Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Powerful Value of Melancholy with Susan Cain

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

In this episode, Sharon has a conversation with Susan Cain, the best-selling author of the international phenomenon Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Susan’s new book, Bittersweet, is about the undervalued power of a melancholic view of the world. Susan talks about how melancholy and bittersweet emotions are connected to our sensitivity and our sense of transcendence, and this view of the world is often overlooked. Instead, we can be bound by the tyranny of positivity: the cultural expectation that we should present a positive outlook at all times, regardless of what we may be experiencing or feeling. When we’re willing to take in the truth and complexity of human experience–the this and that of emotions–we leave ourselves open to a deeper sense of meaning, more gratitude, and forge more connected relationships. 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

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. Hello friends. Welcome. So excited you're here. Today I am joined by legendary author, Susan Cain. Many of you read her first book, Quiet, and she has a new book out called Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. I absolutely loved chatting with Susan. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to

the Sharon Says So podcast. I am very excited to be able to chat with Susan Cain today. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me, Sharon. I'm excited to be here. It's truly my pleasure because I have been a fan of your work for a very long time. And I would love for you to just give everybody who's listening, if they have never read Quiet or they have not yet ordered Bittersweet. Give everybody just a little overview of the work you do as an author. Oh, sure. So I write about psychology and culture, but I write about it from the perspective of letting people know about what their hidden superpowers are that tend to be undervalued in our culture. So in Quiet, which is the power of

introverts in a world that can't stop talking, I guess the title kind of says it all. And it talked about how we live in a society that's really biased in favor of a very extroverted self-presentation, but the power that reflective cerebral introverts have that we haven't been paying enough attention to. So that was Quiet. And then my recent book, which just came out a few weeks ago, it's called Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And that book is about, again, the undervalued power of a more kind of melancholic, bittersweet outlook on the world and why our culture has been so blind to its value. Fascinating. And your writing is so beautiful. Your writing just

pulls you in and just kind of like fills you with this sense of, you know, like, I really want to keep reading this because it just makes me feel the feelings. Thank you. So I would love to hear what made this topic interesting to you. How did you land upon this concept for a book to begin with? I mean, for Bittersweet, it actually started in an unlikely place. I didn't actually know it was going to lead to a book. It just started with me wondering all the time why it was that I so adored bittersweet music, like, you know, the music of Leonard Cohen. He's like my patron saint. When I hear that kind of music, the paradox was that it makes me really happy. There's a little bit of sadness in it, but it also makes me feel this kind of sense of uplift and connection and communion and transcendence and all these feelings. But I couldn't understand why this should be. And I wanted to figure this out. And

so I started researching what we know about sad music, and there's actually quite a bit why we listen to it. But what I ended up realizing is that there is a, you could call it a bittersweet tradition that is centuries old and it spans the globe. Our wisdom traditions or artists or literary figures have been talking about this for thousands of years. Like Aristotle 2,000 years ago asked why it was that so many of the great philosophers, poets, and politicians of his day, why so many of them had melancholic temperaments. This is something that we've noticed and known about for a long time, but in our modern culture, we don't have a way of talking about it because we're supposed to be so positive all the time. And the bittersweet view is that joy and sorrow in this world are forever paired, that everyone and everything

we love is deeply impermanent. And yet there is somehow a deeply intense beauty that comes from the recognition of these truths. And that's the bittersweet view. And what our traditions teach us is that it's connected to our creativity, our sense of communion, our sense of transcendence. So we overlook it at our peril. You mentioned in your book, this very unique concept that I'd never heard this phrased in quite this way before, which is the tyranny of positivity. Yeah. I mean, so the phrase toxic positivity, I think has become quite well known in the last year or two. And they're similar ideas. And it's basically the cultural expectation that you should be and present a positive face at all times, regardless of what you might be experiencing, regardless of what you might actually be feeling.

