We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 265. Megan Falley Knows What Love Is

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

When was the first time you were made aware of your body or made to feel ashamed of your body? As promised, poet and author, Megan Falley, returns and blows Glennon’s mind with her explorations into the complexities of body, gender, and love.  Megan reflects on her earliest memories of body shame and the lessons she learned about love from her family (and how she’s able to hold both the good and the bad at once). Megan shares about her summers at “fat camp,” her decision to leave an abusive relationship, and finding love with poet Andrea Gibson that redefined for her what it means to truly love and be loved. At the end, she tells a story that Glennon decides is the best description she’s heard of what forgiveness might actually be.  For our Andrea Gibson and double date episodes, check out:  Ep 245 An Unforgettable Double Date with Andrea Gibson & Megan Falley Ep 215 The Bravest Conversation We’ve Had: Andrea Gibson About Megan:  Megan Falley is a nationally-ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry – most recently her book “Drive Here and Devastate Me”. Since transitioning to writing prose, excerpts from her memoir-in-progress have won several first- and second-place national prizes. She runs an online writing workshop called “Poems That Don’t Suck” which has been heralded as “a degree’s worth of education in 5 short weeks.” TW: @megan_falley IG: @meganfalley To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I walk through fire, I came out the other side. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is a special episode with just me because I requested this to be just me because I had such a emotional and special and important experience reading and experiencing our guest's art. So today our guest is Megan Falley and she is a nationally ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently her book Drive Here and Devastate Me excerpts from her memoir and progress have won several national prizes and she runs an online writing workshop called Poems that Don't Suck, which has been heralded

as a degrees worth of education in five short weeks. You might remember Megan from our double date episode with Megan's partner, Andrea Gibson. So go back and listen to that. Megan, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you for doing this with me today. I could not be more excited. Thank you for having me. So I want to tell you one interesting thing that happened to me as I started reading

your work. Because as I've mentioned before in my eating disorder recovery, I got to kind of a stuck place where I wasn't making any more progress. And my doctors prescribed to me your partner's poetry, Andrew Gibbs's poetry like as medicine. And it worked, okay. But I didn't know your work. And so I started reading you to prepare for our double date because that's the kind of nerd I am, okay? Okay.

And this really interesting thing happened, which I wasn't sure I was gonna even talk about today, but as I, as I read, I fell more in love with your writing and with the themes that you explore. I felt such a connection to you and to your experiences in life, which we'll talk about later. But I also felt this feeling of surprise that you were so good. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And then I kept thinking, I was talking to Abby about it.

Like, why am I so surprised? And Megan, I think that I have internalized femme bias. Mm, and I'm a humiliate, a feminist, a fem queer person. Like I'm embarrassed to explore this part of myself, but I think I looked at you in Andrea and thought, Andrea will be the badass one. What all did you know?

Don't you think, and it's so interesting because it drives me nuts when people do that to me. People will come see me speak on stages. And afterwards say to me, God, I can't believe how smart you are. I can't believe you're such a good speaker. And I'm like, but I do this for a living. You came to see me. Do you think that that's a thing that we internalize this idea that the FEM will somehow be less powerful? 100% and I feel like I've encountered that and I don't know if it's, yeah, femininity,

like it's interesting how you hold it in a queer relationship as well, like the patriarchal dynamic, but I said to a friend yesterday about this interview and podcast, I was like, I'm so excited, I'm going to do great. And she was like, I love your confidence. And my initial thought was that I didn't actually take that as a compliment, because if Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to go into a competition or something and say, you know, I'm going to win this or whatever, nobody would say to him, I love your confidence. They'd say, hell yeah, you are. And I exactly have felt that and I'm sure have done it myself.

But yes, that's real. It's almost like you're so photogenic. I'm like, no, I'm beautiful. Yes, you are. You post a picture of yourself in a bathing suit and a bunch of people say, you're so brave. Oh my goodness. And you're like, whoa.

I've gotten not a lot when I would get on stage. Like, you're so brave to do that. And I'm like, does that mean it would scare you to be me in public? I, it's fascinating. It makes you... So I'm not offended. Thank you for sharing that.

It's so interesting to me because I think it's a self-hatred thing. That's all it can be. Like, the bias we have against other women is really like, I don't believe in myself either. So it's so exciting for me to see it and get it out of me because I don't feel guilty about it because I'm conditioned to feel that way. So it's cool to notice it

because that's a process of getting rid of it. Absolutely. I think it's out of me a lot because I almost never see a man. I know. Our community is just all women are so queer. And so, yeah, I get really strange when I see a man. I think it's almost the opposite of me.

