March 16, 2020 • 51 mins
Can dreams really change? Does a creative life have to be all or nothing? Should you give up or keep going? If you’ve ever asked yourself questions like these, this episode is a must-listen. Our guest is Rachel Friedman, author of And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. We discuss how to customize your creativity in a way that’s truly aligned with who you are, as Rachel shares the through-lines, surprises, and patterns of success and fulfillment.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Limit Does Not Exist is a production of I
Heart Radio. Okay, I'm Christina Wallace and I'm Kate Scott Campbell.
We're here to help you follow your curiosity, celebrate your individuality,
(00:20):
and embrace the and not the ore so you can
turn everything you love into a custom built career that's
as unique and dynamic as you are. If you feel
that one path may not be your only path, and
you call yourself a human bend diagram, then you are
in the right place, because when it comes to pursuing
your passions, we believe the limit does not exist. Do
(00:45):
you ever catch yourself reminiscing about how your life might
have turned out if you had stuck with the primary
discipline of your youth the viola or ballet or figure skating.
Would you be first chair in the New York Philharmonic,
or starring in Swan or maybe meddling at the Olympics
by now? Or would you be miserable, still hammering away
(01:06):
at something that's not aligned with who you are as
a fully formed adult. These kinds of questions might lead
you to other questions, such as does success have to
be linear? And does a creative life have to be
all or Nothing. Our guest today is Rachel Friedman, author
of And Then We Grew Up on Creativity, Potential, and
the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. Growing up, Rachel was a
(01:29):
serious classical musician, and then one day she gave it
up and chose a different path as a journalist and writer.
Years later, struggling with its decision, she tracked down her
childhood colleagues to find out how their creative paths turned
out and to compare them with her own. We talk
with Rachel about what she found, the through lines, the surprises,
(01:49):
and the patterns of success and fulfillment, and in doing
so we explore them many ways in which you can
customize your own creativity. So, whether you consider your career
merging or established, this episode is full of insights for you.
So let's just jump in, shall we. Let's do it.
(02:14):
How do you describe who you are and what you do?
Let's pretend we're at a dinner party. Yes, I would
say I'm a writer and editor. It would be the
simplest explanation of Okay, excellent. So that's interesting because you
were a serious realist, and you trained in high school
at Interlocking Arts camp, and you started a music performance
(02:37):
degree in underground. This is pretty serious training. And then
you realized you didn't want to be a professional musician.
What happened? How did you know it was time to quit?
I knew it was time to quit because I was miserable,
and even in my misery, I persisted, probably for longer
than I should. Thinking artists suffer, People who are working
(03:00):
hard to achieve things suffer. You know, this is par
for the course. But I realized at a certain point
as an undergrad in music school, that playing viola, which
had always given me so much joy as a kid,
was now the bane of my existence. I I hated it.
I was cracking under the pressure. I lost a bunch
of weight. I was literally physically sick to my stomach
(03:22):
before my viola lessons, and it just became very clear
my body was screaming at me to stop doing what
I was doing. That's a pretty clear sign. Yeah, what
do you think it was? Really just the overall pressure?
Do you feel like there was not enough of whatever
that original love was? You know, like, what sort of
(03:46):
had you pick up the viola in the first place?
And did that ever go away for you? It was
a couple of things in college. You know, I was
studying with a new teacher. And when you're a musician,
I'm sure this happens in other arts as well. When
you switch teachers and you're at a certain level, they
teach technique differently, for instance, And so I was breaking
(04:06):
down a lot of the technique that I was used
to from many many years with a different teacher, and
I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do what he wanted.
That's the that's the first thing. Um. I was practicing,
you know, hours and hours a day, um, missing out
on having a social life. I was very intimidated by
(04:27):
that teacher because he was so good. That was a
big component, I think in terms of what was making
me miserable. And then I also realized that I was
not the most talented person around all of a sudden,
and not even close. It wasn't like, oh I was,
you know second, Um, it was like I was tenth
(04:48):
all of a sudden, and that was a real reckoning.
And if it had just been a matter of working
hard enough to close that gap, I think potentially I
would have done that. I would have tried to do that,
but I just at a certain point also had this
understanding that I was going to have to give up
so much of the rest of my life, of my
(05:10):
other interests of relationships, that it wasn't worth it to me.
There became a tipping point um even though I thought
this was all I ever wanted, And that was a
really hard existential moment, thinking, oh, I don't actually want
this thing I've been telling myself I've wanted since I
was eight. So the joy of playing it did evaporate
(05:33):
for me for a while. It came back in a
different form later on, but I really had to put
down my viola for quite a while. So tell me
about that moment when you were, you know, making that
decision to say this isn't it and I need to
do something else. What was that transition, like, how did
you decide what that something else might be? I had
(05:54):
no idea what that something else might be. I transferred
universe cities. So that was good for me because it
was a kind of psychic shift. I had this feeling
that I just couldn't stay I was anymore. I had
to get out of there, and so I was in Boston.
I went to school in Philadelphia after that, and then
(06:15):
after undergrad I went traveling for a couple of years
because I was still very lost, so I really didn't
know what I was going to do. What I did
know is that I came from a family of English majors,
and my other love as a child was reading and writing,
but it always been a very private pursuit. And so
when I left music, I became an English major, but
(06:38):
not having any real sense of what would happen after college.
That's a pretty big change, right, because when you were
a musician, it felt like there was a clear path. Right.
You can be an orchestral musician, you can be a teacher,
but there seemed to be from high school to undergrad.
You know, maybe you do a master's degree, but everyone
knows if you're pursuing classical music what that path looks like.
