October 3, 2022 • 39 mins
“Getting people to feel angry with me makes me feel less alone, less helpless. (It) makes me feel like, okay, there’s a whole team of us. We're all gonna do it.” - Writer and illustrator, Aubrey Hirsch
The world is such a hot mess: every day a new disaster, a new human rights catastrophe. It can just feel… endless. Illustrator Aubrey Hirsch joins us to talk about outrage and trauma and community building - it’s like the greatest hits of modern culture. But mostly, she joins us to talk about art - specifically, the ways that storytelling helps us band together and work towards the world we all want.
PS: Listen all the way through so you don’t miss Aubrey’s slightly sinister but ultimately functional ideas on hope.
In this episode we cover:
- The relationship between rage and creation: when there’s so much wrong with the world all you can do is scream
- Why taking action to change things matters - even if your actions won’t save everyone
- Women and anger: hoo boy, it’s a whole thing.
- Why healing inside trauma is actually kind of… boring.
- Connecting through the power of storytelling
Notable quotes:
“I feel very helpless and I don't wanna feel like that because I know that to be f*cked is a spectrum and we can be more f*cked than we are now or less f*cked. It's not a binary. I want us to move in the right direction (less f*cked), and I want to be a part of that movement - even if my action comes too late for some.” - Aubrey Hirsch
About our guest:
Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories, and This Will Be His Legacy, a flash fiction chapbook. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared widely in print and online in places like American Short Fiction, Vox, TIME, The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Toast, and in the New York Times bestselling anthology, Not That Bad. Her essay on trauma and surviving gun violence is a must read. Find it here.
Additional resources
Aubrey occasionally teaches comics for “non-artists.” Check her TW @aubreyhirsch for announcements. She publishes new comics and essays on Roxane Gay’s substack, The Audacity.
Aubrey’s written on so many topics relevant to human life. Find a long list of awesome essays on her website, https://aubreyhirsch.com
Get in touch:
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right.
Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at (323) 643-3768 or visit megandevine.co
For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
For me, I find it really helpful. And that's a
huge part of where most of what I write comes
from is from a place of anger. You know, I'll
get upset about something and then I'll say, I'm I
need to like write about it. Like a lot of
the time, what I'll be thinking is, why isn't everyone
screaming about this all the time? And then I wonder
if it's because maybe people don't know, And so then
(00:23):
I feel like it's my responsibility to try to make
something that people will look at and then come and
join me in, you know, please join me in the
scream fest. Yes, this is here After, and I'm your host,
Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay
that You're Not Okay. This week on here After, writer
(00:46):
and illustrator Aubrey Hirsch joins us to talk about, well,
a lot of things. She joins us to talk about
anger and trauma and gender it's like the greatest modern
hits of outrage on today a show. But mostly she
joins us to talk about art, specifically the ways that
storytelling helps us band together and work towards the world
(01:09):
we all want. This is a good one, friends, coming
up right after this first break before we get started,
one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional
relational territory in each episode, this show is not a
substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider
(01:32):
or for professional supervision related to your work. So I
first consciously encountered Aubrey Hersh's work in her essay on
Surviving gun violence that was in Roxane Gay's newsletter of
the Audacity. I say consciously because I'd seen Aubrey's work before,
and I bet you have to, from her comics on
(01:53):
reproductive rights to her essays on breastfeeding in public, Aubrey's
work distills complex issues down to a few emotionally powerful frames,
As you'll hear her say in this conversation, Using the
medium of comics allows her to bring social issues to
life in a way that feels more immediate, more visceral,
and honestly more human than news stories or sound bites
(02:16):
or statistics can usually do. Aubrey Hirsch is the author
of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of
short stories and This will be his Legacy, a flash
fiction chatbook. Her stories and essays and comics have appeared
widely in print and online in places like American Short Fiction,
Vox Time, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and in
(02:38):
the New York Times best selling anthology Not That Bad.
In today's episode of Hereafter, we talk outrage about the
state of the world and the powers of activism and
storytelling to help bind us together in the service of
the world. We actually want Aubrey, welcome to the show.
I'm so glad to have you here. So I saw
(03:00):
your gun Violent Survivor essay and basically stalked you after that,
because honestly, people know that I will I will cry
at least once in every episode, but like that essay
was the first time I saw my experience of being
a trauma survivor reflected, like the way that surviving something
(03:22):
life threatening and terrifying, the way that that lives in
a person out in the world. So thank you for that.
You're so welcome, thank you for having me, And what
a nice thing to say, thank you. That really means
a lot to me. That was a very very challenging
essay to write, and I have heard from many people
who have said something similar, and it just it feels
(03:43):
so good, you know, after you work so hard on
something to hear that it means something, even to one person,
really just makes it worth it. So thank you. You're welcome.
You have worked everywhere, including one comic called Medicine's Women
Problem about being ignored and misdiagnosed for years with significant
health issues. You've covered reproductive restrictions and misogyny and harassment
(04:05):
and the me too movements. So so much of your
work has this unifying theme of telling the truth about
really shitty things, really difficult things. In a lot of ways,
your work is really also about telling the truth about
things as a way to I'm totally editorializing here, but
like to upset the social order, right, like to kick
things over and start talking about things that we really
(04:26):
need to be talking about. So you're an illustrator and
obviously a fantastic writer, But what is it about that
combination of narrative and imagery specifically for talking about these
kinds of issues. What does illustration let you do that
maybe writing alone doesn't. Yeah, it's such a good question.
This is something that I kind of discovered as I
was working my way into comics, is that I think
(04:50):
comics are a fantastic medium for discussing difficult things. I
think part of it is sort of like I like
to call it, like the spoonful of sugar effect, where
if you're writing about something that's really difficult and maybe heavy,
maybe challenging, but there are pictures to look at, it
can feel like a bit more accessible. It can like
offer people kind of a way into it. You see
(05:11):
a comic, you recognize a visual form. You know this
is not going to take a ton of your time.
You're not gonna have to sit with this for too long.
And also you know there's things to look at. What
comments allows me to do when I'm talking about social
issues especially is to take statistics and kind of like
bring them to life because within the piece you can
(05:31):
have like infographics and and it's just it's sometimes it's
more impactful to see what one fifth looks like than
to just read that number or you know, read one fifth,
but rather like to see it in a pie chart,
to see it in a graph. I think just gives
people a different way to access the material, and it
it can make things like that hit harder. We're such
(05:52):
visual creatures, right like that is the way that we
get a lot of our information. Like you can you
can pack a lot more information into an image than
you can in words, right, And there's an immediacy to that.
And I think also like that immediacy is how we
feel things, especially the topics that you usually talk about.
I think that's right. And also, you know, people will
(06:14):
see something it will resonate with them. And I think
because of things like Instagram, because of how text messaging works,
were so likely to be sharing pictures with each other
that it's a lot easier for people to send like
a panel of a comic than they would, say, like
a paragraph from a news story. And then you know,
it just helps more people get their eyes on d
(06:35):
can raise awareness about like a whole slew of problems
in the world. Yeah, nobody's going to read a whole paragraph, right,
it's not share able from a graphic perspective. And it's
also like the full catastrophe is just it's so overwhelming.
The sheer amount of atrocities and things to be outraged
about and things to talk about like that overwhelm is
(06:55):
so intense and no one's going to read all of
that stuff. But you make a comic and it opens
different doors. Yeah, I think that's right for me. I
find it really helpful and that's a huge part of
where most of what I write comes from is from
a place of anger. You know, I'll get upset about
something and then I'll say, I'm I need to like
(07:18):
write about it. Like a lot of the time, what
I'll be thinking is, why isn't everyone screaming about this
all the time? And then I wonder if it's because
maybe people don't know. And so then I feel like
it's my responsibility to try to make something that people
will look at and then come and join me in,
you know, please join me in the screen fest. Yes. Yeah.