I assume men don't have a lot of the intelligent things to say at this point. Yeah. And I almost have to unlearn that too. I get quite surprised. And then I might do a thing where if a man does like a simple gesture that a woman might do every day, I will be like, oh my God, he's incredible.

You know? We do that with our kids. Like our boy will pick up the dishes and we're like, oh, he's such a good boy, but our girls are doing it reflexively. It's in all of us. It's in all of us. And I literally do it with my boy dog,

and I'm not kidding. Give me an example. First of all, we didn't know if we would love a boy dog. He kind of came into our life and he's absolutely our favorite And we just can't stop talking about how good looking he is all the time and Just what a sweet little muffin he is and it it's so wild The man worship in all of us is so intense

And then if this double edged sword of worship, but also it's interesting what we're both saying. It's like we either put them above, they're above human, or we put them so below, we think, oh, you can't have a conversation. I am really trying. I really want to, in this next part of my life, undo all of that shit and like try to approach everybody as if they are just human, not super or sub. Just like us. On our double date, we, you said something that I'm still thinking about, which is that you have, and I'm gonna say it wrong, you fix it, but you've struggled a lot with the way your body looks and feels your whole life and then you were talking to your partner Andrea after they got a really serious cancer diagnosis and

They were struggling with you know sickness in their body and they said I just so badly want to have a body And that that kind of rearranged some things for you in terms of worrying about the shape of your body. Can you talk to us about where this whole body thing started for you? Maybe talk to us a little bit about the brochure you found on your kitchen table and you're a little one. Yeah. So the first time I became aware of my body as different in any way or and I do think it's a really

poignant moment to ask anyone when was the first time you were made aware of your body or made to feel ashamed of your body so much happens from that moment and I was nine years old I can remember exactly what I was wearing exactly where I was standing and my uncle said, you've got a real pot belly over there, don't you? And I was nine years old. And I looked to my mom who then sort of rushed me upstairs to safety away from this comment.

And sometimes I wonder now what it might have been like if she was like, oh, whatever, you know, it was almost when it, like when a child falls and they look to their parent to confirm the damage, I think my mom's reaction amplified it in my mind. And since then, it was maybe sort of a magnet, but I was like bullied for my weight as a kid and throughout my adulthood. And I was 11, I think, yes, 11. And I went downstairs one night, my mom was at at work

and she'd left up for a shore for a co-ed children's weight loss camp on her kitchen table. And I'd heard of the camp before and knew what it was and was completely mortified. And so angry with my mom, it felt like my own mom had stuck a kick me sign on my back. And it came with a VHS tape. And for whatever reason,

I took it into our den and I put the video in the VCR. And I watched it. And I was crying the whole time and just having all my little 11 year old feelings. And I was also so much wanting to be an after picture. That when my mom came home, I told her that I wanted to go. And I went that summer, I turned 12 there. I went for five consecutive summers until I turned 16. And they were always my choice. And I think I held a lot of anger with my mom for that place, for what it solidified in my psyche about, you know, what my problem was as a child. I hadn't gotten my period yet.

Like, I was a baby. But when I think about it now, my mom was one of the most loving moms ever. Andrea says, my biggest problem is that I was loved too much. And I think what was really happening is that it wasn't necessarily that she wanted me to be thin in the way you might see, like, I don't know, the sort of militant mothers were really in control of their daughter's body is and that feels like a reflection of them. I think my mom so badly wanted me to be happy and she saw how much teasing I was enduring, how many times I cried to her about this and you know, that was her solution. She was absolutely doing the best she could to give me the most love that she could. So I can hold all of that now.

All of that now. It's such an interesting, if there's so many of us that are looking back at how our moms, and by the way, we always blame the moms, right? Dash always somehow get off the hook. right? I always somehow get off the hook. But how they dealt with our weight stuff. And I know I have had so much anger about it. But it's like it was such a different consciousness then. And they looked at us and just wanted us to be safe too. Like they knew they felt like it wasn't safe to be a fat kid or a fat woman. And so they did everything they could to protect us, I guess from it. It's beautiful that you can hold both of those things. I think the narrative was for my mom that if you were fat, it was almost a fat woman you didn't get to choose.

