sense of loss and grief right now. I wanted to explore what that does to us, what it means for us, and how to work with it in a way that owns the reality, and also allows us to be changed, and move forward from a place of greater understanding, and maybe even lightness and grace. And, that’s what we dive into in today’s conversation.You can find Megan at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Ocean Vuong about how loss and othering as a child led to creativity and insight as an adult.-------------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.My new book, Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive is now available for order at https://sparketype.com/book/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So there's something big happening that few people are really talking about in a meaningful and constructive way. A sense of loss on so many levels, even if there's also hope and excitement. We hate talking about this stuff, but it's also really important. Whenever I'm grappling with any kind of feelings of loss or grief, or I'm just kind of anxious or agitated and I don't understand why, whether that's around a circumstance or a relationship, or even just a broader sense of freedom or connection, humanity, possibility, my go-to person is my dear friend, Megan Devine, who also happens to be today's guest. Megan is a psychotherapist and grief advocate. She's the author of the best-selling book,

It's Okay That You're Not Okay, and the new guided journal for grief, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed. Megan was on the show back in 2016, but I asked her to come back after a conversation that we recently had about how so many of us are carrying this unacknowledged sense of loss and grief right now. I wanted to explore what that does to us,

what it means for us and how to work with it in a way that owns the reality and also allows us to be changed and move forward from a place of greater understanding and maybe even lightness and grace. And that is what we dive into in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X 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 X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So as we have this conversation, you are hanging out in LA area. I am sitting on the back porch of a cottage

in Western Massachusetts, I'm looking out over this pastoral field and garden. Along my left side is a stance of really tall evergreen trees. how to describe them, but it feels like an army of birds that chime in on occasion and remind you just how much birds are part of spring and summer and all the yumminess. So for our dear listeners, you will hear all sorts of nature sounds, little breezes sweeping across the tall grasses, birds. We're kind of calling these the summer sessions here. We're going to bring you into the outdoor vibe in our conversation here. So, but so good to just kind of be hanging out with you again. You and I have a history. We've been on the podcast and conversation before we've hung out in person and we were kind of going back and forth recently and sort of exploring this moment that we're all in and different aspects of it a little bit as much as you can do.

And, you know, like five word texts and realize that, you know, what we're going through now is this moment of profound transition, transformation, reclamation, all these different things and fierce processing. And you're somebody who I've always turned to for a lot of different things, for deep wisdom, but also especially in the context of any form of moving away from and moving toward, whether we frame that as grief, whether we frame it on a very deeply personal level or a societal level. So I thought it would be just really interesting to sit down and have a conversation with you about this moment that we're in, because you have this really intense, narrowly focused metal lens on the process of internal change and also a very broad metal lens on what happens when we're all going through something profound at scale. Yeah, this moment, I love how many words you just used to talk about the moment we're in. So there's transition, there's transformation, there's reclamation. I would add another genre of

maybe devastation, right? That there's so much going on on so many different levels internally, externally, communally. It's fascinating to me sort of from my detached sociologist mind, it's fascinating to me to watch how we navigate sort of coming out of such an intense pandemic period in the US anyway, since the rest of the world is still in the thick of things, coming through that intense period of loss and longing and interruption of daily life, and how do we make that transition, I don't know, into something different? So from the detached sociologist point, I'm like, this is fascinating. From the personal standpoint, I'm like, what the heck are we doing? And what am I doing? And what is going on? And it's just a really,

it's a really interesting moment on a lot of different levels. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine you're wearing these different hats. So many hats. I have so many hats. Open up the closet. Which one shall I put on today? How many can you fit on your head at once? But yeah, I mean, there's the, you know, the lens that I look through so much is the grieving person lens, right? And very often I'm talking about loss related to death.

And we just, you know, as you and I are talking, we just passed the 600,000 deaths marker for coronavirus related deaths in this country. So 600,000 people means a lot of people grieving a death. And also the, you know, there, people kept dying right alongside COVID deaths too. So we've, you know, we've got last year's batch of people grieving other losses. So that's sort of my lens coming into it is what is it like to be a grieving person at this time in our history and at this time and sort of the pacing of how things are changing? Because you've got people who are understandably sort of ready to go back and connect with others and be social and resume some sense of normalcy, however they can cobble that together. And at the same time, you've got people who lost a family member, sometimes several family

members to COVID-related illnesses or whatever we call those, I don't even know anymore. And just how jarring that is when you lost family members and to hear other people saying like, we're going to party like it's the second Roaring Twenties. How do we navigate spaces where almost everybody you touch has lost something, whether it's a family member or their own health or a job or a home or a sense of safety in a benign and friendly world? Like a lot of people have lost that too. There's just, there's loss everywhere right alongside this sort of desire to go out and touch and connect because it's something we've really longed for. It's a weird time.