(07:39):
And then when I know I'm onto something is when
during the process of researching, I become more angry, you know,
like I thought I understood the scope of the problem,
but in fact I did not. It's a lot worse
than I thought. And then that's really that's a powerful
moment for me and my process is when I get
when I start getting more angry, then it makes me
(08:01):
more excited about the thing that I'm working on, and
it really does kind of help neutralize my terrible feelings.
When I can feel like I'm doing something. Tell me
more about that that relationship between rage and creation and
that last element that you just put in there that
it actually makes you feel less overwhelmed by the terrible
(08:21):
things tapping into that. I think you said anger and
I said rage, but I mean either, I'm going to
go with rage. It's you know, we're at a moment
in the world right now, especially with all of the
attacks on reproductive rights that are that are going on,
where I find myself often like sitting around thinking what
are we going to do? And I feel very helpless.
(08:45):
And I don't want to feel like that because I
know that to be fucked is a spectrum, and we
can be more fucked than we are now or less fucked.
It's not a binary. And I want us to move
in the right direction and I want to be a
part of that movement. But then on the other hand,
(09:06):
you know, I'll read a new story about a woman
who is right now, you know, bleeding in a hospital
in Texas because they won't terminate her very dangerous pregnancy,
and that makes me feel awful because even if we
can move in the right direction, it's not going to
help her. You know, it's too late for her, And
every day it's too late for somebody new whose life
(09:28):
is being seriously damaged or ruined by you know, these
terrible attacks on our freedoms. And I think there are
moments when I find that really paralyzing, and there are
moments where I think, Wow, what am I doing? You know,
I'm like making my dumb come, like drawing my little pictures,
(09:48):
and it all feels very useless. But then the only
way out is through. There's nothing to do but to
do the work. And then when I sit down and
I do it, I almost always feel better, you know,
just by the process of making something. Getting people to
feel angry with me makes me feel less alone, less helpless,
makes me feel like, Okay, there there's a whole team
(10:09):
of us. We're all going to do it, you know,
we're all trying. And then hearing from people who say
this thing meant something to me, or I sent this
to my partner, I sent this to my mother, I
sent this to my uncle. You know, I put this
on Facebook. It makes me feel better, you know, like
it makes me feel like at least I'm doing something.
(10:31):
And it's not going to help that person that's in
Texas right now, but maybe it will help somebody think
a different way. Maybe it will help fire somebody up
to vote who wasn't going to or reach out and
do some campaigning or donate to an abortion fund, you know,
or whatever the thing is that's going to help us
get out of this mess, that maybe it will do something,
(10:53):
And that's my hope. Yes, and I love the sort
of unifying force of rage. That's something that you write
about a lot about how historically and currently kind of
always like women's anger is not okay, right, Telling the
truth about these things is not okay. Showing anger is
not okay. What's one of the things that pisces me
(11:15):
off the most about everything that's happening is that we
aren't supposed to be angry about it. And we also
don't recognize all of this as loss, as a grief issue, right,
that there is grief and loss and anger involved in
so much of everything that's been unfolding always, I mean,
I don't want to whitewash things to be like it
(11:36):
used to be better. Well, not for everybody, but you know,
especially these last several years and just the explosion of
injustice and violence and backpedaling of basic human rights, the
ways that loss, grief, anger, and gender all come together
as something that's really a thread through a lot of
your work. Yeah, and the connections. There is something I've
(11:58):
been thinking a lot about two, especially like with anger,
because women, we get socialized to de escalate. That's our job,
you know, in the face of anger, in the face
of outrage. We're there to put the brakes on that
and like slow things down and calm things down. And
I think it does us a disservice because anger, as
(12:22):
much as we're taught to repress it, ignore it, that
it's negative, that it's somehow bad. It's there for a reason.
You know, it's there because if something's gone wrong, you
need to get angry before you can address injustice. And
the fact that women get socialized to suppress their anger
is part I think of the reason why so much
injustice can be done to us, because you know, everybody
(12:46):
tells us, you know, be quiet, calm down, don't be hysterical,
and we hear that all of our lives. It's impossible
not to internalize it on some level. So what we've
got is storytelling and rage and ending together and for me,
you know, really tapping into not only the anger, but
the loss and the the compassion in there. And compassion
(13:09):
is such a word that gets screwed around with so much,
and I think it also gets weaponized, like have some
compassion and understanding for over here and the other like
no wrong use of the word etymological badness. I wish
that the people who are creating so much arbitrary suffering
(13:30):
would understand the suffering. Yeah, I mean that empathy gap
is like the biggest source of injustice in this country.
You know that the fact that so many you know,
Republicans can be against gay marriage until their kid is
gay and then all of a sudden, you know, it
doesn't require empathy because it directly affects them and it
(13:53):
changes their tune. If there was a way that we
could make this directly affect every single person, I don't
think we would have a problem. But if you can't
have empathy for other things that you know aren't directly
affecting you, but are directly affecting other people, it's very
difficult to have conversations with people like that. Yeah, you're
purposely shutting down your relatedness to others, your ability to
(14:17):
see yourself in other people's experience. And honestly, I mean,
we do that because we're afraid of those feelings, right,
I don't want to know what it's like to be
this person because then I have to feel that, right,
you know, For me, everything comes back to our aversion
to feeling and our version of grief, right, Like, we
don't want to see the people we care about suffer, right,
(14:40):
And that includes refusing to see the suffering of others
because that would tap us into our own humanity, and
those emotions are too big for us to really take
in and really handle. Very generous perspective, Yeah, some days
I get to be generous while also holding white hot
rage in the other hand, you know. And it's just
for me. This is part of age, right. It's like
(15:02):
we have so demonized emotion and we're so afraid of
emotion and feeling with each other. There are real world
consequences for a refusal to acknowledge the frailty of being
alive and how things can change in an instant. Unless
and until we get better at allowing the tenderness of
(15:25):
being human, nothing is really going to change because we
refuse to feel with each other, and because we squashed
down anger and grief and loss, we can't access that
ability to feel with each other and make laws and
communities that are actually human, centered and kind. You know,
(15:45):
you said it much more syscinctly and much better than
I just rambled through. But until we can feel with
each other, we're not going to have the kind of
just connected society that some of us dream of. It's
really beautiful. Actually, yeah, you're listening to Hereafter with me,
(16:19):
Megan Divine and this week's guest illustrator Aubrey Hirsch. As
we rejoined this conversation, Aubrey and I are discussing her
essay on surviving gun violence. Now we're gonna link to
that essay in the show notes so you can read it,
and please, really really do go read it. I wasn't
exaggerating at the top of the show when I said
it was the first time I saw my own experience
(16:41):
reflected in somebody else's story. There's something I don't know,
just amazingly powerful about the way Aubrey describes the ways
that trauma and memory live in your body and mind.
So let's get back to our conversation. But I did
just want to remind you to go read that essay
once you're finished listening to the show. Your gun violent
(17:02):
Survivor essay isn't illustrated is there a difference for you
between the things you typically create and illustrate and that
particular piece. Yeah, it's interesting because so I write a
monthly comic for Rocks and Gays newsletter, The Audacity, And
when I sat down to write that piece, I intended
to make a comic, and I thought, you know, maybe
(17:23):
I will try to make a comic about my experience
with PTSD. So I sat down and I started to
do my script, which is usually how I start with
just the text, and usually I write, I overwrite it,
and then pare it down. But I was like, what
would have been twelve panels in? And I felt like
I wasn't even anywhere near anything that I wanted to say.