You shouldn't even really admit that to yourself. You should kind of constantly be redirecting yourself in the direction of positivity. And positivity is wonderful, right? We all love to be in a good mood. We all love to feel happy. The problem is that that's not who humans are. So what we're really telling everybody to do is to not tell the truth about their experiences. to do is to not tell the truth about their experiences. And we're shutting ourselves off from a kind of wisdom that comes from, not from unhappiness, but from awareness of the fragility

of this existence. And we know this from studies that people who are more aware of how fragile and precarious life is also tend to be focused on a greater sense of meaning. They have a deeper sense of gratitude. They focus more on their deeper relationships. So there's some bounty that comes to us when we're willing to take in the actual truth about human experience. What is the bounty? What is the payoff for living in a manner that allows you to be honest about what you're experiencing or perhaps having that more sort of melancholy or bittersweet existence in the world? What is it that we can gain from that?

I mean, one payoff is that we can be a lot closer with each other because we're responding to each other where we really are, especially for the kind of work you do. I think this is incredibly important because we are famously at a time in our culture, and this is true, I think, across the world, of great division. And we can't seem to figure out a way to bridge our political and cultural divides. And yet one of the best ways we have always had of bridging our divides and coming closer is to respond to each other's sorrows. And this is because humans are built, we're evolutionarily designed to do this, but that depends on having a world in which people can actually tell each other what their sorrows are. And so I often think like in the political realm, before we talk about policies, before we talk about agendas or what we're asking or hoping to achieve, we just need a space where different groups of people could tell each other the truth of what their difficult experiences have

been. Again, like without asking for anything, just to tell the truth. And that's what's going to open each other's hearts and minds because that's what we're designed to do. The vagus nerve, V-A-G-U-S, that's the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. It's so fundamental to humans. It regulates our breathing and our digestion, but also the vagus nerve responds when it sees another human or being in distress. Like it makes us want to put an end to their distress. It makes us want to comfort them. It makes us experience that distress somewhat viscerally. So we're designed to do this. We've been taught the idea of survival of the fittest, which is true, but there's also another way of interpreting evolution that kind of sits side by side with the idea of survival of the fittest.

And that is survival of the kindest because Darwin actually noticed this himself. He noticed that in animals, there is an impulse that's visceral. It's like pre-conscious to try to alleviate the pain of other animals at the same time that animals can also be quite cruel and horrible. So these two truths about animals and about humans exist side by side. I love that. I love that. It's so true that humans are incredibly nuanced creatures and it's rarely kind or sad. It is almost always and. overly kind or sad. It is almost always and. So much of our experiences, we want to reduce them to this or that. And in reality, it's often this and that. Exactly. It's this and that. It's this and that. It's joy and sorrow. It's light and dark. That's who humans are. That's what our reality is. So if we can get to a point where culturally we would just accept that, many things would open up from there. better than we do. But is this something that Americans have pioneered in our quote unquote infinite wisdom? Or is this a product of Western 21st century thinking? How do we get here?

Well, it's definitely more pronounced in the US than in many other countries. And in fact, researchers have tracked how much do people smile? And it varies from country to country in the US, of course, at the top of the charts. And in terms of how we got here, there's a really interesting history to it that I thinkism, the way it worked was you were predestined for heaven or hell. There's nothing you could do about it. But what you could do was to show that you were one of the people who was going to heaven. You would show this by working really hard. If you worked really hard, you were probably heaven bound. In the 19th century, though, all of that same framework remained, but it got superimposed onto the quest to be successful in business. People started asking the question, if somebody succeeds in business or they fail in business, is that because they had good or bad luck? Or is it because of something inside them that predisposed them to success or failure. And increasingly, the answer

we arrived at was that there was something inside the person that made them destined for their path. And once you've got that belief, then you're kind of in trouble because then we started looking at people as sort of inborn winners or losers. And the more you do that, the more you want to avoid anything that would indicate that you're one of the losers. You don't want to talk about loss. You don't want to talk about melancholy. You don't want to talk about bittersweetness. You don't want to talk about the fact that joy and sorrow always go together or that life is impermanent or any of these things, you don't want to talk about them because that's like for losers. That would mark you as someone who's not going to succeed. And this is where we got this cultural allergy to the truth of our emotional experience. It kind of comes from that. And we're trying now, you can see the culture

