If I Speak - 01: Should I give my mum an allowance?

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Ash and Moya respond to a listener who’s struggling to support her mum financially and wonder why people are being weirdly hyper-sexual online. Plus: the most common misconception about Moya, and the story behind Ash’s Twitter handle. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to If I Speak, the podcast which nobody asked for, but you're gonna get it anyway. And before we get cracking on our maiden voyage, please let me introduce my effervescent, my amazing, my gorgeous, my intelligent co-host, Moya Lothian-McLean. Moya, greet your public. Hello. I want to do like a really Eeyore greeting to offset how well you introduced me there, but what can I say I'm full of beans the beans are bopping today we should probably tell you a bit about ourselves before we get cracking um me and Moya are journalists by day but by night and also sometimes by day we are championship gossipers we like nothing more than to talk about people

what moves them what motivates them what problems they come up against of course if you want to find our non-gossipy work you can find that at navarramedia.com so what we've been wanting to do for a while is create a place where we can talk about the kinds of things that we're thinking about outside of the world of politics like are dating apps actually making it harder to meet people yes they should be banned is moya a secret incel yes she should be banned and can you ever really be friends with your boss and lo if i speak was born a place where we can be our most unhinged and nosy selves without fear of judgment yeah i mean you said this is away from the world of politics but

i definitely think all this personal stuff fits the world of politics but i definitely think all this personal stuff fits into our wider political view which is why i want to do i want to show that the gossiping i do is actually very important politically uh and underpins my political ideology and how i form that uh so i wanted we wanted to bring this to the people we wanted to bring our personal and the politics to the people how this works is that every week we have a big old chunk of chat about something that's been on our mind so it might be a big theory like moya's idea that gossip columns are turning everyone into conspiracy theorists or it might be an intrusive thought just something you can't get out of your brain like how i can't get out of my head that pets are just naked little men rubbing their bums on all of your soft furnishings.

And sometimes we won't be doing this alone. We will be joined by a bevy of guests, friends and foes. Guests, kidnap victims, you know, potato, potatoe. And every week we'll be trying to solve some of your dilemmas as well, which is absolutely my favourite part of the show. And if you want us to offer our thoughts

about a problem you have with work, love, friends, family, life, whatever, absolutely my favorite part of the show and if you want us to offer our thoughts about a problem you have with work love friends family life whatever email us at if i speak at navarra media.com that's if i speak at navarra media.com no problem too small to consider though some may be too weird i don't know test us let's see how that goes um first let's christen this ship with an icebreaker we've got ambitions with this podcast. We want to be bigger than Condé Nast or at least a bit more financially viable. So in the spirit of Vogue's 73 questions, here's 73 questions I'm going to ask Moya. We don't actually have time for 73 questions. So we deducted 70 of them. So it's just three questions. Are you happy now? you've dragged that out of me

moya are you ready i'm ready i also noticed used a lot of naval metaphors in that introduction i did recently watch master and commander oh the film that plays on every man's mind every millennial man's mind master and commander um i mean maybe there's something we can talk about another time i am a millennial man i think about the roman Empire every day. French Revolution as well. You're always on about the French Revolution. Yeah, military history.

Got so many thoughts about the Battle of Austerlitz. But anyway, this isn't about me. This is about you. What is the most common misconception about you as a person? That I'm tall. It's that people think I'm taller than I am. And when I meet people in real life, they're like, wow, you're really short. I'm five foot one for the listeners out there. I just want that on record. I need people to know I'm not tall. I'm very short. And that when you meet me in real

life and you say, oh, you're tiny, it doesn't do good things to my ego. So thank you. I think you've got classic short girl energy, which is a compliment from a fellow short girl. so thank you I think you've got classic short girl energy which is a compliment from a fellow short girl question two is it worse to do something when you shouldn't or do nothing when you should oh okay I think it's do nothing when you should because sometimes the shouldn't governing you are things like laws which don't exist in a vacuum and might be counterproductive for like a revolutionary end. So I think if you are inactive when you really should be active, whether that's on the streets, whether that's campaigning,

you know, being silent during a genocide say that to me is worse than doing something when you shouldn't, because I think the interpretation of doing something when you shouldn't is really open. And final question. I mean, this goes along with all the naval metaphors

