The One You Feed - Andrew Solomon Re-Release (Originally Ep #50) The Atlas of Depression

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

This week on The One You Feed we have Andrew Solomon.Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology.Solomon’s recent book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, published on November 13, 2012, won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction among many other awards. The New York Times hailed the book, writing, “It’s a book everyone should read… there’s no one who wouldn’t be a more imaginative and understanding parent — or human being — for having done so… a wise and beautiful book.”  People described it as “a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity.”Solomon’s previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner, 2001), won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times of London‘s list of one hundred best books of the decade. A New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback editions, The Noonday Demon has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries, and has been published in twenty-four languages. The New York Times described it as “All-encompassing, brave, deeply humane… a book of remarkable depth, breadth and vitality… open-minded, critically informed and poetic all at the same time… fearless, and full of compassion.” In This Interview Andrew and I Discuss…The One You Feed parable.Using work to make the world a better place.The urgent business of living a moral life.How to decide what we should change and what we should accept.How hope can become the cornerstone of misery.The challenges and joys of parenting disabled children.The perfectionism of privilege.The importance of the choice to celebrate what is versus wishing it to be different.How we can grow through difficult circumstances.The poison of comparison.The idea of the “psychological supermodel”.Layering feelings of failure onto depression and how damaging that is.Learning to celebrate our difficulties and differences.A beautiful and hopeful reading on depression.How critical humor is in dealing with depressionNew approaches to treating depression.His ongoing challenges with depression and anxiety.The shame of mental illness.If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.A life that is only luxury and pleasure tends to feel rather hollow and empty.How sparing our children from all adversity is a bad idea.The choices we face.How encounters with darkness give us the energy to feed our good wolf.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everyone. Our episode next week is a return episode from Johan Hari and it's a book called Lost Connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions. And to get ready for that episode, I want to re-release one of our very early episodes. It was episode number 25, so it's going back a couple hundred episodes. It's with Andrew Solomon, who wrote a book called The Noonday Demon, An Atlas of Depression, and another book called Far From the Tree. And we had a wonderful conversation and we do talk about depression amongst some other things. This is one of my favorite conversations, again, from a long time ago, but one of those that I think back on very fondly.

So I hope you enjoy it. The music breaks our old guitar parts, which makes me think I need to get the guitar out more and the iPad out less. Let me know what you think. And next week, we will have Johan Hari, Lost Connections. lost connections. The encounter with the things that are dark and that are terrible and that are difficult is just exactly the thing that gives one the energy to feed the wolf who represents goodness and kindness and virtue. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.

How they feed their good wolf. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is author Andrew Solomon. Andrew is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Art Forum, and The New York Times Magazine. In addition, he is the author of several books, including The Irony Tower, Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, also The Noonday Demon, and a novel, A Stone Boat. He is the winner of the 2001 National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. the winner of the 2001 National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Andrew's newest book is Far From the Tree, Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm

Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hi andrew welcome to the show what a pleasure to be here we're uh we're really glad to have to have you on. I'm a big fan of both of your books, so this is a real pleasure for us. So our podcast is based on the old parable where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and love and joy, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like hate and greed and jealousy. And the grandson stops and he thinks and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. I think that the attempt to lead a moral life is an urgent business for many of us, perhaps even for most of us, and that one is always trying to get away from exploitation. I think especially as a writer, because there's a great deal of writing that is exploitative, my aim is always to write work which is actually helpful to people, to continue to be productive somehow of trying to improve and make the world better. It sounds a little pompous and arrogant as the basis for writing. Partly I just write to describe things, but ultimately I think the goal is to do things that are moving. And as I've looked at the

areas in which I work, including this area of psychology and psychiatry, I found over and over again that people are often working with a real view to somehow making a better world. And I think that attempt in all of its urgency is part of what gives human experience its meaning. Great. One of the themes that shows up in both books that I thought was really interesting, and it's something we talk about on this show a lot, and it was really about the core question of about what should we change in ourselves and what things should we accept in ourselves. In Far From the Tree, you have a lot of examples of families who took a more accepting approach to their kids' disabilities versus other families who were, you know, trying to change everything they could. I'm curious if you could