trying in many ways to break out of that emotional straitjacket. But it's also hard to do at the same time that nobody wants to be a loser. But we need to kind of change that whole paradigm to understand that true success in this life is being able to be our whole selves. being able to be our whole selves. That's so interesting that you could trace that back to Massachusetts Bay Colony and things like Calvinist beliefs and this sort of predestination belief that we can see. I can see what you're saying that when we think about like the world's tech billionaires, I think we have this like intrinsic belief that like, well, they were obviously born with it. And what ended up happening, like as these beliefs cemented in the 19th century, there were literally like manuals that would teach children, like Boy

Scouts were taught, you should be cheerful all the time. You should be whistling cheerfully all the time. William James, the famous psychologist, talked about how the mandate for cheerfulness became so extreme that people stopped feeling that they could even complain about the weather. Like to complain about bad weather was seen as being just not the way you should present yourself. What about people who would say, well, that mindset is part of what has made America great. I think there is something to that. There's obviously a power in that kind of like forward momentum, leaning forward, not letting anything get in your way. And I'm not talking about

abandoning to the extent that we have a culture of grit, you know, where you persevere no matter what. I'm not talking about abandoning that in any way. It's rather that the culture of kind of blindly, smilingly pushing forward can only take you so far. And I think it's taken us where we are. And now we're seeing some of the downsides of that. And there's a way to keep persevering while also telling the full truth, I guess. And we also know that at the heart of creativity lies the experience of a kind of longing for a more perfect and beautiful and better world. That's part of what drives us as creative beings. So to let this in will actually be a boon to us economically as well. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling right is important and impactful.

Let's work together and make a difference, because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions

and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. 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. What do you view as the relationship between melancholy and things like depression or mental illness?

I'm really glad that you asked that question because these are very different states that I'm talking about. I think they're probably differences of degree as opposed to differences of kind though. So we don't currently have a way in our mainstream psychology of distinguishing between productive, creative melancholy on the one hand versus clinical depression, which kind of takes everything from you. So one of the things I'm trying to do with this book is actually like say to the field of psychology, we need a more subtle way to look at this. For people who feel like you're somewhere kind of on that bittersweet spectrum, I think you kind of know the difference between when you're in that state that feels productive and connected to the world versus with depression where it feels like more of an emotional black hole. And we know that many of the most creative people are very much tuned into this melancholic state, but when you get to depression, it's very difficult, if not impossible

to be creative when a person is in a state of depression, because it's such a form of numbness that it's hard to create from that place. Do you feel that the melancholy state is an inborn temperament predisposal? Do you feel like some people are just Picasso and they're just born that way? Or is this a learned behavior? Where do you fall on that spectrum? I believe it's a combination of the two. In the book, we have a bittersweet quiz, which you can take to figure out how prone you are to this bittersweet state of mind. I say we, because I designed the quiz with the psychologists, Scott Barry Kaufman and David Yadin. And we did a lot of research to figure out what are the attributes of people who score high in this quiz. One of the attributes was

being predisposed to creativity. Another one was people high in bittersweetness often experience states of awe and wonder and transcendence. But a third one to answer your question was there was a very high correlation between bittersweet types and people who score high on Elaine Aron's highly sensitive person scale. So for people who aren't familiar with that, highly sensitive people, it's about 15 to 20% of the population. It is an inborn trait. And these are people who just react more intensely to everything that life has to offer. So the gorgeous sunset, you're going to be that much more thrilled by it. The noxious sound of a construction site outside your window, it's going to aggravate you more. You're more sensitive to everything for good and for bad. That does seem to be correlated with bittersweetness. Now that said, there are some people who come to the bittersweet way of being

through life experience. If you go through life and you experience enough of its joys and its sorrows, then the truth of that is going to kind of hit you in the face, regardless of your temperament. How can we, if we are thinking to ourselves, you know, I would like to leave behind this mindset of like, everything needs to be great all the time. And I need to continually hide the, uh, the bitter portions of my life because I might be branded a loser or I might be branded as like, oh, they're just so negative. I don't want to be around them. What can somebody do to start embracing that? I'm going to give you an answer that may not seem obvious at first, but I would say to tune into beauty, proactively make beauty and art or wherever you feel most emotionally connected to beauty, whether it's in music or art or nature or whatever, to make that proactively a part of your life and start your days by immersing yourself in it.

