Here's Where It Gets Interesting - No Cure for Being Human with Kate Bowler

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by bestselling author, Kate Bowler. At the age of 35, Kate was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Tired of relentlessly positive mantras and advice on how to live her “best life now,” Kate questioned how to grapple with her grim diagnosis in a culture that believes everything is fixable. Kate explains the idea of toxic positivity and why so many Americans practice it. As well, she shares the key to living a courageous life... and it has nothing to do with overcoming fear. In an episode that is sure to make you laugh and cry, join Sharon and Kate as they walk through the beauty, magic, heartbreak and hilariousness of the human experience.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. So happy you're here today. I am talking to my friend, Kate Bowler. I just love her so much. She is a professor of religious history at Duke Divinity School. And if that is not an interesting enough guest, she also was diagnosed with stage four cancer at age 35. And she's written an absolutely mesmerizing book about her experiences called No Cure for Being Human. And I think this is the second episode that both me and the guest have cried. I think so. But ultimately, this is not a sad episode. We have so many laughs. That's my favorite kind of conversation, where you laugh and cry in the same few moments. So I really think you're going to fall in love with Kate Bowler. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Oh my goodness. My friend Kate is here today. Thank you so much for coming. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited. Thank you for writing this book and congratulations on no cure for being human. Thanks so much. First of all, I just have to say I devoured it in one sitting and at the end of the

book, I was like, Oh no, tears are coming. And my daughter walked in the room and I'm reading this book and I just have, you know, like tears streaming down my face. And my daughter was like, what is happening? And she's nine. And I'm like, oh, I'm just reading a book. And she's like, why are you doing this to yourself? Exactly. I remember after I was diagnosed with cancer, I remember my dad introducing what he called the no sadness decree after he had once watched an early 1970s movie about the enslavement of Troy. And then after that, he was like, why do we do this to ourselves? I took his advice, except that I then go on to write things that are medium sad. I guess because I love, like you do, I just love the ability to practice telling the truth, even when it goes against the cultural scripts that we're

given. And I didn't realize how many cultural stories there are that make it really hard to suffer in this culture. So when I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer when I was 35, which is like not a very common cancer for someone my age. And I realized right away that I was just like inundated with advice about how to live and how to survive and how to just be present or just live once or make a bucket list. And in the middle of that, I, that was sort of the joy of starting to write is trying to figure out how to learn to tell the truth again, when so much of me just wanted to lie to get along. What are some of the lies that you feel people tell each other? They tell themselves

this idea of like, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to suffer? What does it mean to face a scary diagnosis? What, what did you encounter when you were diagnosed? It kind of came out of my academic background. Cause I happened to be like the historian and the idea that good things are always supposed to happen to good people. But when I was a lot of people's like first tragedy and I had a really little kid and I married my high school sweetheart and I had just gotten my dream job, I seemed to have almost like stuck the landing. And I had sort of assumed that life was somehow always going to be able to get better because I work hard and I am good at managing problems. And I just figured I could

clear most hurdles. And then I couldn't. I think the most common response I got was that I was somehow supposed to figure out how to find my way back to better, that we were all supposed to be always improving. Our best life now is around the corner. I didn't realize how much of the history of relentless, obsessive positivity had made it almost impossible to say true things like, oh, I'm really scared right now, or the doctor thinks that I probably won't make it past June and it was September. I guess the first kind of thing I realized that felt impossible to say was anything that didn't sort of go along with our culture of relentless good, better, best. Do you think that's because people just feel uncomfortable with death?