what is your favorite sea i will also accept oceans inland seas and really big lakes this really does tell me that you are a millennial man because the idea that i would be across every sea and be able to answer what my favorite one is uh okay the best sea that i've personally experienced has got to be the Caribbean Sea. I'm a warm, blue water girl at heart. But I do have a soft spot for whichever sea is on the southern coast of Turkey, down at the bottom in the Dalaman region. That sea, I just have personal fond memories of it,

even though it's very salty and stings your eyes. But in terms of comfort all round, Caribbean Sea. I've got a soft spot for the Adriatic. I think it's highly underrated. Anyway, that's us done with 73 questions minus 70. Moya, take it away. The segment we're going to be doing this week is intrusive thoughts, which is where we talk about something we've been thinking about obsessively during the week.

And the thing that's been playing on my mind is actually quite serious, I would say. But it started with a joke tweet. So this is what introduced me to this line of thinking. So I saw this joke tweet that a prank account on ex-formerly Twitter had mocked up and they'd sent this message or pretended to send this message to a young Houthi pirate. Now, if you don't know who the Houthis are, they're a Yemeni militia group who've been fighting one side of a civil war in Yemen for years and years and years. And they've currently got renewed global fame because they've been attacking ships in the Red Sea,

apparently in protest at the assault on Gaza. That's the reason they're giving for it. I like that you called it renewed global fame. Like they were an actor who had a fallow period and now just starred in like a really well-regarded A24 movie. Like the Houthis are back. The Houthis are back. No, it's because the west is paying attention to them again um after just abandoning yemen for years and years and years and ignoring

what was going on there so the hoothies are back and one of the hoothies who's really come to prominence is this young pirate called rashid who is part of this group has been posting videos online about the hoothyi actions in the Red Sea but Rashid and I'll say I'll say this bluntly is very attractive that is why Rashid is achieving such prominence and why people have been like oh my god they keep calling Tim Houthi Chalamet you know he doesn't actually look like Tim Houthi Chalamet and I would say not to objectify too much but definitely above Tim Houthi Chalamet if we're really going to go there uh but this joke tweet was kind of in the vein of these sort of thirst tweets that had been

going around but it just went so much further and the message was it read something like this it said i'll let you use my throat till it bleeds free palestine and yemen i have a fat ass do you want me to come to yemen i genuinely don't know if this account sent this tweet to Rashid. They pretended they did. They pretended they got a reply. But it's kind of inconsequential because even as a joke, this disturbed my spirit. There was something about it that was so crass. And it tapped into something deeper that was going on, a wider trend that it fitted into. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly what that trend was. I knew that there was an annoyance I had with it, a revulsion that was going deeper than just this one message. And then I read this

response to that tweet and everything clicked. And so the response was from an account under the name Q Anthony Alley. And it said, there's something so deeply diseased about the way Westerners have ritualized this kind of hyper sexual public performance especially towards people of color who clearly want no part of it while at the same time having almost zero ability for sincere intimacy in private now the bit i've been zooming in on again and again is that phrase hyper sexual public performance and i've been thinking about how there seems to be these two poles of extremes emerging in our like pop cultural lexicon uh so the the

digital square where I hang out quite a lot and we talk about you know tv film music all of that and one position is at one end of it is this hypersexualized language which has taken a form of like support and admiration when people want to be like oh i like you i support you i support your work they say stuff like run me over with a truck run a train on me do it till the room stinks it's all like really sexual metaphors but on the other hand there's this endless discourse about you know in film like unnecessary sex scenes actors who are saying they're refusing sex scenes out of respect for their real life partners, studies that suggest young Americans want less sex on screen and more platonic friendships depicted. And the reason I'm wrapping in this political, the Houthi pirate

with culture is because he came to fame on TikTok. It's like his videos have become a form of entertainment for people. They're engaging with him the same way they would as a fan of other sort of figures. So like the Timothee Chalamet thing, it's Timothee Chalamet. I don't think people say do it to the room stinks about Timothee Chalamet, except this one middle-aged lady has this crazy account about him. But still, I see it as part of the same sort of sphere. And it's a really interesting position in history to be in because it feels like to me never has sex and reference to sex been so normalized in mainstream digital language and culture and yet there's this like growing stigma on the other side around it this response

