A few weeks ago, I had a significant setback with my health and whilst I am slowly, slowly improving, it’s taken a toll physically, yes, but also mentally and emotionally.

I don’t like to share the details around much of the health struggles I still live with, especially something that is particularly difficult, because even when I say: please no advice, even the most gigantically-tender-hearted, respectful people with the very best of intentions can’t help themselves from offering it up. I get it! I’m often tempted to do the same with others! And whilst the suggestion might, indeed, be just the thing I need, it’s usually alongside the suggestions of many other gigantically-tender-hearted, respectful, best-intentioned people. And in no time, my nervous system is blown.

I’m guessing I’m not alone in this.

I’m also guessing that in this beautiful, wise, compassionate community there is oceans of truly helpful healing and coping and thriving wisdom.

So I thought:

What if we shared our best insight and suggestions without attaching them to anything specific.

What helps you through health concerns, through sadness, through grief, through frustration, through thwarted desire, through exhaustion, through shock, through disappointment, through anxiety, through depression, through all life has to offer! How do you calm your nervous system? Where do you find joy?

Let’s share all of it! I want to hear! And I believe others will want to hear, too.

I’ll go first: Back in the day, when I was doing Muay Thai, my coach Kru Phil Nurse, was teaching me how to throw a presentable roundhouse. He held the thick, heavy pad, and I threw one after another after another after another. Every once in a while, I managed a beautiful kick: strong, precise, good pivot, flawless hip rotation, gorgeous arm swing, landing the hit with my shin, not the top of my foot, wicked fast recoil back to fighting position. I was in my glory.

But the rest, the vast majority, were awful.

I was frustrated, disappointed, mad at myself. How could I possibly be this bad?

Phil continued to serenely hold the pad, utterly unmoved by my despair.

“I’m the worst,” I said. “I will never get better.”

"Course you will,” he said, crisp British accent, firm in his knowing. “You’ve already thrown a few perfect ones. If your body knows how to do it once, it knows how to do it again.”

Oh, how those words have stayed with me. They’ve helped me through so many profound hardships, in particular, setbacks, such as now. I remind myself, sometimes uncountable times a day, when I have lost my tracking—my body knows how to heal this. It’s done it before, it can do it again.

I also get outside. Listening to the birds chatter, watching the squirrels race the trees, pulling weeds, bare feet on the grass in the summer, cold wind on my face in the winter, always helps. If I keep returning to the trees and earth and sun, the help stretches longer and longer.

I also make pots (and pots) of nettles tea. It grounds me. I trace my Radiant Circuits. Listen to music, lately it’s been a lot of Gram Parsons—gentle on my nervous system, nurturing for my soul. And, of course, snuggle with Rudy Lu and Delilah.

How about you? What are some of the things that get you through rough times? Words you rely on? Supplements? Foods? Protocols? Podcasts? Books? Activities? Spiritual practices? Journaling? Meditation? Walks? Animals? Therapy? Exercise? Anything at all!

I really love when we share our stories; doing so helps me feel less alone in my experiences. I also enjoy getting to know more about all of you.

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I tried to find footage of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris singing Hickory Wind live—and failed. But this video includes a slide show with some nice shots of the two of them.

His voice, his words, his very essence goes deep. Same with Emmylou. If you know Gram’s work, you know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t yet know it, you’re in for a treat!

Another one who died far too young.

What gets you through? Let’s help one another! Share your best tips in the comments!

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Heather Abel on writing The Emilys:

“Can you make the doctor nicer in this scene? More supportive? What if he held her hand or told her he believed her?”

My friend was sitting on my office floor with pages of my novel manuscript spread out around her. This is what we do for each other. She rides the Amtrak from Brooklyn to Western Massachusetts when I have a draft ready for her to read, and I take the reverse trip when she does. We spread chapters across floorboards, rearrange, physically cut out paragraphs and move them. The novel that emerges is always sharper, more open-hearted, wearing its true shape.

But this was a change I couldn’t make. “It doesn’t feel true to me. It just hasn’t been my experience,” I told her. All the years when I was sick in ways doctors didn’t understand – teeth chipping off, stomach and head aches, nerve pain - all the years my kid was dealing with baffling symptoms, I wish I’d had a doctor hold my hand and tell me he trusted me.

My novel, The Emilys, begins when Eve, a mom with two kids, moves from Brooklyn back to her hometown in western Massachusetts. She’s isolated and bored until she reconnects with a friend she hasn’t seen in thirty years. Demeter is a free spirit, charming, loving, and charismatic, but there’s a problem. Demeter’s daughter (who Eve calls Persephone, but has another name), gets violently ill when she spends time in daylight. She’s developed a strange sort of photosensitivity, and Demeter has returned to Massachusetts in the hopes that a doctor there could help her. Eventually, Eve and Demeter find more people suffering in the same way. Nobody’s sure why these people – dubbed the Emilys after the poet Emily Dickinson - are getting sick, or even if the illness is real. As Demeter tries to find help for her daughter, Eve joins a ragtag group of local detectives looking to the past for a cure.

Honestly, I was nervous to write a novel with an illness at its center. Sickness is something we all want to turn away from. But this book grew from my desire to give my characters bodies, unruly bodies, full of pleasure and pain, bodies with symptoms dismissed by doctors, bodies like mine. I wanted my novel to accompany readers who had walked through the land of the undiagnosed, with a friend or a child or by themselves. I wanted to remind myself that in this land there’s kindness, humor, so much love and unexpected connection.

I couldn’t make the doctor act nicer to Demeter in the scene you’ll read below, but I knew that my friend was right about something: Like all of us, Demeter needed someone to believe her, to hold her hand. After my friend left my house, full of her belief in me and my book, I wrote on a file card that I taped to my office wall: Focus on love. And then I wrote an entirely new ending to the novel. It’s the ending you’ll see if you read the book. I won’t give it away, but I’ll just say that this doctor has no idea how powerful and transformative the Emilys will become.

Excerpt from The Emilys:

I expected her to direct me to the office of a specialist, but she told me to turn at the familiar sign of an apple with smiling worm. I knew this place from our own family’s visits here – strep tests, hives, splinters – although not this particular pediatrician, young and redheaded, who brought an antsy energy into the room, chewing gum, spinning on a wheely stool. “Mom brought a friend?”

“Eve Yalen,” Demeter said from a wooden bench. She said my last name slowly, even spelling it for him, which surprised me.

“Just here for moral support.” I was leaning against the examining table; its paper crinkled when I gave a little wave. My instinct was to ingratiate myself to authority.

“You thought you needed moral support? Well, I’ll say again what I said on the phone. Your daughter is a healthy-mealthy.” He kept his eyes on his laptop screen as he talked. “You said you saw a tick on her. Okay. No rash, but I think, well, let’s be cautious, let’s test. As I told you, all the tests are negative, so not sure what we’re doing here. I say, whew, mom, dodged a bullet.” He glanced from screen to me. “Yalen? Any relation to the author, um, Jill, um…”

“Joan. Joan Yalen,” Demeter said. “The Wormfood series? You read it?”

“About a thousand times. Loved it. I mean I loved it. Dark as hell, but funny, too.”

“Joan’s brilliant. Just like her daughter here.”

I felt heat on my cheeks. Not because of the compliment, or not entirely, but because it occurred to me that Demeter hadn’t wanted me there for moral support. No, it was for my name, because I could align her with brilliant Joan, with fame and respectability. I’d been in this position before, although not with Demeter. But why not? I thought it over quickly, why shouldn’t she use my mom?

“Joan Yalen? I’ll be darned. Well, Eve Yalen, what we have here is a case of horses.”

“Horses?” Demeter asked.

“Horses,” he repeated, looking only at me. “You’re standing on a road and you hear hoofbeats. What’s causing them? Zebras? Not likely.” He turned to Persephone. “Have you read Wormfood? You like to read?”

“I listen to audiobooks. In Africa it could be zebras.”

“Good girl.” He winked. “Keep reading.”

“She got the tick bite in Northampton,” Demeter said, holding out a folded square of yellow paper – the graph of symptoms against light stimuli over seventeen weeks. “What we’re wondering is, has anyone else shown up like this? Because there’s no other explanation.”

He set his laptop on the examination table and rolled his chair close to her. “Here’s what I say to kids. Add ‘yet’ to the end of every sentence. Maybe you say, I can’t ride a bike. Or, I can’t shoot a basket. Stop. Add ‘yet’. Get it? I can’t ride a bike yet. You don’t have another explanation yet.” He turned again to Persephone, “Tell Mom to make sure you get outside. Kick a ball. What school do you go to?”

Persephone glanced at Demeter before saying softly, “I don’t go to school.”

I could almost hear it, how the mood dropped. “What’s that?” All levity was gone from his face.

“She’d get sick,” Demeter said. “We’re telling you.” There was a thickness in her voice that sounded like annoyance but I could tell was fear.

He tapped one of Persephone’s knees. “So, kiddo, when you used to go to school, and you complained of an upset tummy, what would happen?”

“My mom … she’d pick me up?”

“And then, at home, walk me through it, what next?”

“We’d eat crackers? We’d play some games?”

“You like all this attention from Mom?”

Again Persephone looked at Demeter, but Demeter’s eyes were closed, her head resting on the wall. “I mean, I like my mom?”

“How about you remove your hat and sunglasses?”

Demeter opened her eyes. “It’s not immediate. The reaction. Could take ten minutes, an hour. Maybe the next day. It’s all right here.” She unfolded the yellow paper.

“What I’m thinking is, who doesn’t want Mom’s attention? Who doesn’t want to skip school?”

All the muscles in Demeter’s neck tensed. “She’s not faking it.” Her voice was so quiet. “She would kill to go to school.”

He rolled backward, pushing off nearly violently, and grabbed his laptop. “There’s the law,” he said. “There’s reporting required.”

Demeter pulled Persephone close. “Well, we’re homeschooling.”

“Okay, great.” He was looking at his screen, typing quickly. “And the district has your letter of intent and educational plan? Your curriculum? I think I can find it all here if you don’t have it on you.”

I became aware of a baby screaming behind the thin wall, of my heart calling emergency, emergency.

“Let’s take a step back,” My businesslike chirp surprised even me, like I’d been possessed by a flight attendant. “How many weeks until summer break? Two? It’s basically summer. That gives us plenty of time to enroll her for the fall. JFK Middle School, that’s where she’ll go.”

“Well…”

I smiled at him, the smile of a daughter of a once-famous woman. “How about we make a follow-up appointment on our way out? For September. Persephone will tell you all about her teachers then. Are you excited, Perse? A brand-­new school.”

“You’ll make sure?” He glanced nervously at the closed door, then back to me. “I’ll need to see her proof of enrollment.”

“You can count on it.” I lowered my voice. “Hey, just out of curiosity, what was your favorite Wormfood? You know everyone chooses the finale, but mine’s book three, weirdly.”

A lie. I hated them all. And calculated flattery, too. Guys always wanted to believe they were unusual for loving the third book.

“Seriously? Bring it here.” He showed me his pale palm. “Team Three all the way.” I slapped him, not as hard as I wanted. “Joan Yalen, man. Some dark nights those books got me through.”

From the book THE EMILYS by Heather Abel. Copyright © 2026 by Heather Abel. With permission from Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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I was captivated by this scene. I certainly relate to both Heather’s experiences as well as that of her characters! I’m guessing many of you have had similar experiences. Or maybe you’ve had doctors who did believe you and hold your hand. Or something in between.

Share in the comments! I’d love to hear!

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What do I love about ’s writing? Her tenderness. Her vulnerability. The music of it; the rhythm. Her delight in language. Her pacing. The long, winding sentences. The clipped ones. How thoughtfully she weighs the world. She seems to take it all in: the tragedies, the injustice, the wonder, the hope; ponders how these all fit together. Then writes something so beautiful, so gutting, so helplessly funny and wise and open. She is forthright but never cruel. And there’s always (always!) a dog. Or two.

And it feels like we’re there with her, every step.

It’s not just me who feels this way. When Lauren filled in the Beyond Questionnaire, she got more hearts and more comments than anyone before or since. Her collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing, became a NYT bestseller. Her essay, I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America, went viral overnight. And her new cross-country memoir, Monster of a Land, has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal and mountains of praise from all corners. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Texas Highways, Huffpost, and The Guardian.

I learned a lot from speaking with Lauren. For one thing, I’m keeping my stereo on again when I write.

If you missed Part One, you can read it here.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

xJane

❤️ Gigantic gratitude to all the paid subscribers whose support for Beyond also supports The DeTommaso Dogs. Ana has gotten over 800 dogs and kitties off the streets and into safe homes. She’s also spayed and neutered over 3,000 animals. Her heart is as big as her determination. I’m so grateful for your support in keeping these sweet babies safe. Thank you! ❤️

Where do you write?

Anywhere. I wrote a lot of this in a studio in the East Village that Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark let me sublet last summer. I write in chairs in my living room. I write sometimes in coffee shops.

When I began the book, I tried the stunts that people told me would help, like renting a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Didn’t write a word. Then the due date starts approaching, and it doesn’t matter where you are, you just write.

We all like to have the fantasy that if we had enough quiet time. But enough quiet time for me, apparently, is not the secret. I need to be a little bit busier. I wrote both books while moving across the country.

Do you think pressure helps you?

Yeah, I need a little bit of time pressure. I need deadlines. I need an editor to be kind of on my ass about it. That’s how I run.

Do you write every day?

No. There’s the type of writing that feels like you’re writing: and then, and then, and then, and then, and then. You have to do it. And it’s boring. And it sucks. And you know it sucks. And you know that nothing you’re writing is going to go anywhere. But if you do that long enough, the hope is, and it’s worked so far, that something clicks.

I’d sit in the living room and put Mad Men on in the background, or the Olympics worked for a while, and just tap it out. I set a schedule: between 10 and 2 I will write. I will do nothing else. That doesn’t ever work. I fuck off and don’t get anything done.

But I have to go through that boring part, and then something will click. Part of that click is a deadline; but part of it is that you have enough of it on paper that you start to see what you were trying to say.

What happens to all those and thens?

A lot of it gets deleted. A lot of it, I hit enter and put it at the bottom of the page and start again with what I wanted to say, not just a chronological log of what happened.

I wish I could write every day, but I just can’t. You get empty and you have to fill with something: going to concerts, or looking at art, or going for a fucking walk. If one day I could remember that driving around listening to music usually gets me unstuck, that would be helpful. But I always forget. Until I have to drive to someplace, and I listen to music, and I’m like, “Oh shit, this works, I should remember that now.”

Do you write on computer, or do you also write by hand?

I write in those little composition pads that used to be 99 cents at CVS, but are now $2.99 because let’s jack up the price of everything. I scribble in those. If I’m stuck on a laptop, sometimes it works to change the format. But I mostly write on a laptop.

When you were traveling, were you keeping notes every day?

I had a composition pad stuck in the net above my bed, and I would write down everything that I thought might be important: the weather, where I drove from, where I drove to, where I stopped, and names of who I talked to. If they said anything that was really interesting or that I thought I might be able to use later, I would copy that down. Just so that I had a note to myself of what had happened.

Would every day have a page or two?

Every day was at least a page even if nothing happened. And there were days where nothing happened. But Woody did this funny thing.

You were on the road three months and visited 37 states. How did you decide what to include? Was that part of the “and then” process?

Yes. But eventually you have to have a story, or it’s going to be 800 pages. And it was 800 pages for a minute there. Once you find what you’re talking about, you figure out what matters pretty quickly. So you cut everything that doesn’t matter. Some of it hurts to cut, you really like it. But it’s repetitive. The point of the book is to make it entertaining for people to read. It can’t be all one thing. It can’t be all levity. It can’t be all tragedy. You have to layer it.

You have this beautiful intermingling throughout of past and present. Do you have tips on how to pull that off?

We get intimidated by a page and forget that we already learned how to tell a story. If you’re telling about a fun night you had out, you’re like, “Rob was there.” And then you add, “he’s the guy who ten years ago….” And then, you say you went to this bar. And then you add, “by the way, I used to work at this bar.”

Just by telling a person a story, you learn what to cut, where their eyes start to glaze over, and what to keep in. What’s the funny aside, and what’s the not funny aside. What’s the interesting tangent, and what’s not.

If you’re at a party and you find another writer, you know they’re going to know how to tell you a story. Whereas if you listen to a non-writer try to tell you a story, it’s excruciating: fast-forward that part, fast forward that part, fast forward that part. And that’s what we forget to cut in our writing, is all those parts we were supposed to fast-forward.

What if it’s a first-time writer, and they’re wondering, “How does Lauren know what to fast-forward?”

If I get bored reading it, that’s what I cut. I started doing stand-up when I was writing my first book. I would go to open mic nights and tell the story, and you can feel when the audience is with you, and you can feel when they drift off. You can feel where they laugh, and where that punchline does not work.

You learn it by reading, you learn it by talking to other people, you learn it by listening to people tell stories. If you don’t come from storytellers, you do have to go find them. A lot of us found them in books.

You write that much of your trip is beyond words, and yet you need words to write your book. I keep feeling like I’m experiencing the world in ways that I don’t have words for anymore, but then I have to sit down and write and try to find the words. How do we write about things that are beyond words?

That’s our entire job, isn’t it? It’s why I started writing, This is a thing that I don’t have words for, and I write until I find them. It was a thing that happened more recently in my life where I realized I’m not always going to have the words for something, and that’s alright. You can just say, “This is too much. Or this is just for me.” I think people understand that.

So you’re going to write a novel! Have you already started it?

I have started four, and gotten pissed off, and scrapped them. So we’re working on it.

Is it about dogs?

No, it is not about dogs. I have a couple ideas. They seem really fun, and then when I try to do them, they’re not working yet. So I’m in that really frustrating stage of it.

What is the pull towards fiction?

I think it would be fun. That’s really the only motivation that I have for writing anything. Because so much of it is not fun, you have to start with, “I think it’ll be fun.” I’ve done a book of essays. I’ve done a memoir. I want to try something new that’s hard in a fun and interesting way. It’s a new jigsaw puzzle to figure out.

Your main character in Monster of a Land is a dog. Is it different to write a dog than to write a human? Woody is so vibrant and alive in the book.

The thing about a dog is you can make him vibrant and alive without trying to make him too complicated. People are complicated; you can’t make them all bad or all good, or they’re flat on the page. But Woody can just be awesome, and he’s still alive and real.

It’s harder, in a way, because ego doesn’t play into it at all; he’s just a dog. It was hard to be tender without being sentimental. But most of it’s the way I talk about him and the way I think about him. It was getting that on the page and not worrying about whether I was making him sound cool enough. He is cool, so I can put what I think about him, and if you don’t think he’s the best, then I don’t really care. He’s the best.

A lot of people who read Beyond are writers themselves, so is there a prompt that you use either for yourself, or—I forget, do you teach? So a prompt you would use when you’re teaching.

I just had my first experience teaching.

Oh, with Roxane [Gay], right?

Yes, Roxane invited me to do a thing at Rutgers. They asked me what I wanted to teach, and I panicked and said voice, which is, you know, the one thing you can’t teach. But I gave them my secrets. I thought about it beforehand; I’m like, “I don’t want to give away my secrets.” But I tell other writers what I do, so why not.