(07:01):
To go from that very clear future to a very
unclear future was that as much of the you know,
the pain of that shift as losing the identity of
saying I'm Rachel and I'm abile. List. Yeah, I'm sure
you talked to people all the time, and I'm sure
potentially includes the two of you. From what I know
that when you're clear from such a young age about
(07:24):
who you are and what you want to do. It's
extremely disorienting to lose that, and college is supposed to
be this time where you're figuring things out. Plenty of
people come into college open minded and exploring what they
want to do, but it's really strange to feel that
loss and to feel lost at this moment when everyone
else is figuring things out. It's really interesting to me, Rachel,
(07:48):
because you were relatively young when you made this decision, right,
You were nineteen. You were about a year into college,
Is that right? Yep? So I'm curious about who did
you turn to for advice at this time and kind
of what messaging were you getting. Did it feel at
the time that this was a hard and fast decision
(08:10):
that this was the end of the road for the
viola or did it feel more like I've just got
to take a minute and go somewhere else and maybe
I'll come back to it. No, it felt like the
end of the road. Maybe that was because of who
I am in my own mindset. Maybe it would not
have felt that way to someone else, but for me,
I felt like I hit a ceiling and I was
really done pursuing it. On the professional track of that
(08:36):
current moment. So not that I wasn't ever going to
come back to Viola in some way, but it really
hit me hard. You know. I was very young and
naive and hard on myself, which so many of us are.
I just felt like such a failure that I kind
of had to walk away completely. You know. It didn't
feel like I could do it halfway. Oh my god,
(08:57):
that gets me right here. Yeah, and I'm okay. I
wish I could talk to the nineteen year old me,
you know, and shake her a little bit and say,
you know, yeah, I gave it a bee, or reimagine
how this might look for you. But I couldn't do
that at the time. My ego was so wrapped up
in that identity and I just didn't know how to
(09:17):
handle it very well. You've written that you never stopped
fantasizing about what your life might be like if you
hadn't put down that bow. What do you think is
the source of that fantasizing. Is it regret? Is it nostalgia? Yes? Yes,
uh yes, I think that it's really natural and really
(09:39):
human to fantasize about what your life might look like.
That's something that I really wanted to explore in the
book that I just published, because it felt so natural,
and yet I was grappling with it in this way
I couldn't let go. And there was some particular research
I read at the time I was thinking about this
(09:59):
that talks about possible selves. So we have our past
selves and our now selves and are possible future selves,
and we navigate the world through those different ideas of
who we are. And so I think I was really
hooked into that past self and that possible self in
a way that is common. But for me, it was
(10:22):
hanging on too hard. You know. That's what I was
trying to let go of when I worked on this book,
because I just thought, I'm too steeped in what if land,
So let's talk about the book it's called. And then
we grew up on creativity, potential and the imperfect art
of adulthood. You publish this book where you interviewed your
(10:44):
former interlocking camp friends to see how their creative paths
turn out? What inspired you to go write a book
about this? Right? Like? I get the curiosity? Isn't that
what Facebook is for? We go stalk our our friends
and the xes to see if they know we're more
successful than us, Like to write a book about it
is a whole other level of curiosity. Well, the Facebook
(11:07):
thing is interesting, right, because what we see is this
tiny little sliver of who someone became, and yet we
make up all of these stories about what we think
that person's life is like. So part of what I
was actually interested in with this book was getting past
that superficial viewing of someone's world, because I do feel
(11:31):
I'm sure everyone feels this way now, where it's stuck
in like comparison land. You know, what if land is
exacerbated by comparison land because we're on social media all
the time and we think that we're seeing people's reality
when even though we know intellectually that's not what we're seeing.
You know, they've done research that like, Emotionally, we can't
help but feeling bad when we see that someone got
(11:53):
something that we thought we wanted. You know, someone's in
a better job, someone has a better relationship, someone's thin,
or someone's which or whatever it is. So I, you know,
wanted to push past that and really try to get
at some of the meteor stuff, you know, the in
our lives of these people. And the reason that I
(12:14):
tracked them down was that I couldn't shake this curiosity
that I had about what became of their lives. And
the reason I probably couldn't shake it at this particular
time is because I was struggling as a writer in
a similar way I had struggled as a musician, with
this kind of gap between what I thought my fantasy
life as a writer would look like and it's much
(12:34):
more complicated reality. And at this particular one, I struggling
financially and I had gone to my account and I
had owed way more money than I had for taxes,
and I was just like, what am I doing? I
thought I was like pulling this off living in New
York and being a freelance writer and I'm working all
the time, I'm taking every assignment, I'm being published places,
(12:55):
you know, I'm still not making a living. And right
around that time, I had gone into a movie theater
and found myself kind of accidentally watching a movie starring
one of my former campmates from Interlockin, who is now
a very well known actor named Ben Foster. And I
just was sitting there thinking, like what the I allowed?
(13:21):
You know, like he just got he is doing exactly
what he was doing so brilliantly at eleven and I'm
sitting here with this tax bill that I can't pay.
And what's the difference in those paths? Is it talent?
Is it hard? Work? Is it luck? Is it? What
is it? And I just I couldn't let it go?
(13:42):
What is it? Do you think? Certainly there's many answers
to that question. But what did you find sort of
when you went and tracked down your former interlock in peers,
were the vast majority closer to where you felt like
you were, or closer to work Ben was, or somewhere
all over the map? They were all over the map.
(14:06):
But no one in the book as an outlier. No
one is a famous person, No one has won an oscar.