of fear and disgust and I would love to hear what you think about my entries of thoughts on hypersexual public performance and that's so interesting and there's so much in it. And I think that what you're observing is like the confluence of lots of different things at once. So one of the things that's really interesting to me about this hypersexualized public performance is that it is quite clearly rooted not in heterosexual male desire, but in female desire and queer desire. So it's not about what men want to do. It's about what femmes and queers are saying they want done to them. So I think that there's an element of it, which is kind of drawn from sex positive feminism and some of the language that has you know orbited you know the queer rights movement and that's being played out through this like hyper-sexualized public

performance of you know thirst tweets do you know what i mean i think there's a second thing which is like the particular pop cultural moment that we're in I think because there is this sort of background political context of sex positivity you can see the way in which that's playing out in popular culture in ways which are exaggerated and hyperbolic and kind of funny but also really really explicit the obvious examples of this being like any time Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B team up on a song, it's going to be about this particular kind of like hyper-sexualized public performance. And that's enjoyable. There's a lot that's enjoyable about it. prevalent form of visual material that nobody can talk about or share with each other openly, right? There's a famous Amiya Srinivasan essay where she is a professor of gender studies and sexuality at Oxford. She goes, well, we're always talking about porn. I can't show it to my students. And so I think that that creates a kind of really dysfunctional relationship to

both pornography and sexuality, right? Think about any time you have to compartmentalize that ruthlessly. You know, a different example might be kids who are raised in very, very religious backgrounds and can't be open with their parents about what their life outdoors is like who they're hanging out with what they're getting up to that kind of compartmentalization that level of denial is recognized to be kind of psychologically unhealthy and to have all these effects later in life and that is what as a society we do with pornography it is everywhere and it is nowhere it has a huge impact even if you don't watch pornography it has a massive impact on what you're seeing in a pop

cultural landscape right what you're seeing in like what I would call like daylight visual culture except you can't you can't talk about that openly and so I think that this language of like hypersexuality is coming from all of these things at once and I also think that the the flip side of that what you're talking about is like the discomfort and I don't want to see sexuality everywhere and like I didn't consent to this sex scene in a movie about a woman's sexual you know maturity like it it's coming from I think existing in the space which is like really dysfunctional deeply dishonest and steeped in denial because we can't talk about this stuff openly and I suppose maybe the last thing is that like the specific example of the the Houthi fighter

that you were referencing I think it's also about what is unsayable and what's transgressive so everywhere in the media is like the houthis are just bad people doing things for no reason all right and if you've got half a brain cell it's not about saying you know who these good people are they bad people what are their broader political aims we know for a fact that this is happening as a direct consequence of Israel's bombardment of Gaza, the political media class are in denial about that. And so as a way of sort of saying, okay, not only is this happening because of Gaza, but because it's happening because of Gaza, we think that their cause is just, a way of expressing that transgressive thought

is to wrap it up within the transgressiveness of a hypersexual public performance so those are my thoughts about your intrusive thoughts does any of that resonate or make sense i think a lot resonates i think what i'm really interested in is when did invoking sex or the promise of sort of like a sexual encounter that will never, that will never materialize. Because the whole point of this is online, when you're expressing this hypersexual public performance, it's not actually going to happen. Like, you're not actually going to go suck that person off. You know, Chris Evans being like, Chris Evans, run a train on me. Chris Evans is not going to run a train on you.'s that's not happening that's the whole point there's an awareness that I've actually

like chartered a hovercraft to the Red Sea you don't know what I'm capable of but this is this is the thing it's like when did sex become when did this performance of sex become the ultimate way to express that support and you're saying it's because it's transgressive as well but I'm not sure it's transgressive it's it's like this it's become this bargain basement go-to like my I was talking to my friend about this and she was like saying you know I did say that I'd give like Jeremy Corbyn a blow job after all his efforts in the 2019 election like when did that become the currency which we go to first of all and I'm not saying it's a bad thing per se I'm just saying it's so at odds with how when I'm out in the world and I'm engaging with it's a bad thing per se I'm just saying it's so at odds with how when I'm