You didn't get to choose the partner, you didn't get to choose the job, you didn't get to choose the life that you wanted. You just sort of sat around waiting to be chosen. Tell us about your mom. Well, my mom is incredible. And she is the sort of mom where everybody kind of wishes she'd been their mom. And she makes beauty everywhere she goes. We didn't grow up with a ton of money and she really wanted a Persian rug. And so she painted a rug onto our hardwood floor. And my favorite part would be, you know, if some workers came to fix a furnace or something,

I'd watch them actively avoid getting their work boots on the rug because that's how realistic it looked. And she's an incredible person who I think has grown with me through this process. Like, we can have the conversations about the past and she can, I think, honor that she was doing the best that she could, and also acknowledge why that would have been damaging. Yeah, I also, she grew up so poor that her parents own a candy store in Brooklyn and she lived in the back of it. She grew up there. And I think she maybe had some sort of maybe had some sort of princess fantasy of being saved from that by a man. And so I think for her beauty was a survival mechanism. Like it was life or death. That, you know, that she would be swept up and taking care of.

And beauty was interlocked with that 100%. We judge people now for thinking that way, but there's also the element of they weren't wrong. Yeah. She 100% she wasn't wrong. And I think that's a really good point of we're trying to operate outside of the culture while still in the culture. So how can you successfully do that?

How can you be anti-capitalism in a capitalist country? All of it. How can you fight patriarchy within the patriarchy and still survive it? It's more complex. But I think my work in the world right now is wanting so badly. I think we've come into a time where we're seeing things so black and white and we're becoming fundamentalists of what is right and what is wrong. And even the most liberal people are capable of becoming fundamentalists in this way. And camp for me,

it, you know, Andrea compared it to a conversion camp. And I thought that I at the same time, I was like, that is brilliant. And that's not true. And they really argued with me about it. And I think what it came to is, while I don't think that children's weight loss camps should exist, I don't think they're good. I think that they promote, at least in me, it promoted this idea of total distrust of my body, that and out of controlness, that I needed to live somewhere where there was a gate and counselors and any so-called temptation was just not there, and I needed to be forced into exercise and forced into eating a certain way. And it built a distrust of my body and my intuition in a lot of ways. And at the same time, those were the best summers of my life.

The girls that I met, it felt like we were all intimate in knowing each other's wounds. That understanding was just there. And I think because the acknowledgement was that we were all that and that common denominator was settled. And so we weren't the fat kid in any circumstance. And so we were allowed to be other things. And I think I found so much of who I was outside

of my body there as well. And how do you hold all of that? I want to burn these camps down, and what I have survived without them. Wow. Yeah. It is interesting thinking of it as a conversion camp, because it is like interesting thinking of it as a conversion camp because it is like sexuality is innate in us and an energy and appetite in us. It's human and it both of those things just feel dangerous in our culture of sexuality being free, a woman's appetite being free. And so it's the place you go to shut down your humanness. And both, I mean, I feel like my eating disorder is tied to my queerness in so many ways. And I have an undone,

I don't even know what I'm saying. I just know that that's true. But they're both things that were shut down really early. And that when you don't trust your sexuality in your body, you don't trust your appetite in your body. You just shut your whole body down. I relate to that so much, Glennon, because I didn't know I was queer until I was literally in a woman's bed kind of, if I happen to stand, so you make it out. And it was the night before my college graduation. And I went to a really like liberal women. There were a lot of queer women around and I would have had a better experience how I figured this out, you know, at least a year before. But I think what happens is I, when you're told so much that your body is wrong, I totally disassociated from my body. I would have

preferred to be a floating brain. Yes. And so I thought of attraction as, okay, well, who's stereotypically attractive? Who does the media tell me to lust after? Yes. And my body wasn't, oh, I can look back now and see that when I followed this girl who is a Jehovah's Witness to do Bible studies with her, that I had a big old crush. I can so in my head, it did not occur to me. And I also thought that to be like a lesbian would mean to be masculine. That was all that I had seen at the time, or like sports, which certainly wasn't going to happen. You might have to camp.

There were no gay Disney princesses. And I wanted to be a Disney princess. I mean, I think what I really wanted from the Disney princess idea was to be loved at first sight. And I have listened to you talk about objectifying yourself and oddly, this is the first interview or anything on a podcast I've ever done where I hid myself view because that resonated with me so much of you saying that,

that I was like, I just want to be completely present and with Glenin and not worry about how my hair is looking or whatever. Wow. Yeah. I'm looking at myself a lot of the time. Yeah, same. I'm like, do I look like I'm responding? It's like, do I, Abby, do I look comfortable? Like, what the fuck? Yeah.

And it just creates another layer where you can't be fully present. You have this other awareness of how am I appearing. And we already have so much of that, but just being able to see your own face, imagine being in a conversation and just holding a mirror. Yeah. Yeah, it's quite similar. So this is actually, this feels really good to just look at you. Tell me about how you learned that men love women and women love men from your parents marriage.