And it's like, we feel better about using euphemisms for death. You know, like I had my dog put to sleep, which is really like I paid someone to kill my pet. That's right. That would be a closer truth, wouldn't it? Yeah, I'm sure there is. And I know I feel that way too, that when I'm confronted by a problem that I can't solve, especially in someone I love, that it does feel unbearable. My mind is racing to try to find a solution, any kind of fix, a next step that we can do. And it does make us feel really helpless and frightened to be

close to somebody whose life seems unsolvable. I guess it just sort of raises the question though, of why we started believing our lives were solvable in the first place. And not just like death in terms of the fact that it is not like enormous news that we're all going to die someday, but I think this culture is so high on, it's like an over-oxygenated atmosphere of like agency. We can always do something. Everything is fixable. Choices. Yeah. It's like one giant, everything is figureoutable kind of approach. And of course, most of the things that will define our lives truly are things that happen to us, like a global earth plague, for example,

or like a miscarriage or somebody leaves. But when something breaks, then I think we start to realize that our endlessly fix it mindset is like not serving us well in that moment. Okay. As a historian, I would love to know if you have researched when this North American Western mindset began. My take is that it's probably more like American versus the global West. My perspective, maybe I'm wrong, is like, there's a very different viewpoint of what death is in many European countries than there is in North America. When did we arrive at this conclusion of best life now, make better choices? There's always something that can be done, like the toxic positivity. make better choices. There's always something that can be done, like the toxic positivity.

Well, it is a really American idea. It starts in the late 19th century. So we imagine urbanization. So people are in cities in mass. They're looking at some people who are very, very wealthy and very, very poor in the midst of inequality. There are these sort of beginning nascent ideas percolating that maybe the mind is a really powerful incubator. So like, what if our minds were more powerful than we even imagined? And all we have to do is harness the power of our thoughts and then speak them out loud or visualize, or the kids say like, put it out into the universe or manifest or all of those words are from a religious tradition called new thought, which was just a cluster of ideas and thinkers. And they wrote for stuff like ladies home journal, or they became part of the very first self-help bestsellers, like How to Win Friends and Influence People or Think and Grow Rich.

These are all sort of early get-rich handbooks. And it became a deeply held and much cherished publishing genre where everywhere you looked, all of a sudden, there was a thing called a self-help book, which could convince you that your mind is powerful, choose your words carefully. And then everything that you hope for either, you know, wealth or health or happiness, or that family is possible. Once it was in the water, it just, everyone drank from it. There's a zillion different preachers of it, salesmen of it, bestsellers of it. It got consolidated and people don't usually imagine Norman Vincent Peale's bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. And that was after World War II, but really it had been around for at least 60 years by then. It's so interesting. I'm not

saying that positive thinking is mass delusion. I'm not saying that. And I'm not saying that positive thinking has no place in your life, but it harkens back to this idea that I find interesting of mass delusion, like going back to Salem, which trials, like, what are we willing to believe collectively and blindly? Yeah. I think the problem with positive thinking is that because it overlaps multiple kinds of ways of thinking, it accidentally becomes conflated. So for instance, sometimes when people think of positive thinking, they just imagine optimism. They're like, well, what's the opposite? Despair. They're like, oh no, I'm just, I'm talking about the belief that you

are divine in some way, able to create divine forces. And that is from everything from Oprah to The Secret to most people selling crystals or astrology on Instagram at this very moment to business manuals. Almost everybody has a version of your thoughts are what makes you powerful. And therefore, therefore you're invincible. Therefore me, you can't be sick with cancer. If everything's overcomable, then we're not allowed to be fragile or finite or like not have enough. And I can think of like a half a dozen times in my life where there was just genuinely not enough. And I was frankly, very positive about it. I love what you say in your book too. This is on page 192. You said, how lucky then that we are not failing. Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.

The idea that your life is a problem to be solved and that if you haven't solved it yet, you're probably not trying hard enough. You probably need these affirmations. Yes, exactly. I, especially Jesus-y person, and I'm a professor at a university where I mostly teach pastors and nonprofit workers. And so the fact that I was in Christian world meant that there was these very religious versions of that, like God has a plan, you just need more faith. But then there was these very supposedly secular versions that were equally convinced that there was some kind of failure on my part to act, believe, outsmart, you know, any obstacle. And in this case... Out Peloton.

