The One You Feed - How to Find Peace Amidst Emotional Storms with Maggie Smith

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn: Why it's important to keep asking questions, even when the answers may keep changing The challenge of going through a big life change and not expecting clear answers How looking back through your past can bring clarity to where you are and who you are now Staying open and curious when life is challenging is what keeps you from being stuck. Learning to work with and quiet the loud inner critic Why investigating and taking responsibility for your own role in relationships is so important. How we hold every version of ourselves throughout life Understanding that having realstic expectations in relationships can bring forth peace How writing about your own life experiences can give you new insights and understanding The importance of allowing yourself to feel and process difficult emotions To learn more, click here! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What really I was looking for was like, who is the person I am now? How was she created? And how will kind of coming to terms with all of that help me move forward? How does reckoning with the past help us understand the present? 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is our friend and the poet Maggie Smith. She's the author of several books,

including Good Bones and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Maggie's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and many other publications. And her poem, Good Bones, went viral internationally, and since then has been translated into nearly a dozen languages and featured on the CBS primetime drama, Madam Secretary. Today, Maggie, Eric, and Ginny discuss her new book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir. Hi, Maggie. Welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me. Hello, Ginny.

Hello, Eric. Hello, Maggie. So this will be a three-person conversation. We have Maggie back on. We're going to be discussing her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. Ginny, would you like to do it? Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. So Maggie, there was a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they said, in life, there are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf who represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad wolf that represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad wolf that represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks and looks up at their grandparent and say, well, grandparent, which one wins? And the grandparent says,

the one you feed. So how does that parable apply to you in your life and in your work at this point? I feel like I should have cheated and listened to my earlier responses to this question and then improved upon my earlier responses to this question. You know, I think for me, it comes down a lot to choice and intention, right? Because I mean, as we were talking before we started recording, there are always going to be things like anger or a sense of injustice or a sense of being wronged or things not turning out the way we had hoped. Those things are all valid and real and we can't just sort of box them up and put them away. But what gets more time, space, power, momentum, energy to me has to be the desire for peace more than the desire to wage war. And so that's sort of where I'm at right now, both with my writing and with this book and with

my living and my parenting is, is how can I sort of put peace for myself and my kids at the front of my decision making? And then how can I make sure that the things I'm doing align with that? Right. And if I keep that in mind, I won't always succeed, but I think I can help myself from failing too often and slipping into negative patterns. So I have a follow-up question to your answer because something you said really struck me. And I was wondering if you would elaborate a little bit on it. So you said you're prioritizing or choosing peace for you, for your kids. What does peace look like or feel like or mean right now to you guys? or mean right now to you guys? Calm, you know, I mean, peace sounds kind of boring. Like it doesn't sound as energetic as joy, for example, peace, but it's the thing I wish for on sort of every wish, like every 1111, every little piece of dandelion fluff, every one, two, three, four on the digital clock,

like peace is what I'm looking for. And probably more than joy, just that sense of like, even keeled living, you know, having gone through so much upheaval between the divorce and the pandemic, what I'm really wanting to offer them in particular is a real sense of stability. And yeah, and just like a soft place to just land and be. And I need that too. I mean, I guess I'm saying I offer that to them. And this would be the place where if my therapist were also on this podcast, she would jump in and say, don't forget that you also live in your house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you are a person living in the house too. You are not just the sort of like distant overseer of others' lives. It's you too.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I was listening to an interview yesterday. Brene Brown was talking and she was just reflecting on how we have the ordinary moments as kind of a steady diet until life throws us a curve ball and the apple cart's turned over and everything is chaotic. And then all we want is like ordinary moments again, sort of that, like you're saying, what I feel like you're saying is that peace, that stability, that rhythm, that calm. And that feels like such an oasis. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Just to have no news. Yes. You know, to be able to go five days without talking to someone and not have a lot of updates. That would be really nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peace sounds boring until you've been at war. Exactly. Exactly. As we were talking, I was thinking a little bit about this question I'm always interested in, which is relating to difficult emotions and this sort of thing and trying to choose peace over conflict. Although in a divorce, which is what much of this memoir is about, there is a certain amount of inevitable conflict that's in there. And so striking that balance of like, all right, how do I defend what needs defended? How do I take care of what needs taken care of? How do I allow myself to feel the natural emotions that are coming up, right? We don't want to squelch our emotions and orient towards a more peaceful state.