Can you share one or two of them now?

I listen to Sun Radio. They’re this Austin station, but they have an app. I think it’s helpful to not choose the music; to not be hitting next, or play, or skip. They do blues on Monday nights, and I like to listen to the blues and free write. It’s a way that I find my voice and my cadence.

If your writing doesn’t have a cadence, if it doesn’t have a musicality to it, it’s not going to be interesting to read, and the reader will probably never know why they set the book down. But it’s because they can’t find that pace that keeps them moving.

How do you know when you have that pace, the cadence?

I will be keeping time with my hand or with my body while I’m writing. And I will feel that pace in keystrokes. I will feel it when I read it back.

It’s just like any song: there’s a chorus, and there’s a bridge, and there are stops, and there’s that one line that guts you. Patty Griffin’s great at that. Every essay, every book I’ve written has a song that goes to it that I was just listening to on repeat. I’m trying to write something that makes me feel like that song.

What’s the song for Monster of a Land?

I don’t think I’m going tell you that.

Is it a Woody Guthrie song?

No, it’s a song by Ron Pope called A Little More Love. It’s a great song. I wanted to write something that felt like that song. [Readers—Monster of a Land does feel like this song!]

Also: Writing about something you’re raging about really helps because your layers fall away when you’re so pissed off that you’re shaking. That helps me find my voice sometimes.

Those are so helpful. Any more tricks?

I put the computer away and go tell a friend the story. I have a few that I call and ramble about the thing that I’m trying to write on. It helps. Especially if it’s a friend who asks infuriating questions. The questions will piss you off; you’ll be like, “you don’t understand.” And then you realize you’re not telling the story right. If you were telling the story the right, they would understand.

Do you read all your work out loud?

Yes, I have to hear it. I’ll fill in blanks that aren’t on the page if I’m just reading it off the page. I’ll see things that aren’t there. Or I’ll think it’s there, and as soon as I read it aloud, I realize, it’s not there at all.

Going back to the prompt, is there anything you want to add?

Find a song you love and try to write something that feels like it. It’s so hard to find the emotion that you want for a book or for an essay, because it’s a story that’s yours. But to make it reach outward, it has to have a song to it.

That’s the perfect closing line. But I’m going to ruin it because I want to thank you, Lauren, for the ways that I always feel like you have my back. My life post-head and brain injury is not what it once was. So it’s meaningful for me, and I feel it deeply, when I know someone has my back. Thank you for that.

Thank you. Likewise.

If you enjoyed this Craft Advice with Lauren, you might also enjoy this one with

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’s work as a writer, architect, and professor navigates our time of climate collapse and environmental reconciliation. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation. She holds a Fiction MFA from Southern New Hampshire University. She writes the newsletter on Substack, where she serialized her CliFi novel, FLUX. Julie has been published in the magazines Orion, Ecological Home Ideas, and Urbanite; and in literary journals: Assignment; Dark Mountain Journal #6, #8 and #10; Dark Matter #3 and Immanence. Her essay, “Song of the Chesapeake,” is included in the 2025 anthology, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction.

1. What are you reading now?

Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which comes out from Shambhala Publications on June 23. It’s a beautiful meditation on our relationship with the living world and the transformative power of story. It includes presence practices to try outside, to reconnect and experience wonder.

Nina Schulyer’s marvelous forthcoming novel, Open the Floodgates, which will be released September 15. I love her audacious, imaginative premise, and who better to explore the personhood of a river than Nina?

Just finished Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke. Even though it’s been mega-hyped, I liked it more than I expected. It made me think and I’m a sucker for good metaphors.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

Charlotte’s Web and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret come to mind easily. Yes, they’re cliché, suburban American girlhood books. When I was 10, I secretly read the very racy (!!) Flowers for Algernon. I even remember why I had to hide it.

As a visual person, I’ve always loved picture books, so it was a treat to revisit my favorites when my son was little. Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and The Little House are close to my heart. I felt sorry for the innocent little farmhouse being bullied by the aggressively encroaching, dirty, noisy city. Sure, it’s cheap American anti-city propaganda, but I was smitten by that cute, anthropomorphized house.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

The book I’ve re-read the most is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Partly for entertainment, partly to marvel at how she does it. I always learn something new about her craft, and I’m always in awe of the economy of her storytelling. The latest re-read, I noticed that it can be seen as an early foray into what we now call eco-fiction or climate fiction. The novel is set within a deeply felt, ever-present connection to nature.

I read Brian Doyle’s Mink River during the pandemic. Getting lost in his wit and real-life magical world was a salve to my extreme anxiety.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Leopard print pajamas, which I’m wearing right now.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I’m an obsessive collector of aphorisms, so this stumped me. How can I possibly choose? Yesterday, I read this from James Hillman: “We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.” I love the idea that words choose us, not the other way around.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I live on a cove at the head of a creek. Our resident Great Blue Heron is endlessly fascinating. She doesn’t suffer close observation but will tolerate me if I keep a respectful distance. Her patience is a lesson. Her skill. I’ve watched her head dart under and come up with a wriggling fish in her long beak. She tips her head back and extends her elegant snake-neck to swallow the fish whole. Then she sips a dainty bit of water for a chaser. To witness a Great Blue take flight is always a thrill. Whenever the Egret dares to visit from another part of the creek, the Great Blue escorts him out. Bossy and territorial: I like it. I flirted with including her perspective in my short story, “Shapeshifting.”

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I tried for years to quit my profession. I wasn’t getting enough traction as an eco-architect, whether in practice, consulting, or teaching. Ecological devastation and the climate crisis continued to worsen, despite the many strategies to do better. Eventually, I discovered that architecture is not alone in being infected with our mistaken cultural story of separation from (and domination of) the living world. With that perspective, I recast my relationship with architecture, mostly as an educator. I’ve always been a storyteller, so that’s how I approach it now.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I’ll sing in the car (alone), and I’ve danced in the kitchen on occasion (with a partner). When I was younger, I thought my body was just there to carry my head and thoughts around. Now I’m delighted for my body and grateful that it allows me to get out there and participate and feel the world.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope to publish my novel and future novels, and maybe other writing. I’m in love with writing, it gives me such pleasure, and I will keep doing it as long as I’m able.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

My son’s birthmother chose us to be his parents. There’s no greater kindness than that sort of trust. He’s 24 now, we’ve all been through a lot together, and he is the most marvelous human being. I’m so proud of him and enjoy his wit and intelligence. He sees the world so differently from me, it’s like his job in life is to keep me humble.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Hope. I can’t help it, I don’t know why I’m this way, but I am a hopeful person. Hope is different from naïve or blind optimism. Hope is a muscle that needs to be worked. Perhaps paradoxically, it’s an outcome, not a driver. It’s a guiding light for action, not an excuse for apathy. It orients to the future from present reality and past experience. Most of all, hope derives from a healthy dose of wonder and humility in the face of the great mysteries of life.

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I’m just going to start by saying, I love ’s writing. I was part of that lucky wave of people who woke one morning in 2018 and devoured her viral essay I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America and then never felt quite the same about the world again. That’s because Lauren writes with such frankness and insight (it’s like she just cleaned our windshields), and some of it is brutal and some of it is heartbreaking; yet there is always—always—tenderness and, well, hope (see interview subtitle). I’m helpless against this double-carry of sorrow and beauty.

A few things to know about Lauren: She loves dogs. Like, really, really, really loves dogs. In her new memoir Monster of a Land, she goes on a roadtrip across America—more or less following in the tire tracks of Steinbeck and his dog Charley—with her beloved pooch Woody Guthrie (who made the cover of the book). Along the journey, she reminiscences about past dogs, including Teddy, the love of her life when she published her first book, the New York Times bestselling collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing. There is nothing Lauren wouldn’t do for a dog.

Lauren also loves the word fuck. A lot. Which you’ll notice in our conversation, and in both her books.

Lauren was raised in a cult; the infamous Children of God. She’s worked hard to educate people about the dangers of cults in all forms, not only so called spiritual. She was in the Air Force and had some awful, bigoted stuff happen to her there (read Leaving for more insight). She was a cable guy. She once pretty much ruled Twitter and people routinely came after her for just about anything. She stands up to bullies and strikes me as a loyal sort of human. Most especially if you’re an animal. She’s also very, very funny.

Monster of a Land stole my heart. Over the course of three months, Lauren drives through thirty-seven states, a lot them Very Red, in her rigged-out, rickety Dodge van, and winds up in conversations with the sort of people she would have tussled with on social media. Instead, they treat each other with kindness, concern, and empathy. Part travelogue, part astute social commentary, part doggie diary, part hilarity, part big-hearted exploration of how to be a human in today’s America, and entirely bursting with hope.

Lauren also writes the fantastic newsletter .

I always enjoy speaking with Lauren. Her spirit is true. I think you’ll enjoy her words, as well.

xJane

⭐️ Lauren is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Monster Of A Land! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “MONSTER” after your comment (ALL CAPS makes sure I don’t miss it). The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, June 22nd and notified by Substack Direct Chat. This book is so good! ⭐️

This giveaway is open to paid subscribers to Beyond. Shipping is limited to the United States.

Of course we’re going to start with animals! I was so moved by what your friend Jen said about how in Germany, it’s strange to leave your dog alone. They’re meant to always be next to you, including taking them to work. You write, “We don’t have that culture—one that values living beings or their quality of life.” What do you see as humans’ responsibility to animals—wild and domestic?

I mean, wild animals. We’re failing on all fronts here.

Domestic animals is a fraught subject. We have this agreement with them, I think, especially dogs, of: You guys can hear better than we can, you can see better than we can, you have better early warning signals, you’re good at herding animals, you’re good at all these kind of things, and you’re good at keeping us company.

We have thumbs and can get you treats. And play sometimes.

But I don’t think we’re always thinking of the animal first when we adopt one. Can I provide for them? Is this the right dog for me? Is this the right breed for my lifestyle? Like, I am the worst of the couch potatoes. I’ll happily sit there all day and watch Netflix. But I have a really grumpy dog who will yell at me until I get up and take him somewhere cool. If he doesn’t have enough fun, he will destroy my apartment.

I don’t know that we’re necessarily looking enough at how we can make their lives full and fun. A lot of times they end up being furniture and seem miserable.

It’s one of the things I really like about moving back here to Austin: I see dogs everywhere, living dogs’ best lives.

Can you tell us about your relationship with Woody?

I don’t know how to function without him. I really don’t. It might be unhealthy, our relationship. He doesn’t know how to function without me. He sits in the window and stares, until I get home. He’s my soulmate, in a sense. I am a better person because I have him. I leave the house, I talk to people, I do fun things for him that turns out are fun for me, too. I hope I provide the same for him.

In the book, you reflect on how Steinbeck made his dog, Charley, immortal in his book Travels with Charley. Now that you’ve done that for Woody, and also Teddy, how does that feel?

I realize it’s probably going to be a mistake.

Why?

You know how there’s that year, or however long, after an animal dies, where you can’t think of them or talk about them without tearing up. And I’m going have people asking me about Teddy. But also, I’m happy. I put Teddy’s picture on my phone lock screen, so that I would stop crying every time I saw his face. And now I put Woody on the cover of the book. It’s nice that I get to remember. That’s what you want anytime when a person dies, or when an animal dies. Remember the good things, the fun and the goofy parts, and not the animal who you watched die.

I generally have an easier time with animals than humans. Is that true with you?

I connect in a very different way with animals, because there’s no fear of all those buttons they put on us when we were kids. There’s no fear of rejection. There’s no fear of is that thing I said dumb? There’s no, are they mad at me? There’s none of that. It’s all right on their face and right in their expression, and you can make them not mad at you again by giving them peanut butter. Which doesn’t work quite as well as people.

Having dogs has taught me how to be loved by humans. I got this sense of value about myself from animals that I didn’t really get from people. You know, I can’t be completely worthless: dogs fucking love me.

Oh, Lauren, that made my heart swell.

It’s unconditional, their love for us. Maybe not. It’s not entirely selfless, and I don’t think love should be. You should expect something back. They expect care, and treats, and fun. You should also expect care and treats and fun from people. Very simple.

At heart, your book is about kindness, community, helping one another. We are in such fucking mess in America right now. So, how do we help each other get out of this? What do we do with all this collective sorrow?

It’s not just America, it’s the entire globe. The right is rising. It’s the answer it’s always been: the only thing you can do, is whatever you can do. For us, that’s always going to be in our own communities; finding that community, meeting your neighbors.

I was in Durham when ICE showed up. It was our neighbors going around door-to-door, passing out whistles, passing out meeting times for the elementary school. When I was there, because I’d been walking around with Woody, everybody knew me. It’s the same thing in Austin now. I walk around with Woody, so I know the neighbors, and we talk about what’s going on.

You have to find your community, and you have to start small, because there’s no other way to start.

So then all these small communities start connecting, and connecting, and connecting?

We would hope.

I know that we have to get offline. Because they’re farming us. Maybe it started for good reasons. It started as find-your-high-school-friends. But it turns out we didn’t actually need to talk to them very much. Friendships end for a reason, because you’ve grown into very different people. We don’t need to stay connected all the time to everyone we’ve ever known. We definitely don’t need to hear the constant opinions of everyone around us, that they would not be comfortable saying in person.

A lot of us thought we could do some good, but all we did was contribute to this hatred that we’ve all been suffering from. There’s a concerted effort to keep us all at each other’s throats, and hating each other for things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. They are running away with everything, and they are going to burn the goddamn planet down. And we’re going to be yelling about whether hunter green is called blue now. It doesn’t fucking matter.

In your editor’s letter at the beginning of your ARC, she wrote that you walked away from your trip “filled with a tremulous kind of hope.” Is that how you feel?

Really, I expected to lose all hope. I really did. I expected to finish that book and yell and use a lot of fuck words, and then edit most of them out because it’s too many. I expected it to just be a stream of fuck words. And just fuck it, I’m out. Fuck all of you, fuck what you voted for, fuck everything. Peace the fuck out.

You drive around and you talk to people; you fucking go outside, and you’re not online. And people are kind, and people want to help other people, and people want better things for themselves and their families and their friends, and their hometowns. People are fucking trying.

I mean, what good does it do if we lose hope? I’m a natural cynic, but it does no good whatsoever. So a lot of it’s that I choose to have hope. I choose to believe in people. And people will prove me wrong sometimes, but more often than not, they prove me right. And they’re better than I hoped they could be.

I agree with that. And it’s one of the things I love about you. And out walking the doggies, I also have these sort of encounters. But at the same time, while I loved all of the encounters you were having with strangers, and the tenderness that was going on, some of these people were probably racist, some probably were misogynist. These same people who in exchanges with you, this particular light shone from them…some of them must be the same people that are supporting ICE, or trying to get trans people banned from bathrooms or don’t believe in climate change. How do we reconcile all of this? Because I struggle with that.

I struggle with it too. But if you look at your parents’ Facebook feed, all they’re being fed is crime, danger, crime, danger, crime, danger. If you watch their news: crime, danger, crime, danger, crime, danger. They feel like they should be in a bunker right now. So there’s that.

Their experience with the world is being completely manipulated by billionaires. I don’t think you’re ever going to rid the world of racism and misogyny. But racism and misogyny breed when people are scared and desperate.

Nobody who’s able to be happy in their community, and with their time off, and enjoying life and getting two-week vacations is sitting around worrying about what’s going on in DC, and draining a swamp. People know they’re getting shafted. They just don’t know why. That motherfucker told them why, and they believed him, while the Democrats were telling them everything was fine and the economy’s great. They know the economy’s not great, because they can’t fucking afford anything. So, yes, they’re still going to be racists. They’re still going to be misogynistic. But those ideals are bred in fear. And they are manipulated and spread by people who want something. They want power.

You write, “We let the unfuckable get rich and we let them take power, and it wasn’t enough. They wanted us to think they’re cool, too.” You go on from there. But this really struck me as it boils all this cruelty and greed down to people who are ashamed of themselves and are trying so hard to be liked.

If you remember the unfuckables from your high school, those boys who were creepy and nerds, and no girl wanted to talk to them because they fucking hated women. Those are the Mark Zuckerbergs, they’re the Elon Musks, they’re the Sam Altmans. They’re the Peter Thiels. What does Elon Musk have now? 800 billion fucking dollars? And he’s fucking miserable. He’s spending all this time online trying to be funny. And soaking up the tech bros who gargle his balls and their adoration for him. He needs, desperately needs, to be loved. And for people to think he’s cool and fun and interesting. He’s not. He’s just fucking rich.

This might be impossible to answer, but how do we solve that?

We fucking take it from them. They shouldn’t have it. They need to get stuffed back into lockers. I don’t know how to do it, but they should have been stuffed in more lockers or left in one. I don’t know.

Do we try to generate compassion toward them?

Fuck no.

This is where we went wrong. We’re trying to be compassionate and understand people who are not fully human, and never will be. They just see weakness. And they see us as pawns. We are not human to them. They don’t need our compassion. They need to be brought down. I don’t know how we do that. But I know that the longer we play with their fucking toys, the more money they make and the more we learn to hate one another and the more we’re distracted and anesthetized to what they’re doing we become.

That circles back to going offline. You had such a vibrant online presence in your Twitter heyday but you left there. You write your Substack, but you’re not really in Notes very often. Are you basically offline now?

I went to Threads for a minute and realized that that was becoming the same problem as Twitter for my mental health, The problem is now I have to promote a book, so of course they want me making reels, and I never learned how to do that. I had to send my marketing person an email the other day saying, “Look, we’re two menopausal women trying to put a video together. I don’t know how to do this. I need to hire a niece, I think.”

I think Substack has probably a better chance than anything else of selling books, because people there are following your writing. When you had a lot of followers on Twitter, there were a large percentage of them that were just following you to get mad about something.

They’re hate followers; they waited till you said something slightly off that they could then turn into a whole thing. It didn’t take much. Substack followers, if they’re reading emails regularly, they like your writing. So I’m hoping that will translate to book sales.

I just wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to have to dance on a--and I’m not going to--video to sell a book. That’s demeaning and humiliating, and we should not have to do that. But that’s the economy we live in.

Once you’re through the book promotion, can you envision your life being completely offline?

That’s the dream, isn’t it?

Yes, but there are friendships there.

That’s the problem. I miss a lot of the friends I had on Twitter, I really do. I probably should have written down some phone numbers before I nuked my account.

But I don’t know if it’s possible to go completely offline. I know that it’s possible to not scroll and regret days that I spent scrolling. I know that I get a lot more writing done when I’m not scrolling. But I’m not better than anybody. My girlfriend and I still get in bed and scroll for a few minutes before we turn out the lights.

You’re in a relationship now?

Yes.

Oh, that’s lovely. There’s a thread of loneliness throughout your book. You’re lonely as a kid. Lonely after Teddy dies. In and out of loneliness on your road trip. You note the life of a writer can be lonely. So I was going to ask where are you with loneliness these days? Not that you can’t have a girlfriend, and still be lonely. How has loneliness shaped you as a human and as a writer?