Yeah, I mean, it really is. You know, I've been thinking recently of any moments where I could touch into a feeling that was in any way similar in that it held even pieces of what I've been feeling, just on a personal level and those around me. And, you know, the answer is in its entirety, no, there's nothing remotely similar to this, you know. in pieces and moments, you know, I get glimpses of me, um, post 9-11 in, in New York city, being a New Yorker, being down standing feet from, you know, what the workers were calling the pile, knowing that people that I actually knew were, were in it and were never

coming out of it. Um, being in the city in the months that followed and knowing that we were existing in a bubble that was profoundly different, even though, you know, I would never compare levels of suffering, but the quality of the experience in the immediate zone was profoundly different than the nature and the quality of the experience outside of that. And I was trying to sort of compare in a weird way how I was feeling then and how I've been feeling now. And there are bits that are the same, but it is so experientially different right now that it was hard for me to really anchor, well, how should I feel? How am I feeling? Like, where do I go from here? How do I behave in a way that feels right to me by trying to search my past and figure out what feels right for me?

Yeah. I like that analogy and sort of where I go with that is post 9-11, there was tangible evidence of wreckage, right? You couldn't be there and not have it in your face. And I think, I mean, Manhattan experienced that during the pandemic, right? With the streets emptying out and all of the sirens. So there was shared evidence of what was unfolding behind doors that maybe you weren't behind. And now, you know, with vaccination rates climbing and cases dropping and this desire to go back to quote unquote normal life, like the evidence, the physical tangible evidence of what we just lived through isn't in our faces anymore. It's invisible. So it's hard to find that like, wait a minute, didn't something just happen? Weren't we just all washing our groceries

a minute ago? So the evidence of that very concrete visceral life that we were living during the pandemic and the height of it in the US, that evidence is not all the way gone because you still have a mask, right? Still wearing masks, still like, what's your vaccination status? But it's not as viscerally evident as something like the aftermath of 9-11 where you couldn't escape that. And I think that contributes to that communal, relational, personal cognitive dissonance, right? I know I just went through something, but it's not visible anymore and I don't know what to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting contrast. I hadn't really thought of that. So then let's dive into that question then. As we are all going

through this on all different levels, you know, people who have lost people in their immediate families or friendships, there's that one sense of grief and transition all the way out to folks who have been not personally touched by loss or even illness in any meaningful way, but certainly personally touched by profound transformation in freedom, culture, capability, constraint, dreams, desires,

expectations. I'd love your lens on sort of like those different levels. Maybe do we just start with sort of like the most fundamental one and maybe build out from there? Yeah. I mean, let's choose which one of those is fundamental. All right. So let me make that my first question. I think for me this morning, fundamental would be a worldview that dissolved, right? So something so, so, so tiny as a virus can knock down the whole world. I'm going to choose the fundamental starting point for this morning being, I think a lot of us, if not all of us, whether we're conscious of it or not, lost the belief in that veneer of safety, right? That everything is okay and that life isn't the tenuous ball of string that it really is, which sounds really like morbid and terrible, but that knowing how quickly the world

can change and how widespread that change can be. I think for a lot of people, um, that interruption of daily routine, the loss of touchstones, the loss of those, what do they call them? There's a name for those like secondary relationships that you have like with your barista or the bus driver. There's actual name for them, but I don't remember what it is. I remember during a lot of the pandemic seeing essays and articles about, ooh, we're now discovering the actual power of these micro relationships that we think are no big deal, but the loss of them really shows you what the sort of cloth of life looks like now that you can't have a lot of those threads. And that's sort of what I mean when I talk about the fundamental, that fundamental piece for today. I keep saying for today because you

asked me tomorrow and what I think is the fundamental thing will probably be different. But as humans, I think we don't change things. We don't notice things unless they personally affect us. I don't think that's a nefarious, terrible thing. I think that's just the way that the sorting system of our brains work, right? Like, you don't care about the plight of banana plantation workers unless you've actually seen a banana plantation and seen whatever. Unless something touches us personally, we don't necessarily pay attention to it or understand it or try to understand it. And I think what happened with the pandemic is that it touched everybody in some way, even if it was, you know, you didn't lose somebody to death or illness, nothing sort of outwardly identifiable as traumatic happened,