(17:48):
And the more I thought on it, the more I
felt like this was gonna need to be much longer
than a comic, you know, the text I could put
into a comic. So I texted Rocks and what if
instead of a comic? I didn't say, and she was like, great,
I love it, go for it. And so then I
sat down to try to write it. And it was
a tough piece to write because there was a lot
(18:12):
that I wanted to say and a lot that I
wanted to get across that. That was really difficult for
me to do, but I think I needed that the room.
I don't think I could have done that in a
much more compressed space. I tried, but because you have
to follow where the story wants to go, right, And
one of the things about telling the truth about trauma
(18:34):
and about violence is that we always try to shrink
those stories. I want people to go read it, so
obviously I'm going to link the crap out of it everywhere.
But the repetition in that piece is one of the
things that makes it so powerful, right that each each
iteration comes with a slightly larger lens, right, And that
(18:56):
is the way that trauma lives in the body. That
was the lad us. Thank you for saying that, because
that was really the last piece of the puzzle to
fall into place for me. I wrote like five full
drafts of that essay, top to bottom, and every time
I wrote it, I was like, this is just not
it's not doing the thing I wanted to do, until
I started focusing on the paragraph where I talk about
(19:18):
how the experience of trauma is actually quite boring and
why that is is because you have to keep doing
the same thing over and over and over again. And
then as I was, you know, trying to work that
into language, I thought, Okay, this is what I need
to do. I need to make the essay do the
thing and just you're just gonna hear me say it
(19:41):
over and over and over again, here's what's happened. And
then hoping that the time that you spend with me
and the essay gives you a little bit of a
glimpse of like what it's like to be in the
head of a trauma survivor. Yeah, the repetition of that
both as like a creative writing divid I and making
the reader feel it. And this this is something that
(20:05):
we really don't talk about, not just in gun violence,
but in the way that life altering, life changing, loss
of whatever sort lives in you. And honestly, it really
is boring, so boring, it really really is. And it's
the this engine that just keeps chug. Yeah, it's just exhausting.
(20:27):
It's boring, and it wears you out, you know, it
wears you out, It wears out you know. Whenever any
time I have to say to my partner, like can
I talk to you again about the time I was
held host to point I feel I'm myself. I'm so
annoyed with me, you know, and he's great, but I
feel bored and annoyed because I know he knows he's
(20:50):
heard the story before. But like the telling is the cure.
You know, you have to do it. You have to
get in there with it when your body tells you
that it's time, and so you're going to dragon whoever
it is, you know, your therapist, your partner, your best friend,
your roommate, whoever is the person who's going to be
there for you in those moments, and then you know
you're dragging them into the boring nous of it all too.
(21:14):
I love this. I think we're just kind of precious
about trauma, right, Like you you can't call it boring,
you can't laugh about it, Like it is this very
serious thing, and and it's such a serious thing that
you have to be able to tell the truth about it.
And part of the truth is it's repetitive. The reach
of trauma is very long, very long. Yeah, And you know,
(21:37):
after a time, there's nothing creative about it. There's nothing
generative about it. There's nothing that's entertaining about it. It's
just about the work, you know, and its working on
your trauma, surviving your trauma, processing your trauma, healing. It's
just becomes like brushing your teeth. It's boring, but you
(21:57):
have to do it. You know, you have to do
it all the time time because your teeth are going
to grow new plaque, you know. And the same thing
with your brain. Your brain is still going to tell
your body something's wrong. You've got to keep doing it
over and over again, even when it's not interesting or
exciting or new anymore. Yeah, and the relationship with the
story also changes, right as you change, and new experiences
(22:18):
come in and you were new outrages come into it.
One of the big pieces of that essay is how
all of this stuff, I mean, you and I just
spent a while talking about feeling with each other. And
a lot of that essay is about every new act
of gun violence that hits the headlines brings you back
to I know what that feeling is. I don't know
(22:39):
that person's experience because I'm not them and I'm not
in that same thing. I know what after feels like. Yeah,
I know what after feels like. You know, every time
these things happen. People on Twitter are making calls for empathy,
you know, to say like, how can we be letting
this happen? How can we let someone think about it?
You know, here is a child on the floor terrified
(23:03):
because there's a man with a gun standing two feet away.
Think about what that feels like, and you know, and
like I don't have to, you know, well then I
can't stop thinking about it. You know. It's this constant
state of re traumatization because every day there's some new
terrifying gun violence thing happening, and there's people you know,
(23:27):
shouting at you on Twitter to put yourself in their place.
And obviously they mean well, and they're good reasons to
do it, but for people who are survivors of gun violence,
it's quite triggering. And it does make me think about it,
you know, And when I hear people interviewed on the news,
I see the shaking, I hear the terror in their voice,
(23:48):
and it reminds me of hearing my own terrified voice
and being surprised by the sounds like, oh, I didn't
know my voice gets sound like that. It just it's
all the little things you know that that can kind
of like yanke you back into a moment Yeah, because
time is nothing right to the nervous system and to
(24:09):
the body, you can go back to that moment so easily.
And this is this is the work of therapy and storytelling,
right to to get to a point where when your
body and your nervous system responds to new stimulus, a
new shooting, a new tweet yelling at you to think
about this person or put yourself in their shoes. All
(24:30):
of the work that we do is so that those
moments don't destroy you. Yeah, And I like to talk
about it too, like it's about you gotta beat the
path to and from you know, you gotta beat the
path in because that's also your path out. And if
you don't do it, and you just let it become
this like crazy swamp of overgrowth, you think you're walling
(24:50):
it off, but you're not, because sometimes you're gonna get
teleported back there against your will and you're not going
to have a way out. You're going to be stuck
in there with everything around you that you haven't thought
about and you haven't processed. But if you can make
your safe routes in, that's your exit strategy. Also, you
gotta you gotta do it. Yeah, you gotta do it.
(25:11):
I mean, we we spend some time just now talking
about what happens when you don't allow things that hurt
space to hurt and space to breathe and engage with them. Like,
if you don't do that, we get authoritarian angry in
a bad way. People who need to outsource their pain
onto others. Right, So we do this for ourselves, right,
(25:33):
so that being reminded when the body remembers, when the
nervous system remembers, that it doesn't destroy you. And also
so that we don't suppress this truth so much that
we destroy others. You don't get through this life without
some kind of hardship and being able to talk about
that and tend to yourself in that, Like that is
(25:55):
the work. Yeah, so you sometimes teach comics. What is
there about storytelling that you feel like people might find helpful?
I think sometimes the personal pain and outrage at the
world is so big that we're like, I can't even
begin so advice or anything for the power of storytelling
(26:17):
or people who want to start messing with it. What
do you got you mean, from the perspective of a storyteller,
like how it can be helpful? Yeah, well, I mean,
I think, as we've been talking about this whole time,
it's like communication. It's just it's everything. It's how you
heal yourself, it's how you heal society. It's how you
build relationships and maintain them. You know, our our connections,
(26:41):
everything we are is about communicating with each other. And
you know, hearing, listening, and being able to tell your story,
being able to tell your truth in a way that
other people can connect with, I think is really important.