It definitely shaped my writing. It definitely shaped me. Writing’s the thing I learned to do with all those feelings that I had nowhere to go with. The fears and the doubts. I learned to put them on paper, and then they had a place to live outside me.

It’s how I think. If I can’t figure something out, I start writing it. Sometimes it becomes clear, sometimes I realize I was asking the wrong question. Often. I’m not sure how I’m going to write without being lonely.

How are you caring for yourself these days? How you tend to your nervous system?

The main thing I did is move back to Austin. The woman I love is here. My dad’s here. I haven’t rented an apartment yet, because I decided not to make big decisions during the book promotion about where I live, so I’m staying between my dad’s house and my girlfriend’s house,

I care for myself by being around friends, and keeping the people who love me close, and keeping everyone else at a bit of a distance now. Because it’s not healthy. I want to be liked as much as anyone, but what you get from the internet isn’t real. It will never feel real. So it’s healthier for me to stay off of it.

Are there foods or vitamins that help?

I have estrogen now, which is amazing. Thank fuck for the VA. Socialized medicine is terrific, and everyone should have access to it. You go to the women’s clinic, and they send you your patches, and they make sure that you’re getting the correct dose, and you go back, and they give you a little bit stronger, and then they ask if you want to add some testosterone, and you say, sure, why not?

Hormones are terrific. I have energy again, and can sometimes remember words, which is amazing. I really wish I’d started hormones immediately. I didn’t. I was scared of them. But that’s no way to live. Everything starts hurting.

I take multivitamins now. I exercise now. Keeping a sleep schedule is extremely important, and Woody helps with that, because it doesn’t matter how late I stay up, he’s waking me up at 7:30.

That all sounds really good. In this phase of your life, what are your hopes for yourself?

I hope this book does well. I’m really fucking proud of it, which I didn’t know I would feel. I don’t know exactly what that means, or what metrics I’m going by. I just would like it to do well.

There’s this moment that authors warned me about after the publicity tour ends, and things get really quiet, that I would get depressed. The last time it happened, when it finally got really quiet, I looked at my schedule that week, and I had nothing. It was the best feeling on Earth.

I was like, “I get to just read a novel now. It doesn’t have to be a book that I need to read for a reason.” I went to Maine and went fishing, and stayed in a cabin and read novels. I’m looking forward to that again. Because there’s a moment after that where I forget how hard it was to write a book, and I start writing another one. I’m excited for that. I don’t really feel fully human when I’m not writing.

It’s extraordinary what you’ve overcome in your life, Lauren. Do you recognize that? Like really, really feel all that you’ve accomplished. Overcome and accomplished don’t feel like the right words because I don’t want to make your early years less than. But you’ve changed your life dramatically.

Very rarely. I probably should do that more. I know my therapist would be happy if I did that more. People around me would be happy if I did that more. There are moments, for whatever reason, it takes someone else saying it to me. When I hit the bestseller list last book, I went straight over to my brother’s, and he ran out of the house, and then remembered that we don’t hug, because I’m not a hugger, and he sort of awkwardly patted me on the back. But he kept telling me until it sunk in.

So much is hard right now, where are you finding joy?

It still is little things. I mean, Hacks is great. It’s my dog. I got back to Austin when wildflowers were still out, so that made me pretty happy. My nieces and nephews, and, not to be cheesy, but it really is my relationship.

I love that!

She's amazing. Being in a healthy relationship where it’s fun and easy and makes sense, and I’m not trying to be someone she can love. I get to just be me. That’s pretty fucking great. I immediately became one of those smug assholes who’s like, “when it’s right, you’ll just know.” Fucking forty-nine years old. It took some of us longer than others.

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I woke early the other morning with the clear understanding that I would never learn how to be a catcher. My mind electric with a worn catcher’s mitt, a baseball thwacking satisfactorily into it.

I will never get good at catching a baseball! I thought. Sharp, sudden despair gripped me before my eyes even opened.

The fact I have never had the tiniest desire to get good at catching a baseball was meaningless. I was buzzing with grief at all that I had lost: days in the park with cold beers, rowdy friends, and my racking up putouts—something I have, just this moment, learned catchers are good at.

Later, in the kitchen, having fed Rudy Lu and Delilah, sipping my morning hot water with lemon, I chuckled at the baseball mitt. As someone whose life was dramatically changed by a blow to the head, crouching in the line of fire for a hard, speeding ball, even with a mask on, was ridiculous. And yet the mourning of these lost experiences stayed with me.

So much of my life has not played out as I once desired or what my upbringing foretold. Writing this, I am reminded of ’s tender contemplation in a Dear Sugar letter of the sister life she might have lived had she not had children. She was responding to a man who was seeking advice on whether to become a father. She writes: I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Oh, how I feel these words in every morsel of my body. For me, there was no choice involved. A massive tabletop mounted on a wall fell on my head, and nudged my ship on a different course. And yet, my sister ships are out there.

Just now, I googled “how do ship’s change course?” in hopes of discovering a more nautical verb than nudged. Broaching popped up. A sudden movement in navigation, when the ship, while scudding before the wind, accidentally turns her leeward side to windward, also used to describe the point when water starts to come over the gunwhale due to this turn.

I find it compelling that such an abrupt and most likely frightening redirecting was the first suggestion to appear when my query wasn’t framed as such. And yet it feels correct. My sister ship, the one transporting me on my non-injured life, was broached.

And so here I am.

Where I am is filled with wonder and joy and bird song and a floating bedroom with sloping chalky-pink ceilings. And, of course, Delilah, Rudy Lu, and Cookie. All my babies who preceded them, now the makings of my cells. All those yet to come. Dear friends and family. The bees who tend to my garden. Cups of warm tea after homemade meals. Bossy squirrels who let me know when I am late with their nuts. Bouncing, white tailed bunnies who ate my enter summer supply of lettuce in one evening. A mini-split that allows me to sleep in my bed on the very sort of roasting nights for which I once needed to make up the downstairs couch. Walks deep in the woods with D and Cookie. Rudy snuggled in my arms at night, when we don’t know how many nights are left. Texts with childhood friends—we know each other so differently than anyone else can. Monthly lunches with high school pals—“we were so lucky,” we repeat at each gathering. “And we didn’t realize how much so.” Hot, running water (something I never take for granted!). A computer that works. Neighbors that watch out for each other. My father, at ninety-nine, still curious about the world, still wanting good things for his daughter.

And yet. It can be shocking to me to absorb my life. All that I have overcome. All that I have lost. All the daily challenges I still face. All the things I can no longer do. I made a note to myself here: LIST IT ALL. I’m struggling to do so. I have tremendous health trauma, made worse by still living with chronic symptoms. And whilst living, to varying degrees, in fight or flight, it’s hard to fully heal.

A few: Three rounds of staggering non-stop head pain—went to bed with it, woke up with it—that each lasted a year. Daily flipping and spinning vertigo—that made driving impossible and forced me to lie in bed at night like a plank: this lasted three and a half years. Non-stop racing heart, that lasted a year. Memory issues serious enough that I couldn’t find my way home from one street away, couldn’t remember what I had just that very moment written, couldn’t remember what someone just that very moment had said to me. Staying awake for three or four days straight; nights I did sleep, getting two or three or four hours, tops. This lasted over a decade. Inability to make sense conversations with more than one person. And there is more.

Many of these crossed over. I’m leaving out the most terrifying ones because I simply can’t write about them. Though the ones I did include were in and of themselves terrifying. And I am leaving out the Michigan doctors who refused to believe I had head and brain injury (not true of the NYC doctors who had helped me for the prior decade) and fed the terror.

The leaving behind, after twenty-five years, of my beloved NYC and my brilliant, devoted, wildly fantastic group of friends, my robust social life, and, through a sudden worsening of my health, sliding into profound isolation and loneliness in my (beautiful!) new home in Michigan, that I have never entirely left.

And my life now: smaller, quieter, lonely. A list of things I can no longer do, or things I am able to do with great, often exhausting, effort: many of them simple things—going to the store, meeting a friend for dinner, driving to my dad’s house—would make sense to include here. And yet, they feel difficult to write about.

I’m haunted by all of this.

Not too long along, I filled in Debbie Millman’s What Matters Questionnaire. In one question, she asks: What is your biggest regret?

I respond: This one is tough. There are heaps of things in my life that I wish had gone differently, in no small part because there are things in my current life that are difficult. For instance, I want to say, I regret taking the week-long job that landed me in the showroom where the enormous tabletop mounted on the wall fell on my head and changed everything. How different my life would be without all these daily struggles and all the health terror I’ve lived through and the trauma that has built up over the decades! I can feel relief and adventure flowing through me just conjuring that.

And yet: I wouldn’t be the person that is filling in this questionnaire. And I’ve grown quite fond of this person. I may also have grown quite fond of the Jane who didn’t have a tabletop fall on her head. So it’s a conundrum. But since I don’t know that Jane. And I do know and love this Jane and feel protective of her, I will have to, to my great surprise, say I regret nothing.

A recognition of a ghost ship. An honoring of this ship that holds me now.

Lest I sound at peace with this, let me be clear about my longings. For ages, all I wanted was my life back. I wanted to thrust hooks into the myriad sister ships that had carried on without me: boxer, girlfriend, traveller; someone with myriad friends and a vigorous social calendar; daily writer—up to eight or nine or even ten hours a day; someone with money; someone who moved through the world with physical ease—who wasn’t concerned with vertigo and pain and lack of sleep and memory loss and sensitivity to light and sound and so many other issues; someone who didn’t have to constantly calculate what I’m capable of in each moment, unpredictable day to day; someone unweighted by health trauma; someone unweighted by how my issues impact others—what they can reliably expect from me, what I need to push through to enjoy our time together; someone who can still roadtrip; someone who hasn’t been left behind. And I wanted to gather all these ships, and more, back to me; a gathering that would restore me.

But those Janes have sailed. And here I sit, with a moaning sorrow. I want them back. I want to be restored.

And yet: This broken Jane, this Jane who despite her most earnest, most devout, most wise and compassionate efforts, still struggles with the aftermath of the injury, to varying degrees, each day, this is the Jane of my heart. This is my ship.

So I look for ways to salute my beloved sisters from the shore.

Recently, I’ve had a set back with my health that is hard and one that frightens me. The other day, as I pulled my sheets out of the washer, my impulse was to hang them on the line to dry; I love sleeping in sheets fragrant with the sun and garden air. But that day, doing so was a bridge too far.

Then I saw myself, on a sister ship, clipping them to the line. I felt the sun on my shoulders, heard the squirrels racing the trees, felt the earth raw beneath my feet. I thought, the me on that ghost ship will hang those sheets; the me on that sister ship will sleep tonight in sunshine. The me on this ship, is tucking them in the dryer. And I felt unexpectedly soothed.

This has occurred several times since. What I cannot do here, I sense is happening anyway. A string of small sister ships launching throughout the day. These things that I want so deeply, that tug at my sleeves, are being experienced, just not on this ship. I feel connected to these ghost ships, the ships that didn’t carry me. As if we are a fleet: together, mighty and resplendent with the dreams I couldn’t reach.

Do these ships solve everything? No. Is the loneliness of shouldering much of this alone still staggering? Yes. Am I still often shocked by my life? Yes. Do I long to regain my health? Yes, yes, yes. To move through the world with ease? Yes!

But knowing that somewhere all of my losses are being realized, as preposterous as it may sound, and even if I’ll never know the details, brings me an unexpected comfort.

I know I am not alone in loss. We all have ghost ships that carry our longings, our needs, our hopes. A grieving of former selves. And a grieving of the selves that will never come to be.

But perhaps we truly are out there. And perhaps we are catching baseballs.

Last week I posted in Notes about a significant setback with my health and was astounded by the loving response—both in Notes and via email, chat, and text. Whilst I’ve had much kindness and support, some of it staggering in its depth and consistency, over the decades, by necessity, I’ve had to carry much of my own tending to on my own. At times, it’s been quite hard. This outpouring of love and community touched me deeply. Thank you, all. ❤️

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like this one about voicing our desires:

Or this one, on loneliness:

Beyond is heart work—and it’s also a lot of work. If you can swing it, I would be so grateful to have more paid subscribers on board.

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In January of this year, I taught my first creative writing class through Beyond: The Heart-Centered Writing Intensive. For six weeks, we dove deep into POV, Character Development, Dialogue, Plot, The Sound of Language, Setting, Lists, Objects, and more! As my mom would have said, it did my heart good.

My first teaching gig was back in the early aughts through Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC. A recent grad of Columbia, I was keen to teach—in fact, it was the main reason I’d gotten my MFA. Part of the application process was to conduct a sample class for the Dean of Gotham, Alex Steele. To say I was nervous would be an understatement, but Alex later told me I was the most enthusiastic and earnest applicant he’d ever had; he simply couldn’t not hire me.

And so began my decades of teaching which would lead me to Rutger’s, The New School, glorious private workshops out of my LES apartment. Then after my move to Michigan, the wonderful local community college, the women’s prison, and more private workshops.

During all of this, Alex’s words have never left me. I am such an earnest teacher. And because of that, enthusiastic. What writing has done for my soul, my heart, my life is transportive. I want this for others.

At this point, I’ve taught thousands of students and I’ve yet to meet someone who isn’t doing something well, no matter how small. And all you need is that one thing, even if it’s tiny and fragile, to serve as the soil from which you grow your whole, beautiful story garden. There is no greater honor for me than to help people along their path.

The Heart-Centered Writing Intensive included beginners who’d never written a creative word in their life to people who had novels in the works—and everyone in between. Recently, I invited each member to share some of their work. Eight writers said yes!

Writing is a wondrous undertaking and also can be vulnerable. Especially for new writers sharing their work for the first time. Feedback can be deeply nourishing and the fuel we need to keep going. So if you enjoyed these stories, please do let the writers know in the comments!

I asked each writer for a short bio and insight into which prompt they used or how the class shaped what they wrote. These follow each piece.

I’m so very happy to share their beautiful work with you!

Enjoy!

xJane

I hope to teach the Heart-Centered Writing Intensive again in the next few months. If you’re interested in being the first to know, please join the waitlist.

NOTE: Quite a few writers used the prompt: “write whatever your heart desires, using only one-syllable words.” I learned this wonderful prompt from the even more wonderful !

We Called It Strength

My mother never spoke about the emotional reality of polio.

Not the vulnerability of being two years old, just learning to walk, and then suddenly unable to. Not the terror of being taken from home in 1947, during a time thick with fear and uncertainty. Not the long stretches alone, in and out of hospitals. Not the half dozen surgeries on her left leg. Not the braces. Not the deliberate stunting of her right leg so it would not outgrow the weakened one.

All of it before she turned sixteen.

Somewhere inside that story, there must have been fear. A moment, or many, where she did not know how life would unfold. Whether she would walk. Whether she would belong in the world the way she once had.

But she did not tell that version. She told the victory. And on the surface, it was one. A triumph shaped by a familiar American rhythm: endure, push through, come out stronger. A story that earns admiration. That makes sense.

But living inside that kind of strength can feel like something else entirely. A quiet, private loneliness. A narrowing. A life organized around resilience that leaves little room for tenderness. For uncertainty. For the full, unguarded range of being human. The self learns to tighten. To protect. To survive without needing anyone.

There is one piece of her story she carried with unmistakable pride. “I was the only kid on my ward who didn’t see the psychiatrist.”

She offered it as proof. Of strength. Of independence. Of not needing help.

I imagine my becoming a therapist unsettled something in her. Created a contradiction she could feel but never quite name. Her daughter choosing, deliberately, to turn toward the very thing she had spent a lifetime turning away from.

It wasn’t rebellion. Not consciously. But it was a different path. A widening where she had narrowed.

She died at sixty-five. Which means her midpoint was thirty-two. I was eight. Eight years old, absorbing a worldview that equated emotional independence with strength. Learning, quietly and completely, that needing others was something to guard against. That emotions belonged beneath the surface. That survival meant self-containment.

I learned it well.

And still, here I am, writing this. Trying to understand her. Trying to understand myself. Tracing the way her survival shaped my longing to feel. To connect. To heal. To believe that vulnerability is not weakness, but a form of strength she was never given the space to claim.

But before I make meaning of it, I want to tell the stories. Because this is not just reflection. It is repair. For me. For her. For the quiet distance that lived between us without language.

Before we decide who someone is, we have to move closer. Under the skin. Into the places where the story was formed. Only then can we begin to see what survival cost. And what it made possible.

—

Christie Ackmann is the creator of , where she explores healing, belonging, and the quiet courage of becoming who we were meant to be.

This piece grew out of Jane Ratcliffe’s teachings on character development and point of view. As I wrote, I became increasingly interested in the space between the story my mother told about herself and the emotional truths that lingered just beneath the surface.

Destination, Grief

Before my husband died, I thought of grief as linear. I imagined it as distance–the farther I got from my loss, the better I would feel. In the beginning I was untethered but alive, lit up by possibility. Casual dating and sex were a way of reclaiming myself. It was supposed to be a detour, not a destination. I still believed I would re-partner, and resume life along the same trajectory. Five years later, life hasn’t gone back to its old shape, it has narrowed into something quieter and that turns out to be its own kind of grief.

—

Amy Gabrielle is the author of Widow in the City, A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups, an Amazon Hot New Release published by She Writes Press in May 2026; her work also appears in Narratively, The Memoirist, Slackjaw and her Substack .

Jane's pov and voice class helped me capture how I measure time differently after my husband's death in a way that is uniquely mine while also being relatable to others who have suffered a life-altering loss.

Haridwar

When Ana and her grandparents arrived, she pushed her frizzy black hair out of her face and squinted her eyes, to look at the temple at the top of the hill, majestic and heavenly, the turrets on the roof reaching into the hot dusty sky. She sprung out of the car, her spindly brown legs landing on the dirt path but recoiled, leaning back into the car, shocked by the stink of human feces and cremation fires by the banks of the brown Ganges. Papa was there, tall, stern and stiff, observing her and handed her a handkerchief, pointing to her nose so she could use the thin cloth as a filter. Nani was already on her way up, her wide hips swaying and ankle bracelets jingling as she climbed, lifting her sari up off the filthy narrow path .

“Look straight ahead if you need to,” Papa said curtly. Ana gazed up at his angular jaw that was just like her mother’s, placing her tiny hand in his.

As she walked, she looked down at her dusty feet in the pink plastic sandals she had bought in Boston with her mother for this trip, hung her head, embarrassed by her matching flowery multi-colored shorts and t-shirt. When she dared to glance up, she noticed children her height running alongside her, calling out playfully. She met their gazes and smiled. Behind them, she noticed babies and parents who sat in rows. When she looked more closely, she saw they were missing features of their faces and limbs: legs, feet, hands, noses, and ears. Women nursed their babies, holding them with their forearms and others held stumps of their arms out begging from passersby. Ana had to look away but was drawn to look at them now and again as they made their way up the hill.