but you lost your daily routine. You suddenly had to become a homeschool teacher and your job had to change. Like all of these shifts, I think, changed the way that we, I don't know, changed the way that we view the fabric of life. But I think we, I think a lot of people realize that there is a fabric to life and how thin that fabric is. Does that make sense? I mean, I think that does make sense. You know, it is, we live with a certain model of the world, even if that's the model of our, our world that we just projected out to the world. Right. And we expect that model to remain intact. And that's what makes us feel comfortable making decisions, saying yes to taking risks, saying yes to relationships, saying yes to possibilities, invitations, things that scare us. Yeah. And being able to feel like we can weigh, you know, like, is this acceptable or not? And

when that model becomes shattered, then it's sort of like the very foundation of the way that we make choices and move through the world becomes shattered along with it. But I don't think we really are acknowledging that. Yeah. That was said much more succinctly than my rambling could do. So thank you and go you. Yeah. It's that. It's that model of the world inside which we make decisions about not just what we want to do, but about optimism and hope and potential and possibility. And when you suddenly see that, like anything can happen. So how does that, how do I frame those questions that I'm used to asking myself about what do I want and what's ahead and what's possible? Like,

I think that there's a, almost a futility that can creep in, right? Like a wariness of hope or a wariness of optimism. And, you know, just as you said, we're not, I don't think we're acknowledging that. I know we're not acknowledging that enough anyway. And that's the thing, like that is a normal human reaction. Like it makes sense when your container of the world evaporates and your sort of touchstones as to how you make decisions dissolves. That is a gap that we need to address and acknowledge. You can't just build a whole new world on top of what just disappeared and everything will be fine. We've tried that experiment. We've tried that experiment a lot of times and it doesn't hold. So speaking into that gap and acknowledging that gap,

that the world as we knew it has changed. There's some line that I can never track down who actually said it. Maybe it was just somebody in grad school who actually said it and wasn't quoting somebody else, but the world was changed completely for an instant and irrevocably in small ways for a lifetime. And I think this is also the nature of being human. If we go back to what you were talking about with 9-11, like those moments were everything. And now here it is 20 years later, and it doesn't live in you the same way. I'm sure that there are certain things that bring you back to that moment instantly, and it all comes rushing back, but it takes a different, it takes up space differently in that sort of library of self in there. And this moment that we're in now with the dissolution of one world, and then a new world that we lived in where the

horizon line was very, very short, right? The horizon line was like the next room and how much sanitizer do I have to now like this? I mean, it sounds overly dramatic. I should have like big soundtracks behind me saying like the dawn of the next worldview, but that really is what we're in, right? Like that transitional zone, the gap between worlds. Yeah. It's a space that I think we're not always comfortable acknowledging. I know I'm not. Yeah. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. 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 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 eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. 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. It's funny because I feel like I'm somebody who's developed a longstanding practice that allows me a fair amount of equanimity in the context of uncertainty of groundlessness. Um, even when the stakes are fairly high, never a hundred percent. Okay. But I'm better than I used to be a decade ago, you know, and,

and it's a part of my intentional daily practice. And I think that's, I have no doubt that that has made a difference for me over the last couple of years, but at the same time, I'm still spinning off, you know? But that, what you just described, I think was really fascinating. It's sort of, you know, it's not just the closing of a book and then the opening of a new book it is the incineration it is like the unexpected and instantaneous incineration of the old book in front of your eyes and then a lingering in darkness you know where you don't feel like you have the capacity to understand what just happened nor the ability to gather even a modicum of hope about what might happen moving forward.

And then it's like somebody has got the light on that room on a dimmer switch. And right now it's starting to flicker lighter. But how do we, I want to talk about sort of like the reimagining of, you know, like the opening of the next book or like the where we're heading. But I feel like, you know, we also really need to talk more about how do we process the combustion of the book of before times? And can we even think about stepping out of the dark room that we've been in and into like an emerging lightness and lessen until we do? Yeah. I love those questions because, you know, we tend to think in black and white and binaries and