And also it's really rewarding. It's over warding. I have
(27:02):
this experience over and over and over again where I
will think something is so personal to me, it's so
weird and dark and strange, and then I'll write about it,
and I will hear from so many people who will
say me too, and like it. Just it feels so
good to know that you're not alone. And whether you're
(27:26):
sharing that experience with strangers or just the people who
are close to you, you know, if you're just journaling
for yourself to go back and revisit your your past self,
if you're writing something you know for your children to have,
if you're just writing something to your sister or to
a wider audience, I think you can still get that
feeling of recognition. I don't know if you found. I
(27:48):
did do a comic about my experience getting robbed at
gunpoint called The Language of Trauma. That's about how memory
and trauma work or don't work. And what I wrote
about in that comic was my experience of not talking
about this for so long that by the time I
finally addressed it, it was like I couldn't remember it,
(28:10):
almost like I could remember certain things, like the look
of the floor tiles, I can remember the smell of
the soap, but I couldn't give you, like a narrative
account beginning to end of like here's what happened, you know,
man Coument, Here's what he said, Here's what I said,
Here's what my sister said. That was it was like
it was just gone. And part of what made it
(28:30):
difficult for me to talk about was that I was
worried that if I talked about it honestly, that people
would say, like, well, that's not trauma, Like you can't
be traumatized if you don't remember the thing that happened
to you, Like that's just not how it works. You're fine.
It really freaked me out, but then you know, I
did the research, I learned about it. I presented the comic,
(28:51):
which is less about my experience and more about the science.
But I heard from so many people telling me the
same thing happened to me. You know, I tried to
put it out of my head, and now I have
these blank spaces, and it was really healing for them
to read it, and then that was healing for me
to hear. You know, I can like make this beautiful
(29:12):
cycle good instead of bad. Yeah, which is the opposite
of what we think. Right you talk about the hard
things and you bring everybody down. And the reality is
when you tell the truth about your own experience, you
let other people feel seen two mm hm. And this
is really where we started as well, right, Like, when
(29:32):
we tell the truth about our own experience, in whatever
form that takes, we find community and connection, which is
the opposite of sort of the good vibes only culture,
which is like nobody wants to hear about your pay
and like you know, only smiley phases, happy people have friends,
like all of that crap. Like the reality is or
the truth here is like telling the truth about things
(29:52):
is the way forward, and that's how we connect and
that's how we make community, and that's how we build
cultures and societies that treat each other with respect and kindness. Yeah.
And I'll hear from people all the time who will
say I read this, I recognized myself, and I sent
it to these people that I want to know me better,
(30:15):
you know, and like something like that. I feel like
it's so meaningful to me, you know, just to hear that,
like my experience can be a way for two people
that I've never met to connect more fully. Ye that
that that's the stuff that makes you feel like, oh man,
that was worth it, that was worth doing the hard thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(30:36):
I mean this This fits really nicely with my usual
closing question for everybody is like, knowing what you know,
knowing what you've lived and what you've experienced, what does
hope look like for you? And I think you started
to answer that question, but let's let's do it anyway.
What does hope look like for you? This is really
like an important question for me to think about right now, because,
(30:56):
as I said, I have been feeling really hopeless. Part
of what hope I have is I think about and
I just wrote something about this too, how political power
in Our country is often like a pendulum, right and
I feel very strongly that all the terrible things that
are happening right now two women to lgbt Q people,
(31:18):
particularly trans people, is because of progress that we've made.
You know, it's backlash. It's saying, oh, now you've gone
too far. You know, you you're you're out of your
place now, and we're gonna put you back in the kitchen,
you know, back in the clothes you belong, and back
in the relationship that you don't want to be in,
whatever it is we're sending you back now. You've come
(31:39):
too far. And I am hopeful about the backlash to
this backlash, because this backlash has been so much crueler
and more devastating than I would have imagined that I
feel like the stuff we're going to get on the
other side is going to be amazing. You know, it's
just gonna We're gonna make the people who are making
(32:02):
us feel this way feel this way. And I'm looking
forward to that. Yes, I love like, I love this
because this is also that is a hope that I
share as well. Like my functional hope is you know,
when people say things are getting so much worse that
they're not getting so much worse, they're getting so much
more visible. Right, So a lot of the violence and
(32:24):
oppression and everything else we're seeing has been going on
for a very long time. It just could get hidden
because the structures we're holding, and the structures are no
longer holding. And I feel like that dissolution is very hopeful.
So I love your definition of hope. Yeah, functional hope
for everyone with a side of rage, but of a
(32:45):
sinister answer. I wish I wish I could give you
something more positive, But I don't feel like that sinister though,
right Like I think like, is that cynical or is
that realistic? Like I don't find that to be sinister.
I find that to be functional and realistic. Just always
says to me. Every time I will say something, she
(33:08):
will say, that's very adaptive and tell if I can wait?
Is that good? I don't know what you're telling me? Here?
Am I being insulted? But then I've decided to just
own it. And you know, like, sometimes there are things
you do that they're not good or bad, they're just adaptive.
There's something that you do so that you can live
in your environment. And this functional hope, as you call it.
(33:32):
This is my adaptation. This is how I live in
this environment. Perfect. This is how I live in this
environment and don't collapse and also don't go completely ballistic.
I love this. I love this for us, and I
love this for everybody. I am so glad I got
to talk to you today. Me too. This is really fun.
Thank you, This is really fun. I love that we
also know that we have fun talking about very difficult things.
(33:53):
Um So we're gonna obviously link to a bunch of
things and I will track down that link to that
other essay about memory and trauma, anything else you want
people to know where to find you. I mean, you
can find me on Twitter. I'm at Aubreyharsh and on
roxand Gays the Audacity once a month, subscribed to roxan
Gay's newsletter, and you get a comment from you once
(34:15):
a month. Yeah, and lots of other great stuff to you.
I love that thing. Okay, coming up after the break,
your questions to carry with you, and as always, all
the ways you can tell me about what hope means
to you. Right now, don't miss that part. Friends, We'll
be right back each week. I leave you with some
(34:49):
questions to carry with you until we meet again. I
really loved this conversation with Aubrey Hearsh. I just I
have so much fun talking to people who address the
world with intensity. I guess is is a good word
for it. I just it feels really good to meet
other people who feel similar levels of outrage at the
state of the world, and people who believe in the
(35:12):
power of art and creation to help us band together
and fight for a good and just and safe world.
So that's what I'm personally taking from today's show, A
sense of solidarity right here where we are. That kind
of solidarity feels really important to me. What are you
(35:32):
taking from the show this week? Did anything stick with
you in today's conversation? I mean, we packed a lot
of topics into our time here together. What parts made
Do you see something from a new perspective? What parts
had you may be raising your own fist and solidarity
or connection if that happened for you. I'm also really
interested to hear if any of you felt inspired to
mess around with creating comics of your own. That would
(35:55):
be awesome. I think Aubrey would like that too. Everybody's
going to take something different from today's show, but I
do hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really
is a crowd sourced thing. As Aubrey said so many times,
it's easier to move towards the world we want if
(36:15):
we find ways to connect inside this world we have. Actually,
I don't think she said that exactly, but that relationship
building stuff is definitely in there in that conversation. Speaking
of relationship building, everybody, be sure to check out Refuge
in Grief on Instagram and here after Pod on TikTok
(36:35):
to see video clips from today's show and leave your
thoughts in the comments on those posts. Tag us in
your own posts on your own social media accounts, and
remember to use the hashtag here after pod on all
of the platforms so we can find you. That's the
way we search for you with that hashtag here after Pod.
We love to see where this show takes you. If
(36:56):
you want to tell us how today's show felt for you,
or you have a request or a question for upcoming
explorations of some kind of difficult things, give us a
call at three to three six four three three seven
six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it,
you can find the number in the show notes or
visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send
(37:18):
an email, you can do that too. Write on the
website Megan Divine dot CEO. We want to hear from you.
I want to hear from you. This show, this world
needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even
when they can't be made right. You know how most
(37:40):
people are going to scan through their podcast app looking
for something new to listen to, and they're going to
see the show description for Hereafter and think, I don't
want to listen to difficult things, even if amazingly cool
people are talking about them. Well, that's where you come
in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all
that bad in here. We talk about heavy stuff, yes,
but it's in the service of making things better for everyone.