That's a lot of juggling going on there, right? That's a lot of juggling, which is why I think these things can be so very difficult. Yeah, it is a lot of juggling. I think in some ways for me, my need to understand things in order to set them down, you know, I have this like sort of real analytical bent to me that doesn't always serve me well. The need to know, the need to figure it out,

the need to solve is a lot of what drove me to write this book. And a lot of sort of managing all of that conflicting emotion and needing desperately to be able to set a lot of it down. And that's what the book sort of allowed me to do. It was like, okay, it can live in here now. It's interesting you say that because one of the things that really struck me as I read your absolutely beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully honest memoir is sprinkled throughout because it's so interesting the way you sort of organize and structure this memoir. It's unconventional in terms of the other memoirs I've written, and I really liked it. But you say periodically throughout, you have a page that'll say, a friend says every book begins with an unanswerable question. And then it'll list

a question, right, that you seem to have pondered upon. And the book has many of these kind of inserted throughout. And so I wonder, are these questions ultimately unanswerable to you? I mean, I sense your writing is an attempt to sort of answer them. I mean, do you answer them for yourself? I think the answers keep changing. That's the other slippery part of this is a question like, how do you heal is in some ways unanswerable. And in other ways, it's answerable differently every single day, because what is required of you or what feels good or what would help you in that moment is not necessarily what you needed the week before the month before.

in that moment is not necessarily what you needed the week before, the month before. So I don't know that they're sort of ultimately existentially unanswerable. It's just that there isn't a neat response that would encapsulate everything for all of those questions. It's interesting when I wrote the first draft of this book, there was just one chapter that was a list of all the questions. It was just one chapter and all the questions were listed at one time. And then through the editing process, we realized that we thought it would be more impactful to spread them out so that the sort of text leading into the question and then whatever was going to follow would sort of ping off of those things. And it gave me more kind of touch points to reflect on in the book by

spreading them out. And I don't know, I think there are certain days where some of those questions feel like they have clearer answers than others. What is the Rilke? Live the questions now. That's part of the comfort that you have to get to, I think, when going through any kind of big change in life is like, not expecting answers, because they're not necessarily owed to you. Yeah. You know? Yeah. As frustrating as that can be, like, does life owe me answers to these questions? No, no, not really. Like I can do my best with them. But a lot of it is like accepting that life is like a Q and a very heavy on the Q. Very light, frustratingly light on the A.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. And sometimes that's what the writing is for. Yeah. And it does seem that those questions, some of them may have felt unanswerable in the moment when originally posed. And later on, there is some sort of answer, even if that answer is just your life becomes the answer to that question. But I love what you say that those answers are always changing. You know, how do you heal? I mean, that is such a individual question. Like there's no right answer that we can say, like, here's how you heal. Like, who are you? What are you going through? What have you done before? I mean, there's so many variables that go into these things. And then, like you said, what I need now may not be what

I needed three months ago, which is a little bit frustrating sometimes when you feel like I found this thing that really works for me. And then it doesn't anymore. And what you need is something different. And that tends to keep us on our toes. Yeah. Well, it's funny. I mean, just even talking about anger and negative emotions, I think I needed my anger for a time. You know, it felt almost protective for a while, because if you're angry, you're not sad. Right? I don't know. I don't know how it creates that little barrier, but that's my experience. And then it stopped serving me. Yes.

And I needed to put that down and just let myself be sad, you know, and that didn't feel great, but it's what I needed. And I think what ultimately made whatever healing has been possible, possible was not getting stuck in that. Yeah. Keep moving as someone might have once said. Oh my gosh. It's a great theme. You begin this memoir with a quote that has lodged itself in my heart and in my mind. I've carried it with me since reading it. And I just wanted to revisit it now. You begin with this beautiful quote by Emily Dickinson. It says, I am out with lanterns looking for myself. I just have this image and tell me if I'm off, but the events during the