When they approached the top, the sun was setting and a bright pink lit the sky coloring the mighty Ganges below. They entered the smooth marble entry where Nani crouched, facing the gods, pious, devout. Ana’s heart clutched at the sight of this, her Nani small in front of the adorned marble statues decorated with lush flower necklaces and generous offerings of fruit, coconut, candles, and coins from people who prayed for themselves and loved ones

Papa stood straight, glancing at Nani and the deities then turned around and strode to the entrance looking outwards. Ana followed and as darkness fell, the sun slipping down quickly, the pinkness gave way to twinkling lanterns along the path they had just ascended. Ana could hear laughter and chatting and saw shadows of children jumping and running around the edges of the path. Nani circled her soft arms around Ana, cushioning her from behind, nestling her head on her shoulder. They watched together with Papa quietly as the hazy moon rose, growing brighter in the sky. It was ephemeral. Humanity was there.

—Una Basak

Una Basak is of South Indian American heritage, the mother of twin sons with profound autism, an autism advocate, and writer.

Haridwar was revised to include physical details of the characters. The piece was greatly enhanced after heeding Jane’s lesson that characters benefit from not merely being “floating talking heads”.

Old Man; New Man?

My mom died a month or two ago. She has left this old man here with me. The one who has been full of rage and hate my whole life, and his too I guess. Who took that rage out on her and on his five kids, with belts and fists. The man who tried to yell his wife back to here, from her now lost mind to the old one that worked. As if it was so loud his voice could break through the cloud or the fog. SO loud she would have to get it. I tried to make him stop. Then he just yelled at me too.

It did not work and she is gone now. And he is here. My dad.

They lived in a flat in my house. Where the two cars would have gone. He lives there now. Just him.

He did not fall to bits. He went through all her clothes in a week, gave them to an aid store. He got rid of her bed, moved his. He bought new chairs, new lamps, a whole new set up. It looks good. He goes out to walk. Twice a day. Checks in with me as he comes and goes. Phone. Watch. Gloves. Hat. I make sure if he is found out there I will be called.

He gave up his car. For years I have asked him not to drive. Please stop before it’s too late. Now he has. Like it was his plan the whole time.

I am not sure who this man is.

He is not mean. Has not raised his voice to me. Not once since she passed. Says please and thank you. Asks for help. Loves my food, the meals I cook.

What is this change? Why is this change? And can it be of worth or weight at all if there is not a word of the years and years and years of cruel harm and hurt?

I see no guilt. I sense no shame. Could it be he does not know? Has his mind or bits of it been lost as well, like hers? Could it have been her? Did she just push him or goad him? Pull the strings? All this time?

And what if I did know, if I were to find out? What would it change?

Not a thing. I am stuck with this man until he too dies. I will make sure that will not be on me. I will feed him and check on him and make sure he is safe. I will see that he and his home are clean and neat. I will not dwell on what has been. Or cry for what might have been. Too late for that.

I will live with just what is.

—Cheryl Byrne

I am grudgingly facing retirement from a long and successful communications career that includes work on local and presidential campaigns, passage of the Brady Bill, and being named by Newt Gingrich as being in contempt of Congress. I love Jane’s writing and taking her intensive class was one of the best things I have ever done for myself.

Jane’s prompt was to “write about whatever your heart desires, using only one-syllable words.” I fell into this writing assignment like I never have before. The words spilled out and my editing became--I became--a human thesaurus. What I have written here is not what I wrote during the class; that I think will become part of something more. This is a personal essay, memoir, about my life with my father alone in the in-law apartment in my home.

Let Me Be Forgotten, Like a Tree

The leaf litter shifts and crackles, releasing the underfunk of mud and fungus as Agnes stalks uphill. She’s looking for a specific spot, weaving between creeks and downed trees. The perfect spot for a small cabin.

A simple four walls, some windows, a roof, and a door. A comfortable chair by the woodstove, maybe, or perhaps a soft bed. A place to curl up in the sunshine like a cat, slitty-eyed and languid, while the water trickles downhill, the deer mince past, and the bears lumber through.

She’s aware we’re supposed to absorb the whole world these days. To constantly track its news and noise. What if we miss something? What if we’re left behind as the world storms ahead without us?

What if?

Leave me behind, she thinks as she sinks down on a stump, sighing. Please. Run far ahead with your clamor and cruelty. I will not miss your wars or wastefulness. I don’t want to know what you think is so important.

Just let me absorb this place I can see up close while I’m still here. Touch, taste, smell, and hear this infinite world of sensory delight.

Every bit of it. The deep snow that sneaks into the tops of my boots in winter. The rushing creeks, drowning out all other sounds in spring. The brief dryness of high summer. The whispering, golden leaves in fall. The biting ramps, delicate trout lilies, and blood-red trilliums. Jack-in-the-pulpit, dew quivering in its chalice. Fairy cups that beckon in mermaid blue, and pumpkin-colored chanterelles trumpeting out of the pine needles. The woodpecker’s insistent rat-a-tat-tat, and the rushing slither of the fiery newts. The green canopy, dancing with light.

“What can you offer that I would miss more than this?” she queries the sky, as if there’s someone up there listening.

That’s an old habit she can’t quite kick, even after all these years. Imagining there’s someone up there, as opposed to Whatever It Is being right here, which is to say everywhere. In the trees and the soil and the animals. Though maybe these days there is someone up there listening. Some pasty, barely post-adolescent man, trapped inside monitoring satellite feeds. Sucking up his supposed relevance like a drug.

“Bah! Let me be relevant to this bit of Earth,” she whispers to the forest. “Let me love it well. Then, let me be forgotten, like a tree. Or a storm. We all will be anyway, no matter what they think.”

She rises slowly, her knees protesting, and heads back down the hill. She’s got a path to flag before dark.

—

Asha Sanaker is a writer, a mother, and a forest witch whose work can most regularly be found at her Substack newsletter, . She's also working on a memoir.

The wonderful thing about both classes and prompts is they invite playfulness and experimentation. I don't consider myself a fiction writer, but as I worked with the list prompt from Jane's class it became clear to me that what I was writing was fiction. It was both surprising and fun.

The Price of Love

They say that grief is the price we pay for love and boy, does she feel broke. One day she will feel less so, but the loss is still fresh and raw. A deed, a phrase, a sign - these small things each day keep her from the dark.

Life does not end - it is changed. These words wrap her in a hug and hold her tight. There is hope and a deep calm in their weight. Not gone. Changed.

Out for a walk, she takes one step at a time. With no sound, she speaks a prayer to them: I send you love and light where you are. A glow lights and warms in her core as her heart sends the wish. Eyes closed, then a breath, in and out - and it’s gone, on its way.

A red bird lands on a branch in front of her as if to say, I’m still with you.

I miss you. I love you.

I know.

I wish we had more time.

Me too. But I am still with you.

With a flit of its wings, it flies on.

Back at home, she sits down at her desk, pen in hand. Write through the pain sounds trite, but she does and it helps, if just a bit at a time.

Each word on the page, step on a walk, and red bird on a branch . . . for years, as long as it takes, she will hold fast to these as the price is paid. And she knows she will pay it once more, and once more, and once more . . . it is worth it. More than worth it.

—

Skye Zeimet is an organizational consultant and strategist, lifelong learner, and writer who explores how stories help us make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

I have been inspired through the class to reflect on some of the tougher, more complex emotions I've experienced and this particular exercise offered a challenge to write about a incredibly nuanced and consuming emotion like grief through the simplicity of one-syllable words.

The First Few Weeks

In April, the baby was born. We leave the hospital carrying three bags stuffed with witch hazel pads, peri bottles, diapers for her, diapers for me. A pair of red socks with pink rubbery soles, an open package of baby wipes, a 32-ounce souvenir water jug. The student nurse follows us out to our car, picking up the contents of the bag I accidentally spill over the pastel linoleum floor.

“Babies are blessings,” she reassures us. We must look overwhelmed. Our ears are still ringing from the screams of the baby’s first bath, cold over the maternity ward sink.

As the days progress, the baby turns into something less like an alien. Specks of dirt and wax appear in the outer cavity of her ear. Creamy, cheesy scum erupts from her neck folds. Her skin is no longer white, vernix soft, otherworldly. Those tiny arm muscles resist being forced into a onesie, boneless and placid no longer. She kicks, she squirms, she shrieks on occasion. She is human, waking more and more each day.

In turn, I become more and more feral.

At home, I spend hours in bed, a breastfeeding pillow stiff as a shelf strapped around me. Every surface of my side table is covered in food: an oatmeal chocolate chip GoMacro bar, beef sticks sent in a care package from my mother, that 32-ounce water jug. All things I voraciously consume at 12am, 3am, 6am.

My torso is wet with such consistency it feels like my baseline state. I only notice the milk dripping from my nipples when it starts pooling at my sides. The baby naps bare against my chest, so we are both sticky, stuck together. Her hands make tacky little fists and her jaw turns speckled black, collected flecks of lint from my shirt.

I can’t sleep unless the baby is right beside me, an arm stretch away. At night, I pull her bassinet flush with my bed. With one hand, I reach through the bars and grasp the spindly fingers escaped from her swaddle. With the other, I check that she’s still breathing. (Will I ever get over the heartbreak of my baby sleeping at night, knowing she’ll wake up older each time?) All I want to do is consume her, eat her little cheeks, breathe in the scent of her buttered popcorn jellybean-flavored breath, but also, oh god, give me a moment to pee and scroll Youtube Shorts on my phone in peace. Motherhood, I feel in these moments, is a constant state of being splintered in two.

—

Brie Hiramine lives in Minneapolis by way of Brooklyn and the Bay Area.

This excerpt was inspired by the class on lists, and the idea that objects reveal so much about who a person is and what they’re going through.

Next Time

Next time I see him, I will not hold back. Much has come and gone in the years of life. Death, death, ire and rage. How can a man be so full of his own self and lose those of others? I ask this to seek my truth and be at peace. It hangs over me like a cloud of smoke that eats the air we need to live. This soul is all we own while on earth and each breathe gives us now not next.

I want to know why he ghosts me…his one kin. He has hurt me for as long as I am old and the loop rounds one and more but is not yet done. How can I end this and be at a truce with me? This is my plight of smog which is mine to clear with him or not. I want to breath air that is clean, fresh and light as a breeze.

Ire is what I feel now for my kin who has left me once more with a task so hard that I must hold back my tears to move on. If I let them flow, I will lose my “north star” and fall to the floor in a pile of hurt and pain. I will not drop and am much more like a rock than a wisp, so I move on.

With the help of a good friend who knows the big tale, we work hard to clear each box as I see, feel, sort and let go. Each one tugs at my heart like a sharp pang of pain that sets in my chest. The past binds me to them and keeps me here and next.

The first day was hard but as time went by, I could see our grand work and an end in sight. But on the next meet up, the angst was tough as the past, the now and the next were all the same. I am at a loss for how to move on and must break to gain my breathe.

Two days, eight hours each and still more time is due. There are still lots of choices to make…to sell, give, trash or keep. I hire a gem of a soul to shift the goods to homes where they can live and start a new tale of their own. I will keep just a few things that hold the warm hugs of loved ones long gone.

As I go through this toil, I am proud of me and the pain that guides each step as the cloud of smoke tries to choke me. My strength leads and I know that the air will soon be fresh, clean and give me life in the now and next.

To end, my kin will not gain from this task and must live with his choice. He has lost me, and next time I see him, I will not hold back.

—

I am a “creative” living in Canada trying to “walk my walk” with grace, humility, wisdom, truth, and compassion.

I decided to challenge myself by writing a piece using the exercise where we were only allowed to use one-syllable words. This proved to be more of a challenge than I anticipated because my piece is something I am in the process of doing now and is very personal and emotional.

If you’d like to support my work without a subscription, here’s my link to Venmo and Paypal. ❤️

Sharing writing is thrilling…..and vulnerable. If you enjoyed any of these pieces, please share your praise in the comments! Much gratitude! xJane

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is the Amazon best-selling author of The BreakAway Girl: Secrets of a Tantric Yogi and the creator of the Substack publication . A Certified Integrative Coach with more than three decades of experience teaching yoga, meditation, and personal transformation, she helps people uncover hidden patterns, embrace paradox, and navigate life’s beautiful mess with grace, grit, and humor.

Her essays weave together non-dual spirituality, psychology, sensuality, and the raw terrain of everyday life, inviting readers to find meaning in both heartbreak and joy. Her work has appeared in The Rolling Desk, Tales of a Wayward Yogini, In the Limelight, and Without Child.

Paulette lives outside Ashland with her husband and their Wheaton Terrier, Saoirse, and can often be found wandering the Pacific Northwest in an RV, gathering stories along the way.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m usually reading two or more books at a time. In the mornings, before or after my meditation, depending on how I feel, I read the poets.

Recently, I read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, which led me to his prescient novel American War. Balancing that out, I’m also reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

To connect with my ancestors, and for inspiration as I work on my next manuscript about generational shifts–what we carry, what we lose, and what we gain–I return again and again to Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino, randomly choosing a story each time. I love how folklore and myth reveal universal truths about the human condition.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

The most impactful book I read as a young girl was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I completely fell in love with the story, with Francie, though our lives were quite different, and with the way words could transport you to another world.

And yes! I definitely hid books from my parents. I was fascinated by In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. After my father read it, I snuck the book into my bedroom and stayed up late into the night reading. One night, my mother came into my room and found me both terrified and thrilled. She gave me an old-fashioned talking-to, but she let me finish the book.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

The Bhagavad Gita has been my companion for decades now. When I first read it as a new yogi, I was deeply drawn to it, even though I didn’t understand the nuances and depth of its teachings. It’s an allegorical text about facing the battlefield within and has carried me through many a dark night of the soul.

And the older I get, the more alive it becomes. Each time I return to a verse or passage, a new light is shed. I own about six or eight translations/interpretations, and each one reveals the text through a slightly different lens, offering something new. I’ve even gone so far as to have the bindings removed on a few copies and replaced with spiral binding for easy access–which probably says something about my nerdiness.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Oh, that’s a hard one. I think I’ve had different favorites for the different seasons of my life.

Right now, I’m in what my family calls the ‘soft pants’ era. Otherwise known as sweatpants, but they have to be kind of cute as well as comfy. And I often wear a tweed cardigan sweater that I bought with my mother years ago. Whenever I really want to connect and feel her presence, which is a lot right now, with the writing of this new book, I wear it.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

It’s not recent, but it’s to the wisdom of The Bhagavad Gita that I return when I need guidance, when I feel alone or scared. In it, Krishna tells Arjuna that it’s better to live your dharma, your purpose and path, imperfectly than to live another person’s life perfectly. Even though the idea is often repeated, I think it speaks deeply to authenticity: to living as fully yourself as possible, warts and all.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I’ve written about this love affair before. When both my mother and father were placed in hospice at the same time, my mother asked my husband to take their fourteen-year-old Chihuahua. We had just lost our own family pet, and she thought it would ease some of his sadness.

But the Chihuahua, as I often referred to him, became my dog. I think, in some way, I was a natural replacement for my mother. When we took him in, he was overweight and needed surgery. So, we did everything necessary to help him heal and grow stronger.

He died in my arms at almost eighteen years old. When that little guy died, the dam finally broke. It was as if the umbilical cord that kept my parents alive inside me was finally severed, and I was forced to fully grieve their loss.

I still miss him; his name was Bandit.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

About fifteen years ago, the yoga community I had been part of for years imploded. It was not pretty. It was painful, messy, and devastating for everyone involved. At the time, I was heartbroken. But out of that loss came unexpected new directions and possibilities.

I had been mentoring teachers for years, so it seemed natural to deepen that work and become a certified life coach, which I still do today. Around that same time, I became more devoted to writing, which I had done up until then in fits and starts. Eventually, I wrote The BreakAway Girl-Secrets of a Tantric Yogi and later began publishing Because Life is Messy…on Substack.

What once felt like an ending became the doorway into a more authentic and generative chapter of my life.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Well, for decades, as a yogi, practicing asana has been part of how I inhabit my body and express myself, even though the intensity and level have shifted over the years. But I’m also from the Saturday Night Fever and disco era, so honestly, dancing in the kitchen wins.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I’m at an age where I think about the end of life and what that journey might look like for me. I know it’s a cliché, but my hope is to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible and not become a burden on my husband and family.

I hope to stay curious about people and life, to keep growing personally and spiritually, and to remain open to life’s unfolding.

I also hope to keep deepening my craft so I can continue writing in a way that feels true and alive.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

It’s hard to name just one. The kindness that has shaped my life has often felt cumulative–those small, steady gestures of staying with me when it might have been easier to walk away, of truly seeing me, of not turning away when things were uncomfortable or when I wasn’t at my best. There have been so many people over the years who have held out their hand and helped to lift me up when life felt overwhelming.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

The Tantric teachings, along with the myths and the stories woven through them, are a guiding force in my life. They remind me that the saint and sinner live within each of us. That the mess and the magic are interwoven. That laughter and joy coexist alongside sadness and pain.

I honestly don’t know what happens when we die. The teachings don’t speak of a heaven as a distant afterlife so much as a state that can be touched here and now. So, the invitation becomes: live fully, love imperfectly, and don’t squander the gift of your life.

If you enjoyed Paulette’s answers, you might also enjoy this Questionnaire with Don Hamilton (Rudy and Delilah’s wonderful homeopathic vet!):

If you’d like to support my work without a subscription, here’s my link to Venmo and Paypal. ❤️

If you enjoy what you’re reading here, please hit the ❤️ button to boost Beyond in the algorithm. The hearts really do help! And they let Paulette know you enjoyed her words!

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writes with the heart of a fierce, funny, loyal, heartbroken, exuberant, intensely thoughtful sage. Each word is carefully weighed and measured, carried in the marrow of her bones and sinew of her body before it hits the page. I know this because I feel it in my body when I read her work. Those of you who know Meg know what I’m talking about. Those of you who don’t are in for a soul-expanding treat.

Meg is an acclaimed spoken word artist. She’s published four books of poetry, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me. She co-wrote How Poetry Can Change Your Heart with her partner of eleven years, Colorado Poet Laureate . Meg is also an essayist; the stunning essay “The Act of Vanishing,” about Meg’s summers as a child at fat camp, won her first place at the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest in 2021.

Meg teaches the poetry workshop Poems That Don’t Suck (temporarily on hiatus—when it’s back on, I’m signing up!). After Andrea’s death, Meg took over , their wildly popular newsletter. Meg’s essays on grief and hope and dogs and the magic of life are simply astounding. She’s currently working on her memoir.

I learned a lot speaking with Meg. For one thing, I’ll never see vulnerability in the same light!

I think you’ll enjoy our conversation!

If you missed Part One of our talk, you can find it here. And Part Two here.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
xJane

❤️ Gigantic gratitude to all the paid subscribers whose support for Beyond also supports The DeTommaso Dogs. Ana has gotten over 800 dogs and kitties off the streets and into safe homes. She’s also spayed and neutered over 3,000 animals. Her heart is as big as her determination. I’m so grateful for your support in keeping these sweet babies safe. Thank you! ❤️

Where do you write?

Lots of different places. Sometimes in bed. Sometimes on my treadmill desk. I have ADHD, so it actually can help to give my body something to do besides just swivel in a chair and think about doing the dishes.

I like a big desk where I can spread out all my beverages. I’m sitting now at my writing desk. I have Andrea’s boots on here.