expound a little bit more on that theme. I think that I was looking at that particularly in terms of parenting, but everything I said about parenting is relevant also to one's attitude toward oneself. But I would say that one of the central activities of parenting is changing your children. You educate them, you teach them a sense of moral values, you try to teach them some manners, you try to give them all kinds of knowledge they didn't have. Not to change your children would be to neglect them some manners. You try to give them all kinds of knowledge they didn't have. Not to change your children would be to neglect them terribly. But it's also part of the experience of being a parent that you have to accept your child for who he is or she is

and make him or her feel good about who they are or what their identity might be. And I think there are some things that obviously need to be changed. And there are some things that obviously need to be celebrated. And there's a great deal that falls in a gray, foggy middle. And I think a lot of the time our experience comes down to that old serenity prayer about having the courage to change the things that you can and the forbearance to accept the things you can't and the

wisdom to know the difference. And I feel like that wisdom is one of the most urgent but elusive pieces of wisdom for people in their own formation of an identity and in their parents' experience. And so often, especially in the families I looked at in Far From the Tree who are dealing with children with various kinds of stigmatized identities there is the quality that the child has there is the sense that it is stigmatized and therefore carries a burden there are treatments of one kind or another those treatments are themselves often very traumatic or very difficult and the balance between the treatment and its costs and the condition and its costs needs constantly to be assessed and assessed and reassessed over and

over again. That gray area is such a challenge and the wisdom to know the right thing is so difficult and so much a matter of understanding and knowing yourself. One of the things that you talked about that you said in the book, you were talking about the story of Lucy Greeley, who had multiple facial reconstruction surgeries. And you used her as an example to say she kept trying to constantly change herself. And you said that people who know their condition to be irreversible are often happier than people who believe it can be changed, that hope can be the cornerstone of misery. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

People who know that their condition is irreversible are better able to start the process of accommodating it. If you know that there's nothing that you can do about having lost part of your leg or having whatever the other debilitating condition is that you might have. You figure out how to live a good life with that condition. If you have a condition which is easily fixable, you easily fix it, and then you do a pretty good job of living once it's fixed. But a lot of people have conditions which might be fixable or might not be fixable, and that might be fixable or might not be fixable, and that might be somewhat fixable but not fully fixable, where there's a lot of vagueness. And those people tend to live all the time with a sense that their condition requires them,

one way or another, to keep trying to fix it. And they keep trying, and often the fix doesn't happen at all, or it doesn't happen in a sufficient degree. And so those people end up terribly frustrated. So I look, for example, at the experience of people with Down syndrome. You can't actually make the Down syndrome go away at this point. You can have strategies of early intervention that are helpful to people who wish to function well despite their Down syndrome, and responsible parents pursue those options. It's pretty clear with Down syndrome what the things are that help people and what the things are that don't help people and what the extent of the fix can be. But you

get to autism and you discover that there are all kinds of usually rather charlatan-like people marketing all kinds of peculiar strategies that they claim have brought about a complete remission of autism. There are people who are falling into the hands of those practitioners. But there's also solid science which seems to suggest that certain interventions are helpful to certain people to certain degrees. And so the autism parent is left thinking, is this real? Is this fake? Should I be pursuing some sort of improvement? Should I not be? If I don't try to get my child therapies that will help him in my neglecting my child, if I do get my child, these therapies are the therapies themselves so traumatic as to be more destructive than they weren't for the amount of improvement they'll bring about. And because

autism is such a heterogeneous condition, how people will respond to a given treatment is very difficult to know ahead of time. And for every treatment that someone says has been a miracle, there's someone else saying that the pursuit of it was a tragedy. There's a great example in the book where you're talking about two women who have autistic children of a fairly similar functioning level. And one is a fairly wealthy woman and who is tired and frustrated and doesn't enjoy being with her, you know, is stressed out by her son, because she's always trying to fix him. And then you you describe another woman who's of a much lower socioeconomic status, who has no faith that she can fix him, you say, because she could never fix her own life.