You know, these are successful working people trying, like so
many of us, to figure out how to be artistic,
how to live a creative life, and doing it in
(14:26):
all sorts of different ways. Do you turn some of
the classic advice for artists on its head with with
(14:48):
chapters like never quit but maybe quit, and never compromised,
but definitely compromised. How do you make sense of the
single mindedness require to get to the level that you
achieved and the classic refrain to follow your dreams with
the reality of what life is really like on that
(15:10):
professional path, and the acknowledgement that like priorities change, dreams change,
and rent is not cheap, right. I think about this
a lot in terms of single mindedness. I don't think
it's a single mindedness that's necessarily at the root of
the let's say, the problem, you know, or what makes
(15:30):
us miserable. It's more it's a broader mindset problem, a
way that we're hard on ourselves, a way that we
think that success should look like X, like why and
if it doesn't look that way, then we're not successful.
It's when we're single minded and we're miserable, but we
keep beating our head against the wall because we want
(15:52):
to do anything except give up, because giving up means
we're a failure. You know. The reason I wanted to
deconstruct these myths is because they don't serve us. They
don't reflect the complicated reality of making any sort of
creative living. I just wanted to try to nuance a
little bit the stuff that we tell ourselves and that
(16:14):
we're telling other people about what it looks like to
make it, what success looks like? What does failure mean?
What does compromise mean. We have a very single minded
idea about success that I think is not only inaccurate
much of the time, but is so abstract that it
(16:36):
doesn't actually relate to any personal definition of success or
fulfillment or happiness. These are things like we have to
fare it out for ourselves. And as you say, ambitions change,
you know, and I was really scared of my own
changing ambition. I was really scared to take a part
time job that meant I was going to be in
(16:56):
office three days a week, because oh, does that mean
I'm not ambitious and more I'm just giving up. It's
a slippery slope, like into full time office drone working
for the man life. It's the way that we get
fixed in our identities and in our belief systems that
I think is what makes it hard for us to
be happy. I'm so happy to hear you talk about that,
(17:19):
because I also know from experience. You know, we're all
classically trained musicians here. I then went the acting conservatory route.
I mean that is so embedded in the training ground
and those places right that you have to have that
singular focus suffer for your art, that completely specialized point
(17:42):
of view and I know for me that there have
been times when I've thought it's the whole kind of
whiplash idea right of like if I stop, I'm not
strong enough. And to be able to make that call
is such a personal decision, and I feel like there's
just so much weeding through the messaging to be able
to even go, well, what's really right for me? I
(18:02):
think that's the key. And getting back in touch with
our intuition is another thing that's made very difficult by
all of the messages we get about what success looks
like and what we see on social media. You know,
that's part of what I was doing in the book too.
I was trying to just get back to a place
where I could check in with myself and really, in
(18:23):
an honest way, a warm hearted but realistic way, have
some understanding of what do I really want versus what
do I think I want? Was there anything that surprised
you about the book? Any conversation or take away that
you really didn't see coming. The first thing that surprised
me about the book was just that everyone was so
(18:44):
open about letting me back into their lives. I will say,
I mean, you come to people twenty years later, more
than twenty years and you're like, hey, remember me, can
you tell me if you're happy? You know I'm happy,
don't even you know? Even that's like a slippery concept
that I don't find very useful. I think much more
(19:06):
useful to think about fulfillment and meaning an acceptance and
contentment in those kind of softer words. But I was
really surprised by many of the takeaways. I would say
the one that is coming to mind right now is
the idea that being a creative person it's something that,
(19:26):
as one of the people profiled on the book said,
it's in our bones. You know. It can't be taken away.
It's not an identity that others bestow on you. It
doesn't grow rusty from lack of use, like it's there
for you to access at any point. And it doesn't
have to be in this way where you have this
sustained creative output that's going to end in you releasing
(19:49):
X into the world, right Like, it's sometimes that, but
there are other ways to access it. And this person
in the book, her names Dahlia, for her creativity was
really a mindset, really a way of being vulnerable and
open and present in the world and That was a
really useful takeaway from me, because I worried a lot
(20:12):
about things like, Oh, if I take this dage up,
I'm no longer a writer. I can't call myself a writer.
I'm kind of a fraud if I do that. I
worried a lot before I had a child, Oh what
happens to my artistic identity when I have a kid?
You know, you read kind of terrifying stuff that's like, like, oh,
(20:34):
you're a mother. Now your life just becomes like a
monotonous landscape of making dinners and doing laundry and staring
at your child. Well she stares at leaves on the
walk home, you know, for forty five minutes. I don't know.
So there are all these moments when I've worried that
I was not a real artist or not artistic enough,
(20:56):
creative enough. And I think that if you're someone who
moves through the world in a way that is related
to self expression, it's just it's always there for you.
It sounds like what you're saying is is that it
begins with, well, what does creative success look like for me? Right,
which certainly is a an evolving question with an evolving
(21:17):
answer for those listeners who haven't yet read the book,
What were some common traits or outlooks or patterns in
(21:39):
those who consider themselves fulfilled in a sustainable way. The
common traits were mindset. Again, you know, people who were
flexible and adaptable and open minded and who had put
a spin on their narratives that was positive. Sounds like
self help, positive, thinking positive. I'm talking more about making
(22:02):
sense of their paths in a way that was meaningful
for them. So for one person, she was really focused
on balance, and that's how she viewed her life. That's
the lens through which she viewed the choices that she
had made about being a musician. She was an incredible performer.
She is a director of a high school orchestra program.
(22:22):
There's another person who talked about how he divorced outcome
from process. So he's a screenwriter. He says, you're my
job is only to put in the hours. I'm not
responsible for how talented I am. I'm not responsible for
how successful my work is. All I can do is
put in the time. Another person saw her path as destiny.
(22:44):
She was a musician. She quit. Oh this didn't work
out for me, but it's okay because this is where
I was meant to be. These are the steps that
led me to where I am now, and I'm fundamentally
okay with where I am now. I find it so
interesting you traded one creative pursuit for another, swapping of
Yola for writing, and this now makes sense, right this
mindset of your You're a creative person. You're going to
(23:05):
find a way to be creative. Did you imagine writing
might be more stable career than viola playing. Did the
project based nature of freelancing surprise you or was it
just this is the business model of what it is
to be a writer, and now I'm going to have
to figure that out. I was very naive, just like music.