out in the world and I'm engaging with people either sexually or talking about sex their experiences and their like comfort with sex actually seems so much less than you know this hypersexual performance and there's this huge divorce between the sex we're having and the way we're having and the way we're communicating around it in the real world and the ease with which we throw around sort of like as i said like run a train on me like you know lock me in a room with them do it till it hurts you're articulating that as a contradiction i think that makes total sense i think these are two sides of the same coin and these are dynamics that feed on each other right so like online right there's always been an element of of sexual fantasy which is based on the fact that it can never happen all right i think that's a sort of key component of sexual fantasy is that these are safe places to play out various scenarios where

the nature of the fantasy the reason why it can be a fantasy is that it's never going to happen right i think i think that's always been like a part of human psychology um but i also think that like the more like baroque and explicit and the word that always comes to my mind is like pneumatic right it's a form of like sexuality which is just like bam bam bam bam bam bam i was just like oh my god like that's it's kind of stressful like it's kind of stressful like what do you mean until my throat bleeds like leave it be like why does this have to involve like the possibility of a personal injury claim I mean you know it's a particular kind of sexuality which is like it's like one-upmanship about how like you know what used to be in the early 2000s you know called freaky like how freaky you could

be um i think that there's a direct relationship between that being what's discussed public or not even discussed what's been performed publicly and a feeling of like timidity or tentativeness or anxiety or reluctance to express oneself sexually in the real world. I think that there is a relationship between these two things, right? On the one hand, the hyper-sexualized public performance is a kind of like overcompensation for the anxiety and, you know know reluctance you might feel in the real world and also that anxiety and reluctance is a response to like oh my god like every time I want to have sex do I have to like smash someone's head in or like get my head smashed in yeah I really agree with what you're saying and just to wrap up I think what upsets me is this idea that it's

on the one hand it's almost like is this all we have to offer like first and foremost if we're trying to express you know support for someone is all we have to offer this our bodies in a form of like pneumatic sexual expression is that the first thing and then the second thing is I see them as really linked which is like you were saying this's this pushback against sexual depictions of sex in film, TV, the culture we have. Meanwhile, with this hypersexual language on the other side, we need those depictions of sex. We need that varied range of sex on screen, sex in books.

That's how I learned about sex for the first time. It wasn't in PC. It was like reading. And I think all those things are really necessary like good sex bad sex you you really get to kind of learn the gauntlet and the emotions that go with it when you relate to stuff on you know in in literature in in in on the silver screen um it just yeah it just makes me feel like we've gone very wrong somewhere because I when I'm having sex in real world, a lot of these people are, they're unsettled. They're not at home with themselves.

They don't really know how to express sex. And then out there, all that we've kind of got in the language of talking about sex is that pneumatic form of sex now. And that worries me. It worries me that we have, we're supposed to have more awareness ever than before of sex. And yet the dominant form of it is still this kind of like the drilling the fucking and all i have to offer you is the you know to say i support you is like run a train on me that to me says something has gone wrong somewhere with the emotional um language around sex and the emotional understanding of what sex is and how we engage with it and all we have left is the physical physicality like the animal

physicality and that's the only form of sex that we're presenting as like the desirable one i suppose like one last thing is that we're talking about what is happening online and we've created a social environment where it's very very difficult to be sincere it's so difficult and even if you are being sincere it so easily slips into a kind of performance of vulnerability itself right because we're creating these commodified versions of ourselves where there are metrics for success and virality and engagement you know we're being assigned a value uh in these spaces and so i think it's quite easy to become kind of separated from yourself dissociated from aspects of yourself and so if you want to be sincere about sexuality twitter probably it's a very difficult place to do it um but we'll probably

be returning to this theme in future episodes because I think yeah like I said there's so much in what you just said um and you can also let us know your thoughts you can get in touch with us online please don't tell Moya or me that you'd let us run you over with a truck you can find us on Twitter Moya what's your Twitter handle uh it's at emilothiumaclaim but I don't think anyone would tell me that they'd run me over the truck because i'm not the kind of figure that they express that sort of desire for it is as you point out at the start like specific individuals um who run over the truck they'd probably just be like stamp on me queen if anything but i don't think i give off stamp of me queen vibes unfortunately you know you're just you're absolutely tempting fate um and if you want to find me on twitter i am at ayo caesar which was a really dumb handle from 2012 and it stayed with