I love that! What beverages do you drink? Are you a water drinker?

Yes, but [holds up a can].

Okay, sparkling water.

No, Celsius. An insane energy drink that you’re not supposed to drink more than two a day, which I tend not to, but because of my comically unanxious self, I really need to caffeinate.

Do you drink that only when you’re writing, or at any given time?

I definitely need to caffeinate to do mostly anything, but yes, to write, caffeine’s my friend. It used to be coffee, and now it’s this.

Has grief impacted your writing? Not just the content of what you’re writing about, but the way you experience writing, what you view as a poem or a story now, different sounds that appeal to you, different rhythms. Has there been a shift in your style?

I don’t quite know yet, because mostly what I’ve been writing is about Andrea for the newsletter or poems. Which is kind of cool, because what I had been doing for about six years is just working on my memoir. My writing has very much been between me and the page, and hoping, eventually, people will read it.

I think about writing as you’re communicating with yourself, you’re communicating with something greater than yourself, and then, once you publish it, you’re communicating with others, and it becomes this dialogue.

I love that.

Because I’ve been writing the memoir, it’s all been communicating with self, communicating with something greater than self, and the perceived audience is so far away because it’s not published yet. Now that I’m writing the newsletter, my communication with others is way more often and way more immediate. That’s been really nice. It’s a great time to feel less alone.

I haven’t mentioned how much I love that last poem you wrote. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. That line at the end, Why did I care / that we were walking on salt? Oh, my heart! I felt like there was maybe a little shift in your style. I think of your poems as these tight, fierce, piercing, exacting bundles of brilliant energy. With love. But this felt more spacious. Does that even make any sense?

Yes, I really appreciate what you’re saying. It’d been a long time since I wrote poems, and I wrote that, and I posted it the night that I wrote it. Probably what you have normally seen from me is something that feels…I want every line to feel perfect. So I chisel away. I love editing. But with that poem, I had no want or try or desire for it to be perfect.

It’s truly exquisite. I know you and Andrea would edit each other’s work, so who’s editing your work now? Is it still Andrea?

Yes, when I start to go more into my memoir, I do feel like I have Andrea’s voice in my head now, which I feel really lucky for; I don’t have to wonder what they’ll say. Which is usually the same thing: “I know what you’re seeing and what everyone else is feeling, but I want to know what you’re feeling.” Like, to get out of the observational, or at least turn the observational in on myself.

But who’s editing my work? I’ll have a friend or two look over the Substack before I post it, but that’s it.

When I interviewed Andrea, they said that you have such an easy time with writing. Is that true?

Read more

As promised, here’s Part Two of my conversation with the lovely, brilliant, funny, gigantic-hearted .

It picks up exactly where we left off so if you need a review of Part One or haven’t yet read it, you can check it out here.

I loved everything Meg shares here but was particularly moved by her thoughts on the mind-body connection.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think in the comments!

xJane

You’ve talked a lot about how you don’t really ruminate on the past or worry about the future, that you stay very present. I think there are seven of you on the planet who can do that.

My dad is another one of them.

When I lived in New York City, one of my friends was like that. I used to say, “What’s going on in your brain right now?” For her, it was very observational. She would just say, “I’m looking at the streetlights. I’m watching the person in the window.” Can you describe what it’s like for you when you don’t have these other tapes running simultaneously?

It’s funny, because very, very early in our relationship, Andrea was asking me—we were in the car, and I was looking out the window—“What are you thinking about right now?” And I said, “Nothing.” And they thought, “Oh, this person either is not telling the truth, or is not that in touch.” Then they later realized, “She’s really just here. She’s not running another script.”

It’s important for me, as much as I can when I am thinking something, that I express it, within reason. If I’m in a situation and I feel like a person is acting strange toward me, I try to say, “This thing is happening right now,” so I can be present and not have my outer face and inner world at odds with each other. Of course, you can’t always do that.

Let’s say you’re making lunch. Typically, if I’m making lunch, I am thinking, Did I sound like an idiot when I was talking to Megan? And then, After I eat, I have to call the vet. Are you doing any of that? Or are you just thinking, Oh, this cheese looks beautiful?

One of my few scripts is a running to-do list. That’s my cognitive downfall. It’s something that I’m working on. I almost always think that there’s something else I could or should be doing. It’s like capitalism seeping in, and it’s terrible, but that to-do list never ends. But I would say I don’t worry much about big things. It’s more micromanaging myself.

How has going on this journey with Andrea impacted how you view your own body?

When Andrea got sick, I initially became the steward of their body, making sure everything they ate was healthy. I was also helping them gain weight, because their natural oncologist had told us that having a certain amount of body fat was really crucial to fighting cancer. Since I was a child, I’d only had doctors tell me that my body fat was wrong. So that was interesting to try to help somebody gain weight when my whole life had been a failed avoidance of that.

When Andrea got sick, I was like, this is so weird that I can care so much about somebody else’s health and well-being, and I can devote my whole everything to it, and then still ignore my own body and not treat it well.

At the time, Andrea had undergone surgery, and I was taking their blood pressure every day. One day, I decided to surreptitiously take my own. This blood pressure cuff had different levels: green meant healthy; yellow meant keep an eye on it; orange meant this is not good; and red meant go to the hospital right now.

Andrea’s was green, and mine was orange. It was an awakening for me that I hadn’t physically cared for myself. Andrea was thirteen years older, on chemo, post-surgery, had overnight menopause, had cancer, had Lyme disease, all of this stuff, and they were, at least by this one measure, healthier than I was.

They also had you.

Yes, they had me.

You’re an extraordinary human, Meg. I’ve lived with a lot of health challenges, and that depth and breadth of support has been so lacking in my life, detrimentally so. When I recognize that in others, it’s like a light. I’m sorry to have cut you off, but I really want to acknowledge that.

Thank you. That blood pressure reading started a big health journey for me. When Andrea was really, really sick, before they went into hospice and we were not really sure what was going on, I had a lot of bad body image stuff creep back up because that’s my brain’s familiar pain. When something that I don’t know how to deal with comes up, my mind is like, “Well, here’s a pain you know how to deal with, so let’s focus here.” I went into therapy for it because I could feel how discordant it was that Andrea was so sick, and I was so sick in this other way.

The minute Andrea went into hospice, it went away from me. I felt gratitude for my body’s softness because Andrea could get very comfortable and fall asleep on top of me. I felt a lot of love for my body and the size it was at the time, which I’ve just learned is a fluctuating thing.

Andrea really wanted me to heal that trauma, and as they were dying, that was when they kept falling asleep on top of me, and I said something to them like, “I fixed it.” That’s what I wanted them to hear.

That’s so beautiful, Meg. What are your hopes for yourself in this time of your life?

Read more

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

I love ’s brain. For one thing, she’s deeply curious. And I have a soft spot for deeply curious beings. She’s also wicked smart. And when I say thoughtful, I mean she really ponders things. Like matches them up fifty different ways to discover what most resonates for her as truth, as wisdom, as beauty, as hope, as kindness, and as a necessity for being electrically alive.

I also love Meg’s heart: the openness, the devotion. You can feel it radiating, even through Zoom. Read anything she’s written: you’ll feel it there, too.

Together, Meg’s brain and heart form a gentle, potent magic that’s grounded in respect, awe, and a pure, unique lens on the trappings of reality.

Meg began her writing life as an acclaimed, often-touring slam poet. She’s published four gorgeous books of poetry, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me. She co-wrote How Poetry Can Change Your Heart with her partner of eleven years, Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson. Meg is also an essayist; the stunning essay “The Act of Vanishing,” about Meg’s summers as a child at fat camp, won her first place at the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest in 2021. She’s currently working on a much-anticipated-by-thousands-and-thousands-and-tens-of-thousands-of-us memoir.

In 2021, Meg’s wife was diagnosed with an aggressive and then incurable cancer. Meg became Andrea’s everything, caring for them with such devotion, tenderness, fierceness, completeness, honesty, and full-heartedness that it was breathtaking to behold.

The final year of Andrea and Meg’s journey together (in this incarnation!) was chronicled in the hope-affirming documentary Come See Me in the Good Light. It was nominated for an Oscar! If you haven’t yet seen this beauty, you must.

Andrea died on July 14, 2025, but not before cracking open the heart of every person they encountered. Meg is now writing what was Andrea’s newsletter, . If you don’t already subscribe, I encourage you to do so now. Your heart, your mind, your life will never be the same.

Meg lives in Colorado with the three beloved dogs she and Andrea shared.

I enjoyed speaking with Meg so much that we talked a lot; this interview is a two-parter. Part Two will post tomorrow. Craft Advice will post next week.

⭐️ Megan is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Drive Here And Devastate Me! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “DRIVE” after your comment (ALL CAPS makes sure I don’t miss it). The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, May 25th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

When I spoke with Andrea, we started the interview talking about the three doggies who you live with: Squash, Winnie, and Idgie. So I thought we could start there, too. I know you feel like Andrea is now a part of you. Do you feel like they are also now a part of the dogs?

Oh gosh, I haven’t really thought about it that way. I mean, Squash, definitely. Squash is going to be fifteen in August; she and Andrea share a birthday. She’s always been an extension of Andrea to me. She’s old and doing well, but I do think about how losing her will feel like another loss of Andrea, because they were so connected and dear to each other.

Is Squash the one Andrea wanted to be there with when she died?

Yes. Now that we’re talking about them, I have to hold Squash. She just had twenty-three teeth removed. She’s got five left. When Andrea was dying, I had all the dogs in bed with us; I didn’t sequester them to another room. I wanted them to understand as much as possible, and I think that they did. So they’re really well adjusted to it all.

Are they all still sleeping in bed with you?

Oh my god, of course.

In the documentary, you mention a few times how you’re living your life in three-week cycles due to Andrea’s blood tests for cancer markers. What’s the rhythm of your life like now?

It’s been like an experimental jazz rhythm. I hate experimental jazz but I don’t mind it as a life rhythm, I guess. The 14th of the month always feels pretty potent to me, because that’s the month marker of Andrea’s death. So tomorrow’s the 14th [Meg and I spoke on April 13th], and that will make nine months. Nine months feels like a particularly wild number, because when I think of nine months, I think of the time it takes to make a baby. And how weird it is that, theoretically, I could have created a life in this time after walking Andrea to the end of their life. It feels very bizarre.

Also, the rhythm of my life post-Oscars, up until these last couple of weeks, has been really chaotic: traveling and touring and promoting the film. A ton of different time zones and countries and planes.

Has being home again shifted the grieving process at all?

After Andrea died, I was in constant communication with them in profound ways. When I was touring, some of that continued, but I was so immersed in Andrea, their story, their message, and seeing their face on screen.

Now that I’m home, I’m running Andrea’s business with their best friend, Emily, and Andrea’s final performance at the Paramount is going to premier at Red Rocks in Colorado on July 5th. The Colorado Symphony will be there, playing the music live that accompanies Andrea’s poems. I’ll be performing, along with Sara Bareilles and Chris Pureka. So I’m still very immersed in them. But I wasn’t hearing from Andrea as much.

Then I had this incredible thing happen where I realized that there was actually a responsibility on my end to try to communicate with Andrea, not just listen and wait. So I’ve been working with that, and it’s been really powerful.

You’ve said that rather than letting go of Andrea, you’re learning how to feel into the plane where letting go doesn’t exist. Can you speak more about this, not just in terms of Andrea, but also in terms of how you are now perceiving the world and our interface with other realms?

I really enjoy living in an I-don’t-know place. I also enjoy being around people who live in an I-don’t-know realm. I’m turned off by anyone who feels certain about stuff that we can’t be certain of. Andrea said they wanted to live in the mystery. And I do feel like I live there often.

Andrea was definitely the more woo-woo of us, but there were too many wild things that happened after their death for me not to feel very communicated with, and like something was possible in that way. I definitely don’t feel like I’ve reached all of the bounds of it, but I’m kind of wondering if I should just tell you this story.

Yes!

Read more

In 2006, was hit by drunk driver in a stolen truck. Prior to the accident, Judith had enjoyed a thriving freelance career working for Rolling Stone, Elle, Oprah, Time, Vanity Fair, and Martha Stewart, to name a few. Post-accident, with traumatic brain injury, she could barely put two words together. She moved into a rambling farmhouse and began to rebuild what she could of her brain and her life.

Whilst our paths to brain injury are different, I found myself in many of Judith’s experiences. For one thing, the loss of our former lives. For another, not being able to find my way home again. And for another, having a different brain and changed body. I could go on. My sense is, even if you don’t have a TBI, you, too, will find some part of yourself in Judith’s beautiful words.

I’m so moved by the way Judith shares her story—and most especially by her desire to redefine “impossible” to mean something she hasn’t done yet. I love that! It opens the door for those who are struggling with our own challenges, limitations, injuries—which is basically all of us—to come into a new, exciting, hopeful relationship with ourselves and the world around us.

Judith writes the newsletter .

Enjoy!
xJane

Three Miracles

My life ended on a Tuesday nineteen years ago. That would be my first life. No one noticed at the time, not even me. The next thing I recall, I was in a paper gown in a cold white cubicle. My brain was broken and so was my back. I learned I’d been hit by a drunk with a truck. I likely learned and forgot that a few hundred times. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage.

Pre-truck, I was a freelance writer and a freelance ghost. I skimmed, slimmed, trimmed for magazines like Vanity Fair, Vogue and New York and also ghostwrote for an icon or two. Post-truck, I had “more or less aphasia” combined with “more or less amnesia” at any given time --which made me a former freelance writer and a former freelance ghost. This would be a different story if I had regained my former life, complete with my former mind. I didn’t. I lost my lifelong companion. My self. I could not explain how this happened. I could not explain how anything happened. There were no words.

At the beginning, I couldn’t remember the accident. Weeks later, I noticed the all-caps ISUZU logo just beneath my collarbone. I either had never noticed it before or never thought it strange to see the word ISUZU branded just above my bra. I later realized it came from the glovebox into which my breasts were smashed.

I learned I had a “temporal window.” That’s the amount of time I could keep track of something. It was a few seconds or less than that. Non-remembrance of things past. And passed. Once I could walk inside, it was terrifying to go anywhere because I couldn’t “record” what I saw. Had I passed a yellow chair? Had I passed a plastic palm? I didn’t know. I had lost any sense of direction, as well as any “routes” to link my former self to the person I’d become.

Staff in scrubs checked my mental status, cranial nerves, reflexes, sensory system, coordination, gait. Plus, if I bumped into more things on my left or my right. I had acquired unstable legs (now at two different lengths) on unstable feet. Once I could walk outside, I didn’t know if I had passed a bank, a boutique, a diner, a park. It’s scary to go anywhere -- when you can’t find your way back. I also couldn’t recall if I’d gone left or right, or if I’d walked ten blocks or twelve or twenty. I couldn’t both walk and count or remember what I’d counted and couldn’t multitask.

There were other issues, too. Like my brain no longer knew which was my right leg and which was my left, or something like that. One doctor said if we could “trick” my left leg into thinking it’s my right leg, things might improve. For this, he prescribed a mirror, as well as a rollator and then a cane and brace.

For six years, I refused to say two words. The two words were “brain damage.” I preferred “head injured,” which I imagined as a minor mishap -- like a smudge of mascara or lip stain gone astray. I couldn’t say that I’d became a different person, complete with a different brain and a changed body, too. There were other problems, too. For example, when I tried to read, the letters in words seemed to rearrange themselves so “New York” looked like “kroY weN” and “brain trauma” looked like “amuart niarb” and “therapist” looked like “tsipareht.”

Things are subtracted by brain damage. Erased from the inside-out. The meaning of words imploded, as did the meaning of everything else. Words jammed in my ears if I heard them. Jammed in my head if I saw them. I kept saying strange things, too, like “The leak sprang a roof” when I meant to say “the roof sprang a leak.” For a while, I would look at my own hands and not know what to do with them. How to place them on a keyboard, or a pen, or a phone. I couldn’t write at all. Except in very short bursts I called scraps.

When I was a kid, Tetley had a slogan, “Take tea and see.” My mom changed it to, “Take tea and pee.” If I had another cup of tea, would I still have been hit by a truck? Or what if I had stopped to pee? Would I then have avoided the truck? Any infinitesimal change would have produced a different result. Speaking of results, although there are normally 12 points between anyone’s highest and lowest cognitive scores, I had an astounding gap of 77 points. Six times more than it “should” be. This meant that while at one moment, I was pretty smart, in the next moment, I was not smart at all.

The accident occurred in New York State. The drunk driver -- who stole the truck -- had no insurance due to three DUIs, the owner of the stolen truck was not liable, my car insurance covered just one-quarter of the cost. An attorney sold our home up north to pay the bills, a circumstance, like most others, which I could not compute. Then movers I can’t recall packed boxes I can’t recall for a trip I can’t recall to a town in Virginia. I’d never lived in Virginia before. Nineteen years later, no trace of the move remains in my mind. Like it never happened or I wasn’t there.

I now lived in the state of semi-amnesia and in the state of somewhere else. Oh, right, the state of Virginia. And I became an out-patient nine hours south of my former life. The program was divided into “survivors” and “caregivers,” who cared for survivors. I was the only survivor who was a caregiver, too. Rather, I was the caregiver whose job it was to care for me. In that role, I created a “program” of my own. I began to make small collages and to build homes for birds with salvaged wood -- and, too, began to build a book with a few thousand scraps stashed in brown paper bags. They were not in alphabetical order or numerical order or chronological order or in any order at all, but out of order like me.

My daughter, Hannah -- who had lost both her former home and her former mom -- remained at her college. While I lived in a ramshackle farmhouse in a sleepy town, where I knew no one and no one knew me, employing a series of drivers to get me to rehab and back. About two years post-truck, I met Hannah in Manhattan on my first long-distance trip. I was auditioning for the part of “normal mom,” sort of like I was before. I wanted to walk like I did. I wanted to talk like I did. I wanted to think like I did. I was embarrassed by me.

Disabled people are the single largest minority in the world, and likely the least heard from. It’s also the only minority anyone can join at any time. I’m sharing my story not because I think it is exceptional, but because I know it is not. Yet stories like mine are rarely, if ever, told by those who live it. Though the trajectory of head writer to head injured is unique, the larger story is universal. We each get hit by a truck, albeit metaphorical. The disease, the diagnosis, the divorce, the addiction, the death, the natural disaster, or the not-so-natural kind, like a breakfast run for beer. We all lose people we love, and some of us lose the people we were.

You are not in charge of getting breast cancer, or MS, or being hit by a truck, but you are in charge of the way you frame events, the story you tell. One NPR headline touted a few wonderful memoirs as ones that “won’t make you slit your wrists.” I promise my memoir won’t. I absolutely do not want people to feel sorry for me. Nor do I feel sorry for myself. I feel grateful. How? By staying focused on what I’ve been given, not on what I lost or how. Also by not giving up too soon or getting down too fast or staying down too long. And, last, by redefining “impossible” to mean something I haven’t done yet.

Which brings us to miracles. In the crushed car, the margin between my living and dying was less than one inch. That’s one miracle. I wrote a book from scraps. That’s another miracle, though it’s not been published. If the book gets published somehow, that would be a third miracle. So let’s say I’m at 2-and-a-half.