And she's a lot more, she enjoys him and has a lot more time with him that is pleasant, and she's less sort of run out by it. It was important to me never to suggest, by any means, that it's easier to deal with any of the conditions I was looking at if you're poor. Being poor makes everything more difficult than it is for people who have got greater means. People who are poor don't get the same respite care. They don't get the same assistance or support. They don't get the same opportunities. That being said, people who are more privileged tend to be more perfectionistic and often experience these children as imperfect and often throw themselves into trying to fix them. And often back to the theme that we were talking about a moment ago,

what these children really require is not to be fixed, but to be accepted and even to be celebrated. And sometimes that's very difficult for people who keep thinking, but there's something wrong with my child and I need to make it right. And it comes more readily to people who think my child is who my child is, and I just have to deal with what I've been given. What I liked a lot in the book is you're not, you don't really come down on either side of that debate. You're not, you're not suggesting anything one way or the other. You're just sort of exposing the different options and challenges out there. And one of the things that's so interesting about the book is it's a book about people who have different identities of all sorts, but a lot of them are considered disability, whether it be deafness, Down syndrome, autism.

But what comes through in the book over and over is the joy that some of those parents find in that. And you say that the main thing that drives whether the parents are joyful and how able they are to love their children is their ability to find meaning in what's happening. One of the mothers whom I interviewed said to me, people always give us these little sayings like God doesn't give you any more than you can handle. But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen. And I believe that people make those choices all the time. I believe that people who have these children, who have these extraordinary identities or characteristics, really have to decide relatively early on, am I going to suffer with this and

have a very difficult time with it? Or am I going to somehow say, this isn't what I would have chosen. This isn't what I wanted. This isn't what I had in mind when I set out to have children. But it will allow me to grow and to learn and to have, in some sense, a richer life than I would have had without it. And I was impressed at how often people really do make that decision and how often they conform to it, which is not to say that their lives aren't necessarily easy or that given everything to do over again, they would have chosen these experiences. But one story after the next really dwelt on the sense that dealing with disabled people had made people kinder and more tolerant and more open and more generous in all kinds of profound ways. And I remember one mother who had a child with Down

Syndrome and who had ended up spending most of her life working to improve educational opportunities for kids with DS saying to me, you know, for our son, I wish I could make it go away because it's a difficult way to be in the world and I would like to give him an easier life. But speaking for myself, while I would never have believed 26 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point, I have. For him, I would make it go away in an instant. But for me, it's given me so much richer and so much more purposeful a life than I'd ever otherwise have had that speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world. One of the challenges I have in doing this show is that I have to read a book a week for the guests that come on, which I love doing. However, it leaves me very little time to read other books. If you're like me, the list of books you want to read is always expanding and kind of never-ending. You

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where you talk about your own depression and you study depression in a lot of different circumstances, you reference the harm that the emergence of supermodels did, you know, the cultural emergence of supermodels did to women's views of themselves. And then you talk about something, a similar version of that, a psychological supermodel that we all seem to think we need to aspire to. And I think I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit more about that in the context of depression, and also in the context of families who have a child who is different, and their initial, it's not meeting the standard that they had expected,

or hoped for. Well, in depression, I think there's the problem that people believe that the appropriate way for them to live is in a state of sort of constant rapture. You know, you look at the representations of happiness that occur in a great deal of daytime television and popular culture of various kinds, and there's a suggestion all the time that you should be happy. And I don't think people especially expected to be happy, or at least not to be happy that much of the time, even 40 or 50 years ago. And I don't think people especially expected to be happy or at least not to be happy that much of the time, even 40 or 50 years ago. And I think this notion somehow in a celebrity culture, for all that we see celebrities going through complete meltdowns and falling to pieces, we still see a lot of them somehow having these wonderful, perfect lives. And we feel like if my life isn't wonderful and perfect, I've failed.

If my life isn't wonderful and perfect, I've failed. Now, it's hard enough to deal with the fact that you're depressed or with the fact that you're struggling in any of a broad variety of other ways without having the sense that it's a humiliation not to be perfect and not to be completely and perfectly happy. And because people have seen these images of extreme happiness that keep being represented to us, people often blame themselves and have a sense of enormous failure in connection with their own depression. So they're both depressed and feel like failures for being depressed. And I think that's a very unfortunate and very painful layering that takes place. In looking at how that applies to the families I was interviewing in Far From the Tree with all of their engagements with these unusual and extraordinary children, I think a lot of the time the parents had a vision for their own lives, which was for everything to go perfectly. And then they have a child who is, in the eyes of the world, damaged and not as good as a child who was not affected by one of these conditions. And they