(23:27):
I wish I could say I brought to my writing
career some sort of wisdom, but I didn't. It was
so different than music. I really didn't know that I
would have a career as a writer. I just knew
I wanted to write. My path is a little bit
accidental in that I was working on my first book
(23:48):
while I was in an m f A program, and
I was also at the time working as an assistant
editor for an academic press, and so I was seeing
proposals come in for books. I was watching that process
on the editorial side, and I knew how long it
could take. And I had this book idea, and I
had material from my m f A program, and I thought,
I'm just going to send it out, because it's going
(24:10):
to take me years to get this published. I'll just start.
And I got lucky and that an agent really connected
with it, and then an editor. And this was pre recession.
I always feel like I have to say that this
is before the time when anyone cared how many Twitter
followers you had, and remember such a time. It happened
as kind of a whirlwind, and then my freelance career
(24:33):
followed it. It's usually happens in reverse. You know, you're
building a freelance career and then it culminates in a book.
At a certain point. I was still at the time
that I was writing the book freelancing, I was also teaching.
For most of that time, I was teaching literature and
journalism and creative writing. I always had a little bit
of steady income from doing those jobs, but I was
(24:57):
figuring it out along the way. One of the things
I figured out as a writer at that moment when
I had those unpayable taxes was the balance of how
much of my income I wanted to be directly tied
to my art, and I realized, as the writer was
much more important to me to be able to write
what I want and to pay the bills another way.
(25:20):
If I had to then to be able to say, oh,
I'm a full time writer, that's all I do, but
to be writing pieces like I was at the time,
that I couldn't pay those taxes that I did not
care about and that were very unfulfilling, and it was
kind of soul sucking, you know, to have to say
yes to everything, to be up till two am working
(25:41):
because you never knew when the next assignment was going
to come in. So I learned along the way how
to make it work. But the hustle of freelancing, just
like certain parts of music, I realized, Oh, I'm not
suited to parts of this, and I need to reconfigure
what my life looks like because of that, so that
(26:02):
I can hone in. You know, I said that I
can take advantage of the parts of my personality that
are suited to my art, and that meant making some
money some other way. That's so interesting we've we've talked
on this show about how much the business model of
your life, of your art, of your work needs to
(26:22):
fit you as much as the making of the work
needs to fit you. And yet the business model side
is typically not one that's talked about, certainly not taught
in schools for the most part. Maybe in master's programs,
but not very often. As you mentioned, finding out there
are aspects of this, like the freelance hustle that isn't
(26:43):
suited to you know, making you happy to find that
out after you've gone down this path feels really not
just jarring, but like we're not serving students and people
who are coming up through these paths when you are
pursuing an art for that often has money that will
come in later, and you've got to find a way
(27:04):
to make money currently. What I've learned, certainly with my
fellow acting peers, is that it's so personal what that
looks like for you and I. That's what you're touching on, Rachel,
which is that I have some friends who are actors
who prefer to have a day job that they do
not care about, and they can just compartmentalize that and
(27:25):
go when I'm there that's just this part of my
life that's supporting what I'm doing now. And then I have, like,
for example, myself, I had to learn that whatever I do,
I'm going to do wholeheartedly, even if it is a
crummy temp job. Right, so I had to really get
creative about other sources of income that I felt would
be fulfilling while they may not be my primary outsource
(27:48):
of creativity. It's just such a personal discovery to figure
out what lifestyle is going to keep me solvent and
not drain me. And that's why these formulas for success
are so useless because they are not customized to you.
You know, there's some good advice obviously, of course, you know,
for beginners, I think mostly about putting in the hours. Obviously,
(28:11):
you have to be disciplined, you have to put in
the time, you have to have passion. But it's so
much more complicated when you're in the middle of your career,
when you're anywhere past that kind of initial burst of
energy and discipline, enthusiasm, like all this stuff that propels you.
You still at a certain point, I have to take
stock and really think in the day to day, am
(28:35):
I happy with what I'm doing here? With the balance
of what I've got going on. And yeah, I think
your point about the day jobs is a really important
one because that's something I thought about a lot. Oh,
do I want to just waitress forever? That's a job
I could do and not care about and find fun
and you know, make good money. Or do I want
(28:55):
to try to be a staff writer somewhere? Do right?
You know what? Like what is that going to look like?
Because I found it and point I couldn't totally divorce
my attention from what I was doing for twenty to
thirty hours a week. I wanted to do it well,
but I also didn't want it to overtake my creative life.
That's actually one of the reasons that I left teaching,
(29:15):
because as much as I loved teaching, first of all,
paid horribly. I was it's incredibly It's like competitive when
you look at how much time you have to put. Yeah,
and I had long ago chos in New York over
an academic career. You know, I went to get an
m f a it to terminal degree. I could have
taught different places, but I didn't want to go move
(29:36):
out to the middle of the country somewhere. I wanted
to be in New York was where my network was
at the time I was married. For all sorts of reasons,
I wanted to be here, And that's another kind of
choice to Okay, you choose to be here. It's expensive,
Like guess what, there's a reality that goes along with that,
you know. So I wish we would talk to younger
people more about it in a way that didn't depress them,
(29:58):
but that made them feel like they had some agency
because you just take writing. You're a freelance writer. You
are running a small business. And no one gave me
any of those skills, and no one told me that
a big part of my job was going to be
chasing down money that I was owed. That was incredibly
disheartening for me first and a terrible way to be
(30:22):
able to count on paying your rent on time. Yeah,
for sure, I wish there was something like a BuzzFeed
quiz or something where you could put in a combination
of like your personality, the industry you want to go into,
the flexibility you might have geographically, whatever add in. You know,
do you have a trust fund? Yes or now? And
then it will tell you, you know, here are a
(30:44):
few options that suit you well, whether it is as
a staff writer or a day job, or if you're
someone who doesn't mind tracking down, you know, getting paid
for things. I feel like there's got to be some
form of an algori of them that could help us
kind of direct students into a world that might be
(31:05):
slightly better suited for what's going to make them happy.