(38:02):
So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace,
in your social worlds on social media, and click through
to leave a review, Subscribe to the show, download episodes,
and yes, please keep on listening. Want more Hereafter. Grief
education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
(38:23):
that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about
all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements
is an important skill for everyone, especially if you're an activist,
or if you're in any of the helping professions, or
just honestly, if you're a human. You need those kind
of skills. Find trainings professional resources at my best selling
(38:44):
book It's Okay that You're Not Okay plus the Guided
Journal for Grief at Megan Divine dot c. O Hereafter
with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine.
Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fossio,
Logistical and social media support by Micah, and edited by
Houston Tilly. Music provided by Wave Crash and Today is
(39:06):
a backgown noise. You'd have to listen really closely for it,
but the sound of Luna's two long nails clicking on
the hardwood floors.
For me, I find it really helpful. And that's a
huge part of where most of what I write comes
from is from a place of anger. You know, I'll
get upset about something and then I'll say, I'm I
need to like write about it. Like a lot of
the time, what I'll be thinking is, why isn't everyone
screaming about this all the time? And then I wonder
if it's because maybe people don't know, And so then
(00:23):
I feel like it's my responsibility to try to make
something that people will look at and then come and
join me in, you know, please join me in the
scream fest. Yes, this is here After, and I'm your host,
Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay
that You're Not Okay. This week on here After, writer
(00:46):
and illustrator Aubrey Hirsch joins us to talk about, well,
a lot of things. She joins us to talk about
anger and trauma and gender it's like the greatest modern
hits of outrage on today a show. But mostly she
joins us to talk about art, specifically the ways that
storytelling helps us band together and work towards the world
(01:09):
we all want. This is a good one, friends, coming
up right after this first break before we get started,
one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional
relational territory in each episode, this show is not a
substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider
(01:32):
or for professional supervision related to your work. So I
first consciously encountered Aubrey Hersh's work in her essay on
Surviving gun violence that was in Roxane Gay's newsletter of
the Audacity. I say consciously because I'd seen Aubrey's work before,
and I bet you have to, from her comics on
(01:53):
reproductive rights to her essays on breastfeeding in public, Aubrey's
work distills complex issues down to a few emotionally powerful frames,
As you'll hear her say in this conversation, Using the
medium of comics allows her to bring social issues to
life in a way that feels more immediate, more visceral,
and honestly more human than news stories or sound bites
(02:16):
or statistics can usually do. Aubrey Hirsch is the author
of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of
short stories and This will be his Legacy, a flash
fiction chatbook. Her stories and essays and comics have appeared
widely in print and online in places like American Short Fiction,
Vox Time, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and in
(02:38):
the New York Times best selling anthology Not That Bad.
In today's episode of Hereafter, we talk outrage about the
state of the world and the powers of activism and
storytelling to help bind us together in the service of
the world. We actually want Aubrey, welcome to the show.
I'm so glad to have you here. So I saw
(03:00):
your gun Violent Survivor essay and basically stalked you after that,
because honestly, people know that I will I will cry
at least once in every episode, but like that essay
was the first time I saw my experience of being
a trauma survivor reflected, like the way that surviving something
(03:22):
life threatening and terrifying, the way that that lives in
a person out in the world. So thank you for that.
You're so welcome, thank you for having me, And what
a nice thing to say, thank you. That really means
a lot to me. That was a very very challenging
essay to write, and I have heard from many people
who have said something similar, and it just it feels
(03:43):
so good, you know, after you work so hard on
something to hear that it means something, even to one person,
really just makes it worth it. So thank you. You're welcome.
You have worked everywhere, including one comic called Medicine's Women
Problem about being ignored and misdiagnosed for years with significant
health issues. You've covered reproductive restrictions and misogyny and harassment
(04:05):
and the me too movements. So so much of your
work has this unifying theme of telling the truth about
really shitty things, really difficult things. In a lot of ways,
your work is really also about telling the truth about
things as a way to I'm totally editorializing here, but
like to upset the social order, right, like to kick
things over and start talking about things that we really
(04:26):
need to be talking about. So you're an illustrator and
obviously a fantastic writer, But what is it about that
combination of narrative and imagery specifically for talking about these
kinds of issues. What does illustration let you do that
maybe writing alone doesn't. Yeah, it's such a good question.
This is something that I kind of discovered as I
was working my way into comics, is that I think
(04:50):
comics are a fantastic medium for discussing difficult things. I
think part of it is sort of like I like
to call it, like the spoonful of sugar effect, where
if you're writing about something that's really difficult and maybe heavy,
maybe challenging, but there are pictures to look at, it
can feel like a bit more accessible. It can like
offer people kind of a way into it. You see
(05:11):
a comic, you recognize a visual form. You know this
is not going to take a ton of your time.
You're not gonna have to sit with this for too long.
And also you know there's things to look at. What
comments allows me to do when I'm talking about social
issues especially is to take statistics and kind of like
bring them to life because within the piece you can
(05:31):
have like infographics and and it's just it's sometimes it's
more impactful to see what one fifth looks like than
to just read that number or you know, read one fifth,
but rather like to see it in a pie chart,
to see it in a graph. I think just gives
people a different way to access the material, and it
it can make things like that hit harder. We're such
(05:52):
visual creatures, right like that is the way that we
get a lot of our information. Like you can you
can pack a lot more information into an image than
you can in words, right, And there's an immediacy to that.
And I think also like that immediacy is how we
feel things, especially the topics that you usually talk about.
I think that's right. And also, you know, people will
(06:14):
see something it will resonate with them. And I think
because of things like Instagram, because of how text messaging works,
were so likely to be sharing pictures with each other
that it's a lot easier for people to send like
a panel of a comic than they would, say, like
a paragraph from a news story. And then you know,
it just helps more people get their eyes on d
(06:35):
can raise awareness about like a whole slew of problems
in the world. Yeah, nobody's going to read a whole paragraph, right,
it's not share able from a graphic perspective. And it's
also like the full catastrophe is just it's so overwhelming.
The sheer amount of atrocities and things to be outraged
about and things to talk about like that overwhelm is
(06:55):
so intense and no one's going to read all of
that stuff. But you make a comic and it opens
different doors. Yeah, I think that's right for me. I
find it really helpful and that's a huge part of
where most of what I write comes from is from
a place of anger. You know, I'll get upset about
something and then I'll say, I'm I need to like
(07:18):
write about it. Like a lot of the time, what
I'll be thinking is, why isn't everyone screaming about this
all the time? And then I wonder if it's because
maybe people don't know. And so then I feel like
it's my responsibility to try to make something that people
will look at and then come and join me in,
you know, please join me in the screen fest. Yes. Yeah.
(07:39):
And then when I know I'm onto something is when
during the process of researching, I become more angry, you know,
like I thought I understood the scope of the problem,
but in fact I did not. It's a lot worse
than I thought. And then that's really that's a powerful
moment for me and my process is when I get
when I start getting more angry, then it makes me
(08:01):
more excited about the thing that I'm working on, and
it really does kind of help neutralize my terrible feelings.
When I can feel like I'm doing something. Tell me
more about that that relationship between rage and creation and
that last element that you just put in there that
it actually makes you feel less overwhelmed by the terrible
(08:21):
things tapping into that. I think you said anger and
I said rage, but I mean either, I'm going to
go with rage. It's you know, we're at a moment
in the world right now, especially with all of the
attacks on reproductive rights that are that are going on,
where I find myself often like sitting around thinking what
are we going to do? And I feel very helpless.