applying binaries to the human heart is not going to work, right? Binary works for code. It does not work for being human in anything, but that like being able to sit in the stonage. So like I have this image in my mind of when a bird flies into a window, right? And they just, they fall back and they, sometimes they die, but sometimes they look dead, but they're stunned and they need to be protected from predation until such time that their body sort of wakes up out of that protective stunned state and they can fly off, right? So we're a stunned bird right now. So what do you need in that stunned state is containment, protection, rest. I don't know if birds do this, but sort of a curiosity and an inquiry into that space, right? Like we can't look at this last 15 months that, you know, this year plus that was incinerated

in so many ways and poke it for answers, right? I think we look for answers to be like, let me explain this. Let me like retreat into the cerebral capacity to intellectualize. Like we can't, I mean, you can, but I don't, I don't think that's really what we're doing here. I think what we can do in this stunned transitional state where the old world was incinerated and the new world hasn't quite started. And we feel some trepidation about entering that world anyway, because did you see what just happened is to lean on those practices

of self-inquiry. I don't remember if it's Rumi or Hefez, there's a poem that says the clear bead at the center of everything spinning makes all the difference, right? Like, is there a clear center in this in which to be stunned and not yet ready to emerge into the room that's gaining a small bit of light? Like, how do we lean on the practices that we knew in the before times that brought us stability and curiosity for self and inquiry and apply those tools to this new catastrophe, right? This is a fresh, this is a fresh hell in a way, right? Like, we haven't had to live through this before collectively or individually, at least in our current generational lifespan typey thing. How do you want to be here? I think is a really good

question given that this is what's happened, right? Who and what do I want to be in this transition period? And who and what do I want to be in the world that is to come? I think who do you want to be and how do you want to be it is a very different question than what do I do next? I think that when you go through either a communal or a deeply personal experience of devastation and incineration, what do I do next is a useless question because your frame of reference has changed too much to make that decision. Right. But who you want to be and how you want to be. Who do I want to be to myself? Who do I want to be interpersonally, interrelationally? Like one of the things that I love about this weird time we're in is because everybody lost something,

we have a shared ground of loss to lean into. And I think for many, many people, there was deep longing in this last 15 months. If we can make that longing acceptable party conversation, maybe we start getting what we longed for, right? If we can talk about, man, it was, you know, like I, other than the dog and the cat, like I've been alone through this whole thing, physically alone in the house and not new to me that longing for touch and connection and play and all of these things. But looking ahead, it's like, what choices do I want to make in this still wobbly world that give me a better chance of gaining that which I longed for for all of those months? Now Now I moved to a new city,

completely burned down the old life and moved to a new place mid pandemic, because why not? And you did as well, right? So it's like, what, given that the world is as uncertain as it is, what do I want to cultivate in this place? And what do I need in order to be able to reach to that next, I don't know, unfolding thing? Yeah. I mean, those questions are so,

I think they're so important and so powerful. And yet at the same time, I feel like there's also this simultaneous compulsion to just say, what made me feel okay in my past life? Like what made me feel okay in before times? And how quickly can I recreate that or the closest I can get to it today because that will make me feel the way I felt then. And even though maybe life wasn't great then, it was better and I had a sense of expectation and I had a sense that I could plan my next day

or week or month or year. And I want that back. So I'm gonna rush back to try and recreate the circumstances of before as quickly as I can right now so that I can feel the way that I felt. And I get that impulse. I'm not immune from it. Even as somebody who's weirdly enamored

and compelled to be very future-oriented and in a constant pace of intentional evolution, I get that impulse. And yet that place doesn't exist for most people. Yeah. I get the impulse too. There's a sense of having been held back from all of these things and that sort of equal and opposite reaction, like you've been pulling the rubber

band back for a long time and now it's going to out, just leap right over the whole thing. I want to say first that if you choose to do that, if your choice is to say, what worked for me before, let me do it again, do it. Go ahead. So I don't want to set up like there's a right way to recover from an apocalypse and a wrong way to do it. I will say, if you're going to do that, consider it an experiment. Does this still hold for me? I can use tango for an example. So tango and I have had a long relationship, got a little rocky even before the pandemic. And of course, tango is a very close contact dance form. Didn't happen during the pandemic at all. Now that people are vaccinated, it's starting to come back. And I'm finding myself like, on the one hand, here's this easy community to enter. There's a lot of physical touch, which is not something that, you know, myself or many other people have had for the last year. But I have a chance right now to sort of dissolve that identity and explore something else. I can go back to the thing that I know, which is not right, not wrong. Or I can wonder if that is still something that I want to carry with me from the previous world

to the new world. And I don't know the answer to that. I think seeing it all as an experiment and coming into it with awareness, like there's even that thing, like, you know, if, if let's say I'm just going to pick something completely random that I don't actually do, but like, if you're a person who spent, you know, went out to bars a lot with your friends and had a lot of those sort of social out at the club friendships. And now, you know, having gone through the last 15 months of not having that, the temptation might be rush back out to the clubs with all my friends and just like party it out. That is fine. I would also add an interim step in there of reflection.