I didn't learn a ton about love for my parents marriage because I never even seen them kiss. They divorced when I was 11 or 12 and my mom would always sort of say the phrase like, women, marry men, hoping they'll change men, marry women, hoping they'll stay the same. And maybe that's true. I don't know. But I think what I really learned about love through my parents was that they stayed friends after their divorce. And my dad would come over

for brunch on Father's Day as I may and my mom would maybe cook it. I was just in Florida visiting my father and my mom flew out as well. And the three of us went out for dinner, just us. And that was so important to me that they were able to do that. I'd had friends whose parents were divorced and they could not be anywhere near. It couldn't be in a football stadium together. And as a kid, I think I was worried about what it meant that the love that had made me died. I just like that stuck with me as a kid. And one of the things I fell in love with Andrea about is, Andrea's entire community is

their ex-girlfriends. The house that I live in, they bought with their ex-girlfriend. Their manager, ex-girlfriend. Their first girlfriend ever comes to stay with us a couple of times a year. My entire community of support throughout Andrew's diagnosis has been like five or six access. Wow. And I think in Andrea, I saw that this inherent knowledge of love not necessarily leaving

us, but changing shape. And I think that is what really drew me to Andrea. Wow, so you think of your parents, the love that made you did not die, it changed shape. Yeah. Oh, it changed shape. Yeah. That's beautiful. What are you thinking about now in terms of bodies and yourself? I know you're working on a memoir, and I can't wait.

I just want you to hurry up about it. I'm just interested in all of it because of your ability to hold two different things so beautifully, because I think so many of us, we just are in this idea of presentism where it's like, I'm judging everything in the past based on right now. And that's why we're so mad at our moms for doing it wrong because you're also talking a lot about bodies, fat camp. Do you ever feel scared because you're thin presenting now Now, I think about that a lot. I talk so much about my eating disorder and eating, and I'm a thin person. So I, you

know, tons of thin privilege and all of that. How do you balance all of that? And what are you thinking about now, like this month when it comes to your body? So my body is completely different right now than it's ever been. Through Andrew's diagnosis, I lost about 60 pounds. And a lot of people have, I think, wondered if what was happening for me was like I was so depressed or something I couldn't eat when actually the opposite was true. You know, Andrea was bald and they had no eyebrows and no eyelashes. And what's true is I still found them so beautiful. And we look back at photos now.

Now that their hair's back, it will be like, whoa, like this is a little alarming, but at the time, as I was with them every day, I never felt that. I just felt their beauty always. But when somebody around you, so close to you, is facing their mortality, you can't help but to do that for yourself. And when Andrea said they just wanted to have a body, they didn't care what it looked like. I thought, I wanna have a body. I want my body here. Does that mean that I love my body? And then what would it actually look like

for me to act accordingly? And for the first time in my life, I had been so all or nothing that I would either be on like this militant juice cleanse and restricting everything, or I would become a human garbage disposal in every single, like every Oreo Dorito in the house had to be gone so that the next day I could be good again. And it was this horrible cycle. And what I realized was sometimes to love myself meant I would eat a healthy, nutritious meal and sometimes to love myself meant I would have birthday cake. And I think once I decided not to like take anything off the table and operate as if I loved myself. My body really changed after

that. And I will tell you I even though my brain was so tossed with, you know, every New Year's resolution would be like, lose weight, whatever. I never actually thought that it would happen. And so I was writing this memoir about my body, never thinking of the plot twist that I would end up losing this weight or that this thing would happen to my partner's body or there would just be this whole shift. And I did feel scared initially that into my partner's body or there would just be this whole shift. And I did feel scared initially that the

audience I'd originally connected to might feel abandoned in some way. My poetry career sparked with this poem I had called Fat Girl. And I'd been called Fat Girl in a derogatory way my entire life. And I wrote this poem and it was reclaiming it. And I got to stand in the spotlight because I did performance poetry and receive a pause for it. And it felt like, oh, this is, I'm getting something good out of this. And I was in poetry slam, which is a competitive art form,

where you actually get scored on your poems, which I have so much to say about the show as well. Assigning numerical value to art. And I mean, it was an incredible art form, but I think it also really had its downsides. But I would read Fack Girl and get tens and the instant gratification of finally being like rewarded for this thing that you were ashamed of.

And then I had this experience. So I think it's important to note, yes, I wouldn't read the F fat girl poem now, but when I was 60 pounds heavier, I was reading it all the time and a video of me reading it reached half a million views. And I went online one day and saw that it was being reposted by body positive feminist activists in my community, who were saying, this girl is not fat enough to write this. She is co-opting the story. And this isn't hers to speak on. And then they were making attacks on my body. Body positive feminist, and they were writing,

I mean, I won't forget it. It stuck with me for so long. You're not fat, you just have a shark body. Whatever that means. I took to mean shapeless. I don't know. And you're not fat just because you don't have a chin. And I was developing all of these new insecurities now.