Deep gratitude to my paid subscribers whose support keeps my spirits buoyant and this newsletter afloat. ❤️

If you find yourself here a lot, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Not only do you help sustain my work, you help get heaps of (often quite ill!) doggies and kitties off the streets.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support my work without a subscription, here’s my link to Venmo and Paypal. ⭐️

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy this gorgeous poem by :

If you enjoy what you’re reading here, please hit the ❤️ button to boost Beyond in the algorithm. The hearts really do help! And they let Judith know how much you enjoyed her words!

Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!

What’s your version of being hit by a truck?

How have you framed these events?

What “impossible” things have you redefined?

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is a writer, digital creator, and advocate for authentic self-expression in midlife women. Following her husband’s death from cancer, she began using memoir and social media to explore the complex intersection of grief and desire, cultivating a community of thousands drawn to honest conversations about life after loss. Widow in the City, A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups (published by She Writes Press / distributed by Simon & Schuster) was published in May 2026. Her work also appears in and Narratively on Substack, as well as Medium publications including The Memoirist and Slackjaw. She lives in New York City, where she enjoys photography, travel, and raising her son.

1. What are you reading now?

I’ve mostly been listening to audiobooks and I just finished The Midnight Croissant by my good friend Bonnie Solomon. It’s a wonderful, feel-good cozy fantasy set in modern day Paris, France.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. It’s about a brother and sister that “run away” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (where I grew up) and become embroiled in a mystery. I also read a lot of Judy Blume: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Mom, the Wolfman and Me, and Forever.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

When I was fifteen, my mother and step-father gave me The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. It’s a collection of twenty-six poetic essays offering philosophical wisdom on universal themes like love, marriage, work, freedom, and death. They’ve both passed away, but I still have the copy they gave me with their beautiful inscription.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I love my rhinestone studded sneakers by Betsey Johnson because I can feel comfortable and a little bit fancy at the same time.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

The only thing we can control in life are our own thoughts, feelings and actions.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

A few months after my husband died I hired a babysitter to help me with my son who had just turned ten years old. We didn’t have any pets, but Charlotte would sometimes bring her golden retriever when she picked up my son from school. We both loved Milo, who had just turned a year old, and spent the next two summers living with both of them at a house we rented with a pool. I feel nostalgic for that time.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I think I might have answered this question differently before my husband died in August 2021. My first thought is that I am NOT happy about that part of my life turning out differently than I expected, but his death changed my whole world – and it’s not all bad. I don’t know if I would have become a writer or published a memoir if he lived, which I am happy about. There’s a duality in grief and I find I’m both happy and sad at the same time.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

One hundred percent dancing in the kitchen!

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I’ve spent a lot of time alone the last three years, mostly writing in my apartment. I never got back to “normal” after the Covid lockdowns but I would like to find more community in person. Most of my human interaction is over Zoom or another online platform because the city has felt overwhelming to me. I’ve reinvented my life a few times in recent years and find myself once again on the cusp of something new; I just don’t know what it is yet.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I have a small group of writer friends who encouraged me early on. Their kind words and positive comments kept me going when I felt self-critical or too vulnerable. I wish people understood how much their support means to writers and other artists. They might think it’s just a few words typed into a comment box, but sometimes it feels like a lifeline.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Humans have created too many structures that divide us, like religion, race, and the gender binary. The DNA of any two people on Earth is approximately ninety-nine point nine percent identical. At our core, we all want to be loved and appreciated for who we are. My guiding force is dismantling hierarchical cultural and economic systems that relegate so many to the margins.

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Manuka honey, said a voice in my head, calm and clear.

It was eleven at night, late January, and I was on my velvet couch about to get ready for bed. At that point, I knew very little about Manuka honey other than it came from New Zealand. I hadn’t been reading about it. No one had recently mentioned it. I hadn’t just seen it in a store, nor had advertisements for it popped up in my IG stream.

Yet I knew in an instant: Manuka honey would help my kitty, Rudy Lu.

Let me take you back a bit:

Last July, my sweet old man kitty, Rudy Lu, scratched his neck enough that he opened the skin. This isn’t unusual. He has lifelong warm-weather allergies.

In the beginning, his vets weren’t worried. The wound was the size of a penny and appeared “to be healing well.” By September, as it became clear it wasn’t actually healing at all, I treated it with aloe vera and herbal salves and homeopathy. It grew to the size of a quarter. Small ulcers formed. The vets prescribed topical then oral antibiotics and various medical ointments. It grew to the size of an egg. The ulcers oozed all over my white bedspread, where, come October, Rudy was suddenly spending all day and night. They prescribed a topical steroid. A weird, leathery scab suction-cupped itself over part of the ulcers. The still-exposed ulcers continued to ooze. It grew to the size of a small fist.

My days increasingly revolved around my boy. I already made his food, administered thrice-daily eyedrops alongside potions needed for his kidney disease, changed the pee pads on the basement floor where, after a lifetime of only peeing in garden beds no matter the weather, he’d taken to relieving himself. Now I was bathing his awful, tender, thriving wound three times a day and applying the various treatments that were meant to eradicate it.

Usually when the weather turned cool, Rudy spent his days in my office on his cushion in front of the heater, but now he rarely left my bed. All day, I dashed upstairs to tell him I loved him, snuggle him, do hopeful energy work, and bring him the food he didn’t finish with breakfast or dinner. I’d also give him his daily massage, but he had arthritis, and as the wound on his neck grew, so grew the pain in his haunches. I could barely touch the back of him without him flinching away. He was also walking in circles in the early evening, yowling (the kitty version of sundowning) and waking me multiple times a night by positioning himself an inch from my head and yelling. His whole life, Rudy had had the personality of a surfer: mellow, sweet, chill. Now, he was often agitated. My heart was heavy.

And yet: his appetite was good; he was playful and purred a lot. He seemed to know all the wound cleaning and ointment daubing and pills and tinctures were for his benefit and whilst I think he was exhausted by it all, he let me do it.

I was exhausted, too. Firstly, I was distraught for my boy. He had so much going on at once. And his ever-growing, oozing, resistant-to-all-treatment wound was beginning to feel like it would be with him, with us, until the end of time. Secondly, my babies are my heart, and watching each remedy only make things worse was alarming. I knew Rudy was suffering, and despite my devotion, I felt helpless to free him of it.

I was also beginning to feel trapped. Delilah and Rudy are lucky to have The World’s Best Pet Sitter who loves the hell out of them and cares for Rudy with such tenderness and diligence despite his many needs. But this wound, was a bridge too far. So until it healed, I was never going anywhere again.

Come early January, Rudy’s vets were at a loss. I’d also consulted a trusted holistic vet, but his suggestions had likewise failed. There was nothing left to try, and the only solution they could come up with was surgery. They’d remove the scab and then stitch the remaining skin together. My sixteen-year-old kitty with kidney disease would be under anesthesia for up to an hour. Nobody wanted this. But the wound just wouldn’t heal.

In the years after the blow to my head, when I was in nonstop, staggering, debilitating pain, a team of doctors at NYU advised me that the best course of action was to cut muscles out of one side of my neck because, according to them, the muscles were full of scar tissue that was pulling and causing this relentless pain. I was lucky to find another doctor who prescribed craniosacral therapy and acupuncture as I felt certain losing a part of my neck would result in more pulling and hence more pain—only now it would be permanent.

It wasn’t lost on me, that Rudy was facing a similar dilemma. Although he wouldn’t be losing muscle, having a fair portion of his neck skin removed and the remaining stitched together would create pulling and the possibility of ongoing neck and head pain. Whilst I wasn’t sure what to do, I couldn’t do this.

Finally, in mid-January, we drove an hour through a strange winter monsoon to the best kitty dermatologist (yes, they exist!) in the state of Michigan and one of the best in the country.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, donning a pair of magnifying glasses with an attached bright light to examine Rudy’s neck. “The only thing I know to call this is a scab. But it’s not a scab. It’s some strange covering.”

We were there for three hours. I won’t go into all the details. But one of the leading kitty dermatologists in America was as flummoxed as Rudy’s general vets. She managed to culture it (“There’s an enormous number of bacteria in there,” she said with awe) and whilst we waited for the results so she could match an antibiotic to the bacteria, she sent us home with an antifungal wipe and yet another antibiotic ointment. The next week, I started him on oral antibiotics tailored to the impressive amount of bacteria living in his wound. And…nothing changed.

After many phone calls and emails and failed hope, the dermatologist, also concerned about the anesthesia, nevertheless echoed Rudy’s vets, saying, “There is nothing left to try. The only thing to be done, is for the scab to be surgically removed and the remaining skin stitched together.”

I hugged my boy to me. He squirmed because hugs now bothered the back of his body, and tried to make the peace with the surgery. I could not.

And then came The Night of the Manuka Honey. I took that voice seriously, without even a moment of hesitation, and although I was dog-tired, I stayed up until 1:30 learning everything there is to know about Manuka. And there’s way more than I ever imagined.

Online, I stumbled across a long comment written by a man who’d been in an uncannily similar situation: he’d tried everything imaginable, and his beloved dog’s leg wound grew worse to the point the vets said the only choice left was amputation. And then the Manuka honey had healed it. I ordered one potency above his recommendation.

When the honey arrived, I bathed Rudy’s wound and applied it first thing in the morning, after lunch, and just before bed.

On Day Three, all the ulcers that weren’t under the scab were completely healed. And Rudy waltzed downstairs and plopped himself in front of the heater. For the first time in many months, I felt very cautious hope.

On Day Ten, the scab fell off, exposing raw, ulcerated skin. But still: the scab that wasn’t a scab was gone. I reduced the wound cleaning and application of fresh honey to twice a day. My daily mantra (often recited whilst dancing around the house) became: “Thank you, bees! Thank you, bees!”

Over the next few weeks, as the wound continued to heal, Rudy’s pain levels dropped dramatically. I could once more give him full body massages.

Every Friday, I sent his vets an update surrounded by emojis of hearts and bees. They wrote back in all caps with lots of exclamation points. Concerned family and friends checked in regularly and were delighted by the news.

We were joyful! The world felt shiny again!

The super kind people at the honey company had said that a wound as severe as Rudy’s would take about six weeks to heal. And sure enough, at the six-week mark, the wound was down to the size of a pinhead. I allowed myself to daydream about travel, even speaking to friends and family about it. And then it stayed at the teeny-tiny-almost-healed-and-yet-still-an-open-wound place for another two weeks.

Reader, did I almost lose my mind? Yes. Yes, I did almost lose my mind.

Off we went back to the vet, who debrided it to encourage new growth. I treated it with a higher-potency honey for one week and then decided to stop all treatment and let Rudy Lu’s body do the rest. And it did! By the following weekend, it was completely healed. All his beautiful fur began to grow back in at a blessedly fast clip. And whilst he is still my old man kitty, these days, he no longer circles the house yowling, or yells into my ear multiple times a night.

When I started writing this post, I imagined it would be about intuition, which, in recent years, I have listened to and acted upon quite a bit. Or about our guides, something I hear people I trust earnestly discuss—listening to their spirit guides, their ancestors, their beloveds who’ve gone beyond, angels. Though in this case, it would seem it was Rudy’s guides I heard. I thought I’d write about connecting with aspects of this realm or other realms that perhaps we’re too quick to ignore or, if noticed, to dismiss or explain away.

But I realize now, I’ve been writing about the wildness of life, the wildness of having a body; about love and standing by one another; about how some things are just fucking weird and even a little scary and stump four extraordinary and devoted vets, like completely stump them, and yet Rudy Lu still healed! The miracles of life. The practical, simplicity of listening.

And also the interconnectedness of this world. All that it took: those marvelous, beloved bees in New Zealand who flew to the Manuka tree and collected nectar and returned their hive. The beekeepers who harvested the honey. The clinicians who tested it for purity and potency. The workers who bottled it. The people who packaged it for shipping. The ramp agents who loaded the plane and the pilot and co-pilot who flew it to America. The baggage handlers who took it from the plane. The customs workers who cleared it. The truckers who drove it to the warehouse. The warehouse workers who then packed up my one bottle, labeled it, and sent it to me. The delivery person who brought it to my house.

Plus, we could go to an even deeper into those who designed the airplanes and trucks, those who educated the designers, those who built the airplanes, built the trucks, paved the roads, and manufactured the bottles and boxes.

What tremendous kindness and community went into healing Rudy’s neck.

There are tragedies happening in this world of ours every second. If I let my mind settle there, it will break me. So I remind myself that there is goodness all around us, that there is nothing we do alone. Not even heal an impossible-to-heal wound on a beloved old-man kitty’s neck.

I still don’t know who spoke to me that night, but I’m glad I listened.

I hope I keep listening. For one thing, spring is here. And allergy season for Rudy is just revving up.

What’s your relationship like with your intuition? Do you have guides? Has the universe ever spoken directly to you? If so, how did you respond? How do you experience the interconnectedness of life? Have you ever tried the miracle of Manuka honey?

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I’m so grateful to this beautiful, thoughtful, insightful community. Your support and kindness toward me and each other means everything.

I think everyone knows I adore , so I was absolutely over the moon when she asked me to fill in her iconic What Matters questionnaire. Normally, despite running my own Questionnaire, I struggle with my responses, but these just flowed out of me. It was good for my soul!

You can read it here. I hope you enjoy! 🌸

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I’ve somehow only just discovered that is on Substack. Amongst other things, he’s one of the foremost scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder of the Tibet House. He’s also one of my favorite people on the planet. He was a student of and good friends with my lama Gelek Rimpoche so our paths often crossed. I was lucky enough to interview Bob multiple times over the years: here’s an early conversation in Guernica and more recently The Believer. I also studied with him at Columbia University.

I love the way Bob’s mind works. And the way his heart works. And the way they work together. For one thing, he is doggedly hopeful.

I could (and have!) listen to Bob speak for hours. He often goes off on tangents—and then tangents within the tangent and then more tangents, but this is because in his mind everything connects (today’s theme!). And he’s usually right. I don’t agree with every single thing he says, but he always gets me thinking about the world differently than I had before listening to him. And he always inspires more hope! One of his most used words is jolly! This is because he’s often in a jolly mood! I wish he were my neighbor.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked out his Substack, I highly recommend doing so!

Blue Sky Common Sense with T Bob Thurman

Teachings and reflections from Robert Thurman on Buddhism, compassion, and the future of humanity.

By Robert Thurman

My dad is now 99 and still going strong (though not quite this strong!)!

If you enjoy what you’re reading here, please hit the ❤️ button to boost Beyond in the algorithm. The hearts really do help!

has a knack for taking challenging, multi-layered, often tender topics and, through a series of practical and doable steps, illuminating the possibility of a path out.

He explored this first through his award-wining podcast, The One You Feed, as well his Ted Talk, The Battle of Changing Your Behavior—where many of the comments centered on the fact that Eric actually provided guidance on how to make these important changes rather than resorting to general terms.

Now Eric’s taken all that know-how, woven it together with decades of research and wisdom from some of today’s leading minds and the world’s greatest philosophers, and turned it into a wonderful, potent book, How a Little Becomes a Lot. This is the perfect book for anyone wanting to make a change in their lives—slowly, mindfully, step by step.

Eric came by the foundation of his understanding the hard way: he had a heroin addiction so powerful he wound up 100 pounds, living on the streets, and headed for a fifty-year prison sentence. At twenty-four, Eric made the decision to get clean and stay clean. From that one difficult choice all those years ago has grown so much kindness, compassion, and clear, useful steps on how we can make our own difficult changes and stick with them.

If you missed the first part of our conversation, you can find it here.

And if you missed his essay on fighting v. accepting, you can find it here.

This is Eric’s first book, and he offers some refreshing and powerful insight based upon what he learned along the way. I found it particularly helpful, and I think you will, as well!

xJane

❤️ Gigantic gratitude to all the paid subscribers whose support for Beyond also supports The DeTommaso Dogs. Ana has gotten over 800 dogs and kitties off the streets and into safe homes. She’s also spayed and neutered over 3,000 animals. Her heart is as big as her determination. I’m so grateful for your support in keeping these sweet babies safe. Thank you! ❤️

Where do you write?

Before this book, I didn’t write a lot anywhere. I’m a talker. That’s what I’ve done for all these years, is talk. But I wrote this book in a lot of public libraries. A lot on my front porch.

On your laptop?

Yes, I write on my laptop. I would try to vary where I would write. There’s something to me about, “I spent half the day here, let me get up and spend part of the day there.” It does me good to do that.

When you changed places, did that change the writing?

This is my first book. The whole way through, I was like, “How do you do this?” I don’t know what changes what.

I followed my own philosophy on this. I wrote the book thirty minutes at a time. Somebody said to me the other day, “Most people write a book right after their TED Talk. It took you eleven years.”

Part of the reason that I did it now was I could free up some chunks of time. It varied, but it might be like, Monday afternoons, Thursday mornings, and all day Sunday.

The thought of writing all day would strike terror into my heart. So I would go, “Okay, just sit down for thirty minutes.” The low resistance actions we talked about. I would set a timer, I would put on a playlist, and my job was simply not to leave during that time, no matter what was going on. I might just be staring at the screen. I might be feeling frustrated. But I’m going to try for thirty minutes.

Sometimes that timer would go off, and I’d think, “I’m in a good spot,” and I would hit thirty minutes again. Other times, I would go, “I’m done, thank you.” And I’d give myself five, ten, fifteen minutes and walk around. That might be when I’d go, “I’ve got a couple of thirty-minute sessions in, that last one felt rough, let’s go to the library.”

That’s how I did it, a little bit at a time. There never came a point where I was like, “Set the timer for four hours and let’s go!”

That half hour is really smart, because it does make it doable. You say you put on your playlist, so you were listening to music while you were writing?

Yes, but only instrumental music. And always the same playlist. It’s music that I find enjoyable, but not amazing, kind of background-ish.

Every chapter in your book so brilliantly builds on the one that came before. How did you come up with that organization? Did you plot it all out? Or did you let the writing lead you?

I hired a developmental editor. I had a table of contents that turned out to be pretty close to what we used. I did that as part of the proposal, and it actually held up. The developmental editor was the one who had that level of craft. The reason I brought someone in was you don’t just become great at something right away. It’s a craft.

I’ve always been what I would consider a decent writer. I’m competent, I’m comprehensible, and I’m clear. But I wasn’t a really good writer, and it was really important to me to write what I thought was a really good book, because I venerate books. They’ve been my best friend since I was so little.

So I decided to get somebody who can help. And she could see the whole book when I couldn’t. We had it all plotted out, we knew what was going in what section, but what she could do that I couldn’t is she could say, “Oh, we already covered that. So, let’s just callback to it.” I didn’t know that word, callback. Oh, we can callback! Or she would say, “I thought you said that in Chapter Eight we were going to talk about that. You’re going into it right now.”

That was incredibly helpful, because she could see the whole book in a way I could not because I was so in it, and I was learning to write in this way for the first time.

Did you have any graphs or visuals that plotted it all out?