What is it about that that I missed? I missed a sense of play. I missed a sense of freedom in my body. I don't know what it would be for you, but that curiosity, what was I looking for? What do I feel like I got from that experiment or from that experience, the way that I lived my life previous to this last year? Once you know the tangible things you feel like you got from that life, when you go into the experiment of going back into the clubs, you can carry that with you so like you got from that life, when you go into the experiment of going back into the clubs, you can carry that with you so that you can assess, does it still feel that

way? Right? Does this still give me whatever it was or does it feel discordant? Right? You're not the same person that you were in March of 2020, right? I think that's true even without a pandemic, right? There was something recent, I can't remember the name of the author, but there was a piece that just came out recently that a long-term relationship means attending many, many funerals of the person you're partnered with, right? Because we really do change the person that you were when you met your partner and got married at 20. You're both very different people at 25 and 40 and 75. And I think our personal lives

are always getting torn down and reconstructed. We just don't notice it because it doesn't happen usually on such a massive scale. And we also don't usually get to see everybody else around us having their personal lives incinerated all at the same time. So there's like that, the far reach of what we've just lived through sort of gives everybody an opportunity to look at the life that was and says, and ask, like, is there anything that I want to, and that actually applies to whatever life lies ahead right now?

Is there anything I want to bring with me from that world that got incinerated? And I also think that this is a good place to talk about hope. Right? And you've mentioned that a few times. And I have an issue with that word. Etymologically speaking. And as a very picky word person, we usually talk about hope as in a very specific outcome, right? Like I hope that the tests come out clear. I hope that I get that promotion. I can't hope like that.

I don't know that I've ever really been able to hope like that, but I think one of the things that sort of spools out from the pandemic, I kind of wonder if a definition of hope for a lot of people has changed because we don't have that trust that things are going to work out okay anymore, that we don't have sort of a trust in that old world where life isn't so tenuous and fragile and like can be, everything can be ground to a halt by a little virus, like, ah, all of those structures of safety that we, that we believe in have kind of tarnished. So a hope in the way that things work out or, or a specific tangible outcome outcome I don't feel like is very useful hope. If I'm going to hope at all, it needs to be that I hope that I continue to listen to myself. I hope

that I find ways to feel fed by relationships. I hope that the things that I'm doing now will help me continue to be blah, blah, blah, like kind and ridiculous and whatever it is. Like hope in how I live something is a much more accessible hope to me than hope in an outcome. And I wonder if that, if I can see that in people, like if I can be super controlling and say, everybody has to hope in this one way now, like this would be so much more useful. But that, you know, in this gap that we're in, it's like, what, what do you hope for yourself? Not what does it look like? What do I do? What's going to be the right choice? But what do you hope for yourself? What do you, if we're all the stunned bird under some kind person's laundry basket being somewhat protected from predation while we wake back up.

Like, what do you want for yourself? Yeah, I mean, it ties in with that earlier question you shared, which was, I may get it wrong, but who do you want to become? Yeah. What would you like to see this moment help you evolve into? Yeah. Or step into or let go of? Yeah. What would you like to see this moment help you evolve into or step into or let go of, you know? I often think becoming is less the word and, and owning, you know, you know, like how much of the essential part of you that makes you, you are you opening to stand in like at this moment in time that, that you haven't been before. You know, you brought up something also that I think is really fascinating. There's a, an experience of normalization right now, which in the context of grief is not normal. You know, there there's

normally it's somebody has lost something, a person, uh, whatever it may be. And there's almost an othering that happens there because nobody knows how to relate to them. You know, maybe people have experienced the same thing and they might have their lens on how to support and they may also have their lens on the appropriate way to move through that moment, which is completely inappropriate for the other person. But by and large, a lot of times people walk away from that person who's just experienced loss because they feel so uncomfortable around them and they don't know what to say or do or how to be around them in a way that makes both people feel okay. And they just want that person to feel okay. You've written eloquently about this in so much detail in the past. So there's