They were making fun of my hair on these websites. And women that I really admired. And I understood it in a way, because they were much larger than me. And when I have a friend who is much thinner than me, just call herself that, I wanted to murder her. So I could understand that. And even in that body, I still had been privileged technically.

Like I could sit on an airplane without being accosted by the person next to me or and could for the most part at least as an adult go to the doctor and not have it be just about my weight. And it was a real thing that they felt. But I think that the way that they went about it to attack another woman was her heart. And so my thought was like, okay, so I've been called a fat girl my whole life. I finally reclaimed it. Now I'm not allowed to speak about it. And then I'm writing this memoir and then telling the story of my body. Do I have to wait for the arithmetic of my body to be correct for me to be able to tell

my story. No. The good news is there's no correct, you'll never win. So, well, it was so interesting because for me, there was a point where I loved the body positivity movement. I thought it was just so incredible. And I was my Instagram feed and algorithms were diversifying with bodies. And I could see myself in like the lexicon of beauty. I could see myself represented and considered beautiful. And I still had 20 years of this trauma of something telling me the opposite of that. And I would see people post any time that you intentionally lose weight you are succumbing to the patriarchy.

Or there would just be these messages where it started to feel to me, body positivity was equally as pressurized as you should lose weight. And both made me feel like a failure as a female. Yeah. It is very much like that idea that rebellion of a thing, the opposite of a thing, is just as much a cage as obedience to the thing. It's like, yes, neither are freedom. If we have an ideology or a dogma, and then we replace it with the opposite ideology and

a dogma, we still have an ideology and a dogma, which still creates people who are in and out. And so what does the third way with bodies look like? Like what is the freedom of it all? I do feel like what we can say is that the culture that was manifested in your family that put that brochure on your table, that convinced you you had a problem that there was something wrong with you

that needed to be fixed. And that thing was like the thing in your body that wanted food that was appetite. When you were cut off from that, you were cut off from all the rest of the wisdom in your body. You didn't know about your clearness. You didn't believe your appetite. You got yourself into some dangerous relationships later. Talk to us about ACE.

Yes, ACE, which is a good pseudonym, little card up the sleeve. I was 21 when that happened. And I dated a man who was quite a bit older than me, and it was in a position of power over me. And I think he was so gregarious and so out loud in his love and celebration of me in the beginning. And I actually was dating somebody at the time who was really quiet in his love for me, but really good and a really loving partner. And I got swept up in this ace character. I think because of the part of me that needed to be celebrated so bad in such a gigantic way. And that,

yeah, I mean, at that end, did I get a restraining order against him. I look back and think 21. I think I was a kid and I do think that came from This need to just be loved in this gigantic way. I mean he would pick me up when you saw me and spin me around and so even that to feel Light to feel like it could be carried, I think it all connects. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that your separation from the messages in your body allowed you to be influenced above your own inner wisdom by an abusive man. Yes, I do.

And you know what's interesting is I was already in a way using food to cut off the wisdom I had as well, even as a kid. I was eating to not have feelings. I was in a food state. That is. It's cutting off. You're right. That's what it is.

It's cutting off your inner wisdom, your self cutting it off. Yeah. And I heard you speak in one of the podcasts about drinking, I think, as a way of not knowing something that you know, or trying not to know something you know, and that resonated with me so much. And I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I didn't want to know. I mean, my parents were divorcing. My brother was getting into drugs. I don't fully even know what was at the root of it, but I can look back and say, I think I was making myself so full that all I could feel was, I'm so full, I'm going to explode, so I didn't have to feel whatever else the thing was.

So, yes, I can say, culture, 100% cut me off, but I come from a line of addicts to different things, to gambling, to heroin, to alcohol, to sex, and I think that was my way of finding some kind of oblivion of trying to survive. You have some poems and the way you arrange them in your books, it's it's so what you do, which is the end both of things. So you will write one thing from one perspective, like about your dad and then the next poem will be the other perspective. It's so beautiful. When you got that restraining order from Ace, it felt so important to me through your writing of it. It felt like the whole world was telling you to not do that. That it was, you should protect him by not doing something so dramatic.

And you have this poem where you talk about all the things that people said, if you hadn't have done it, How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it?

How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it?