find it shameful and they feel somehow responsible for it, and they feel embarrassed for it. Well, that gives them, the parents, a much less robust and positive life than they would have had otherwise. But additionally, it gives their children a much lower level of self-esteem. And there's a constant struggle that I think goes on between these parents and these children in which the parents are hopefully moving toward out of the outrage they often feel at the time of diagnosis through the bewilderment that usually follows the outrage into the acceptance, which is really necessary for them to lead an okay life and onward to celebration. And the movement through those four stages, and they aren't completely linear. You can get to the point of celebration and then you have a set back and you're outraged all over again. But the movement through those stages with acceptance and celebration as the end goal is a way of rising, I think, to the occasion of saying, I will not

insist on the supermodel vision of what my family should look like. I will not insist on the supermodel vision of what my family should look like. I will not insist on the supermodel vision of what my own moods and characters should be like. I will rather live authentically in my own experience, find as much happiness as I am able to find, and be grateful for the happiness I found and live in the compass of it. Excellent. So I'd like to switch now and talk a little bit more about The Noonday Demon, the book about depression. And I had talked to you before the show about reading a section of it. Could you go ahead and walk us through that or read that for us? Some people seem to give in to their depression. Others seem to battle it.

Some people seem to give in to their depression. Others seem to battle it. Since depression is highly demotivating, it takes a certain survivor impulse to keep going through the depression, not to cave into it. A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover. It is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that, and you have hope. Of course, it can be hard to sustain a sense of humor during an experience that is really not so funny. It is urgently necessary to do so. The most important thing to remember during a depression

is this. You do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will never know again. No matter how bad you feel, you have to do everything you can to keep living, even if all you can do for the moment is to breathe. Wait it out and occupy the time of waiting as fully as you possibly can. That's my big piece of advice to depressed people. Hold on to time. Don't wish your life away. Even the minutes when you feel you are going to explode are minutes of your life, and you will never get those minutes again. Thank you. That's a really beautiful, beautiful section. And I think it goes back a little bit to

the idea of, to some extent, if we're always wishing we were somewhere else, and severe, severe depression is a different story. But the mild depression is often, at least for me, accompanied by that desire that I was somewhere else doing something else, someone else, and I'm missing the moments of my life that are in front of me, regardless of how they may appear, they are my life. And I like the way you put that a lot. Yes. I think, you know, depression is inherently painful. It's not painful because of social prejudice. It's not painful because of your own attitude toward it. It is inherently painful. And most of us really don't like painful experiences and would like to avoid them.

But I've met people who've said that they went through a period of years when they were dysthymic, which is to say they had milder depression, or when they were in and out of depression, and who've said, I just spent all of that time wishing that things were different. And now I realize I wasted a big part of my youth in that enterprise. And I sometimes say when I talk to people about the pursuit of treatment, people will say, well, you know, I really was considering getting some kind of treatment, but I think I'm going to be able to beat this on my own. And I'm just going to stick it out. And if it's still not working out that well in six months, then maybe I'll talk to someone and I say, look, in six

months, you're going to be 29 and you'll never be 28 again. And you will have lost six months of being 28 to this project of duking it out on your own. So why don't you try to avail yourself of whatever treatments there are to get as well as you're able to get as quickly as you're able to get there. Because otherwise, the longer you put it off, aside from the treatment implications, if it's possibly escalating, but the longer you put it off, the longer it's going to be that you've missed a chunk out of your life. And when you're feeling well again, you'll regret that you missed half of the year you were 28. Right. I was curious to ask you, you wrote The Noonday Demon. Has it been 10 years since it was published?

It came out in 2001. Okay, so it's been longer than that. I was curious if you have any thoughts about how treatment for depression has improved and changed since you wrote the book. I've actually just finished writing an epilogue for the book that will be in a new edition of it to bring it up to date, partly to bring up to date my own experience and that of the people in the book, but also to look at treatment. There has not been dramatic advancement in the area of antidepressant medication. The big insights about neurotransmitters

that drove the development of the popular antidepressants medication. The big insights about neurotransmitters that drove the development of the popular antidepressants remain the primary insights for psychopharmacology. Where there has been a certain amount of progress is in the treatment of so-called treatment-resistant depression for people who fail all of what were previously our existing technologies. Ketamine, which was long sold on the streets as special K, is now increasingly being used still on a very experimental basis for people with acute, refractory, unrelenting depression. And they found that many people who have been suicidal for an extended period of time will, after a single infusion of ketamine intravenously, have that depression remit.