me where does that come from ash can we just i've always wondered this where does that handle come from is it the roman empire uh well it was actually a nickname at uni so we all had like stupid nicknames for each other uh so like i had a friend who was called ellen so called a smell and she became the smell and my nickname was caesar for being bossy you called a friend the smell yeah she loved it though she was mega hot so to give her like a kind of like undercutting nickname was sort of enjoyable because she was just like had this perfectly symmetrical face she looked like I don't know if you ever watched Star Trek Voyager but she looked like seven of nine right just insanely good looking and yeah people just like fell in love with her at like a single glance and so

just calling her that the smell I also want to add it's hilarious that you were called Caesar because you're bossy because my friends call me chairman mayo after chairman mao because i'm bossy well i can't wait to see how this goes moving on to dilemmas now it is time for us to make ourselves feel better about our problems by discussing some of yours and as i said earlier if you want to submit a dilemma for a future episode email if i speak at navarro media.com we will keep everything anonymous and we may edit your dilemma slightly to make it short enough to contain in the podcast and like i said earlier

there's no problem too small for us to consider i mean really at this stage we'll take anything so are you ready for our very first dilemma ever oh am i ready yeah i was hoping the i was hoping the audience at that point would uh fill in the gaps and go yes wherever they're listening on public transport in their rooms okay so dear if i speak i've never done this before but here goes we've never done this before either so here goes i love my mom so much but i don't think i can financially support her i live in london and i earn the average wage i have my dog to take care of too and I've taken on her dog to help lessen her burdens. However, she now wants a monthly allowance. I really don't know how I can do that. Life in London is mega

expensive and if I make it to the end of the month, I want to save whatever I have left over. Otherwise, I'm living paycheck to paycheck and will never have anything for a rainy day. a paycheck and will never have anything for a rainy day what shall i do i'm so torn about this moya what do you reckon what your initial thoughts it's just heartbreaking it's a heartbreaking dilemma um and one i think we'll see even more as the cost of living we're like we've had you know 14 years of austerity now, public services have been massively slashed. So the normal support nets, I say normal, for most of my life, they haven't been normal

because they've been cut back so much. So the support nets that previously have been there are just getting smaller and smaller and smaller on every level. Loads of local councils are going bankrupt. You know, the welfare provisions within the benefit system barely, if you're in work work you're still in poverty

on benefits and the sort of interpersonal financial systems that people used to depend on as a last resort you know money within the community there isn't that money anymore you're passing around the same sort of fiver and within family relationships it's really hard when you see a parent and I can say from personal experience when you see a parent who has much less money than you and you get to an age where you're like I need to help out here I need to support you I need to give you money in exchange first of all for the investment that you've put into me but also because I want you to be able to live a life like I'm living but But sometimes you just can't stretch that. You don't have that capital.

And then you're stuck in this impossible position of being the only person who could potentially help, but also knowing you actually can't because you don't really have the liquidity, the capital to do that and survive yourself. In terms of what to do about this problem, I wouldn't call them options because they don't feel like useful solutions. They just feel like potential paths you could explore. There's one I thought of which is you have to look at the expenses on the dog, the extra dog you've taken on for your mother, and maybe have a conversation with her about whether if the dog was no longer in your life, whether the money that you'd be expending on this extra dog could instead go to her.

So instead of having those double expenses, you have, you know, this small monthly stipend that would have gone on the dog that she can no longer look after. And instead she gets that money. Very hard choice, I know, because pets are people's lives uh another one is having a really hard conversation with her about I can't afford to give you an allowance I can afford to maybe give you I don't know 50 quid a month which to me isn't like an allowance allowance that's a really small amount of money but I can't do anything more than that I physically cannot um and then a third one is having to go and have a difficult conversation with a financial advisor about what potential options there are in terms