How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? How am I going to say it? protection of self and listening to yourself. It felt like it in your writing. What's true about ACE is that I wasn't the only woman he had harmed, urban harming. And I felt in that courtroom like I was many women. And I knew that like I was many women. And I knew that it would end up being a public thing that I had this restraining order and almost as if I was taking one for the team, I guess, in that it was, could no longer be speculative about, was he harming people or not?

It was decided, not that I put that much complete trust in the legal system, but it was decided in this way. And yeah, it's really interesting because as I, I, he, there are things he that he's done that aren't mine to forget. But what's true is I can look back and I'm so glad that it came across that I was looking at the world then through multiple lenses. Because I think I consider myself a recovering slam poet.

And because it's an incredible art form, it's so exciting, you'd pack the house with thousands of people coming to your poetry. It's just completely electric and magnetic. But what we eventually saw happening was that the judges who were randomly selected audience members could not hear a poem about trauma and score it poorly, even if it was bad, because the audience members would say, you're a misogynist, you're whatever. So eventually what became rewarded was your trauma

and how hurt you were. And I think we then started writing poems that that was what we uplifted. And that was what we valued in each other. And so there was a way that the restraining order was hard. And then I got power from it. And since moving into writing prose, I mean, you can only perform for three minutes and 10 seconds with a slam poem. So that's the amount of time that the judges have to make a decision.

That's the amount of time that the judges have to make a decision. So of course, things are going to be, you know, make a snap judgment. Here it is. And writing prose has been a miracle for me because the nuance that I've always wanted to explore, I have so much more time and space to do that. I say, you sit with the whole story. And even my father, so yeah, my father delivered the restraining order and he shook Ace's hand when he did. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that part of your poem. I'm so glad you brought that up. He delivered the restraining order to Ace. And yeah, he brought it to his apartment.

And yeah, he brought it to his apartment. And I don't know why he told me this, but he shook his hand. Like it was like, don't do this anymore. And then it ended on a handshake. And it baffled me. But this is sort of an interesting story. I hope you'll stay here with me forever. Take your time.

I did a Zoom show during in the beginning of the pandemic, and my dad was in attendance. And I, for the first time, read a prose about fat camp and what I'd experienced and how ten years later, my mom had finally paid it off. I think I wrote, she paid it off in dollars and I paid it off in skin. And I was 50 pounds heavier than when I left camp

when I was 16 and I, her coming in, like waving the check around that she finally paid it off, it just crushed me. And so I read that story and I read it on Zoom and my dad, you know, raised this as digital hand. And he comes onto the camera and full, Brooklyn accent, no care of where the angle of the camera is on at least like eating a sandwich.

And he comes on and he's like, I got two stories for everyone about Megan when one is she came home from camp and How could she did how well she did at that camp and I brought my beautiful daughter some new outfits and it was just like this I Sweary I could hear a hundred people cringe on mute and And it was this moment of like, oh, you don't get it. And it was almost amazing to have all these Zoom faces as witnesses. And then I was totally

stunned and saying, you know, dad, I don't think any kids should have gone there. I don't think that was a good place for kids to go. And he gets like a moment of flustered and then he just goes, what can I say? Maggie, that's what he calls me, Maggie, I'm so proud of you. I can't wait to go to Andrea Zoom show next week. And what can I say? You're the love of my life. And I'm holding all of that. And I feel like in a slam poem, you just get the first part. You just get, my dad doesn't get it. And you don't get the second part of the complete lack of homophobia of, I can't wait to see Andrea show, and all of his love for me, and that there's photos of me and Andrea kissing on his fridge. And I just am so much more interested in holding the nuance

and the complexity of people. And even I'm trying to do that as I write ace, and sometimes it's hard, but I'm trying to find that too. And isn't it more heartbreaking when you have it all rather than just one side? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What's going on, Glen? I just, I think I struggle with this. I'm really, it's like I do think that I tend to think in black and white more and I am trying to figure out.

I feel like I'm in this weird place where I'm always looking back on my parents and my family and I am thinking you don't get it. Like the first part you just said. And like I want to prove all the ways that they didn't get it. But there's all of the other stuff too. There's the pictures on the refrigerators and the love of my life. Also, just as much, just as true. Yeah. And I just think that right now, it's almost like a cultural eye-wrote and untamed. You make your island and you don't let anything on it, no matter who's bringing the shit to you. And I still believe that, but it's like this next part of my life, it's like I had no boundaries

and then I overbounded myself. And now I'm like, there's no formula for any of it. It's not like right or wrong or good or bad or, there's no way to protect yourself from love and fear. Just don't want to wait a heel. Yeah, I think that's crucial. There's almost arguments about what healing looks like. Healing is, you know, weighing whatever you weigh

and being in a bikini. And then you have other people saying, you're glorifying obesity and then you have other, and then say that same person decides to lose weight then they're like a toxic person. And we've agreed that one size doesn't fit all with clothing and then we're applying like ideologies onto each others if there's one size or one way to do it and it's bonkers to me.