memoir were a happening where you were looking for yourself. And then the writing of this book was another iteration of you looking for yourself through the writing of this. And you go on to say, but here's the thing about carrying light with you, no matter where you go and no matter what you find or don't find, you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through. Tell me more about that and what that means to you? I think Keep Moving as a book was really about pressing forward out of necessity. Like I had to tell myself positive truths every day to sort of move. And this book was more a kind of reckoning with the past. And for me, it was mostly about my divorce, sort of getting to answer that question. I mean, who doesn't quote David Byrne on a daily basis? Like, how did I get here? You know, that moment when you wake up and you're like, this is not my beautiful life. This is not my this, this is not my that just that feeling that I think a lot of us have, particularly in midlife, where we have a moment, and moment is, or the invitation is sort of created by some sort of breakage,

right? Because if life were going fine, you probably wouldn't have that panic moment where you thought, how did I get here? So whatever rupture happens, you know, losing someone close to you or losing your job or having something happen to a relationship you're in creates this like need to reflect and look back on all of the paths, roads taken, roads not taken, choices made, choices not made that led you to that place. And so sort of like traveling back into the dark to figure out kind of how did I get here? How was this my life? How am I in this space? I had to take my Emily Dickinson poetry lantern with me to kind of light at least the few steps in front of me that I could light because what I was looking for was answers, I think, to how

my life turned out in a way that I hadn't expected and didn't see coming. But what really I was looking for was like, who is the person I am now? How was she created? And how will kind of coming to terms with all of that help me move forward? How does reckoning with the past help us understand the present and then feel a little bit more confident moving into the future? Because we know ourselves. If you don't know yourself, I don't know how you keep going. It's very confusing. Yeah, I mean, I love that line.

You change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through. you clear a path through. And that goes back to, I think, unanswerable questions, meaning that it's the act of asking them that clears the path, right? Yeah, you want to get to an answer, but the questioning is what being able to look at it this way, and let me turn it over and look at it that way. And what if I thought about it that way? That's what, at least for me, clears a path through is being willing to take the time and have the courage to ask the questions. Oh, yeah. I love that. You have a lot of poet in you, Eric. I love that, that sort of like idea of holding a many faceted thing and looking at it from different dimensions

and looking at all the different sides of it. I think for me, that's what this book project was like, because I've never really written about my whole life. And I don't mean like from birth to present. I mean, my parenting life, my work life, my writing life, my life as a friend, my life as a daughter, as a sister, as a wife, as an ex-wife. And there was something about writing this whole book that encouraged me to see the connections and sort of touch points between those facets that might be living on the other side of the object, right? But it's almost like when you visit a place, you don't necessarily have the frame of reference for where you're visiting. But if you look at that place on a map, and you can get the perspective of, oh my gosh, I was in France. That's very close to Switzerland. You know, I had no idea where I was when I was there. And something about the whole book project

of working on something of this size really just sort of invited me to see how different parts of my life were related and interconnected in a way that I don't think I would have been able to, to sort of shine light on those things if I hadn't approached all of this in sort of one fell swoop. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's so interesting to me that it's actually fascinating that I can sometimes open my mouth and say something or bring pen to paper and write something that I've never thought before. It just comes out. It comes out in the writing. It comes out in the talking. And unless we engage with a medium like either one of those or something else, for that matter, it might be

unexplored darkness that we just didn't even realize that corner was there, you know? So the benefit to writing this memoir for you is something we've just explored. But you say, the question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon is this, how can this story, this experience be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool that you can use? To play devil's advocate, experience is instructive, you say. People make connections on their own, right? So I think it's really interesting because I tool that you can use to play devil's advocate. Experience is instructive. You say people make connections on their own, right? So I think it's really interesting because I certainly did. As I read your book, read about this divorce, read about your experience throughout, I had moments of my own where the way you languaged something unlocked and showed me something in my own life that I had

not seen that way before. I will pause for a moment before diving into one such example, but I just want you to know it truly is instructive. People do make these connections. It really is so useful. Oh, I love that. I mean, now I think about having that desperate need to want the book to be useful. And I think about it and I think, okay, so underlying that desire is, I think, probably something that a lot of people who write about their lives feel, which is who else cares? How is it not merely self-indulgent? The desire to make it useful for the reader also, I think, comes from a place of really questioning and wondering how to justify the kind of project that is writing about your single, solitary, minuscule, in the grand scheme

of things, life. And so it means a lot to hear that because I think if it makes maybe one person even feel less alone or seen or it resonates in some way or calls something up or helps them figure something out for themselves or, you know, whatever that touch point is, I guess then the book has sort of done its job if it has one. Did you ever or do you ask the same question about poems? I'm curious. No. About the need for them to be useful. And I'm just kind of curious, are they self-evidently useful or that's not the point? Yeah, I don't think it's the point. And I actually don't think it's the point of memoir either, which is why I think it's sort of funny.