Oh my gosh, Peloton. Peloton is very worried about my attitude right now. Yeah. I always just can feel the vague disappointment of a Peloton instructor at any time. I guess, I mean, part of it is we just got confused, right? Even just that phrase, best life now, it was coined by a televangelist in 2004 in his book, Best Life Now, in order to describe the ability to use positive thoughts

to unleash spiritual forces. And for some reason, every Bachelorette contestant just decided that that was the perfect summary of this feeling that the health and wellness industry tries to sell us, which is that we should always be the master, the chooser, the doer. And when we're not, when we're the receiver, when we're fragile, when we're broken, then there must be genuinely something wrong with us. I think that's been one of the weirdest, most intense feelings that I have had, both studying this and being the sick person is embarrassment.

Like when somebody hears, I'm just bracing for it. They're like ready with the solution, the teaching, or any sentence that starts with at least. At least you're at a great hospital. I also love what you say here too. You said time really is a circle and I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can't return to and a future that is uncertain. And it takes guts to live here in the hard space between anticipation and realization. Can you talk more about that? What does that mean to you?

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Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. My cultural conditioning and probably my ridiculous personality was I always kind of lived in the almost future. Like there's always like a plan or a thing I was going to do, or like I'd be on a lovely walk and I'd be kind of figuring out dinner or next week, or, you know, it was like middle distance. It was never there. And at first I

thought the solution, oh, I just need to learn to be present. You know, mindset is stretch out every minute into a moment. And there's a lot of wisdom to that, but I mean, it's one of the, our relentless either futurism or presentism doesn't fix us and isn't even always wise. When people get older, one of the great joys of being older is being able to dip into the past for all the gorgeous things that have already happened or to learn from things that we've done wrong. Like regret is a wonderful thing. It teaches us, It's like a course

correction for our lives. And so learning to be someone who does live in the past, someone who can look back and say, like, thank God that thing is already mine, you know, and then to still always be able to look into the future because that's how we are. So we just dream. Dreams are precious, fragile, ridiculous things. Like I always wanted to be like an Egyptologist, even though as if like people need more Egyptologists for the prairies of jazz, hankering for more hieroglyphs. Or like a million things that I kind of imagined in my very bucket listy mind. And I think realizing that there's no futurism and there's no nostalgia and there's no presentism

that is going to fix this, that we kind of get to swim around in all three for great reasons. Like for instance, when I'm having a bad hospital day, that's actually a great day to live in the past or the future. I don't really need to be stuck in my body at that moment when I'm getting an IV. I need people to remind me of who I was and who I might still be. So I just find that every time everyone thinks there's like one solution, it's usually a good choice, you know, among a couple of lovely ways of learning to live. And that is part of the human experience, right? Like probably our pet cat doesn't have a lot of future dreams. I hope not. That's right. But you know what I mean? Like that is part of the human experience

is the ability to revisit the past and to dream of the future, to experience the present, to be able to have all three of those as wealth to draw from and not just one. I think the thing I was bumping up against was like the math of it. Like the solution people were trying to explain that my life will add up to a feeling of enough if I just do this. So for the be present people, it was like, oh, okay, well, if you just stay in the present, you'll get that feeling of more than enoughness. Or if you're like the bucket list-y, look amazing on Instagram person, that if you're always like skydiving or surfing in Bali, that that column is always going to add up. And I think what I just realized was when it comes to the things that I love most, like my giant

googly eyed kid, or like that feeling when you're having a glass of wine with your friend and you're really getting into how much you hate their ex-boyfriend, you know, that like really delicious specificity of it. Like the feeling when things just transform and back into like that squishy, beautiful moment feeling that none of that is good math. Like none of it adds up in a formula. And frankly, the better I am at being desperately in love with the world and the people that I'm given, like the more that will never be enough. There's no good math to life because we always want more and that the hunger of it is actually part of the beauty of it. So maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I loved your story of visiting that chapel in the Grand Canyon near

the Grand Canyon. Can you tell a little bit of that story to people? It turns out in America, a very large chasm in the earth called the Grand Canyon. I was very interested. And so I was driving by and I saw like a tiny little chapel. And so I was like, pull over. I peeked inside and it was basically like just a little above the height of the door. And I went in and at first I was completely horrified when I realized it was absolutely covered with graffiti and like carving in the wood. It was at this kind of rough plank woods and loose stone gravel floors and but a beautiful plain window at the end where you could see beautiful forests and the way the sun was dappling the leaves and I thought the light was so amazing and it illuminated what I realized were just