And to change the narrative from if you're spending all
this time figuring that part out, you're not serving your art,
to figuring that out serves your art, right, Like we
are as creatives in the business of humanity, and if
(31:25):
we are not fit in our own humanity and every
aspect of that word mentally, financially, emotionally, physically, then we're
bringing just part of ourselves to the actual work. Absolutely,
And that's why I have this chapter on compromise, which
is the word we've loaded up with all sorts of
negative connotations, but compromises the way we navigate the world,
(31:48):
I think to make it work for us. To me,
it's that process of figuring out things like what are
you suited for, what's your particular combination of variables in
terms of person sinality and privilege and um, you know,
there's a role things like luck play that we don't
want to talk about, but that is quantifiable, and researchers
(32:08):
have quantified, you know. So it's all of that. It's
how do you see yourself in terms of your family life.
It's customizing the choices you make to your own definitions
of fulfillment and success. As a new mother with a
very small child, I am fascinated by this idea of
how do you raise creative children. You have a son,
(32:30):
you write about how hard it is to not see
these snippets of his musical greatness and not project the
whole future for him. How do you think about encouraging
that creativity without turning it into this preconservatory route. How
do you think about the balance of discipline, which is
(32:52):
important to learn and I think so much of what
I value of my piano training was the discipline. But
balance that with the exploration that you want children to
have and the joy that you want to build in them.
I think about this all the time. My child Just
(33:12):
this morning it became clear that he knew both parts
of a duet from Frozen, and he began to sing
els a part, and then I sang the an apart
and we went through the entire duet. He's not even
for it, and I was like, oh my god, Broadway
is calling. No. I mean a part of my brain
(33:34):
always goes there, and I think that's okay. You know,
like where we do that as parents, we are picturing
the biggest, brightest lives for our kids in whatever way
that makes sense for us all the time. I think
that's a good thing that we want so much for them.
And I often think about how to cultivate work ethic
(33:57):
in him where he's practicing whatever where it is he
wants to pursue, whether that's in the arts or sports
or writing, whatever it is. I said, the arts and
writing seem clearly biased. I was like arts and squeezed
in sports like I care about sports. And then I
went back to just a specific art um platform. Whatever
(34:19):
he wants to do, I want him to aspire to excellence.
What I'm hoping I can help him with that I
needed help with is being a little less hard on
himself along the way to teach him that. You know,
quitting serves us sometimes and a lot more than we think.
(34:40):
Not way too late know of me either. And there
there's also been research on this that people who are
able to quit at the right time. And that's tricky
because it has to be long enough that you feel
like you put in the effort and not so long
that you feel like you wasteed tremendous amounts of time.
Only you know when that moment is. And again, you know, intuition,
(35:01):
checking in, being open minded, flexible, adaptable. I think those
are all things that help you figure out that moment.
But that when you can quit at quote unquote the
right time and put your energies elsewhere, that you have
a greater chance of success in that new endeavor because
you've been able to pivot. You know, the quicker you
can pivot, the quicker you can pursue something else. And
(35:21):
these studies to have shown you know, the people who
can do that without hanging on so tightly to the
what ifs. They're healthier people. I mean, they're like their
stress hormones, their court as a levels are better, they
have lower inflammation. These are bio markers actually related to
being able to let go of things at the right time.
So I don't have all the answers for how to
(35:43):
do that, and I'm telling myself that the first step
and the most important step is really being thoughtful about it,
and being thoughtful with him about it and talking about
it along the way. Where is your viola right now?
And yes, physically, but also where is it in your life?
My viola is physically in a closet in my very
(36:06):
small Brooklyn apartment, so it's still there. I am not
playing it right now. I do think about it. I
don't get hooked into those fantasies the same way I did,
but I do think about going back to it in
a way that would feel good. And I think why
I don't right now is because the way that felt
(36:30):
good for me when it came to playing was playing
with other people, and as a parent, someone very busy career,
I just don't have the ability to do that right now.
And because of that, I've actually veered two other instruments.
I don't know what my future holds with viola. I
don't think I'm totally done with viola, but I'm not sure. Kate.
(36:55):
I think next time you come to New York, you
should bring your violin. My cello is in the backup closet.
We just need to track down one more violent easy.
We are one away from a quartet string quartet. Second. Yeah,
I mean it's just it's asking for a Netflix spinoff,
(37:18):
is what I'm saying. Clearly. No, that's what I want.
I want a quartet. That's what I think about going
back to, you know. And so I don't pine for
the viola, but I do. I am open minded about
what could be there in terms of returning to it.
But I'm having so much fun playing mediocre guitar right now.
You know, I have to tell you I am too.