I don't think literature in general needs to have a job other than just being itself. And it just gets sent out into the world and then received. And it's kind of none of my business, what the receiver receives, right? I know what I've sent, but what you receive, that's between you and the text. It's not really even between you and me. It's between you and the text. And I think I was considering this book in a new way because there's so much of me in the text in a way that there hasn't been in my poems or even in Keep Moving. There's very little artistic distance in this book. And so it just felt more vulnerable in that way. But no, I i mean poems don't have jobs poems

just get to be poems it's like kids yeah like kids yeah the poems are freeloaders also just like the children they just get to live be cared for be tended to and no one needs them to do much i suppose that depends on where you happen to be a kid in the world and what timeframe. Yeah. If I can get them to take out the recycling, it's a win. Well, I'm wrestling with whether I even share then like how one of your stories sort of applied to me. It may be just between me and the text. I wonder if there's any need to share it. That's the whole point of this podcast, I think.

Okay, so then is the answer yes? Carry on. I think so, yeah, unless Maggie wants to veto this. That's true, Maggie. Of course I wouldn't. Okay, all right. So here, I'm just going to read a little section here. It says, when Violet woke up that morning, she came downstairs into the kitchen

where I was standing at the counter making a pour over. She handed me a piece of paper, a about my mom Q&A her teacher had given out to the whole class for Mother's Day. The question was, what has your mother taught you? To be optimistic, Violet had written. Optimistic? To say I was surprised would be an understatement. It had been a brutal 11 months for me, for all of us, that my daughter had witnessed me struggling for months and saw hope. There was no better gift. Well, what that interestingly unlocked inside of me, I remember before my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I saw changes in her. She and my dad were divorcing. And so I was at lunch one day with my dad and I just said

to him, you know, I just didn't realize how negative mom was. Like she's just so cynical and critical. And he says, oh, she's been like that for a long time. And I thought, huh, because when I look back and I look back at my childhood, the mother, I, some of the characteristics she cultivated in me by example was optimism, encouragement, just all kinds of positivity and love and kind of always pointing towards the opportunity, not the flaw in things, right? And that's how I thought of my mother. Now, I do think some of the disease of Alzheimer's was causing her to become more negative and cynical.

So I do think that would play a role. But I also realized that through this, when I was a young child, my mom was going through a very difficult time. And I think what she was doing for me was giving me those things as an intentional gift, right? To orient that way towards me. And I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't realize that she was probably wanting not for me to see her sadness, not for me to see all of the despair, all of the struggle. And she succeeded. And it was just so interesting because I saw some of that in your story, in Violet, maybe the way she experienced you. And as a child, I received that as a gift. And I hope that Violet can take some of that too with her from this experience. Oh, I love that. I love that. I mean,

I think it is an offering, right? Like frame of mind is an offering. I love Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the nature of trying to write a book like this,

or really look at our lives clearly anyway. And you say, this isn't a tell-all, because all is something we can't access. We don't get all. Some, yes. Most, if we're lucky, all no. And then also at another time you say there's no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some, a tell-most maybe. This is a tell-mine and the mine keeps changing because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that. And I just love this idea of recognizing that anything we are saying is, again, back to that, it has a perspective to it, has a lens we're looking through. And that lens is always changing. You know, I'm always changing.

The way I feel about a certain aspect of my past can look very different one year to the next, to the next. The event didn't necessarily change. Well, it didn't change. Either I remember it differently or I relate to it differently. So there's just this sense. And I just loved the naming of the slipperiness of all that. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of places in the book where I just actually say, like on second thought, or I get to a different realization about something by the, you know, the last third of the book, and I feel differently than I do in the first third.