(08:45):
And I don't want to feel like that because I
know that to be fucked is a spectrum, and we
can be more fucked than we are now or less fucked.
It's not a binary. And I want us to move
in the right direction and I want to be a
part of that movement. But then on the other hand,
(09:06):
you know, I'll read a new story about a woman
who is right now, you know, bleeding in a hospital
in Texas because they won't terminate her very dangerous pregnancy,
and that makes me feel awful because even if we
can move in the right direction, it's not going to
help her. You know, it's too late for her, And
every day it's too late for somebody new whose life
(09:28):
is being seriously damaged or ruined by you know, these
terrible attacks on our freedoms. And I think there are
moments when I find that really paralyzing, and there are
moments where I think, Wow, what am I doing? You know,
I'm like making my dumb come, like drawing my little pictures,
(09:48):
and it all feels very useless. But then the only
way out is through. There's nothing to do but to
do the work. And then when I sit down and
I do it, I almost always feel better, you know,
just by the process of making something. Getting people to
feel angry with me makes me feel less alone, less helpless,
makes me feel like, Okay, there there's a whole team
(10:09):
of us. We're all going to do it, you know,
we're all trying. And then hearing from people who say
this thing meant something to me, or I sent this
to my partner, I sent this to my mother, I
sent this to my uncle. You know, I put this
on Facebook. It makes me feel better, you know, like
it makes me feel like at least I'm doing something.
(10:31):
And it's not going to help that person that's in
Texas right now, but maybe it will help somebody think
a different way. Maybe it will help fire somebody up
to vote who wasn't going to or reach out and
do some campaigning or donate to an abortion fund, you know,
or whatever the thing is that's going to help us
get out of this mess, that maybe it will do something,
(10:53):
And that's my hope. Yes, and I love the sort
of unifying force of rage. That's something that you write
about a lot about how historically and currently kind of
always like women's anger is not okay, right, Telling the
truth about these things is not okay. Showing anger is
not okay. What's one of the things that pisces me
(11:15):
off the most about everything that's happening is that we
aren't supposed to be angry about it. And we also
don't recognize all of this as loss, as a grief issue, right,
that there is grief and loss and anger involved in
so much of everything that's been unfolding always, I mean,
I don't want to whitewash things to be like it
(11:36):
used to be better. Well, not for everybody, but you know,
especially these last several years and just the explosion of
injustice and violence and backpedaling of basic human rights, the
ways that loss, grief, anger, and gender all come together
as something that's really a thread through a lot of
your work. Yeah, and the connections. There is something I've
(11:58):
been thinking a lot about two, especially like with anger,
because women, we get socialized to de escalate. That's our job,
you know, in the face of anger, in the face
of outrage. We're there to put the brakes on that
and like slow things down and calm things down. And
I think it does us a disservice because anger, as
(12:22):
much as we're taught to repress it, ignore it, that
it's negative, that it's somehow bad. It's there for a reason.
You know, it's there because if something's gone wrong, you
need to get angry before you can address injustice. And
the fact that women get socialized to suppress their anger
is part I think of the reason why so much
injustice can be done to us, because you know, everybody
(12:46):
tells us, you know, be quiet, calm down, don't be hysterical,
and we hear that all of our lives. It's impossible
not to internalize it on some level. So what we've
got is storytelling and rage and ending together and for me,
you know, really tapping into not only the anger, but
the loss and the the compassion in there. And compassion
(13:09):
is such a word that gets screwed around with so much,
and I think it also gets weaponized, like have some
compassion and understanding for over here and the other like
no wrong use of the word etymological badness. I wish
that the people who are creating so much arbitrary suffering
(13:30):
would understand the suffering. Yeah, I mean that empathy gap
is like the biggest source of injustice in this country.
You know that the fact that so many you know,
Republicans can be against gay marriage until their kid is
gay and then all of a sudden, you know, it
doesn't require empathy because it directly affects them and it
(13:53):
changes their tune. If there was a way that we
could make this directly affect every single person, I don't
think we would have a problem. But if you can't
have empathy for other things that you know aren't directly
affecting you, but are directly affecting other people, it's very
difficult to have conversations with people like that. Yeah, you're
purposely shutting down your relatedness to others, your ability to
(14:17):
see yourself in other people's experience. And honestly, I mean,
we do that because we're afraid of those feelings, right,
I don't want to know what it's like to be
this person because then I have to feel that, right,
you know, For me, everything comes back to our aversion
to feeling and our version of grief, right, Like, we
don't want to see the people we care about suffer, right,
(14:40):
And that includes refusing to see the suffering of others
because that would tap us into our own humanity, and
those emotions are too big for us to really take
in and really handle. Very generous perspective, Yeah, some days
I get to be generous while also holding white hot
rage in the other hand, you know. And it's just
for me. This is part of age, right. It's like
(15:02):
we have so demonized emotion and we're so afraid of
emotion and feeling with each other. There are real world
consequences for a refusal to acknowledge the frailty of being
alive and how things can change in an instant. Unless
and until we get better at allowing the tenderness of
(15:25):
being human, nothing is really going to change because we
refuse to feel with each other, and because we squashed
down anger and grief and loss, we can't access that
ability to feel with each other and make laws and
communities that are actually human, centered and kind. You know,
(15:45):
you said it much more syscinctly and much better than
I just rambled through. But until we can feel with
each other, we're not going to have the kind of
just connected society that some of us dream of. It's
really beautiful. Actually, yeah, you're listening to Hereafter with me,
(16:19):
Megan Divine and this week's guest illustrator Aubrey Hirsch. As
we rejoined this conversation, Aubrey and I are discussing her
essay on surviving gun violence. Now we're gonna link to
that essay in the show notes so you can read it,
and please, really really do go read it. I wasn't
exaggerating at the top of the show when I said
it was the first time I saw my own experience
(16:41):
reflected in somebody else's story. There's something I don't know,
just amazingly powerful about the way Aubrey describes the ways
that trauma and memory live in your body and mind.
So let's get back to our conversation. But I did
just want to remind you to go read that essay
once you're finished listening to the show. Your gun violent
(17:02):
Survivor essay isn't illustrated is there a difference for you
between the things you typically create and illustrate and that
particular piece. Yeah, it's interesting because so I write a
monthly comic for Rocks and Gays newsletter, The Audacity, And
when I sat down to write that piece, I intended
to make a comic, and I thought, you know, maybe
(17:23):
I will try to make a comic about my experience
with PTSD. So I sat down and I started to
do my script, which is usually how I start with
just the text, and usually I write, I overwrite it,
and then pare it down. But I was like, what
would have been twelve panels in? And I felt like
I wasn't even anywhere near anything that I wanted to say.
(17:48):
And the more I thought on it, the more I
felt like this was gonna need to be much longer
than a comic, you know, the text I could put
into a comic. So I texted Rocks and what if
instead of a comic? I didn't say, and she was like, great,
I love it, go for it. And so then I
sat down to try to write it. And it was
a tough piece to write because there was a lot
(18:12):
that I wanted to say and a lot that I
wanted to get across that. That was really difficult for
me to do, but I think I needed that the room.
I don't think I could have done that in a
much more compressed space. I tried, but because you have
to follow where the story wants to go, right, And
one of the things about telling the truth about trauma
(18:34):
and about violence is that we always try to shrink
those stories. I want people to go read it, so
obviously I'm going to link the crap out of it everywhere.