an othering that happens. And what you described a little while ago in our conversation was, and I think you kind of set it up as a question, you're like, well, what if none of us experienced this the same, but we all experienced enough of a sense of loss of something that we are all in a position of profound disruption. We all are feeling a sense of certain groundlessness and a certain sense of loss that maybe for the first time in generations makes it more okay to have the conversation around loss and longing. And if so, if that's true, then does that make the possibility of manifesting the longing side of the equation more possible because of the simple fact that we're now willing to make

it a part of the conversation? You know that I have to sit on my hands while you talk about all that stuff to prevent myself from like jumping up and cheering and saying, yes, that's exactly what I want to see happen. You know, during the early part of the pandemic, I was doing a lot of media, a lot of television and press because everybody wanted to talk about grief and they needed to talk about it. And then as the pandemic sort of wore on, the journalist questions changed to like, do you think this has made us get better at grief? And my answer then is the same as my answer now, which is no. I don't think that this shared experience of loss has made us better at grief, but I think that

it has made us as a wider population more aware that the ways that we habitually treat grief and loss are wrong and they're not helpful. I think that what we have communally experienced is our deficit in skill set and appropriate responses to loss. Like if you're wrestling with the fact that you, you know, your job is in jeopardy and you, maybe you had to leave your job because now your job, now you have to be a full time teacher. And like, you can't, you can't just tell somebody to look on the bright side in that. Right. I think what's happened going back to something I said earlier is that, you know, just human nature, just the way that our brains work, we don't pay attention to things unless they touch us personally. And nobody was untouched during this pandemic. So everybody lost something. And I do think that that gives us an

amazing opportunity. I'm going to come back to opportunity in just a second, but I think that gives us an amazing opportunity of shared experience to really change how we human together, right? This has affected everyone in some way. And that really, I think that the confluence, right? Like when two rivers come together, that's a confluence, right? So the confluence of things happening here that we've got social media, we have got a population that over successive generations has become more comfortable with sharing personal details for good and for ill, but we're more accustomed to telling personal stories. We've got a pandemic that came through and ushered in a communal experience of loss. Yes, at many levels, we don't want to conflate the loss of your daily routine to go to the coffee

shop and write with the loss of 11 of your family members. We're not talking about conflation of losses. We're talking about a shared experience of the continuum of loss. So we've got these interesting things all coming together at one time where what you just said about like there's maybe we've never seen this before where everybody has experienced some kind of loss. So we've got this great opportunity now to do something with that shared experience. I think in the, in the arc of humankind, we've definitely had large scale losses where grief touched everybody in some way, large or small, but we didn't have a culture that was primed for storytelling.

We didn't have all of these ways to further these conversations before. A lot has changed in human development. A lot has changed in the ways that we tell stories. so much stuff has changed. That's a really interesting crucible right now of if we are brave, we can use this moment to start telling the truth about how hard it is to be human. That's not something we've done very well before, right? What if as you are coming back into social connection in whatever form that takes, what if it's suddenly now okay to say, it's been so weird. A lot of the things that I did, I don't feel comfortable doing anymore. Like, do you feel awkward like that?

Like, can we lead with being awkward? Because that's cool, right? If everybody's out there trying to pretend that the last 15 months didn't happen, we're screwed, right? Because if you think about like, think about how dumb this is. If you've spent the last 15 months longing for connection, play, joy, normalcy, routine, rhythm, all of that stuff, and you go back out into this not yet formed world and you pretend that the whole thing didn't happen, you are setting your future self up for failure

and you won't get the things that you just spent the last 15 months longing for because you're trying to connect through a facade that nobody else shares or nobody, like, do you know what I mean? Like if everybody's pretending, we're not going to, we're not going to get the things that we've been longing for. So there's this really, I mean, neat from that sociologically cultural anthropologist thing, but like hard on a human level, but we have this really neat opportunity right now to lead with the awkwardness of being human and to meet each other there. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And I, the reason why I kind of stuck a pin in talking about opportunity to come back to it, because I think there's, I mean, I'm sure you've seen, it's actually not a correct translation, but you've

seen that thing where like the, the glyph for opportunity and crisis in traditional Chinese are the same things like opportunity and crisis go together. Actually, that's not what those glyphs mean. Look it up. It's actually kind of fascinating the way that, uh, the, the Chinese language has been sort of bastardized to fit the positivity movement opportunity and crisis as characters do not belong together. So I'm really wary about wary about calling a crisis an opportunity because I think that that gets misused. There is also a reality here that what has happened has happened and life will continue chugging forward because that is what life does. How might we use the conditions that are present to build the kinds of things we longed for when the world became just your three rooms, right? How do we use the conditions

that are present to create that which we longed for? I don't have an answer for that, but I know that the path runs right through Awkward Town. Awkward Town is cool. I love that. I feel like Awkward Town has been my primary address for most of my life. I mean, we're all living in Awkward Town, right? Can we just acknowledge that? Take off your hat that's hiding the snakes and we all just live in awkward town.