And it's not because anything is any, quote, different. It's because I'm different. And my perspective on is different. I'm answering the questions for myself in a different way. I mean, we're not static, right? And that's the tricky thing about committing anything to the page is that even as this book ended, the life continued, right? So even this book, it's a sliver, right? It's a time capsule in itself of these events, but also how I felt and processed them in a very specific, you know, two or three year period of time as I was writing it. And in 10 years, will I feel very differently about some of this? Maybe, right? The book stops and the life doesn't, if we're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a beautiful testimony that we are always changing because I think for me and for many, when we're in the thick of a difficult time, the tendency is to say, it's always going to be this way. It's always going to feel this way. I'm never going to feel better. And this is such a beautiful reminder that we don't know how you're going to feel,

but you'll feel differently. You will feel different. You know? Yeah. Ideally. Ideally. Right? Ideally. And I think that gets to being willing to ask the difficult questions, you know, because whether it's about this situation, about all situations in general, that's how change

happens. I think if we stop questioning and we don't recognize that this is a tell mine, you know, we then start to think we know the answer. And once we think we really know the answer, I think that's how humans get stuck, you know, and I can look at people in my life who are older than me who think about, say, a situation that happened to them 30 years ago, the same way they thought about it then. And to me, same way they thought about it then. And to me, that's not ideal, right? Like I'm hoping that as I grow and change, I'm able to say like, oh yeah, you know, I see some things there that I didn't see before. I had a blind spot there I didn't see, or now I understand why she did that. And so I

think that being willing to ask the questions is part of what does what you're saying, Ginny, willing to ask the questions is part of what does what you're saying, Ginny, which is that things change. It's not just time. Time is part of it. And it's interesting to see the book unfold because as time goes on, you start to heal. And time, I think, has an element of healing in it, but I think it can be much accelerated by the questioning. Yeah, time plus curiosity, time plus action. Kindness. Yeah. Yes. Oh my gosh, curiosity.

That's huge. I mean, I think that's really the sort of spirit that I entered the book with was a spirit of curiosity, like a seeking spirit, which is probably where that epigraph really comes from. So I knew if I approached even this sort of difficult subject matter with a spirit of sort of empathy and curiosity and flexibility and open-mindedness and also just self-forgiveness. Yeah. Even that I probably would be on the right path with the writing of it, as opposed to like, if I had gone down the path of writing this book with the opposite, all those things, like I know what's right. I know what happened. My way is the way I'm good.

And these people are bad. I mean, there are ways to approach a situation that I think will put you in a stuck place even over time. Yes. Because you are so committed to your story, your version, whatever that thing is, and staying open and curious about it, I think is the way to like not get in that swamp. Yeah. Yeah. As I reflect on that, now that I hear you say that, I mean, did you at all contend with an inner critic or a self-judgment?

And how did you sort of meet that and work with that through the process of writing this book and reflecting on your experience? Because what I come away with is not someone, you know, beating themselves with a stick. I come away with someone gently and openly exploring what happened and what happened inside of me and around me. And that's beautiful and not necessarily my first inclination when I go to self-examination. No, I mean, I definitely have an inner critic.

She can be loud. Quieting her can be an issue. And actually, I think that section you were talking about before, how can this book be useful? I think that's the inner critic talking. I think it's the critic that says, what right do you have? Why spend your time and energy doing this? Why tell this story? Why go there? Yeah. I think that is the inner critic kind of poking through, you know, peeking out from behind the curtain in that part of the book. And I think some of the threads in the book about wondering about the questions that people will ask me about the book is sort of my way of trying to get ahead of both inner and outer critic. Like, yes, I anticipate the kind of pushback I might get both from myself and others about writing this candidly about my experience. And so the sort of more meta aspects of the book, I think are me kind of contending with my inner critic and having a kind of conversation with myself on the page about like, why are we doing this, Maggie? What is the value in this? Like not just

for you, but like what is the purpose of this kind of writing? It's not a self-help book, right? It's not poetry. So what is this project? project why does it have value that's the inner critic yeah it makes me think of the buddhist story of when the buddha was enlightened the night of his enlightenment the last thing mara sort of the shadow said to him was who do you think you are oh yeah you know it's that idea of like what right do you have to any of this? That is 100% it. Yeah. Yep. Oh, the shadow.

I love the idea of critic self as shadow. Yeah. That actually, as a metaphor, makes a lot of sense to me. In a divorce, it's very easy for us to sort of see what the other person has done. And in some cases, it's very obvious. You say, betrayal is neat because it preempts me from having to look, really look at my marriage. And it caused me to reflect back on, as I was joking before, I've said my first divorce, which then leads you to know that there was a second one.