(37:38):
By the way, I recently picked up the guitar and
my father as a guitarist, and I a lot of
it feels like turning the violin sideways, and it also
feels like there's no pressure. And yeah, I really I
really relate to that. I just want to be like
a campfire, the person who can play the songs that
everyone sings to. That to me, great. You don't mean
(38:00):
you have a very good point, because anytime I show
up somewhere and there's a piano, someone's like, go play
And I was like, do you think I just sit
down and jam? Right? Do I have this work? I'm like,
do you have any of Beethoven sonata music? Okay? I
recently picked up my violin again and I started taking
lessons and my teacher. One of the first things she
(38:21):
said was you've got to just start improvising on your violin,
and I was like, makes me very uncomfortable. So what
she explained to me is is that before the conservatory
system even existed, all musicians would learn other music, but
they also improvise and write their own. And I was like,
wait a minute. It just blew my mind open, because certainly,
(38:42):
as an actor, improv has opened me up so much,
and so I would say yes to the jam. We
all just need to get together and jam. Oh this episode, Christina,
I mean for real, So long time listeners might remember
(39:06):
we did a live show at Interlocking with the current
high school students, and in fact I went to high
school there, so you did. So this definitely hits me
in the fields. It's funny because one of the most
common things I hear when I go back for reunions
is a fear among my friends that Interlock and won't
(39:29):
be proud of us because we left the arts like
these are I kid you not. These are like surgeons
and college professors and entrepreneurs that are probably worth millions
of dollars right, These are not unimpressive people, and yet
we're afraid that we've let our teachers down, the institution
(39:51):
down by not pursuing our creative path professionally. And I
never hear that sentiment from the teach just from each other.
You know, like we have found ways to keep creativity
in our life, and yet we feel like a failure
because we didn't follow our high school dreams, even though
for almost all of us those dreams evolved. I don't know.
(40:14):
I feel like this conversation with Rachel gave me permission
to forgive myself for having my dreams evolved. Do you
know what I'm saying? I do? I do. I think
that this conversation shines such an important, big, warm, glowy
light on how high the expectations can be when you
(40:37):
are pursuing a primary mode of creativity as a young person,
and with that sort of the ingrained personal expectations, there's
a lot to sift through when you're even thinking about
letting something go or or giving something up. We so
often use those terms rather than doing something instead to
(41:00):
right or adding something on. It's so powerful to allow
ourselves to evolve and grow in the way that's true
for us, and by the way, I think it's possible
to continue to do that while pursuing the same dream right,
and not just possible, but necessary. So that's certainly been
true for me as an actress. You know, when I
(41:21):
first stepped on stage as a child, I had this
feeling that I can only describe as complete wholeness. It
felt right and pure and and me. And it reminds
me of what Britt Marling recently wrote in her fantastic
New York Times op ed definitely worth checking out, and
Britt Marling is the creator of the O A wonderful
(41:44):
actress director writer. She says, I was drawn to acting
because I felt it would allow me to become the whole,
embodied person I remembered being in childhood, one that could
imagine freely, listen deeply, and feel wholeheartedly. And so for
me as an actress, I really identify with that. And
(42:05):
there have been many key times that the role of
acting in my life has not reflected that wholeness right
like at all. It's felt indirect opposition to it. And
at those times I've had to very consciously step back
and figure out how to shift and expand my approach.
Sometimes that's meant making my own work, taking back my
(42:25):
power in whatever way that means, loosening my grasp, finding
teachers who are right for me, and often just taking
time away with no guarantee that I will return in
order to sustain the pursuit. That's so crucial, right to, Like,
if you're not feeling that wholeness either not ever or
not anymore, it is your job as a human, as
(42:50):
a creative to go after what it is that will
make you feel whole. Right Like, there's so much When
I think about piano, which was my primary you pursuit
for seventeen years growing up, and I was good at it,
I was really good, but it did not make me
feel whole. It never did. And there was so much more,
(43:15):
whether it was singing or directing in theater or math,
even that did make me feel whole that I that
I went toward because it was the thing that I needed.
But I never let go of the guilt of stepping
away from piano because I was so good at it,
right Like, I felt an obligation to continue it because
(43:38):
of skill, even though it wasn't feeding me. Just because
you're good at something does not mean that you have
to pursue that thing to the very end, and even
just that idea is can feel so out there in
in the way that our our culture around creativity is
(43:58):
often built, right, And I would wager to say that, yeah,
I feel like the creative process and the process of
figuring out what your creative pursuits are is often this
excavation process through those early expectations, through messaging from teachers
and authority, figures to really get to the core of
(44:19):
what do I love and why do I love it?
And can I allow myself away even if I can't
trust that right away, away towards trusting that, whether that's
following curiosity of many disciplines and then that leads you
back to a few or whatever I think about. You know,
so many of the things that I value from that education,
(44:40):
and there is so much that I was able to
take away from piano, but so much of it is
really kind of that discipline and the rigor and and
the excellence, right Like, you know, sticking with something to
become excellent at it is a real commitment as a child,
um and I do value that commitment and that, But
(45:02):
when I think about my relationship to the piano, like
I have one in my apartment, and Chas will sit
down and he'll pick out a McCartney tune and sing
along on Sunday morning while the bacon cooking everything that
that it's fun for him. And I don't do that.
I only sit down when I have an hour to
(45:23):
drill the notes from a Beethoven sonata or a Bach
French suite, and and you know, be raped myself for
having lost them in the first place. I don't sit
down to improvise or jam. I don't even know how
to improvise the right like, it's just that wasn't my
experience with it, and so and I have such guilt
even today that I don't have a relationship with the
(45:47):
piano except for one of like obligation and discipline and
rigor recognizing that and saying like, maybe it gave me
what it needed to give me, and now it's time
to step away and embrace the other things that really
do bring me joy. And I really do believe that
when the time is right, we will be called back.
You know, Christina, I relate to that so much because,
(46:09):
as I briefly mentioned in our conversation, I was trained
classically on the violin until I made a very line
in the sand decision in high school not to go
to a conservatory and pursue it for the rest of
my career. But I played the violin for twelve years rigorously,
and recently I picked my violin back up, which I
(46:30):
still have, and I've got to tell you, I got
in that practice room and I just went hard. You know.