of you know if I put money away from a rainy day is there some sort of compound interest situation where every year I can pay a small amount of that to my mum but I think a monthly allowance as you said you can't afford to do it so you won't be able to do it whatever happens next you're going to have to have a really hard and difficult conversation with her about how to make your lives livable but the problem is not you the problem is these have fallen on individual individuals to sort out to try and make try and produce money where there isn't money try and scrape together this space where there isn't this space because you're being ever constricted by rising costs and absolutely no alleviation from the state that was meant to help take care of us i think those are all really really good points and maybe the thing i want to talk about a bit is where the emotional context and the economic context meet. Something which I think is like a lot more common

in working class families and families which have an immigrant background is that there is a degree of expectation that when the child grows up and enters into employment, that they will look after their families financially, whether that's their parents or an extended family back home. There's a sense that you have a role to play in supporting the family unit that you came from and not just the family unit, which you may or may not establish if you have kids, form a partnership, so on and so forth. and when you had a broader economic context where if you entered into full-time work you could afford to keep a roof over your head potentially even buy a property and also have some surplus left over which you could either save for yourself or send back home

which you could either save for yourself or send back home, like give to your parents, that could work as a system. Not saying there weren't any drawbacks to it, but that could work as a system. Whereas, you know, this person who's messaging in, talking about living in London, you know, they're a younger person, you know, that means that they entered the same employment market that the rest of us did where wages have been in real terms falling for more than a decade now and the experience for young people particularly if they do go to university is that they've taken on a whole load of debt but that's not being paid off through higher wages because you've got a degree. So that means that you've got an economic context, which is really different, but the social expectations of your family and the ones that you were raised with and how you were brought up to think of your

role as becoming an adult, that's not changed to accommodate this new economic reality. And I also wonder if part of the thing which is difficult here, it's not just about the love and feeling like you can't do right by your mom who you love very much. I also wonder if there's an element of, you know, the parent child relationship has been inverted. There's a sense of, well, I love you unconditionally as my parent. That means I have to look after you no matter what happens, which is the defining characteristic of a parent-child relationship. And if there's something which is perhaps emotionally difficult there, particularly when you can't afford to do it and the same way a child and I was thinking about this with regards to like my own upbringing which is my mom was before she married my stepdad

very very broke like she got like completely fucked over financially in a divorce and precariously housed and I remember how much she worried about money, but there was a very, very clear sense of responsibility, which is she was suffering financially, but she was the parent and I was the child. It's not like I could do anything about that. And I wonder if that was maybe a part of this story between like a child and a mom and the expectations have been reversed and you're sort of being put in the position of a parent having been the child and when your own circumstances aren't being considered and you're not being given that sort of it's almost like the parents got a childlike understanding for your situation which is like well I just need this and and you've got to just do it that that is a part of why this is so difficult so I think that you know the advice that you you gave is

is important because there are trade-offs if you don't have the money there are trade-offs the trade-offs might be the dog the trade-offs might be the amount of money if any you know the trade-offs might be some aspects of you know your mum's outgoings know, it might be worth talking to an independent financial advisor, but I would also just urge this person to think about what the emotional dynamics at play are, what's going on for them as well, because that is going to be exerting a huge shaping force on the conversation that happens. And I think that one of the helpful things to do is just bring it into the light so you don't just have it all like roiling inside you I think you've got to make it explicit do you have any other thoughts on on this dilemma before we move on to another dilemma no apart from try

not to feel too much guilt about how it goes as Ash says all you can do is bring this into the light but I think the guilt and the shame is what will make you close down and feeling like you failed on some level but you haven't you haven't failed what's failed is the crumbling society around you and the fact that these social expectations do not match the actually lived lived reality that we have at the moment so this is not a failure in your part that you can't support your mum this is something beyond you and all you can do is try and like reach some sort of middle ground uh with the tools that you actually have available yeah it's society's failure yeah it's very not to be like we live in a society but we really do live in a society shall i read you out the next dilemma ash so this was a very, very short dilemma.