No, we didn’t do that. What’s funny is, about eight years ago, an acquiring editor at HarperOne approached me about a book. They said, “I love your show, I think we should do a book.” And I was like, “Well, HarperOne is knocking at the door. I suppose the answer is yes—even though I don’t feel like I’m ready to write a book.” We did some work, and it didn’t go anywhere.

But as part of that, I did this intense mapping process, where I was going back through all of the old episodes of the show, and I was writing down ideas, and I was doing sticky notes, and they were in columns, and it was all there.

When the project didn’t go anywhere, all the sticky notes came down, and they’re shoved in a drawer somewhere. But that exercise was enormously valuable. It led to what I called the Spiritual Habits course which I taught for four years, and then turned it into the Wise Habits course, because I wanted to play around with language. That was the framework of the book going in. So I had a lot of the ideas already.

A fellow author… that’s the first time I’ve gotten to use that phrase! I had a fellow author say to me, “Spend what’s in your pocket.” That was enormously valuable advice. I was thinking I had to have more stories, I had to have more studies, I had to have more, more, more. When he said that, something clicked, and I went, “Stop. Stop doing what you’re doing which is gathering. And start expressing. Say what you’ve got to say. Pretend you’ve got enough right now.”

It sounds like you met up with your passion.

Yes. It’s why doing a podcast is so enjoyable to me. I interview so many different people, and I love pulling a little thread here and a little thread there. We’ve got some modern psychology. We’ve got a philosopher here. Oh, let me pull in a Zen teaching. Here’s what Islam thinks about that idea.

You do have so much fascinating information in your book and weave together all these ideas. I imagine that represents a fair amount of research. Did you read things specifically with this book in mind? Or had you already read them, and then they fed into the book? And how did you go about organizing all of that? Did you compile things in a notebook? If so, how did you access them when you needed them for the book?

That’s a great question. I don’t know that I have great answers. I would say with the studies, it was about 60% I already had them, 40% I found them. Doing this show for so many years, the number of psychology researchers at major universities that I’ve interviewed, it’s got to be 30, or 40, or 50. So I know what their work is. I’ve read their book, I’ve interviewed them, I know what the studies they’re talking about are.

I do keep my eye on certain things. I saw an article the other day in this email that I get that summarizes the personality traits of procrastinators, and I was like, “That’s perfect.” It bolsters the way I view it.

And some of this had already been compiled for teaching the course. About seven years ago, I became what’s known as an interfaith spiritual director because it gave me a view into a lot of different traditions. Since I was very young, I was always interested in spirituality. I would read it in its various forms, Christianity, or Buddhism, or Hinduism. I’d be like, “Okay, these are slightly different words, but I feel like this is the same thing.”

So I’ve got that side of my interest. Then I’m interviewing all these people, so that’s filtering in, too. Some of it I already had compiled from the course. Some of it, I had a vague idea in my mind, like, “Yeah, Katie Milkman talks about that. I’m going to want to go pull that.” Some of it I was finding.

So you weren’t keeping a notebook or something where you were organizing all this?

No. What I was doing, it’s not the best way to do it, is I basically wrote this thing in Google Docs. That’s probably not common. I had played with Scrivener before, and I actually think it’s a genius tool, and I don’t know why, but I didn’t go back to it. I know Microsoft Word is the main tool used in publishing. But Google is just what I knew.

I would initially be like, [air types] here are fifteen ideas related to Chapter Two, and here’s what I’ve got. Then, of course, as I’m going along, I have another podcast interview, and I think, “Alright, let’s put that in there.” Or I remember, “Let me go look at that interview with Bob.”

I had somebody create a searchable podcast database where I could search for, like, the word depression.

Oh, that’s amazing!

It was able to sort them. “That word came up twenty-seven times in this conversation. It came up eight times in this conversation.” I could look at that, and I’d be like, “No, no, no, yep, quote, bring it over. Oh, you know what, I need to go back to their book. I remember they said X, Y, and Z, let me bring that over.”

It would be this big document. Then when I worked with the developmental editor, we had the basic parts of the chapter we talked through. Now, as I’m writing, I’m looking at that list, which is long, and I have some of it in my mind, and I go, “That would fit in this chapter.” And I periodically would go through the full list, and I’d be like, “That’s no longer relevant. I already talked about it and used something else.” I crossed that out. Or, “Boy, I love that one. Where does it fit?”

Did the notes themselves grow into paragraphs? Or were they always kept in this document, and then they got moved into the book document?

They were all in the same document.

Wild!

There was the working text above. And then there was all the crap below. I did it both ways. Sometimes I would think, “I’m trying to make X point.” I would go down to my list. Other times, I would go to the list in search of a story.

When I was doing the podcast, I started to recognize that as I was interviewing modern psychologists, they were verifying a lot of what had shown up in my spiritual and philosophical life. To me, that was like a bell would ring: I’d think, “Plato said it, I should probably pay some attention.” And when a psychologist says it, I’d think, “they’re a researcher, maybe I should pay some attention.” When they both say it. Now, that interests me.

So I was looking for those. I had a general sense that I want someone old to talk about it, I want someone new to talk about it, I want a story to talk about it.

That’s so helpful. You balance so much, Eric. You have your podcast, writing this book, coaching. You’re also a human with chores and a personal life. Do you have a typical day? If so, what’s it like?

When I started doing this full-time, it was just a scramble. It was like, I’ve got to do anything I can do that will get money in the door. But I also started working with a business coach, and if you’d told me that years later I would continue to pay him as much money as I pay him, I would have said, you’re insane.

One of the things I liked about him, he was very intentional; he’s like, we’re going to build a business that serves your life, not the other way around. So for the first time in my life I got into taking time off. I’d never been off more than a week. All of a sudden, I was like, “I’m going to take two weeks off.” I did it, and I came back to work, and I was better. So then, I was like, “Could I take a month off?” I did. I came back and I was better. Actually, where it started wasn’t even two weeks off. It started with not working on weekends. I wanted to maintain that, so I began to design that.

My days do have a structure. Normally, I wake up, and I have a morning that has some amount of meditation, some amount of exercise, some amount of drinking coffee, and chilling out. Then I start my workday. That workday looks lots of different ways.

What time are you waking up?

I get up around seven.

What time does your workday start?

10-ish. There might be a day that I have two podcast interviews to do, and maybe I haven’t done the preparation for them. That could eat a day. It might be that I have meetings. It might be that I’ve got a newsletter to get out. But it almost always wraps up by about seven because my partner, Ginny, is an amazing cook, and she loves to cook, and so she does.

I’m so fortunate, it’s crazy. I’m always offering to take it over, and she’s more or less like, “Stay out of the kitchen.” I don’t want to sound like a male that’s got my woman forced into the kitchen. It’s a voluntary situation.

So I’m done at seven at the latest. I love when I get done sooner and I can take a short walk or play guitar. I don’t get back on and work. I might check my email briefly later in the evening; that’s more a tick than it is anything else.

So many Beyond readers are writers. Is there a prompt you might share that you find particularly useful?

I think for the first time in our interview, I’m going to have almost nothing to say, because I don’t think I do. But I’ll give you something else that’s not quite a writing prompt, but could be.

People are often like, “What’s one thing I could do now?” And I recommend creating what I call a still point. A still point is a moment of reflection that you put in your day. The little alarm goes off on your phone, tells you to do it, and you just go, “What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I doing right now? And am I doing what I want to be doing?”

If you do that four or five times a day, you start to develop an inner awareness. But it’s also a nice little writing prompt. If I sit down to write in the morning, it’s some version of that.

Writing that into a journal? Or into your Google Doc to get you started?

That would more or less be a journal. Which I don’t keep religiously at all. There just are days I feel like, “things feel kind of tangly in here.” By “in here,” I mean my brain, my heart, and I could use some help. “I should sit down and write for a little bit.”

I do try to ask myself that question pretty regularly throughout my days. Because it’s amazing how much of what is driving us is happening just below the surface. It’s a strange thing that you can be totally lost in something, and also, at the same time, have no idea that’s where you are. We get lost in a thought pattern, it’s just happening. And this prompt can help you see where you are.

If you enjoyed this Craft Advice with Eric, you might also enjoy this one with :

Thank you for being here!

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Do you have still points or other practices you use to bring awareness to your day?

Have you tried the half-hour method of writing?

What are some of your favorite writing tips?

Do you have one place you like to write? Or do you move locations?

Leave a comment

is an author, coach, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 75 million downloads that explores meaningful living. He is also a lovely, kind, compassionate human devoted to helping others. We share a passion for music and dogs, and a driving curiosity for how life works.

At twenty-four, Eric was living on the streets, addicted to heroin, weighing 100 pounds, and facing up to fifty years in prison. A counselor encouraged him to enter long-term treatment, and after first convincing himself he didn’t need it, he had a moment of clarity and went.

Thus began Eric’s long and often arduous and also joyful journey to get clean. And stay clean. What got him there? A series of small steps. Tiny decisions he made every day, every year. And still does.

Through research and his own lived experience, Eric developed protocols and strengthened positive habits that have helped him grow into a thriving, healthy, and sustainable life. Lucky for us, he gathered all of them plus mountains of wisdom and insight into his new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

Earlier this month, Eric wrote a thoughtful essay for Beyond about fighting vs. accepting aspects of our lives. A lot of you left comments and emailed me, letting me know how much it helped you in your own life. In case you missed it, here’s the link.

I so enjoyed speaking with Eric! I think you’ll also enjoy sharing in his vision of the world.

xJane

⭐️ Eric is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of How A Little Becomes A Lot! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “A LOT” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, April 27th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

You have this beautiful closing line to your book, “That little by little, we become who we are.” I really like your definition of “little by little”: low-resistance actions, done consistently over time, in the same direction. So I wondered if we could start there.

First, thank you for your compliment on the closing line. It’s great to hear another writer say that they thought it was good. That’s a great place to start because sometimes people hear little by little, and they think tiny. It doesn’t necessarily mean tiny. It means low-resistance actions. And low resistance is different for each of us.

For example, you might find writing to be a semi-pleasant activity. So for you to sit and write for two hours is fine. But when I started, the thought of writing for two hours would drive me to despair, so thirty minutes was low resistance for me. When we find something we’ll actually do, if we keep doing it, that’s consistently over time.

Then, in the same direction is important. Particularly in the world that I work in, which would be loosely called the self-improvement, self-help space. Because if you get on social media these days, you could find fifteen things to change about yourself in the first fifteen minutes. You should meditate more, you need to do morning pages, you should cold plunge, you need to sit in the sauna, you should be doing yoga, your fascia is too tight. We could just keep going.

The problem with that is we get very distracted—and so little by little in a lot of different directions does not become a lot. It’s actually a lot of scattered attempts that usually leave us feeling worse about ourselves, because we’re like, “I never finish anything that I start.” Or, “I tried that, but it didn’t work.”

You write about how repetition, which is part of the consistency, became spiritual for you.

I’m a recovering addict, and so I spent a lot of time in 12-step meetings. I mean a lot. Three meetings a day for a while. And they read the same stuff at the beginning of every meeting, again, and again, and again, to the point that I felt like I could barely take it. Repetition breeds boredom.

But then, much later, I became a serious Zen student, and I noticed that in that context, I was able to relate to repetition differently. My Zen teacher had me reading the same short amount of material, again and again and again. And every Zen meeting would open with the same readings. And yet, somehow, in this instance, I was able to let the repetition sink into me more deeply.

That may be a difference in my patience level from when I was a brand new recovering heroin addict and today. But now I find that I can listen to those things and reflect more deeply on what they mean. In that way, repetition can become spiritual, if we imbue the repetition with some sort of meaning.

Listening to you reminds me of how obsessive I can become about a song. I’ll play something twenty-seven times in a row! And I know how much music means to you. What role did music play in your life back when you were using, as you got clean, now? What impact has it had on your soul? Did it help you heal? Has it helped you stay sober? Did it ever draw you back to using?

My favorite art form is the song. When I turned eighteen, I decided to learn to play the guitar for the third time, and it finally took. I played in bands, and I had an identity in music, for a certain number of years there, as I descended into addiction, I could use it as an excuse, partially. Like, “I’m a musician.” That would justify my whole lifestyle. I’m not saying that music wasn’t incredibly valuable to me, it was. I wasn’t doing it for that reason, but I do think I used it as a shield.

When I got sober, a lot of the music that I listened to, I couldn’t listen to anymore. I was listening to music that would glorify the drug addict type of life, or the hedonism. So all of a sudden, a lot of that was immediately off-limits because it caused emotions that I did not like.

I hate that feeling of being torn in two, which is what addiction feels like. One part of me is screaming, “I have to do it!” The other part of me is screaming, “You can’t do it!”Anything that would even start to bring that feeling on, I was like, “No, thank you.” So I started to discover all kinds of new music, and I do think music was with me all through recovery.

I got sober and played in bands, which was really important for me, because I was afraid that was all gone. But I found sober musicians, and I had some of the best years of my life. I still play today. I don’t play in a band, but I play guitar most every day. I’m just so glad I know how to do it. It’s something I do simply for the enjoyment of doing it. I have no outcome associated with it at all anymore.

I’ve wrestled with depression a fair amount of my adult life, and one of the things I know is that music helps me. But there’s this curious thing that happens, because my depression shows up, at least at first, mainly as anhedonia, meaning an inability to take pleasure in anything. So if I go on, say, Spotify, if I’m in one of those moods, I don’t want to listen to any of it. That’s when I know something’s going on with me.

So I created a playlist of songs that I know help me when I’m in that space, and I’ve been adding to it for probably a decade now. All I have to do is go to the playlist and hit play, instead of trying to talk myself into thinking about what I want to listen to.

That’s amazing. What are one or two of your favorite songs that help the most?

Anything by an English musician, Frank Turner. Get Better is a great one that can immediately go on that list. Further Up, Further In by The Waterboys. Badlands by Bruce Springsteen.

At one point early in your recovery, you ask the universe a series of questions about why some people are able to make necessary changes toward health and others aren’t. And then in the 12-step programs, there’s “Let go and let God.” And now you’ve talked about Zen Buddhism. How do these all come together for you? What is your greater belief of what the fuck is going on?

I will caveat any greater belief with, I don’t have any idea what the fuck is going on. When I ask the universe, that’s more me just asking a question that has a great deal of meaning and mystery around it. When I got sober the first time in AA, God was what was on offer. God as you understand him, which is what it says in the Big Book. So I tried really hard to believe in the kind of God that the people around me believed in. There’s a God that came in and helped them get sober, and did things in the world.

I always struggled with it as an idea. I don’t know in the beginning if I got sober because of that belief, or in spite of that belief. I do know that a certain number of years into my recovery, my son was two and a half, and my wife came home one day and said, “I’m in love with someone else.” And it was someone who was in AA. My world crumbled. I didn’t drink right away, that was maybe three years later, but what I realized in that period was I did not have a spiritual life that made any sense to me.

So I went back out and drank, and when I came back, I was like, “Alright, I have to take this seriously. If I’m going to go to 12-step programs—because this is eighteen years ago, there wasn’t anything else—what is a higher power going to mean to me?”The third step says we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. What am I turning it over to?

There are a couple things I reflected on there. First is, “let go and let God.” What I realized for me was that I struggled with the “let go” part. If I let go and don’t believe somebody’s going to pick it up, it’s like dropping a baton. I’m supposed to hand this to somebody, and I don’t believe there’s anybody to hand it to. What I realized for me, it was the holding on that was making me sick. It was absolutely irrelevant whether anybody was going to pick up the baton. I just needed to let the baton go.

But the other thing that I came back to—and there’s a line in the AA Big Book about this that I didn’t even ever know was there—was this idea from Stephen Covey that you can live a principle-centered life. I came to believe that if I lived my life according to certain principles, I could handle whatever life brought me, and I could stay sober.

That’s beautiful.

I also did believe in the power of the group. I did believe that 12-step groups were a power greater than myself. They were a place I could go when I felt my own power wasn’t sufficient to keep me sober.

Now, as to how that ties together with my current belief system and Zen, I’ve had some experiences in Zen, the classic mystical experience, satori enlightenment-type thing, and a couple of them lasted for a while. What I saw to be true is that I was part of an unbroken reality that was all stitched together.

What does that mean to you?

We divide reality up into concepts: me, you, that light, the tree over there. That’s a valid view; it’s the one that helps us survive and get around. But there’s another view that doesn’t do any of that division. And when that division isn’t there, you suddenly find there’s a lot less to argue about. There’s a lot less to resist. It doesn’t really matter what happens to this individual me.

Another way I sometimes describe it is, imagine there’s a light shining. Somebody puts a piece of black cardboard in front of it and starts poking holes in it. And then where there’s a hole, the light goes through. I often think I’m just one of those holes.

There’s a light that’s shining through everything. The light that shines through me is the same light that shines through you and everyone else. And then that light takes on the shape of what we happen to be.

Are you viewing the light as benevolent? Or can it be harmful? I know you don’t believe in binary so is it an all light?

I think it’s an all-light. With my deep spiritual experiences, love is part of them. Whether that is imbued in the light, I don’t know. Or if when I see reality as it is, my only response is love, because I am everything, and everything is me in some way.

You have been on quite a journey—you were unhoused, addicted to heroin, weighed 100 pounds, had hep C, and headed for prison. You got clean, you relapsed, you got clean again, and now you’re here. If you feel comfortable, can you talk a little bit about your relationship with yourself these days?

My relationship with myself is a very benevolent one at this point in my life. I write about self-compassion in the book. And I write about it for two reasons. One is it’s really important if we’re in our ability, to make a change. Actually, it’s a great asset.

Secondly, it’s the biggest upgrade I’ve ever given myself besides, you know, stopping burning my life to the ground with mind-altering substances. It didn’t happen overnight; it’s happened over a number of years, but I am almost never mean to myself. That doesn’t mean that I don’t hold myself to account; it doesn’t mean that I can’t look at my behavior and go, “That wasn’t it,” or see where I’m falling short, or the way I want to be different. It’s just that I can do that with a certain amount of kindness.

So lovely. You write: “We tend to treat the ordinary moments of our lives as something we need to get through to get to the good stuff.” Then you go on to talk about how rushing is a mindset—and that we can change how we move through the day without changing our schedule. Can you talk more about this because I feel like most of us are doing exactly that.

One of my strongest traits is my ability to make things happen. However, it often takes over, and I end up always rushing to the next thing. You know, whatever is here, great, good, off the list, let’s go. Next, next, next, next. That is one that I have to work with a lot. I’m doing it with the book right now. I’m trying to slow down and go, “Look, this is amazing. Somebody sent you a picture of your book in the bookstore. Enjoy it, appreciate it!” But my mind is like, “Oh, that’s great, but I’ve still got 500 emails to send, so let’s move on.”

I relate!

I think we all have examples of rushing in our lives. There are days when you just feel frantic. And there are other days that there’s a lot going on, but there’s a certain peace, or a certain enjoyment, or a certain something that’s different. I look at those and think, “Well, the busyness doesn’t appear to be the only factor here. So, if that’s not the only factor, what else is going on?” And I do think it is rushing.