Because beauty has a way of telling the truth. Artists aren't always telling you only about what's rosy. They're telling you everything and they're turning it into beauty. And that's actually what the bittersweet tradition does. It's basically saying to us, we are all beings who are going to experience pain at some point. And we have the choice of ignoring that pain and then invariably taking it out on ourselves or other people, or we can transform it into beauty in some way. So when you're looking at something beautiful, it's like you're looking at something that personifies joy turned into creativity, all of it. I love that. I think that's such a little practiced, you know, little cultivated thing that many people who are very busy,

like myself, but it is something you can intentionally practice. Yes. And it's interesting, the busy thing, because I'm like you that way. And I notice, you know, even just when you wake up in the morning, it's like you have two choices. You could start doom scrolling, you could start listening to the news, or you could listen to beautiful music like that. And you can still get everything done depending on which choice you make. But I find it hard sometimes to push myself to do what I know I should be doing, which is like, listen to the music. What about accessing that sort of more melancholy aspect of our lives? What about that helps people feel more happy, more connected to the world, more connected to themselves? Because I think I get bet there are going to

be a lot of people listening to this that are like, well, why would I want more sad things to feel more happy? Right, right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean. Here's what we know. If you look at all of our religions, we are beings who come into this world kind of seized by the knowledge that there is a more perfect and beautiful world out there to which we feel like we belong and have inexplicably no longer are a part of. And whether you're an atheist or believer, religious or not, it has nothing to do with this. This is just like a psychological truth about humans, which is why you see it manifesting through our religions. There's the longing for the Garden of Eden or for Mecca or for Zion. You look at the Wizard of Oz, like our iconic stories. There's Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow. There's Harry Potter who enters the story, like the moment he enters

the story is a moment where he has just become orphaned. He's just experienced the fundamental pain of separation that humans experience. And we understand on some really deep level that this is a common human experience and that Harry Potter's adventures are only going to begin once that separation event has occurred. This is a really deep human truth. So to gain access to that truth is not to make ourselves feel more sad. It's rather to join the common human experience and understand what's really motivating us and driving us to our adventures and to our creative experiences. I can tell you also for when we, you know, when we hit some of what life has in store for us, I'd been working on this book for years and then COVID hit and I quickly lost my father and my brother to COVID, both of them in the first year. And people ask me sometimes like,

did that change the book that you wrote? And it really didn't change the book that I wrote. It's more that having written the book and having been immersed in everything that these wisdom traditions of bittersweetness teach us, it helped me navigate those losses in a different way from what I would have done, I think, if I hadn't already been so immersed. So I guess I'm just, there's a deepening of life's experience that comes with this. It's not, I don't feel any more sad because of being in tune with this tradition. It's more that I feel more connected to other people. So sorry for your loss. Oh, thank you.

It's one of those experiences where the world that you knew is not the world that it's, the world is different. It's forever changed. It's turned on its axis. It's very true. We grow up and become adults ourselves. There is something about the fact of it's parents who are kind of like situated between you and between the great unknown. And then when your parents aren't there, it's like you and the unknown face to face.

How can humans who are experiencing a bitter portion of their lives, how can they turn that into beauty? Well, first of all, I would say don't put any pressure on yourself to do that right away or anytime soon. You'll do that when you're ready to do that. But there's a kind of resolutely turning in that direction that you can do. First of all, there's something about the fact that there's no human that doesn't experience bereavement or whatever the pain is that we're talking about. There's no one who doesn't experience that. So you start to gain this knowledge that we truly are all in it together. There's a real communion in that. And for many people, the impulse is not so much to create some new piece of art or something like that,