It often remits within a few hours. And so that's an extraordinary effect because the antidepressant medications we have take weeks and weeks to work. Unfortunately, ketamine is a substance of abuse and the effects that it has are effects that can have many unwanted downstream effects. So it's not really a practical line of treatment. And the improvement it induces usually lasts only a week to 10 days, occasionally to two weeks. So it's not really a practical means of treatment.

But the fact that it works sets up an understanding of other pathways than the ones we know for the treatment of depression and hopefully will be applicable. And there are a number of things that are in development now that would operate on the same pathways as ketamine. The other, I think, really major advance is the advent of deep brain stimulation, which was pioneered by Helen Mayberg and Emory. It's a surgical process in which a little electrode, like the ones that are used for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, is actually implanted quite deep in the brain and connected to a battery pack, which sends a constant electrical signal to the area, and it changes the activity of something called Broca's Area 25 in the brain, which had not previously

been associated with depression or really much studied at all, but which Mayberg, who's an imaging specialist, had designated as the locus of a lot of dysregulation in depressed patients. It's obviously an invasive brain surgery. It's done only for people who have extreme, extreme depression that's been unresponsive to psychotherapy and medication and electroshock or electroconvulsive treatment and so on and so forth. But for the people in whom it's worked,

it's been quite remarkable. There is a wonderful description of Maberg working with a patient. The patients have to remain conscious while it's being done because their consciousness can help them to respond if something is going wrong in the way that it's being inserted. And she puts the device in and then she turns it on and she never tells them when she's turning it on. And she had one patient on the operating table. She turned on the device and he suddenly looked at her and said, what did you just do?

And she said, why? And he said, all my life, I've been locked in a room with a thousand screaming children, and they've just left the building. So it's extraordinary work. Again, it's not practical for a broad range of people, but I think there's a feeling that it may provide insights that will ultimately be applicable to a larger range of people. There does seem to be a lot more, you know, transcranial direct stimulation and other ways that are emerging that appear to be less invasive than that, but follow some principles around stimulating neurons via electricity. That seems to be a lot more studies around that.

I was curious about how, and it's going to be in your epilogue, but how has your depression been since you published the book? The sense that my depression was so disabling that it was destroying my life is now well and truly behind me. But it requires constant management. I'm on permanent medication and in permanent therapy. And when life gets very stressful, I have upticks and surges of it again. I tried to make some changes in my medication to get away from some side effects about eight or nine years ago with catastrophic effects and went into a really severe depression and had to cancel

various plans that I had and was unable to function really for a little while. And then I managed to pull out of that. I had something of a depression when I published Far From the Tree. I had worked on the book for 11 years. I found the idea of letting it go out into the world sort of terrifying. I was under an enormous amount of stress. I then developed a physical problem with partial hearing loss, sensory neural hearing loss. I have had some of my hearing in my left ear come back, but my hearing is permanently compromised there. I found the mix of feeling like my hearing was going and feeling like I was in this terribly self-exposing business of putting my book in the world really overwhelming. And I found myself getting incredibly anxious in the

way that I had when I was depressed and feeling over and over again as though I couldn't get through this day. I couldn't get through the next day. I couldn't get through the day after that. I think I have the advantage now of having lived through a number of depressive episodes. And so even when I'm feeling my worst,

there's some rational piece of me that knows you will feel better and it won't take that long and you just have to ride this out. But it lasted for quite a while and it was really very horrible. And in a sense, when you've been feeling all right for a long time, you forget how physical and how horrible it is. You forget that you lie there in that state of blind panic, unable to sleep for days at a time, or doing nothing but sleep for days at a time. You forget the sense that you're completely helpless in the clutches of it. And I found, which was interesting to me, now that I'm through that episode, I can talk about it very cavalierly. But while it was going on, it felt shameful, and it was very hard for me to speak of it.