I really realized that I needed to just sort of
have this come to Jesus moment with my violin where
I think it for all it's given me. Because when
I picked it up again, I realized that the meticulous
(46:51):
way that I approached my work as an actress, as
a podcaster, as a creative in all forms can directly
be traced back to the way I was trained on
the violin. But then also to just really keep working
on letting that go, letting it be messy, like you know,
(47:13):
I want to get on the violin and just play bluegrass,
like just not play. That's why I love picking up
the guitar because it's sort of with this new beginning,
I've said to myself, you don't you don't have to
play this in any right way, you know, and that
runs deep, it really does. I think part of finding
that joy again and finding what is it about it
(47:34):
that makes you happy? What is your why? Right? Why
are you doing this art, whatever it might be. If
you don't know what that is or you can't find
it anymore, I think that's your primary job. Go back
and find the why. And if why isn't there for you,
as it isn't for me right now with piano, but
it is for singing, for choir, for podcasting, for creative writing,
(48:00):
I'm giving myself permission to let those be as important
to me as piano once was. Yeah, that's our job
as creatives and as humans that are constantly We're dynamic people, right,
We're constantly evolving. If we were exactly the same as
we were at sixteen, that would be pretty depressing. So
that would be my advice to anyone out there who's
(48:23):
who secretly be rating yourself for having lost something. Go
back and figure out if you still have a y
for that thing, and if so, find a way back
to it, and if not, figure out where you do
have a y go toward that instead. You know, it
reminds me of this passage in the Great Book The
War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, where he writes that
(48:44):
a professional distances herself from her instrument and it makes
me think about the fact that when we are so young,
whatever that creative pursuit is for us, we're so close
to it, you know. And and to add on top
of that, creative war work or any type of work
that we are close with is deeply personal. I think
(49:05):
that's something that we are constantly talking about on this show.
And so, just like any relationship with anyone or anything,
sometimes we just need some space. Only you know what's
right for you. I think a really great thing to
do this week is to think about the different modes
of your creativity and if there's one that you used
(49:28):
to pursue and aren't anymore, and you feel like there's
still some unfinished business there, just kind of ask yourself
what don't need to explore there, and how can I
kind of start to do that in a way that's
on my terms that feels right to me absolutely. So
let us know how you have customized your creativity to
fit into your life. We love hearing your updates and questions,
(49:51):
and you can send them to us on Twitter or
Instagram at t L d N E pod, or you
can email us at hello at t L d n
E pod asked dot com, or you can leave us
a voicemail at eight three three high t L d
n E. That's eight three three four eight five three
six three and when you first call the number, you'll
(50:11):
hear a computer voice. That's when you dial eight oh three,
and you'll hear a much more familiar voice after that.
We'll link to Rachel's book in the show notes, along
with our live show from Interlocking britt Marlinks, op Ed
and the War of Art, and you can find all
of those links at t L d n E podcast
dot com slash. Thanks so much to our producer, Miya
(50:42):
Coole and Tu for tuning in. As always, please subscribe, rate,
and review on Apple Podcasts if you like what you heard,
It really helps us get the word out to fellow
human ven Diagrams. Until next time, remember the Limit does
not ex The Limit does not Exist is a production
(51:05):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah
The Limit Does Not Exist is a production of I
Heart Radio. Okay, I'm Christina Wallace and I'm Kate Scott Campbell.
We're here to help you follow your curiosity, celebrate your individuality,
(00:20):
and embrace the and not the ore so you can
turn everything you love into a custom built career that's
as unique and dynamic as you are. If you feel
that one path may not be your only path, and
you call yourself a human bend diagram, then you are
in the right place, because when it comes to pursuing
your passions, we believe the limit does not exist. Do
(00:45):
you ever catch yourself reminiscing about how your life might
have turned out if you had stuck with the primary
discipline of your youth the viola or ballet or figure skating.
Would you be first chair in the New York Philharmonic,
or starring in Swan or maybe meddling at the Olympics
by now? Or would you be miserable, still hammering away
(01:06):
at something that's not aligned with who you are as
a fully formed adult. These kinds of questions might lead
you to other questions, such as does success have to
be linear? And does a creative life have to be
all or Nothing. Our guest today is Rachel Friedman, author
of And Then We Grew Up on Creativity, Potential, and
the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. Growing up, Rachel was a
(01:29):
serious classical musician, and then one day she gave it
up and chose a different path as a journalist and writer.
Years later, struggling with its decision, she tracked down her
childhood colleagues to find out how their creative paths turned
out and to compare them with her own. We talk
with Rachel about what she found, the through lines, the surprises,
(01:49):
and the patterns of success and fulfillment, and in doing
so we explore them many ways in which you can
customize your own creativity. So, whether you consider your career
merging or established, this episode is full of insights for you.
So let's just jump in, shall we. Let's do it.
(02:14):
How do you describe who you are and what you do?
Let's pretend we're at a dinner party. Yes, I would
say I'm a writer and editor. It would be the
simplest explanation of Okay, excellent. So that's interesting because you
were a serious realist, and you trained in high school
at Interlocking Arts camp, and you started a music performance
(02:37):
degree in underground. This is pretty serious training. And then
you realized you didn't want to be a professional musician.
What happened? How did you know it was time to quit?
I knew it was time to quit because I was miserable,
and even in my misery, I persisted, probably for longer
than I should. Thinking artists suffer, People who are working
(03:00):
hard to achieve things suffer. You know, this is par
for the course. But I realized at a certain point
as an undergrad in music school, that playing viola, which
had always given me so much joy as a kid,
was now the bane of my existence. I I hated it.
I was cracking under the pressure. I lost a bunch
of weight. I was literally physically sick to my stomach
(03:22):
before my viola lessons, and it just became very clear
my body was screaming at me to stop doing what
I was doing. That's a pretty clear sign. Yeah, what
do you think it was? Really just the overall pressure?