This was all I received. It just says, I miss her. So I don't know what the context is. I don't know what has happened. I don't know if this is missing someone because they've moved away. I don't know if this is missing someone who's a friend. I don't know if this is missing a family member

or my instinct is this is missing somebody who this guy had been in a relationship with so take it away moya what do you do when you miss her grief's a bitch isn't it it hurts it really hurts um you have to do the basic things. Two things. You have to feed your body and you have to feed your soul and make your life. You have to move on, but moving on is this process. So this is my, I want to say foolproof, but we'll see, method of learning to live with some sort of grief. First of all, you have to look directly at it, which you're doing now. you have to acknowledge that you're feeling this grief and that you are grappling with it and that it's hurting that is painful you can't keep tamping it down you need to talk about it

with people around you um you have to kind of like let it into the open i always say if you you know let the wound be open so it can see the air and it can heal uh i would read or listen to audiobooks as much as possible around this subject because it helps you feel seen on a level sometimes even talking to your friends doesn't like there's only so much they can kind of give you but when you see other people writing really in a really raw way about their grief whether that's from bereavement whether that's from a breakup there is a sort of like level of oh I see this and also I can see where the end might be or not even end or how you learn to live with this how you learn to live alongside this grief

um from that writing I found that really helpful for me and then you have to do maintenance the body stuff is the maintenance which is you have to kind of keep yourself going through the motions every single day until you come back to a form of like fuller life whether that is you know I would always say go and exercise even that's walking or whatever but it's like getting up every morning making sure you're washing making sure you're brushing your teeth you know eating three meals even if you have to batch cook you don't want to do these things a lot of the time but you have to I'm just going to do tough love you have to do them because I like to think of it as a scaffold that right now your mind is not really present

your mind is somewhere else your mind is fixated on this pain and this loss but one day you will wake up and if you have this you know this body this scaffold around you that has remained standing that you have managed to keep maintained you will come back to it'll be much easier to kind of slot back into a life and be find a happiness again is just what I've discovered through my own workings with you know heartbreak and loss and pain um so acknowledge it um feel it don't let it subsume you to a degree where you are totally immobilized like just try and keep that sack of flesh going around you and then one day you will come back to life and wake up and you'll find yourself smiling again.

You'll be like, holy shit, I'm smiling. And it will feel totally alien for a bit. And then it will happen more frequently. But that's how I deal with grief. I think that's all really, really good. Very practical advice. I think the only thing I have to add to it is the distinction between grieving somebody who has died and grieving somebody

with whom you no longer have a relationship because how you integrate that into yourself I think is really really different um so first starting with bereavement. And I say this as someone who like, just like I've had like a weird amount of death in my life. And I always have a recurring dream about the people I know who've died. And it's that I've bumped into them somewhere and they're alive and I'm going oh my god I thought I thought you were dead how did I fuck up this badly right so it's almost like I didn't value the relationship enough and so I didn't I didn't know that they were alive and I'd let something lapse for years and years and years because I somehow convinced myself they were dead I think one is that that shows you just like the power of denial right your unconscious mind can be

complicit in denial and wants to create realities where the terrible thing didn't happen but I also think what it indicates is that when someone dies that is not the end of your relationship with them like it's just not so the question is then how do you have a relationship with somebody who is no longer there and who can no longer talk back to you? And for some people, faith plays a real role in it. That isn't so much there for me. It's much more about keeping them as an active part of my life, thinking about all the things they said, bringing them up in conversations and almost imagining what they'd be like in these contexts. That is a way of keeping that relationship that you had with them alive. If it is a breakup,

if it is a loss of your relationship with somebody but they're still on this earth and interacting with other people in some way I think it's a very different thing because in a way what you have to do is let go of that relationship and you shouldn't try and keep it alive and I think there's lots of elements that go into that. Time is one thing, but I think another is being able to see the relationship for what it was, because I think that we can really idealize people in situations when they're no longer available to us. And I think being able to really look at what was going on for you, was really going on for them talking that through with your friends I think is just such a critical part of letting go of a relationship and for some people

that's something that can happen within like one month of breaking up with someone for other people that's something which take years because we're talking about emotional time not literal time but I think that that is an essential part of the process i mean speaking of endings we've come to the end of our very first if i speak moya how are you feeling after that oh cleansed uh don't grieve us too much because unfortunately for you we will be back very soon sooner than you'd like so this has been the very first If I Speak. I've been Ash Sarkar. Who have you been today? Matthew.

I've been Moyalodin McLean. And we can't wait to see you all again. Goodbye. Bye.