Like, let's play there. I'm cool with that. 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 eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available

for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. 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 him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. It is really interesting, right? Because the completely agree with that. And there is this, I think, realization also that if we're willing to go to that awkward place, that not only can we potentially feel more comfortable. And, but a lot of times the awkward place that we were not willing to go to over, you know, like the last short window of time is that is an evolution of the awkward or

the awkward world that we created around ourselves as a shield for the vast majority of our lives so that we wouldn't have to deal with our own humanity and how it interacts with expectations and society around us. And by doing that, we create limitations. You know, we create the inability for us to express ourselves for who we are, as we are, and ask for what we need and invest in what we want to make. And then we always live as the projection of, you know, the we that we want people to see us as without the awkward interior, which is always there. And it's that awkward interior, you know, that is the heartbeat of everything that's good. Yeah. And I agree. Opportunity is a really weird word to use right now. I have been using the word possibility for some reason that lands, that feels better to me because it's not.

Opportunity to me is like the, you know, the adjective version of that is opportunistic. Yeah. And that's not what we're talking about. But is there an occurrence of disruption that exists without a simultaneous occurrence of possibility. No, they, they, they don't exist without each other. They're two sides of the identical coin. So, you know, and, and if part of the possibility of what do we want to shape our world, this world into, who do we want to individually allow ourselves to, to become, you know, if, if part of that process is standing in our awkwardness is allowing ourselves to be fully us, to be fully seen,

to be fully manifest in the world. And we weren't even willing to do that in before times. And now everything is turned upside down. Now the entire world is, you know, just like it's chaos and awkwardness. Why not just go there now? Like when else are you going to have such an opportunity where you being awkward is actually understood by everybody else around, right? Like when else is that going to happen? You know, and this is not everybody. You're not going to, you know, suddenly start being your awkward, awesome self in front of everyone, right? We still need some discernment. You still need,

there will still be people around whom sort of sharing that awkwardness is not going to be the best, the best audience. So we're not saying that you need to throw discernment out the window, but that like, as a working experiment, when else are we going to have a time like this where everyone has shared, when everyone is carrying some bit of awkwardness because of what we just all went through together, like, when is that going to happen again? Hopefully not ever. I mean, you know, but this really is a, you know, if there ever was a good time to lead with your awkward, it is now. It really, really is. And I think, you know, it's not that we suddenly feel

awkward and we were all feeling like perfectly awesome and well-rooted and whatever before times, but you know, there's that, there's that thing. And I use this example quite often. Like if you're really nervous and you get up on stage and you don't say anything about how nervous you are, like your first few minutes on stage are going to be a little clunky, right? But for a lot of people, you'll hear them like first-time speakers, they'll get up there and they'll say like, I'm really nervous today. Just that act of telling the truth about what's happening in that moment lets your nervous system relax, right? Like if there's a gap between what you're actually feeling and what you're saying

out in the world, your nervous system is like, what are we doing? Right? So your whole system is sort of jangly, but just that moment of telling the truth changes something, right? So this is true in the before times, it's true in the during it, and it's true in the after it. Like telling the truth is actually much more efficient if you're feeling really awkward and anxious, reconnecting in different ways, naming the fact that you feel awkward and anxious and not really sure how to do this makes it easier to connect. Pretending that you don't feel awkward or anxious is going to make it feel worse because you're trying to hold something down and you can't lie to your nervous system. Nervous system doesn't play that way. So it really is much more efficient and effective to name the awkward elephant in the

room. And again, just as we were saying, there really isn't ever a better time than now to do that because you're much more likely to find a relieved and reflective audience than you might be at other times. Right. It's like this is the one time in recent history where you're guaranteed to not be alone. Yes. You know, in stepping into like whatever strange you decide to bring to the surface and telling the truth and just being straightforward. As you were sharing that observation about people who are speaking, what immediately came to mind is, you know, for five years we ran this adult summer camp and we used to have a talent night, you know, like on Saturday night and everyone would come up and I think we might even stopped calling it

talent. It was basically just show up and do whatever you want to do. And I remember one woman coming up on stage and she wrote poetry. And she shared immediately, she said, I get really nervous. And when I do, I shake. I physically shake. And it kind of like, okay, well, you know, a lot of people do. Like when I'm really nervous before I go on stage, there are times where I feel myself literally physically, my body, it shows up in my body.