So looking at my previous marriages in both cases, in the first marriage, there was an absolute betrayal of that sort that you describe. And in the second, one person was much louder and much more angry than the other person. I was not the loud and angry one, as you might imagine. And that made it easy to say like that the problem is there. Problem is you, you fell in love with someone else. You were always angry. But that made my role so much more hidden and so much more subtle, but nonetheless, still really there, right? I mean, still absolutely there. And I just love the nuance that you were taking and trying to question your role in it without taking too much responsibility at the same time for someone else's behavior. Again, we're sort of juggling different things, right?

Because on one hand, it's like, well, we're sort of juggling different things, right? Because on one hand, it's like, well, I do want to understand what I contributed here, if for no other reason, so I don't do it next time, right? And as a way of understanding why somebody might have acted the way they did, but without then suddenly going too far the other way and saying, well, they were right to act that way because I was X, Y, and Z. I've sort of skirted both those extremes before. Yeah. I mean, I think it's easy to fall into either blaming and finger pointing and making yourself the victim or on the other hand, sort of justifying or excusing someone else's poor choices. And like in between, I think on the continuum in between

those two things is the space in which you realize that all relationships, work, family, parent, child, friendship, marriage, partnership, these are all co-created systems. And yes, you know, things can happen that are surprising and things can happen that sort of blow everything up, right? Like we can't always know what will happen, but there's still a whole lot going on besides any individual problem that did contribute. And so it was important to me to sort of be like, also i'm not perfect wasn't perfect will never be perfect these are the ways in which i see now i contributed to that system yeah and the way that it looked and here are the bits of my family life that i probably inherited from my parents because

of the way the division of labor in my home, for example, between my parents and how I sort of recreated some of that in my home and how it didn't serve me, but I didn't change it. A big part of this, I think, is like taking responsibility for my part and only speaking for myself. Yeah. Which ultimately is, at least for me, has been an empowering thing to do because I then realized that what I contribute in future relationships can be different. And therefore, I co-create a different system that I'm not sort of victim to another person's painful choices. Do you see what I mean? I mean, not that I won't experience people that make painful choices that have impact on me, of course, but I have a power in the way I respond. And I do have choice in the way that I day-to-day meet that system I'm co-creating.

I think that's incredibly empowering. Yeah. It makes me think we were talking earlier about asking the questions about it. And by doing that, you remain unstuck. I think all these things are a way of taking the locus of control such as it is and putting it back inside us to some extent. It's not to say like, oh, I'm the whole problem. No, of course not. As you said, co-created. However, I can only change me. I can't change the other person. If all the answers lie in the other person and their behavior, I'm kind of stuck. And when I say, I know people who are like 30 years later have the same relation to the other person is because

they, the whole problem was always in the other person. And if the problem is always outside on interpersonal things, right? The problem is always outside. We have very limited means with which to work with that. Yeah. And of course, things that are just happening to you. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's a really disempowering and frankly, scary way to live, which is to just sort of perceive that things are going to happen to you. And you just are at the mercy of everyone else's decision making where it's like, well, now I see I could have done X, like, well, now I see I could have done X, right? Not that I'm beating myself up about not doing X. Yes. I did the best that I could with the information I had in the person I was in that iteration of me. I did the best I could, but with the information I have now, I probably

would do it differently. I would set a different boundary. I would ask for something else. I would speak up in a different way. I would be more assertive. I mean, it's really too bad we don't have like the wisdom of middle age in our teens and twenties as, as it truly, you know, when so many of us are making those decisions about how to live our lives in ways we think are permanent. You know, I mean, there are decisions I made in my 20s, I really thought were permanent. That's it decisions, you know, I had sort of like frozen my life and time, and I would just copy paste it, basically, you know, into infinity. And every year would pretty much look the same because I had decided what my life was going to be. And, you know, some decisions cannot hold, should not hold,

were not meant to hold. You know, I think about, you know, Pema Chodron's difference between pain and suffering, right? Like pain's not optional pain. We just have to like, feel it. There we are. I would love to have some other multiple choice available to me, but, but pain is always going to be part of it. Actually, my therapist and I decided that there is a multiple choice. It's you can feel pain, feel sad, and shame yourself for it and beat yourself up for it, A. Or B, you can feel sad, feel pain, and not beat yourself up about it. So I feel confident there actually is multiple choice there now. And it has to do more with my reaction to it.