prayers scrawled everywhere and like little bits of pieces of paper that people had stuffed in all the cracks when they couldn't find a space and it it was stuff like, will she ever come home? Or will you please tell him that I love him? Will my daughter ever be the same? And the main feeling I'd gotten when I got sick was I was so lonely. Like I was really tired of being the person that everything happened to. And then when I realized, sorry, like everybody lives like this, you know? And then when I realized, sorry, like everybody lives like this, you know, like with the unfinished bits and the crying into the void and the hoping for an answer, I just, I realized like, oh,

I think this is where we all are and we can keep each other good company here at the edge of things. I think that's why we need courage and we need hope in something that's not just us, but it's in a much bigger story about love. So it turns out that not being alone is like such a greatest feeling in the world. I love what your contribution was to that chapel too, because to me, I'll tell you a story about that after you, can you tell us what your contribution to that was? Oh yeah. That took a minute. I remembered my old math teacher. I was so bad at math. He used to yell

stuff like a B minus isn't the death of your dreams bowler. He just had endless hope that the world could keep remaking the world. I met him as my high school teacher and he used to always give us these lovely little quotes in Latin when he was being disappointed in us. And so I remembered one that he had said, which was the Latin for while I breathe, I hope. And I thought, that sounds right. The Latin phrase, it's one of those things where there are various terms for it in the self-help world. The scientific term is about your reticular activating system, which is you tell your brain that something is important and then it starts showing up everywhere. You know what I mean? Where it's like,

why does everybody drive a blue Camry? You start noticing it all the time. Why does that keep coming up? You're the fourth person to mention Iowa this week. Your brain starts paying attention to that. And that Latin phrase for whatever reason has come up this week, like four times. And then when I read it in the book, I was like, get out. It's like the state motto of South Carolina. It totally is. Yes. Anyway, it was just like seeing it written there. It was like, well, okay. I love it. Right after I was diagnosed, like just everything comes to a halt. Can't work. You're saying goodbye to everybody. You're saying hellos and goodbyes all the time. And the beautiful, terrible bit about that season of crisis was that it made everything

really bright and clear. Like I could see everything that I loved. Almost like it like turned the volume up on just like every right sound. But then that feeling goes away. And like, I think that's just part of kind of moving back into your just ordinary time. And I think part of the gift of teaching yourself to remember is that we do have to like lock in to those bright, beautiful things. And so that we, um, cause we won't always have a crisis, know it, but it's the things that we want to remember deep down, not just for me, but for all of us. I love too, that you say that we cannot

solve the problem of finitude. What does that mean? I kind of wondered if maybe if I was a better person, a better Christian, a better anything that I wouldn't want more all the time. So I was like, is finitude, like are things being finite, countable? Is that the problem? Is the problem that we have numbered days? I just, so I did a lot of like reading about the theories of our hungers. Like, can we become the kind of people that never hunger? Cause I had met all these people who I just wondered if they aged into a feeling of enough or if they just magically got it one day. And then I just realized that the more that I love, the more wonderfully beautiful and painful it will be. And that will be partly how I know that I'm alive is that I can stay desperately hungry for more. And so I don't think we have to solve the

problem of our being numbered or our being scared about being numbered. I think knowing that is going to make us very clear about the fact that we need to be hilariously courageous as we step into each day, but also like really smooshy and say about the stuff that matters. You know how people at the beginning of the year set their news resolutions. Some people have like a word of the year, et cetera, or a word they want to focus on or whatever it is. And again, I think that speaks to your brain's reticular activating system that as soon as you're like, well, this year's word is gratitude. You know what I mean?