To me, it feels like this constant leaning too far forward. So, instead of leaning into go-go-go, can I sit back? I’m in a car that’s going. My life is structured to a certain degree that it has an engine to it. It doesn’t make my car go any faster when I’m leaning way forward with my head two inches from the windshield. I can sit back up and drop my shoulders, and try to keep going in a different way.

That’s a great image! So much is hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

For all intents and purposes, the amount of suffering in the world is infinite, and it always has been. Now, I may get exposed to more of it, I may see more of it, I may choose to seek more of it out, but I don’t think there’s any more of it than there’s ever been. That’s not to say that there aren’t incredibly difficult things happening. I truly mean none of us could process all the suffering that’s in the world, ever.

Part of it for me is that I try not to be so extreme in the way I describe everything. To acknowledge that there is an infinite amount of suffering, but there is an infinite amount of goodness and kindness also. I actually believe there’s much more of that. We just don’t recognize so much of it for what it is, because it seems so ordinary.

When we drive down the freeway, all of us mostly are following the rules and being respectful, and working together. But we don’t think that, because it’s just ordinary. We only focus on the one jackass, where everybody else is being kind of good.

I think joy and kindness are everywhere. So my job becomes, where do I find them? Music, for sure. Always music. Dogs, for sure. Always dogs. Nature, it’s always there. I love this time of year: the trees here in Columbus, we’ve actually got blooms, but about ten days ago, you could look at the tree and see buds and think, “it’s all about to come out of that little thing there.”

My friends are joyful. My partner is joyful. There’s so much good art, books, or TV series, or comedy.

I generally find joy easily if I look for it. It’s just a matter of choosing to look for it. Part of my life, I think, “Oh boy, there’s a lot of suffering.” That’s always kind of there to me. But I also try and then go, “Okay, and there’s this other part.” Both are true.

I’m not trying to be Pollyanna. It’s me saying, “Let me balance.” If all I’m seeing is the bad, then I’m not really seeing reality.

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is the author most recently of the memoir This is the Door. Her other books include the memoirs Flash Count Diary, Easter Everywhere and five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and many have been New York Times Notables. Her nonfiction has appeared widely and she often writes about art. Her web story “Blindspot” was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and on the long list of the Independent Book Award and the French Arles Author Prize. She has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

In case you missed my interview with Darcey, check it out here. And Darcey’s brilliant Craft Advice here.

1. What are you reading now?

I just finished Jen Percy’s amazing Girls Play Dead and I am nearly done with the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s amazing If Only. I have an intergenerational book group with my friends, my daughter and her friends and some of my former students and we are about to read Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness’ Under the Glacier.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I read like crazy as a girl! I loved The Chronicles of Narnia of course and Edward Eager’s Half Magic series. But I would basically read almost anything. I remember reading Psychoanalytic text that my Dad kept in his bathroom. Sometimes I would sneak into my parent’s bedroom and read the books on their nightstand. I remember Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Fear of Flying freaking me out!

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I am not a big re-reader. But I have returned to Wuthering Heights more than once. That book is like a forever channel, it’s so alive. When I have problems, I always find books that might help me. I remember when my mother died. I read A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir about her own mother’s death. And during a bad break up I read Lydia Davis’ book The End of the Story, that helped me. I also read a lot of theology from all religions.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

My Flatbush sweatshirt. I write in jeans and a sweatshirt. One of the nice things about getting older is that I don’t stress as much about clothes. Sometimes when I go out at night, I don’t even change. This would have been unthinkable in my younger days.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you encountered recently?

From my therapist: “Now that your parents are both dead try to stop seeking their approval.” Game Changer!

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

My cat Junebug! He is actually sleeping as of this moment on the bed beside me. Thirteen years ago we heard a cat crying in our yard just before Hurricane Sandy and when my husband when out, Junebug, then a tiny kitten, crawled up his pants leg. He is very bonded to us. After I feed him in the morning he comes up to my office, I pet him while I drink my coffee and then he comes and sleeps on the bed beside me while I write. At night he comes into the bedroom and curls up on the pillow beside mine. He has very large soulful eyes. When he dies, I will be devastated.

7. What one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I think when I was a younger writer I thought I would teach at a university in a small college town. But, while I went out to teach sometimes, it never really stuck. I was always happy to get back to Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn. I do open water swimming at Brighton Beach and I love all the bookstores and literary life. I live near Prospect Park and I walk there almost every day.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I like to walk. I have always loved just to roam in the city. Sometimes, rather than take the subway, I will walk for an hour or more across Brooklyn, from one hood to another. The street life in the city is very nourishing to me. The little interactions you have with people, dogs, children.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope to be, as I say in my new book, worthy of my suffering. I hope to continue to transform my life into stories that people will want to read. A lot of people my age are thinking of retiring and traveling, and while I love to take trips, the most important thing for me still is to be at my desk most days, to see what I am thinking by working out ideas in language.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

So many! My early writing teachers were great. Some of them were very hard on me, but that helped me see what’s at stake, and how I would have to work tirelessly. But just strangers too. I remember when I was in my twenties and had just come to NYC, I was crying on the subway and an old women came over and sat beside me and said: “I have felt just how you are feeling now.” That stays with me.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My daughter, Abbie, is amazing. She is hard working and creative and kind, a film producer and through her I get to experience so much. I see the younger generation, their art and music and I understand the world is going to be ok. She is also very centered and wise.

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A few months ago, a research grad student from NYU reached out to me about participating in a Remote Traumatic Brain Injury Research Study that the Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology Lab was conducting. They’d had great success with these brain exercises in person. And now, because so many people with brain injuries have driving challenges (raises hand), they wanted to see if the same protocols were effective online.

I was immediately drawn to the study, but also scared: what if I completed all six weeks and nothing changed? Would that demonstrate, once and for all, I was beyond further improvement?

Yet over the next few weeks, I found myself daydreaming about, amongst other things, no longer feeling like a lunch with friends had happened three months ago by the time I walked home; becoming utterly overwhelmed if necessary information was longer than a paragraph; having my mind go blank, like truly a black screen, if something new didn’t make sense to me; or having to repeat something back three times to make sure I had understood it clearly. Perhaps it would even help with the altered way I now literally see the world.

To participate in the study, you need to show your medical records to prove that you do, indeed, have a brain injury.

After speaking with Dr. Voelbel, the head of the TBI Study, and feeling hopeful—even elated!—that some healing awaited me, I called Dr. Gotlin’s office. He was the head of Sports Medicine at Mount Sinai and sports doctor to the Knicks and the Giants and myriad boxers—and the doctor who helped me the most back then. Doing so nearly brought me to tears as those years of arduous pain and fear returned to me. From there, I was put through to the medical records department. The phone connection was crackly and the woman who helped me rude, but that all felt secondary to the fact that these records were my stepping stone to my future, healthier brain.

But when I shared the years I was requesting, she crisply informed me, “Those records have been destroyed.”

My chest clenched. “What?”

“We only keep medical records for ten years.”

I did a quick Google and learned that this is standard practice in America: if you are no longer an active patient, records are purged between four and ten years without notice.

My nervous system was rattled, so I waited until the next day to call NYU, where I had first sought help. They destroy records after six years.

This revelation was shocking to me. All official documentation of the most traumatic and transformative event of my life had been wiped out. The practicalities of my daily life hadn’t changed—and yet grief swept through my body: pungent, watery, electric, and alive. I felt as if a piece of my soul had been wrested from me.

I told my poet friend Victoria that I wanted to write a poem about it (I do not write poetry!) because I couldn’t think of any other form to hold this strange, faltering sorrow. The next few days, I felt bogged down, lost, jangled, unclear on who I now was.

I somehow managed to convey all of this to my endlessly patient Spanish tutor, and her face fell. But then, a few moments later, she brightened. “It’s like when you break up with a boy,” she said. “You erase all trace of him—photos, texts, emails. All of it. It’s as if he never existed.”

Readers, I found this strangely settling. My nervous system slipped into a gentle hum. And a peculiar, unexpected joy crept in. “I’m breaking up with my head injury,” I said. “Sí,” she said with a nod of indisputable affirmation. Excitement, delight, adventure coursed through me.

I am breaking up with my head and brain injury, I repeated to myself throughout the next few days. And suddenly everything, everything, seemed possible.

Nothing has actually changed since the break-up. And to be honest, I’ve never been one to erase a person completely after things fall apart. In fact, we usually stay friends. The grief over the loss of the records dissipated, but no supersonic healing moved in. And yet, I do feel lighter. Less tethered to this particular definition of myself that has ushered in much compassion and kindness and love, and also much loss and sorrow and grief.

For ages, I’ve longed to experience this injured part myself in a new light. But how? The facts are the facts: a huge tabletop fell on my head and changed everything. I spent decades in and out of doctor’s offices, ran up mountains of debt on care, missed out on far too many things to list due to staggering pain, vertigo, memory loss, an inability to follow conversations with more than one person, heightened sensitivity to light and sound, and so much more. My career faltered, my friendships shrank, dating became next to impossible, travel a sweet memory. Once in the thick of things, I recreated my life in smaller, quieter, safer measures—many of which continue to this day.

And yet, here’s another fact: the medical records of these facts are gone. Leaving in their wake the space for a new sort of kinship with the Jane of those days and the aftermath of the blow to my head.

Alas, I can no longer participate in the study. But the people running it are so wonderful: kind, wise, and dedicated to helping people heal. I know some of you also have a brain injury, so I will share with you what Christian, the grad student, shared with me:

Participants with TBI will receive 30 days of free Computerized Cognitive Remediation treatment, which is an intervention that uses an interactive computer program to “exercise” the brain. Participants use the program 5 days a week for 6 weeks, with researchers meeting participants over video conference for each 35-minute session. They will receive online assessments over Zoom before and after treatment to determine treatment efficacy.

The goal of this research is to identify a computerized and remote treatment that individuals with TBIs can receive in their own homes. Individuals with TBIs sometimes have symptoms that make driving to treatment difficult, so online treatment has the potential to make treatment more equitable and accessible to difficult-to-access or historically medically underserved populations.

The study is ongoing, so if you are interested in joining, reach out to Christian Zaballos: cez2025@nyu.edu. And if you do join, please let us know how it goes!

My novel about the unpopular peace movement in London during WWII is out on submission. I’m hoping to have some good news to share with you soon!

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Have you broken up with past illnesses or traumas? Have you lost important medical records? Have you been able to create a new relationship with old and painful events? I’d love to hear!

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had somehow not been in my orbit until introduced us last month—and I’m so glad she did. Eric also does interviews and I love his approach both to interviewing and, well, to life. He holds a gentle, earnest curiosity and a stalwart desire to help. No doubt because Eric was once in a vulnerable place himself. At twenty-four, he was on the streets, with a staggering heroin addiction, and facing prison. A combination of meditation, 12-step programs, deep-deep inner work, good music, tenacity, community, some good fortune, and time, landed him where he is today: clean and thriving with a burning interest in human transformation and resilience.

His award-winning podcast—The One You Feed—has more than 75 million downloads, and he’s a sought-after teacher, speaker, life coach, and author. His new book was just published: How a Little Become a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

I’m so happy Eric wrote this essay for Beyond, chockful of wisdom we could all do with at the moment. It’s a beautiful illustration of how a little and a little more becomes a lot. Enjoy!

xJane

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

I related very much to Jane’s recent essay about being a fighter. Just this morning I listened to one of my favorite songs from The Alarm called “Without a Fight” and it is a very vociferous declaration that I will not be giving up without said fight.

However, in that odd way that our best traits often become our worst traits, I’ve also had to realize that fighting is not the tool for every job. But when is fighting to change something versus accepting it the wiser move?

Back in my heavy 12-step days you would hear this in meetings a lot: “Four forty-nine, man, look at page four forty-nine,” or “You need to apply some four forty-nine to that.” People even had bumper stickers that said “449.” Now, 449 is not a cleaning solution like 409 or a lubricant like WD-40.

It’s a page in the AA Big Book. And what was on page 449?

This statement: “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.”

Rebellious young me heard that line and it drove me crazy more often than it brought me serenity. Because, of course, as I would point out to whatever well-meaning soul dared speak those words, acceptance isn’t the answer to all our problems. Nothing is an answer to all our problems.

But then again, as with any spiritual truism, there is wisdom at the core of page 449. Not all “problems” are things we can change today—or, sometimes, things we can change at all. They might not even be problems, strictly speaking.

Our biological hardwiring tells us that pain, discomfort, or loss of any kind are enemies to be fought. The fight-or-flight responses that helped us survive as animals on the savannah are still right there, ready to flood us with adrenaline. But as humans, we face the unique challenge and opportunity of rising above these automatic impulses. We can pause. We can reflect. We can recognize that sadness over the death of a loved one is a different kind of pain than a persistent backache, which is a different kind of pain than a sense of injustice, which is a different kind of pain than existential dread. (The downside to self-awareness as a species: lots of feelings.)

The starting point of acceptance is to do the simple, hard work of agreeing that whatever is happening to us is actually happening. My back hurts. My dog has passed. An injustice has occurred. The next step is to answer a simple, hard question: Can I do anything to change the source of this pain? Not “do I want to change it”; not “do I wish I could.” You already know the answers to those.

This is the confusion for which the Serenity Prayer seeks clarity.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr

And for centuries, thinkers have tried to make it easier than it actually is. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus framed the ability to know what is and isn’t within our control as the cornerstone of a life well lived. He drew a neat division: our judgments, choices, and attitudes on one side; our health, reputation, wealth, and the actions of others on the other.

As brilliant and timeless as that central insight is—that it’s worth focusing your time and energy where they will have the most impact—you may have some qualms with those lists. I do.

I can agree that we can’t control the fact of aging, for example, but I’d point out that we can make choices about our health today that give us a better chance of aging well. And yes, we can’t control the stock market, but we can make choices about how to save and invest.

The Serenity Prayer, Epictetus, and all sorts of other thinkers—they all want life to sort into two columns. Things you can change, things you can’t. But life rarely supplies obvious answers in the “wisdom to know the difference” department.

It asks us to balance conflicting truths and invites us to wonder whether to blame the world around us or our own perspective. Am I unhappy at work because my boss is actually a jerk, or because I’m being triggered and there’s something in me that needs attention? Is this business not working because it’s not a good idea, or do I need to hang on a little longer? Is my phone glitching because it’s truly outdated, or is the universe trying to teach me patience while I Google “how to fix slow phone”?

I dislike binary, simple answers. Our actions, judgments, and choices—which all these thinkers put in the “we can control” bucket—come from a complex stew of motivations, not all of which are even conscious. “Control” itself is a slippery concept as soon as you stick “self-” in front of it. And what even counts as a “choice”?

Is it a choice to drink, when you’re deep in the patterns of an alcoholic? Not exactly, I would argue, but at some point, there is some choice to say “no more.” So which column does that go in? The thing I can change, or the thing I can’t? I spent years living inside that question. The answer, when it finally came, wasn’t one or the other.

I think that’s closer to how most of life actually works. We often need to learn to both change and accept the very same thing. Which is harder than picking one. But I think it’s also more honest.

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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy these deeply moving paintings by , (pretty much my favorite living artist):

I can’t hear the Serenity Prayer without thinking about Sinéad O’Connor (though it might be clear to most of you by now, that it doesn’t take much to make me think of Sinéad.) She recites it at the beginning of Feel so Different, the first song on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, my favorite album of all time.

Stunning live version of the song, but, alas, no Serenity Prayer.

Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!

Do you struggle with the change/accept binary? What, if anything, has helped you find the balance? How easily do you accept what is actually happening? What’s your relationship like with control? What are your thoughts on the Serenity Prayer?

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spent more than three decades working in and around the capital markets, including over a decade on Wall Street where he organized and managed several securities trading businesses. His career in finance gave him a front-row seat to the inner workings of markets, institutions, and power.

After leaving the industry, Weems turned to writing, producing essays, white papers, and research reports on financial markets, economic systems, and American culture. His work has been quoted in major financial publications and cited in academic research. In 2022, he authored a report on blockchain use cases in healthcare for STAT, the digital health publication of Boston Globe Media.

In 2020, he founded , a newsletter exploring the intersection of economics, politics, culture, and race in American life. The publication has since grown into a multi-platform project that includes livestream programming and collaborative journalism. Weems is also the founder of The Journeyman Media Network, a creator-owned collective of independent writers and journalists.

He is currently completing a memoir about his thirty-year career in finance. An essay from the manuscript, “How Starting an Investment Firm Almost Landed Me in Federal Prison,” received wide attention when it was published in 2023.

Always interested in new forms of storytelling, Weems made his theatrical debut in 2023 in the role of Uncle Ben in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

1. What are you reading now?

I tend to read several things at once. It’s usually a combination of economics, history, and journalism. Lately I’ve been revisiting books about financial history and global economic systems because they provide useful context for the strange period we’re living through now. The older I get, the more I find that history is a reliable guide to what markets—and people—are likely to do next.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

As a kid I used to sneak comic books into the house—mostly Spider-Man and Batman. I also read a lot of mythology and was really fascinated with the stories of the Norse gods. You know, Odin, Thor, Loki. Looking back, those myths led directly to my comic book habit. Superheroes are just modern mythology. That’s why M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakableis one of my favorite films.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I’ve reread Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, half a dozen times. It’s gripping storytelling, but it’s also about power, corruption, and justice. Those themes never really go out of style. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and Simon Vance is one of the best readers in the game.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

It used to be my French-cuffed shirts. When I worked in Manhattan, there was a tailor several of us used. He’d come to the city and set up in a Midtown hotel like a pop-up clothing store. We’d drop in, get measured, and place our orders.

I still have about a dozen of those shirts, but these days it’s very different. I collect T-shirts with logos from movies or television shows, and I wear hoodies a lot. But my favorite piece of clothing is my Converse sneakers. They’re the Jack Purcell edition, which is difficult to find. Folks mistake them for Chuck Taylors, but Purcell was a Canadian badminton champion. I’d never heard of him, but when I saw the shoe, I had to have a pair.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

The older I get, the more I’ve come to believe that life is less about certainty and more about judgment. You rarely have perfect information. What matters is how thoughtfully you make decisions with the information you have.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild.

We’re cat people, and we’ve had several—always rescues. All of them were special, but there was one named Kibbles who was particularly memorable.

Kibbles had heterochromia, a genetic condition that causes deafness in cats. Cats with it are snow-white and have different colored eyes. He made the move with us to North Carolina and was part of the family for many years. When he passed away a few years ago, it genuinely felt like losing a family member.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Leaving Wall Street. At the time it felt like the end of something I had spent years building, but in retrospect it opened the door to writing, storytelling, and a completely different way of thinking about the world.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Neither—but does chair dancing count?

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

To keep learning, keep writing, and build something that outlasts me. Right now, that means continuing to grow The Journeyman and the community around it. I’m also working on building the Journeyman Media Network, a collaboration of independent writers who believe audiences increasingly trust people more than institutions.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

Throughout my career there have been people who took chances on me—mentors, colleagues, editors, and readers. Those moments matter more than people realize. Sometimes a single act of belief can change the trajectory of someone’s life.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

I’m not always successful, but I try to do the right thing. Most of us already know the difference between right and wrong. The real challenge is having the courage to act on that knowledge when it matters.

If you enjoyed Marlon’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with :

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