I just love your end both of everything of healing too of like I want to be able to say what was fucked up and I want to keep my people close. And I want to keep my people close. And the picture of that for me is you telling the truth on a Zoom with your dad with a sandwich. Like, yeah, I don't get it, Maggie, but you're the love of my life. Shit. You know, we'll just have to take the rest of this offline. I think we really have some work to do. Can you talk to me about how you said that you said when you look like I do, you don't so much come out of the closet as you do a revolving door. Can you talk to me about what you meant by that? I mean, I know what you

meant by that, but just. Yes, I wear Andrea's name on my neck and a necklace. And if I go to a barista or something, they think it's my name. And it's interesting. Whereas like, I can't imagine like Andrea would go in with a necklace like that, that said Megan and somebody would think that they were wearing their own name. And basically just the assumption because I'm feminine presenting that I am straight

and I'm constantly having to contradict that with people. Just wherever on planes. It's always assumed like a he pronoun, if I say my partner, even my partner, which to me is such a gay word. It's always, oh, like what does he do? And it's a constant process. You don't come out once. You come out little ways all of the time to everyone. And it makes you feel left out. What you just said, when I see two women holding hands and I'm alone, I just start

smiling at them, wishing for some kind of secret coat or handshake so I can say yes me too, but I'm just a weird smiling homicidal freak unless I have a butch there to validate me. I feel that all the time I am the smiling homicidal freak unless I have a butch there to validate me. I feel that all the time I am the smiling homicidal freak hoping that the two gaze holding hands will somehow recognize me as one of them. Unless Abby is there, I'm sure. And then, and isn't that interesting to then be validated as who you are with a more masculine presence? Always. A circle. Always.

Full circle. I just want to read this that you said, and you can comment on it or not. I don't think you even need to. When I pass for straight, I feel like I fail something else myself mostly. But what keeps me invisible often keeps me safe. Though there are streets where I'm not sure if I'm safer with hair long enough to pull, or if a shaved head would make them want to prove my woman to me. Does the beast prefer girl flesh or queer? Okay, so I'm going to say this and you probably don't. I think I have more internal, I should than you do. But sometimes when I'm at a place and like say I met like a dry, the dry cleaner or something And I go to the thing and then the man behind the desk says,

are these your husband shirts? And there's something inside of me that wants to correct him. But I don't, because I don't want to like ruin the like good girl moment that we're having. I don't know how to explain it. I don't want to rock the boat of that moment too much. Do you know what I'm talking about at all? Or do you direct everyone all the time? I don't correct everyone all of the time. And I think if I'm in a situation where it I might feel unsafe,

not to, I won't correct somebody. I usually go for the route that's going to entertain me most. So I think if I were the dry cleaner and someone said, oh, these are your husband shirts, I'd be like, they're my wives. Like that to me, it wouldn't necessarily be rocking the boat. But I will say I also think I grew up where there's just more safety, not 100%, but there's queerness is more in our vernacular and like there's more acceptance.

And so maybe there's a freedom in in doing what would entertain me the most that I sort of grew up with that. But I mean the other night we had an Instacart shopper come and Andrea was walking around the house just in their underwear and band-aids over their nipples which is what they use for a bra. And they had their laptop open. And then I'm in another room and I just hear Andrew screaming. And I'm like, what's wrong? What's wrong?

And they're like, the Instacart shopper just saw me naked. And then the Instacart shopper writes. And it was like, I'm sorry, I came to the door. I gave a knock because I didn't want to, um, like, anyone to be freaked out, but I think I startled your boy. So you think that Andrea is my nine year old son. That was your interpretation. And so to me, the most entertaining thing that I could do would, I responded to him and wrote, oh, that's okay, he's easily startled. And so I think it depends each time, but mostly I do what will make myself

a real laugh the most, if it feels safe enough to do. Oh my God, that's so awesome. Can you tell us the story of rediscovering your old friend from Fat Camp? Yes. So I don't like porn, and I was trying to figure out why I don't like porn. I thought there was something wrong with me to not like it.