But the suffering, that's from like the resistance to change and the refusal to accept. That's a place of stuckness I don't want to be in. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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Through the lens of mindfulness, we talk about there's the object of our attention, and then there's the relationship we have with it, the way we are in relationship to it. And that is where actually all of our experience with it lies. Like you said, the why me or the fighting it, and there may be a place for that, right? And then there's also a place for moving towards acceptance or wise action and wise response. And however we meet it, that's the experience we're going to have by and large. Yeah. You know, and that's kind of empowering, I think. There's another framework that you describe in your memoir that was yet again another one that just I had this moment of like, exactly, that is it. Exactly. You named it. And I'm wondering, do you have a copy of your book handy? Would you mind

reading it? I can point you right to it because I just love hearing you read your work as you read your poetry. It's been so beautiful. So this is page 22. As you mentioned your 20 year old self. Okay. How I picture it. We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves, all of ourselves, wherever we go. Inside 40-something me is the woman I was in my 30s, the woman I was in my 20s, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me, married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death. All these different lives we get to live in this one body

as ourselves. Ah, yes. You were the first person to ever language it like that. It's so true. I always feel like little me is still there inside of me. And you're right. We carry all of them with us. What a beautiful way to integrate the lives we live. I've been thinking about integration a lot. So I love that. And to me, it's sort of like the same thing we do when we revise a piece of writing and then save a new version. I never save over, right? Like I never replace one version with the new version.

I always save the old draft because I want to see where I was before. I want to be able to follow the breadcrumb trail back and see each iteration of that poem or essay. And I kind of think of us like that too. You know, when we had a new birthday, we're not saving over all of the other drafts of us. I think of them as nesting dolls, like those Russian Matryoshka dolls, because it's like, it's all in there. And somehow it's just impossibly elastic that we're able to carry all of these versions of ourselves with us all the time and all of these memories and all of these different ways of being all at the same time. It seems impossible. It's a kind of multiverse. It seems impossible.

And yet that's just how we live. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the word carrying because the way you say it evoked in me this tenderness that it's almost like I'm carrying the younger versions of me, a maternal way. It's in a loving way. It's in a bringing you with me gently. I'm trying to cultivate more of that energy in the way I relate to myself. I love that you read tenderness in that. Someone asked recently, if you could go back and revise a poem from a published book from 20 years ago, would you do it? And I said, no, even if I think I would write the poem differently now, that poem is a record of the writer and the person I was then, right? And I don't want to erase her by erasing her choices and how she wrote that poem. Again, we're not auto-saving. We're carrying all of it along. That's important to me.

Let's talk a little bit about another thing that comes up in the book a number of times, which is the idea of forgiveness. And you say in the book, my aspiration is to forgive. You say, by the time these pages are printed, by the time you're reading this, may I be in a place of forgiveness? And I was just thinking about that. And I was also thinking about, we've had a couple people on and we've done episodes on forgiveness. And we've talked about how one of the hardest things in the world to do is forgive someone who's not sorry. And so I'm curious for you, as you continue to, you know, have an aspiration towards forgiveness, do you feel like you're making progress on that? And do you feel

like there is a part of you, a place in you that is afraid to forgive or doesn't think that forgiveness is wise at the current moment for any number of different reasons? If I'm teasing too much out about your current situation, you can kick this question down the road. No, you know, I think I have a complicated relationship with forgiveness, which is why I think I was, I was writing that aspirationally. And I think where I landed was acceptance, which feels, I don't know how you feel about this, but it feels somewhat different to me. Like, I don't know about the dictionary definition of acceptance versus forgiveness, but I think they do feel kind of

texturally and qualitatively different to me. So perhaps the short answer is I think I got myself to a place of acceptance where I'm not in a place of like struggling and pushing back against what is, and I'm not blaming myself, but I'm also not blaming others. Like I'm in, I think, a sort of like as peaceful as I can be neutral space about that, you know, because what I'm seeking is peace. But forgiveness still feels still slightly like my fingers can't quite touch it for some of the reasons you're describing. Yeah, if you have any wisdom to share there, I am all ears. I don't know that I do.