And sometimes that's in shaking. I'm like, not a big deal. And then she took out her paper and she starts reading her poetry. And her hand starts, not just like little quavers, but it's shaking violently, almost spasmodically, where you could, I couldn't imagine how she could actually continue to see the paper to read.

And yet she is standing there, you know, like shaking and reading and everyone is on stage with her. Yeah. Yeah. And what power in that moment, right? Naming what was about to happen because she knows herself, it's like it's not necessarily going to make the shaking go away. But I mean, how many years ago now and you just tell this story and of course I'm crying. that honesty is a portal to connection that has a really long reverb like isn't that what we just spent the last 15 months and potentially our entire lives longing for they claim you're shaking and let other people enter it

what else are you going to do with it? I got nothing. I mean, what else? What else, right? Retreat back. No. And again, no judgments. But if not, now when? Yeah. And I like the no judgment thing, right? We all make our choices in the moment, given the container and safety and sleep and all of these things. But it's like, how often can you turn yourself towards that awkward gap? If you come into a situation where afterwards you're like, crap, I really, I kind of missed something there and I could have done this. Well, then you use that information moving forward to the next one and sort of keeping that clear bead at the center of what do I long for for myself? And in this current experiment, what do i want to try

i don't know i mean i think that's that in a way is the only stability in an unstable world is what experiments will you run right yeah don't disagree it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I've asked you this question in the past, but the past was the past. A different time. So I'll ask it again and see where you land. So in the context of this container, Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? That is a question I have been really reflecting on. Having moved to a new city in the middle of the pandemic and looking at like habits and routines that created the world that I did not

enjoy. Right. So living where I was living before I developed certain habits and routines to help myself survive in an environment that I had outgrown, but I, I wasn't leaving yet. So like, there are all these habits that I did to make that life as beautiful as it could be. And picking up the physical body and moving it to a new place and watching the physical body and the mind lean into habits that were developed in a life that no longer exists. Right? this, right? So like that question of what does a good life look like, not just in me, but in this space, right? And I don't know the answer to that. And I think that's important because not just because of the pandemic, but personally, like I have an opportunity here to find new good things that I don't even know what they are yet. Right. Um, so reminding myself, I think, I think to, to attempt to answer the question succinctly, huh, have we met me? Um, a good life right now is looking is my, how do I want to say this? It's like, I don't know. I don't think that I can answer like, what is, what would be elements of good life? What does

that feel like for you right now? Like, I don't think I can answer that. I think that I need to stay focused on like a good life right now is probably breaking habits and routines and ways of interpreting the world. So a good life, unfortunately, I can't believe I'm going to say this because then I have to stick with it. A good life right now is pushing for internal disruption. Ah, nobody hold me to that because it's uncomfortable, but that there's goodness in not doing things the way that I know how to do them. I think that's going to have to be good right now because I know where the other roads lead. I've done those roads, right? So yeah you know, if I listen to myself, which I have to, there really is no better time than this shared, awkward landscape to be orders of magnitude more extroverted than typical. And, you know, that meant like when I was out taking the dog for a walk, if I saw a yard that

looked particularly cool, I would leave a note in people's mailboxes saying like, we should really be friends. And it worked for a time. And the, one of the things that I really took from that is like, because of multiple factors on the East Coast, I understood myself to be a very deeply introverted person. And then I moved to conditions that were different and found myself in certain situations to actually be a very extroverted person. Who knew? Right? So trying to bring that, I think there's goodness in disruption for me right now, and also bringing that, who do I want to play at being this time? I think that's a better way of saying it than disruption. Who do I want to play at being this time? And trying to find, I think, a good life right now is trying to find the playfulness in construction of an identity and relationships from scratch. Yeah, I'll take that. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation that we had with Ocean Vuong about how loss and othering as a child led to creativity and insight as an adult.

You'll find a link to Ocean's episode in the show notes. Even if you don't listen now, be sure to click and download so it's ready to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode. Then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. 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 for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

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 him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.