And so my best friend, Olivia and I were watching, this queer feminist porn. I'm like, maybe I just don't like the straight porn. So we're on this site, and all of a sudden, I see it in a thumbnail. I'm like, maybe I just don't like like the straight porn. So we're on this site and all the sun And I see in a thumbnail. I was like, Oh my God, I know her and I Double clicked and there was one of my first friends from pac camp my first bunk mates and she was in this like Really involved porn scene. It was like watching her have sex and she was bigger.

You know, she was large and she was just enjoying her body so much and in like this wild sexual dynamic and I was so moved that I felt like she'd found a freedom in her body that maybe not all of us had found yet. It's so funny because when, and I figured out, OK, the reasons I don't like porn. First of all, I've been a romantic since I was three. And I realized that what I wanted to type into the search

bar was love. That's what I wanted to see. And also that as a person who is disembodied, as a, I mean, a queer woman who, I mean, I consider myself pretty gay. I know I've had a lot of talk about a lot of boyfriends, but I feel pretty solid in my gayness now. And when I had sex with men so much of that was outside of my body, that I felt like I was looking in on a performance. And so that's what porn had felt like to me too. And just another way that that disembodied me manifested, to not enjoy my body sexually, but to feel like, you know, how does this look or how is somebody else experiencing my body?

Yeah. And then when you saw this girl, woman now, you said everybody would say, when you'd say, when you'd tell people, I saw my friend from Vacuum Bon porn. They would say, what does she look like now? Knowing that what they meant was, is she still fat. Right. But you wrote what does she look like now? Great. Larger than this starving culture. What a feat this is. Here she is taking space like a comet. Here she has roared an internet-wide fuckno. She is my favorite after picture. She looks free in a way that I envy. The way sometimes I look at birds. What did you mean?

Well, the line break in that part, she looks free in the way that I envy, in the way that I sometimes look. I think I wanted my reader to think she looks the way that I look, but no, it's not the way that I look. It's the way I look at the freedom of something else. Oh. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. What is love to you? Yeah, yeah, wow. What is love to you? There's this video that I saw many, many years ago, and I don't even think it's an English speaking child. I think it was captioned. And this little boy is realizing for the first time that the meat that he's eating comes from animals.

And he's talking with his mother about it and he starts crying and he can't believe it. And then the mother starts crying. And he says, why are you crying? And he says, am I doing something beautiful? And I don't even know that I can put words to it, but that to me is what love is. When somebody is the filter of like, how can we walk through this world and like not stop and look at every tree and be just completely amazed? We're desensitized to what's incredible. And I feel like love is when that partition is split open or whatever it is and we're

just moved by the beauty, the immensity, and we're sort of shocked into presence. Hmm. Hmm. I think that is it. I mean, it's so many things, right? Bell Hook said it, or culture's problem is that we don't have a common definition for love. Hmm. I think you're just wonderful. And I'm so happy to know you.

I'm just happy to know that you exist. And I can't wait for your memoir. And I think that your insistence on the whole story is kind of world changing in a shift that we really desperately need. So thanks for sticking to the tension of that. It's something that's missing and we need. And thanks for being so present with me for this last hour. I've loved every minute. Thank you, Glen. And I thank you for being so femme and beautiful and so intelligent.

And I just want to being so femme and beautiful and so intelligent. And I just want to make sure that everybody knows, okay, I have right here. These are the books that you must go get and just keep on your coffee table all the time as medicine. Drive here and devastate me. This is the most recent. Is that correct? Yeah.

That's my favorite. Drive here and devastate me. This is the most recent, is that correct? Yeah. That's my favorite. Do I fear and devastate me? Unreal. Redhead and the slaughter king, Unreal. And after the witch hunt, just so gorgeous, Megan, you're writing, kills me, and brings me back to life. Thank you. I love you.

You did amazing. You were right to be so confident and brave. So photogenic too. Yes, yes. Bifod Squad, we'll see you next time. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things, first, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll

never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved for the friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We can do hard things, is produced in partnership with Keynes 13 Studios. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlyle.

I walk through a fire I came out, the other side I chased desire, I made sure I got what's mine and I continue to believe that I'm the one for me And because I'm mine, I want the line Cause we're adventurers in heartbreak So man, a final destination That we stopped asking directions Some places they've never been

And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home Through the joy and pain That our lives bring We can do a heartache I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new star. I'm not the problem, sometimes things fall apart And I continue to believe The best people are free And it took some time

But I'm finally fine Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on matter A final destination with that They stopped asking directions So places they've never been Come to beloved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain

That our lives bring We can do hard This world finished her rose and heart breaks on land. We might get lost but we're only in that. Stop that skiing directions. Some places may've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain

That our lives bring We can do hard things. Yeah, we can do hard things. Yeah, we can do hard things. you