And then like your brain is like, okay, well, I'm going to pay attention to that. Yeah. So one year I was talking to one of my friends and she was like, well, do you have a word of the year? And I was like, well, you know, I'm not somebody who sets a lot of resolutions, et cetera. But I was like, you know, this year I feel like my word should be courage. She was like, oh no, don't you know that if you ask for courage or patience, you are going to need a lot of things to be patient about, or you're going to have a lot of things that

you need to be courageous about. Like pick something easier. My word is macaroni. Yeah, totally. Don't pick courage because then suddenly you're going to have an incredible need for courage was just like, oh, well, that's fine. And now I'm like, she was right. Absolutely. I don't do sort of giant goals anymore because I have to be more cautious about future thinking that I'm very good in. I think maybe I got used to it with scans because

I always had scans like two months and three months and then now have them six months. I'm great with six to nine months. I can do all kinds of lovely things. Not because I have like a super checklist mentality because I think maybe the surrealness of my terrible things that happen also hit at weirdly the same frequency as, oh my goodness, what could happen? Like, I guess what could happen is sort of the great question. Yeah. I find that I'm very good at making random magic because people are magic. And so we need to be open to just the magic and the surprise of other people popping in to make it feel like it adds up to enough. So I'm better at spotting it now than I was before. I like how your therapist asked you to this question.

And I was like, oh, that is a really good question that I'm going to tuck that away. Where they said, do you need to stop being afraid to move forward? Yeah. I thought fear was supposed to be the bad thing, right? Our culture really pathologizes fear. Fear must mean you're unfaithful or you have an anxiety disorder or that. It's always a psychological setback as opposed to just being, I don't know, realistic about things you see and experience with your eyes and ears. I do love it when he was so great about it. He was like, well, what if it just... Well, okay. So to be honest, I was like, look, you, I think you should stop asking me to really change my relationship to fear because I'm constantly having unbelievably terrible news. So what if I wanted to get over the fear of cancer? Is that really a good idea? What would

you do if I was afraid of heights? And he was like, oh, well, we'd take you up to a roof. And we'd stay there for a while and it's called exposure therapy. And I was like, great. What if that roof caved in just multiple times over and over again, that roof caved in? He's like, oh, we'd have to keep you up there for a really long time. I was like, well, I guess given that I know that sometimes the roof caves in, how do we then live alongside fear instead of imagining we're supposed to overcome it? like live alongside fear instead of imagining we're supposed to overcome it. So I started loving that word precarity. A wonderful activist, Catholic, Dorothy Day talked about it when she created these communities for the working poor. And she said, you know, like precarity was her word because it was not imagining that life is something you have to overcome, but like the bubble inside which we live and letting the fragility inform, like make her more compassionate,

make her more, I mean, feisty. Yes. About justice. I was like, oh, okay. So I guess fear is about learning to live with precarity, learning to live with uncertainty. Maybe that's something you live with instead of, and allow it to show you things rather than just constantly be reading books like fear, an overcomers manual. Again, going back to that is part of the human experience and for which there is no cure. Yeah. What do you hope people take away from this book?

I want everybody to feel like their problems don't make them strange, don't exile them to another planet, that we're all here in these sort of taking turns between befores and afters, and that it feels hard because it is hard to suffer in America. They're consistent declarations that everything is possible makes us feel we were supposed to have fixed this long ago. So yeah. And maybe then that's okay that we need each other as much as we think we do. If you have the opportunity to use what I call the space to face pipeline, where one message could be beamed from outer space, what would you want to say to everybody? I guess you are not a problem to be solved, period. And life is not a problem to be solved. Oh my goodness. It's also a close tie with the thing

my sister said on like, I was having a really terrible day. And she said, you are loved. You are loved. You are loved. You will not disappear. You are here. And that to me is like the feeling of other people scooting right up close to you, regardless of what the day will bring. Beautiful. She's a good one. Kate, thank you so much. This has been such a joy. Thank you. I absolutely loved your book. Where can everybody find you aside from going to buy No Care for Being Human at your favorite local bookstore? Oh, well, I am on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter at Kate C. Bowler at my website,

which is mostly full of stuff like, hey, do you want people to bless the crap out of you in your weird and terrible day? I just write a lot of like blessings. And then I write sometimes about the limits of our culture's scripts about positivity. And that's kind of what I That's kind of what I do. Kind of what I do.

Toggle. Yeah. And then I bless people. And then I get mad about hashtag blessed. That's pretty much it. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor.

Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.