But the repetition in that piece is one of the
things that makes it so powerful, right that each each
iteration comes with a slightly larger lens, right, And that
(18:56):
is the way that trauma lives in the body. That
was the lad us. Thank you for saying that, because
that was really the last piece of the puzzle to
fall into place for me. I wrote like five full
drafts of that essay, top to bottom, and every time
I wrote it, I was like, this is just not
it's not doing the thing I wanted to do, until
I started focusing on the paragraph where I talk about
(19:18):
how the experience of trauma is actually quite boring and
why that is is because you have to keep doing
the same thing over and over and over again. And
then as I was, you know, trying to work that
into language, I thought, Okay, this is what I need
to do. I need to make the essay do the
thing and just you're just gonna hear me say it
(19:41):
over and over and over again, here's what's happened. And
then hoping that the time that you spend with me
and the essay gives you a little bit of a
glimpse of like what it's like to be in the
head of a trauma survivor. Yeah, the repetition of that
both as like a creative writing divid I and making
the reader feel it. And this this is something that
(20:05):
we really don't talk about, not just in gun violence,
but in the way that life altering, life changing, loss
of whatever sort lives in you. And honestly, it really
is boring, so boring, it really really is. And it's
the this engine that just keeps chug. Yeah, it's just exhausting.
(20:27):
It's boring, and it wears you out, you know, it
wears you out, It wears out you know. Whenever any
time I have to say to my partner, like can
I talk to you again about the time I was
held host to point I feel I'm myself. I'm so
annoyed with me, you know, and he's great, but I
feel bored and annoyed because I know he knows he's
(20:50):
heard the story before. But like the telling is the cure.
You know, you have to do it. You have to
get in there with it when your body tells you
that it's time, and so you're going to dragon whoever
it is, you know, your therapist, your partner, your best friend,
your roommate, whoever is the person who's going to be
there for you in those moments, and then you know
you're dragging them into the boring nous of it all too.
(21:14):
I love this. I think we're just kind of precious
about trauma, right, Like you you can't call it boring,
you can't laugh about it, Like it is this very
serious thing, and and it's such a serious thing that
you have to be able to tell the truth about it.
And part of the truth is it's repetitive. The reach
of trauma is very long, very long. Yeah, And you know,
(21:37):
after a time, there's nothing creative about it. There's nothing
generative about it. There's nothing that's entertaining about it. It's
just about the work, you know, and its working on
your trauma, surviving your trauma, processing your trauma, healing. It's
just becomes like brushing your teeth. It's boring, but you
(21:57):
have to do it. You know, you have to do
it all the time time because your teeth are going
to grow new plaque, you know. And the same thing
with your brain. Your brain is still going to tell
your body something's wrong. You've got to keep doing it
over and over again, even when it's not interesting or
exciting or new anymore. Yeah, and the relationship with the
story also changes, right as you change, and new experiences
(22:18):
come in and you were new outrages come into it.
One of the big pieces of that essay is how
all of this stuff, I mean, you and I just
spent a while talking about feeling with each other. And
a lot of that essay is about every new act
of gun violence that hits the headlines brings you back
to I know what that feeling is. I don't know
(22:39):
that person's experience because I'm not them and I'm not
in that same thing. I know what after feels like. Yeah,
I know what after feels like. You know, every time
these things happen. People on Twitter are making calls for empathy,
you know, to say like, how can we be letting
this happen? How can we let someone think about it?
You know, here is a child on the floor terrified
(23:03):
because there's a man with a gun standing two feet away.
Think about what that feels like, and you know, and
like I don't have to, you know, well then I
can't stop thinking about it. You know. It's this constant
state of re traumatization because every day there's some new
terrifying gun violence thing happening, and there's people you know,
(23:27):
shouting at you on Twitter to put yourself in their place.
And obviously they mean well, and they're good reasons to
do it, but for people who are survivors of gun violence,
it's quite triggering. And it does make me think about it,
you know, And when I hear people interviewed on the news,
I see the shaking, I hear the terror in their voice,
(23:48):
and it reminds me of hearing my own terrified voice
and being surprised by the sounds like, oh, I didn't
know my voice gets sound like that. It just it's
all the little things you know that that can kind
of like yanke you back into a moment Yeah, because
time is nothing right to the nervous system and to
(24:09):
the body, you can go back to that moment so easily.
And this is this is the work of therapy and storytelling,
right to to get to a point where when your
body and your nervous system responds to new stimulus, a
new shooting, a new tweet yelling at you to think
about this person or put yourself in their shoes. All
(24:30):
of the work that we do is so that those
moments don't destroy you. Yeah, And I like to talk
about it too, like it's about you gotta beat the
path to and from you know, you gotta beat the
path in because that's also your path out. And if
you don't do it, and you just let it become
this like crazy swamp of overgrowth, you think you're walling
(24:50):
it off, but you're not, because sometimes you're gonna get
teleported back there against your will and you're not going
to have a way out. You're going to be stuck
in there with everything around you that you haven't thought
about and you haven't processed. But if you can make
your safe routes in, that's your exit strategy. Also, you
gotta you gotta do it. Yeah, you gotta do it.
(25:11):
I mean, we we spend some time just now talking
about what happens when you don't allow things that hurt
space to hurt and space to breathe and engage with them. Like,
if you don't do that, we get authoritarian angry in
a bad way. People who need to outsource their pain
onto others. Right, So we do this for ourselves, right,
(25:33):
so that being reminded when the body remembers, when the
nervous system remembers, that it doesn't destroy you. And also
so that we don't suppress this truth so much that
we destroy others. You don't get through this life without
some kind of hardship and being able to talk about
that and tend to yourself in that, Like that is
(25:55):
the work. Yeah, so you sometimes teach comics. What is
there about storytelling that you feel like people might find helpful?
I think sometimes the personal pain and outrage at the
world is so big that we're like, I can't even
begin so advice or anything for the power of storytelling
(26:17):
or people who want to start messing with it. What
do you got you mean, from the perspective of a storyteller,
like how it can be helpful? Yeah, well, I mean,
I think, as we've been talking about this whole time,
it's like communication. It's just it's everything. It's how you
heal yourself, it's how you heal society. It's how you
build relationships and maintain them. You know, our our connections,
(26:41):
everything we are is about communicating with each other. And
you know, hearing, listening, and being able to tell your story,
being able to tell your truth in a way that
other people can connect with, I think is really important.
And also it's really rewarding. It's over warding. I have
(27:02):
this experience over and over and over again where I
will think something is so personal to me, it's so
weird and dark and strange, and then I'll write about it,
and I will hear from so many people who will
say me too, and like it. Just it feels so
good to know that you're not alone. And whether you're
(27:26):
sharing that experience with strangers or just the people who
are close to you, you know, if you're just journaling
for yourself to go back and revisit your your past self,
if you're writing something you know for your children to have,
if you're just writing something to your sister or to
a wider audience, I think you can still get that
feeling of recognition. I don't know if you found. I
(27:48):
did do a comic about my experience getting robbed at
gunpoint called The Language of Trauma. That's about how memory
and trauma work or don't work. And what I wrote
about in that comic was my experience of not talking
about this for so long that by the time I
finally addressed it, it was like I couldn't remember it,
(28:10):
almost like I could remember certain things, like the look
of the floor tiles, I can remember the smell of
the soap, but I couldn't give you, like a narrative
account beginning to end of like here's what happened, you know,
man Coument, Here's what he said, Here's what I said,
Here's what my sister said. That was it was like
it was just gone. And part of what made it
(28:30):
difficult for me to talk about was that I was
worried that if I talked about it honestly, that people
would say, like, well, that's not trauma, Like you can't
be traumatized if you don't remember the thing that happened
to you, Like that's just not how it works. You're fine.
It really freaked me out, but then you know, I
did the research, I learned about it. I presented the comic,
(28:51):
which is less about my experience and more about the science.