but we have this long tradition, thousands of years, of what we call wounded healers. This is through all our mythology, the idea of the wounded healer. I mean, there were literally figures in Greek mythology who had been grievously wounded by a poisoned arrow and were in terrible pain, but there was something about having experienced that that gave them healing powers that other people who were not similarly wounded didn't have. And for humans, we do this without even realizing it. So there's the mother whose child is tragically killed by a drunk driver and she goes on to found an organization, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, where the child who loses a parent early in life, she grows up to become a grief counselor. We do this collectively too,

like now in the face of the pandemic, that we see a surge of applications to medical school, nursing school. After 9-11, a sudden rush of people to become firefighters and teachers. So this is a very natural human response. At times of grief or trouble, we turn in the direction of meaning. It's just what we do. We kind of like activate our best selves. Yes, I can see exactly what you're saying. If you think back to 9-11, how despite the incredible tragedy, there was this swell of collective identity that occurred that like, we are Americans and we will get through this. And, you know, we respected the leadership of people who were in power at the time and thinking

about like Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, these people who emerged as these central figures of like, I'm going to help get you through this. And we can do it. We can band together. We're Americans. They have these like crazy approval ratings. And obviously, once that surge recedes, obviously things change. But that's such an interesting point that we often become our best selves during times of tremendous

difficulty. Yeah. And I mean, I still remember like being in New York city after that and like hanging out in a Starbucks one day and some firefighters came in for their coffee and like everybody's standing up and cheering and you have tears in your eyes. So it's happening collectively, but I would say it's also happening individually in terms of the decisions that we make in our most private selves. This is happening in each individual human brain. You know, this person turns towards meaning, this person does, this person does. This person does. And then collectively, that turns into something quite powerful. We see it most starkly at a time like a 9-11, but this is happening every day in our personal lives in ways that our culture, we had license

to talk about it with 9-11, but these kinds of things are happening all the time in much more, you know, supposedly mundane ways. How do you think the pandemic has affected America's ability to embrace bittersweetness? Well, it has opened it up quite a bit. It's opened it up to a point. I think it's kind of gone in two ways. I mean, it's like, on the one hand, the losses of the pandemic are so vast in so many different ways, economically, psychologically, like life, disease, all of it. So vast that we haven't been able to sort of resolutely turn away in the direction of, you know, cheerfully whistle while you work. Like, that doesn't work in a stage like this. But at the same time, you could say that part of the reason we're having the divisive reaction that we are to the pandemic is because we're not so comfortable talking about these things or existing in this realm of sorrows and longings. And so we turn on each other. How can we get better at existing in that

realm? What can we do to, first of all, support ourselves through that, but also support other people in their desire to perhaps embrace more of life? Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things, a couple of practices that I came across that I write about that I really like. One is the practice of expressive writing. And this comes from the work of James Pennebaker at UT Austin. He did all these amazing studies that have found that the sheer act of just writing down your troubles or sorrows or whatever it is, just like two minutes of writing it down and then rip it up, doesn't have to be well well-written. It can improve our wellbeing. It literally lowers our blood pressure. It makes us more successful at work, all of it. So as individuals, we can easily incorporate that into our daily lives. Like anytime you feel the pressure building or something that's bothering you, you know,

just get it out, just write it down. That's a pretty easy practice. Another one that I really love, the Cleveland Clinic is the hospital, and they did this project where they wanted to teach empathy to their caregivers. So they made this video, which they intended just for the hospital workers, but it ended up going viral because it's so powerful. It's basically this video where the video camera goes with you through the hospital corridors, and you're just like passing random people you would normally walk past without thinking twice. But in this video, there are these little captions that show you what each person is experiencing at that moment. And sometimes they're joyful things like the caption will tell you just found out he's going to be a father for the first time. But then because it's a hospital, the captions are more often things like, you know, like under a little girl, it says going to say goodbye to her dad for the last time. And you

can't watch this video without literally experiencing your heart opening up. It's so powerful. You watch that and you realize, well, what if all of us were trained to be imagining what each other's captions are just as we walk through life? And I do this sometimes and I don't know what the captions are. I don't have a video telling me, but just the act of pushing myself to wonder transforms the most banal interactions. You know, like the chit-chat with the person checking out your groceries is completely different when you're wondering about their captions. Like when my kids will come home and they'll talk about some rotten thing that another