I do think we touched on this a little bit earlier, I think, in this conversation. Or I can't remember. Maybe we touched on it in our few minutes beforehand. But the idea of when we really recognize what anger or hate can be doing to us, right? For me, that was a fundamental step on at least getting to the aspiration for forgiveness, where I went like, oh, I see, like another old Buddha story says, resentment is like holding on to hot coals you know the other person isn't getting burned you know or which we used to say in a it's like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die you know so you get this sense like oh okay well this is only hurting me

and yet i do think you're right there is a place i think between forgiveness which i've experienced for some people who have harmed me in the past, true forgiveness. It feels like I have extreme warmth towards them. When I think about the situation, it doesn't cause me any distress. It's just kind of over. Have they apologized? They have in those cases. Yeah. Or at least recognized we co-created a situation. But then I think of other situations where I don't think that I'm there. Where I don't want to be is I don't want them occupying a bunch of space in my brain all the time. And so that does seem to be a little bit of the acceptance piece. It's, you know, sort of like, okay, I've got to find a

way to turn the temperature on this whole thing down, take them from occupying 50% of my mental energy to 3% of my mental energy. But I wouldn't say that I necessarily feel feelings of warmth in my heart towards that person. And I've sort of started to accept that in certain cases, particularly if the harm is ongoing, that that might be just about as far as is reasonable to go. Yeah. At least for me. I think that seems reasonable to me too. And also self-protective

and not in a sort of like guarded overreaching way, but in a really reasonable boundaried way, which is like, I respect myself enough that I'm going to keep this distance and it might not ever be warm. Right. I've never thought about warmth and forgiveness as sort of traveling together. And I find that interesting because I do think that's clarifying. If it's impossible for you to think about having warm feelings towards someone, you're probably not in a place of forgiveness with them. Yeah. But you might be in a place of acceptance without warm feelings.

I love that you brought the word acceptance into the forgiveness conversation, because as I think about a relationship where there is, well, let me say there has been an apology, but there is no change in behavior with my sister. It's a really ongoing, long, painful, difficult relationship. I think lately what I have been able to find is accepting of who she is. Not that I want her in my life. I have a maximum sympathy, minimum contact scenario with her. Like the boundary is there. But in terms of how I can have peace up in my own head, in my heart about the situation, I've just sort of accepted this is who she is telling me she is through her actions repeatedly. And so I am going to accept that as opposed to constantly in my head, wishing she was different, wanting her to be different, arguing she should be different,

talking, you know, it's like, and it's interesting because I just on Instagram, I started following this woman, Dr. Caroline Leaf. She had a post recently that said, you can't hurt others with your thoughts, only yourself. And I was like, oh, so all of these arguments I'm having with her in my head, all of this is only corroding my own brain. Yeah. So if I can just quit being surprised that a snake has bitten me, they are a snake, they tend to do that. And just accept that's who she is and quit walking in paths riddled with snakes. If I can, then I can have some peace. Yeah. Realistic expectations I think are important. And also having a real sort of heart to heart with the self about what the people in your life are capable of. Yeah, exactly. Like this is what this person

is capable of. Like this is what they have to offer. That's right. This is what they're bringing to this co-created system. And so I have to behave accordingly and I can't make them different. I can't make them show up in a different way. I can't make them capable of what I think they should be capable. You know, the realistic expectations piece of like acceptance is big. Yeah. The piece that comes with that is huge. I mean, for me, since I had that realization about my sister, I have spent so much last time, very little time at war in my head with her.

Yeah. And it's just, it's like liberating. Yeah. I think that capacity thing is a really important one. When I think that somebody should change or more importantly, could change, I'm then very troubled. If on the other hand, it was like with Ginny's mom, there became a point with Alzheimer's, I went like, she can't, it can't happen. She can't do differently than this. In that moment, it became incredibly easy to be like, she can't, it can't happen. She can't do differently than this. In that moment, it became incredibly easy to be like, well, that's the way she is,

because she can't not be. Right. But that extends further than we might often think it does with people, at the very least, with the capacity to not want to change. I mean, one of my favorite quotes that I use on this show over and over again is when you realize how difficult it is to change yourself, you realize the near impossibility of changing anyone else. And I just love that because it really puts it in perspective for me. I'm like, yeah, you're right. I've got my hands full trying to like, with me here, like, I'm not going to get someone else to do it, particularly if they don't want to do it. Yeah. I'm going to mind my own side of the street as best as I can. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Maggie, thank you so much. We both loved the book. We love talking to you as always. And thank you so much for this generous and fun conversation. Yeah. Thank you, Maggie.

Oh, this was a joy. Thank you both. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

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