I just need to ride it out. And that's been really helpful for me over time. And one of the things that I like a lot there at the end that you said is, is that it still is when we're in the midst of it, it is still very difficult and very shameful feeling. It's easier to talk about it outside of it. But thank you for the work you're doing in talking about it, because people not talking about it and hiding it is one of the worst ways to handle mental illness, for sure. Yes, it is definitely one of the worst ways to handle it. And I think, as I said earlier in the program, that that burden of secrecy adds to the burden of the disease and that the burden of dealing with both of them at the same time is utterly overwhelming. I always think

about the gay activist Harvey Milk who when he was asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the cause Harvey Milk said go out and tell someone and I think there has been in general a great deal more openness about mental illness and that as more and more people speak about it more and more openly, the stigma associated with it gets less. As I said, lessening the stigma doesn't take away the pain of the condition, but not having to deal with the sense of inadequacy that often comes with having depression is definitely a stride forward. with having depression is definitely a stride forward. Definitely. It's that Buddhist idea of there's going to be pain, but we layer all these layers of suffering on top of it. The suffering being, I shouldn't be having this.

There's something wrong with me for having this versus just the actual pain is plenty if you just leave it at that. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Casper Mattress. And Casper is a sleep brand that makes expertly designed products to help you get your best rest one night at a time. A little bit of info about the mattresses themselves. They are very cleverly designed to mimic human curves, providing support and comfort for all kinds of bodies. And of course, since we spend one third of our lives sleeping, we should be comfortable. I think about that all the time. I think about it with mattresses and I think about it with shoes. The mattresses have a breathable design and it helps you sleep cool and kind of regulate your body temperature throughout

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So again, go to casper.com slash 1UFEED, use the promo code 1UFEED at checkout and get $50 off towards select mattresses. And now back to the interview. You say at one point, we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted out of it. You also say it takes an active will to grow from loss. The disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself. And then you also say, if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes. Can you talk a little bit about that as a way to wrap the show up? Well, I think that people, I say if you banish the dragons, you banish the

heroes, and people become attached to the heroic strain in their own lives. At least that's more or less, I think, what the sentence is. And I think there is the feeling that while none of us choose our specific adversities, that the experience of surviving whatever the adversities are that come along give us a sense of resilience and give us a sense of power that living through happy and joyful experiences on its own can't bring.

And there's a lot of intimacy with others in the experience of adversity and in managing to live through the experience of adversity. So there are many people who, for example, faced with having children with these differences and disabilities that I've written about, really find that they become more attached to those children by virtue of the time they spend with them. There's a sociologist who once said that we not only care for our children because we love them, but also love them because we care for them. And that that process of taking care of our children is, in fact, immensely bonding. And our experience of difficulty altogether is where we come to know ourselves. A life that is only luxury and pleasure tends to feel rather hollow and empty.

So as I say, you want to get away from often from the specific adversity you're conquering. But I certainly feel when I look at my own children and think about what I want for them, that in any single instance, I would spare them from an adversity or a painful experience. I try all the time to give them the best life I could. And yet I feel if I were able to protect them entirely from adversity, and if they never had a painful experience, I would not be doing a good job as a father because part of the job as a parent is to teach them resilience. And they can only learn resilience through the experience of difficulty. So you constantly want in your own life and in the lives of your children, to protect them, but also to engage

with those difficult moments and to find whatever meaning there is buried in them and to grow from them. Great. Is there anything you'd like to add on the topic of the parable before we wrap up? I think it's a very powerful and very beautiful parable. And I've talked a lot in this program about choices, a choice that we make about how to experience our own lives. And I think those choices are choices about which wolf you feed. And I think we have those choices all the time. And I think often, in some strange sense, one wolf feeds the other, that the encounter with the things that are dark and that are terrible and that are difficult is just exactly the thing that gives one the energy to feed the wolf who represents goodness and kindness and virtue.

Excellent. That is a great way to end. Well, thank you very much, Andrew, for being on the show. Congrats on your recent success with some of the awards that Far From the Tree has won. And I thank you for the books myself. They've been personally valuable to me. So thanks. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to be with you. Okay. Bye. Bye.