kid did that day or something, you know, my immediate impulse is always like, you don't know what that person's going through. Maybe they did that because they were hurt or upset or what. And so I often go in that direction. And then I'll second guess myself and say, well, I don't want to be invalidating their experience, my child's experiences either, or you can take that too far and then start doubting your own gut judgment of why a person is behaving the way they are. So this too is one of those situations where you kind of have to hold both truths at the same time. It can be this and that. This and that, exactly. What do you hope that when somebody reads your book,

Bittersweet, and they have closed the last page, what do you hope that they take away? I guess I would say whatever pain you can't get rid of, make that your offering, whether it's your creative offering or your social offering or whatever it is, there's almost always a way to transform it. And I feel like that's what our bittersweet traditions have been teaching us for these thousands of years. teaching us for these thousands of years. I love that. Where can people find you online? Can people follow you on Twitter or are you like, listen, it's a book or nothing? Oh God, no, no, no. So first of all, I would say the best place is I have a website,

which is susancaine.net. And there's a newsletter you can sign up for. And of course we never share your email. It's just a way of staying up to date with things. But I also am on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram. So all those ways. And they can buy your book bittersweet, which is out now at wherever they like to buy books. Yes. So bittersweet is on sale everywhere. It actually hit number one on the bestseller list when it came out. So that was kind of amazing. Yes. That is such a, it's a huge shock and amazement. Yeah. Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you so much. What was it like when you, when you saw that? Oh my gosh. What was that moment like? Were you, okay, first of all,

do you guys set the stage? Were you like, they come out today. Today is the day that I will know if I land on the bestseller list. And I'm sure you had to anticipate I'll probably be on the bestseller list. But were you anticipating of like, oh my gosh, refresh, what's the answer?

Or did you get a phone call or what was it? How did you experience that moment? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, I swear this is not me just sort of saying this in a polytech way. I truly mean this. I never in a million years thought it was going to land at number one. That thought had never even entered my head. So it wasn't like I was hoping. I just had not considered that. And then I was doing an interview, kind of the way we're doing right now. And I hung up and my editor called me

and she gave me the news. I don't even think I realized we were going to be hearing quite that soon. It was just the most incredible thing. And my husband and I for the rest of, that was at like 5 p.m. And my husband and I for the rest of the was like 5pm. And my husband and I for the rest of the night where he brought Bailey's, which is our go to drink, we just kind

of kept exclaiming at each other, we could not believe it. And I did not want to go to sleep that night. I stayed up till like 2am. Because you know how when something amazing happens, no matter how amazing it is, the feeling wears off after a little while. So I was like, I know I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning, this will still be amazing, but not quite as amazing. So I'm just staying up for as late as I can to just enjoy it. Yes. Oh, that's such a fun moment. It's such a fun moment and a moment that so few humans get to experience. Did that realization sink in for you that so few humans on earth are in this? Well, I mean, I guess this particular club, I guess I think and hope that most humans have

their moments where they feel like a tremendous, I did it about something that matters to them. I wanted to be a writer since I was four. So what my husband kept saying was like, tell your childhood self that this would happen. And I love that. But I guess I hope everybody can go back and tell their childhood self that something that they once dreamed of has come true. It's such a fun moment. It really is. It is one of the sweet moments that is interspersed with some of the bitter moments and that make that bittersweet human experience. Yeah, that is true.ersed with some of the bitter moments and that make that bittersweet human experience. Yeah, that is true. They always go together. That's a huge accomplishment.

Congratulations. Thank you so much. I'm very happy for you. Oh, I really appreciate it. It was a delight to read your book. I absolutely loved Quiet as well. I absolutely loved this book. You're a fantastic thinker, a beautiful writer. I'm so grateful for your time today. Well, thank you so much for having me and thank you for doing the work that you do in the world. And yeah, it was wonderful to connect. Thanks, Susan. 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 a 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. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.