But I heard from so many people telling me the
same thing happened to me. You know, I tried to
put it out of my head, and now I have
these blank spaces, and it was really healing for them
to read it, and then that was healing for me
to hear. You know, I can like make this beautiful
(29:12):
cycle good instead of bad. Yeah, which is the opposite
of what we think. Right you talk about the hard
things and you bring everybody down. And the reality is
when you tell the truth about your own experience, you
let other people feel seen two mm hm. And this
is really where we started as well, right, Like, when
(29:32):
we tell the truth about our own experience, in whatever
form that takes, we find community and connection, which is
the opposite of sort of the good vibes only culture,
which is like nobody wants to hear about your pay
and like you know, only smiley phases, happy people have friends,
like all of that crap. Like the reality is or
the truth here is like telling the truth about things
(29:52):
is the way forward, and that's how we connect and
that's how we make community, and that's how we build
cultures and societies that treat each other with respect and kindness. Yeah.
And I'll hear from people all the time who will
say I read this, I recognized myself, and I sent
it to these people that I want to know me better,
(30:15):
you know, and like something like that. I feel like
it's so meaningful to me, you know, just to hear that,
like my experience can be a way for two people
that I've never met to connect more fully. Ye that
that that's the stuff that makes you feel like, oh man,
that was worth it, that was worth doing the hard thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(30:36):
I mean this This fits really nicely with my usual
closing question for everybody is like, knowing what you know,
knowing what you've lived and what you've experienced, what does
hope look like for you? And I think you started
to answer that question, but let's let's do it anyway.
What does hope look like for you? This is really
like an important question for me to think about right now, because,
(30:56):
as I said, I have been feeling really hopeless. Part
of what hope I have is I think about and
I just wrote something about this too, how political power
in Our country is often like a pendulum, right and
I feel very strongly that all the terrible things that
are happening right now two women to lgbt Q people,
(31:18):
particularly trans people, is because of progress that we've made.
You know, it's backlash. It's saying, oh, now you've gone
too far. You know, you you're you're out of your
place now, and we're gonna put you back in the kitchen,
you know, back in the clothes you belong, and back
in the relationship that you don't want to be in,
whatever it is we're sending you back now. You've come
(31:39):
too far. And I am hopeful about the backlash to
this backlash, because this backlash has been so much crueler
and more devastating than I would have imagined that I
feel like the stuff we're going to get on the
other side is going to be amazing. You know, it's
just gonna We're gonna make the people who are making
(32:02):
us feel this way feel this way. And I'm looking
forward to that. Yes, I love like, I love this
because this is also that is a hope that I
share as well. Like my functional hope is you know,
when people say things are getting so much worse that
they're not getting so much worse, they're getting so much
more visible. Right, So a lot of the violence and
(32:24):
oppression and everything else we're seeing has been going on
for a very long time. It just could get hidden
because the structures we're holding, and the structures are no
longer holding. And I feel like that dissolution is very hopeful.
So I love your definition of hope. Yeah, functional hope
for everyone with a side of rage, but of a
(32:45):
sinister answer. I wish I wish I could give you
something more positive, But I don't feel like that sinister though,
right Like I think like, is that cynical or is
that realistic? Like I don't find that to be sinister.
I find that to be functional and realistic. Just always
says to me. Every time I will say something, she
(33:08):
will say, that's very adaptive and tell if I can wait?
Is that good? I don't know what you're telling me? Here?
Am I being insulted? But then I've decided to just
own it. And you know, like, sometimes there are things
you do that they're not good or bad, they're just adaptive.
There's something that you do so that you can live
in your environment. And this functional hope, as you call it.
(33:32):
This is my adaptation. This is how I live in
this environment. Perfect. This is how I live in this
environment and don't collapse and also don't go completely ballistic.
I love this. I love this for us, and I
love this for everybody. I am so glad I got
to talk to you today. Me too. This is really fun.
Thank you, This is really fun. I love that we
also know that we have fun talking about very difficult things.
(33:53):
Um So we're gonna obviously link to a bunch of
things and I will track down that link to that
other essay about memory and trauma, anything else you want
people to know where to find you. I mean, you
can find me on Twitter. I'm at Aubreyharsh and on
roxand Gays the Audacity once a month, subscribed to roxan
Gay's newsletter, and you get a comment from you once
(34:15):
a month. Yeah, and lots of other great stuff to you.
I love that thing. Okay, coming up after the break,
your questions to carry with you, and as always, all
the ways you can tell me about what hope means
to you. Right now, don't miss that part. Friends, We'll
be right back each week. I leave you with some
(34:49):
questions to carry with you until we meet again. I
really loved this conversation with Aubrey Hearsh. I just I
have so much fun talking to people who address the
world with intensity. I guess is is a good word
for it. I just it feels really good to meet
other people who feel similar levels of outrage at the
state of the world, and people who believe in the
(35:12):
power of art and creation to help us band together
and fight for a good and just and safe world.
So that's what I'm personally taking from today's show, A
sense of solidarity right here where we are. That kind
of solidarity feels really important to me. What are you
(35:32):
taking from the show this week? Did anything stick with
you in today's conversation? I mean, we packed a lot
of topics into our time here together. What parts made
Do you see something from a new perspective? What parts
had you may be raising your own fist and solidarity
or connection if that happened for you. I'm also really
interested to hear if any of you felt inspired to
mess around with creating comics of your own. That would
(35:55):
be awesome. I think Aubrey would like that too. Everybody's
going to take something different from today's show, but I
do hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really
is a crowd sourced thing. As Aubrey said so many times,
it's easier to move towards the world we want if
(36:15):
we find ways to connect inside this world we have. Actually,
I don't think she said that exactly, but that relationship
building stuff is definitely in there in that conversation. Speaking
of relationship building, everybody, be sure to check out Refuge
in Grief on Instagram and here after Pod on TikTok
(36:35):
to see video clips from today's show and leave your
thoughts in the comments on those posts. Tag us in
your own posts on your own social media accounts, and
remember to use the hashtag here after pod on all
of the platforms so we can find you. That's the
way we search for you with that hashtag here after Pod.
We love to see where this show takes you. If
(36:56):
you want to tell us how today's show felt for you,
or you have a request or a question for upcoming
explorations of some kind of difficult things, give us a
call at three to three six four three three seven
six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it,
you can find the number in the show notes or
visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send
(37:18):
an email, you can do that too. Write on the
website Megan Divine dot CEO. We want to hear from you.
I want to hear from you. This show, this world
needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even
when they can't be made right. You know how most
(37:40):
people are going to scan through their podcast app looking
for something new to listen to, and they're going to
see the show description for Hereafter and think, I don't
want to listen to difficult things, even if amazingly cool
people are talking about them. Well, that's where you come
in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all
that bad in here. We talk about heavy stuff, yes,
but it's in the service of making things better for everyone.
(38:02):
So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace,
in your social worlds on social media, and click through
to leave a review, Subscribe to the show, download episodes,
and yes, please keep on listening. Want more Hereafter. Grief
education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
(38:23):
that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about
all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements
is an important skill for everyone, especially if you're an activist,
or if you're in any of the helping professions, or
just honestly, if you're a human. You need those kind
of skills. Find trainings professional resources at my best selling
(38:44):
book It's Okay that You're Not Okay plus the Guided
Journal for Grief at Megan Divine dot c. O Hereafter
with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine.
Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fossio,
Logistical and social media support by Micah, and edited by
Houston Tilly. Music provided by Wave Crash and Today is
(39:06):
a backgown noise. You'd have to listen really closely for it,
but the sound of Luna's two long nails clicking on
the hardwood floors.
Host
Megan Devine
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