Do you feel like there was not enough of whatever
that original love was? You know, like, what sort of
(03:46):
had you pick up the viola in the first place?
And did that ever go away for you? It was
a couple of things in college. You know, I was
studying with a new teacher. And when you're a musician,
I'm sure this happens in other arts as well. When
you switch teachers and you're at a certain level, they
teach technique differently, for instance, And so I was breaking
(04:06):
down a lot of the technique that I was used
to from many many years with a different teacher, and
I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do what he wanted.
That's the that's the first thing. Um. I was practicing,
you know, hours and hours a day, um, missing out
on having a social life. I was very intimidated by
(04:27):
that teacher because he was so good. That was a
big component, I think in terms of what was making
me miserable. And then I also realized that I was
not the most talented person around all of a sudden,
and not even close. It wasn't like, oh I was,
you know second, Um, it was like I was tenth
(04:48):
all of a sudden, and that was a real reckoning.
And if it had just been a matter of working
hard enough to close that gap, I think potentially I
would have done that. I would have tried to do that,
but I just at a certain point also had this
understanding that I was going to have to give up
so much of the rest of my life, of my
(05:10):
other interests of relationships, that it wasn't worth it to me.
There became a tipping point um even though I thought
this was all I ever wanted, And that was a
really hard existential moment, thinking, oh, I don't actually want
this thing I've been telling myself I've wanted since I
was eight. So the joy of playing it did evaporate
(05:33):
for me for a while. It came back in a
different form later on, but I really had to put
down my viola for quite a while. So tell me
about that moment when you were, you know, making that
decision to say this isn't it and I need to
do something else. What was that transition, like, how did
you decide what that something else might be? I had
(05:54):
no idea what that something else might be. I transferred
universe cities. So that was good for me because it
was a kind of psychic shift. I had this feeling
that I just couldn't stay I was anymore. I had
to get out of there, and so I was in Boston.
I went to school in Philadelphia after that, and then
(06:15):
after undergrad I went traveling for a couple of years
because I was still very lost, so I really didn't
know what I was going to do. What I did
know is that I came from a family of English majors,
and my other love as a child was reading and writing,
but it always been a very private pursuit. And so
when I left music, I became an English major, but
(06:38):
not having any real sense of what would happen after college.
That's a pretty big change, right, because when you were
a musician, it felt like there was a clear path. Right.
You can be an orchestral musician, you can be a teacher,
but there seemed to be from high school to undergrad.
You know, maybe you do a master's degree, but everyone
knows if you're pursuing classical music what that path looks like.
(07:01):
To go from that very clear future to a very
unclear future was that as much of the you know,
the pain of that shift as losing the identity of
saying I'm Rachel and I'm abile. List. Yeah, I'm sure
you talked to people all the time, and I'm sure
potentially includes the two of you. From what I know
that when you're clear from such a young age about
(07:24):
who you are and what you want to do. It's
extremely disorienting to lose that, and college is supposed to
be this time where you're figuring things out. Plenty of
people come into college open minded and exploring what they
want to do, but it's really strange to feel that
loss and to feel lost at this moment when everyone
else is figuring things out. It's really interesting to me, Rachel,
(07:48):
because you were relatively young when you made this decision, right,
You were nineteen. You were about a year into college,
Is that right? Yep? So I'm curious about who did
you turn to for advice at this time and kind
of what messaging were you getting. Did it feel at
the time that this was a hard and fast decision
(08:10):
that this was the end of the road for the
viola or did it feel more like I've just got
to take a minute and go somewhere else and maybe
I'll come back to it. No, it felt like the
end of the road. Maybe that was because of who
I am in my own mindset. Maybe it would not
have felt that way to someone else, but for me,
I felt like I hit a ceiling and I was
really done pursuing it. On the professional track of that
(08:36):
current moment. So not that I wasn't ever going to
come back to Viola in some way, but it really
hit me hard. You know. I was very young and
naive and hard on myself, which so many of us are.
I just felt like such a failure that I kind
of had to walk away completely. You know. It didn't
feel like I could do it halfway. Oh my god,
(08:57):
that gets me right here. Yeah, and I'm okay. I
wish I could talk to the nineteen year old me,
you know, and shake her a little bit and say,
you know, yeah, I gave it a bee, or reimagine
how this might look for you. But I couldn't do
that at the time. My ego was so wrapped up
in that identity and I just didn't know how to
(09:17):
handle it very well. You've written that you never stopped
fantasizing about what your life might be like if you
hadn't put down that bow. What do you think is
the source of that fantasizing. Is it regret? Is it nostalgia? Yes? Yes,
uh yes, I think that it's really natural and really
(09:39):
human to fantasize about what your life might look like.
That's something that I really wanted to explore in the
book that I just published, because it felt so natural,
and yet I was grappling with it in this way
I couldn't let go. And there was some particular research
I read at the time I was thinking about this
(09:59):
that talks about possible selves. So we have our past
selves and our now selves and are possible future selves,
and we navigate the world through those different ideas of
who we are. And so I think I was really
hooked into that past self and that possible self in
a way that is common. But for me, it was
(10:22):
hanging on too hard. You know. That's what I was
trying to let go of when I worked on this book,
because I just thought, I'm too steeped in what if land,
So let's talk about the book it's called. And then
we grew up on creativity, potential and the imperfect art
of adulthood. You publish this book where you interviewed your
(10:44):
former interlocking camp friends to see how their creative paths
turn out? What inspired you to go write a book
about this? Right? Like? I get the curiosity? Isn't that
what Facebook is for? We go stalk our our friends
and the xes to see if they know we're more
successful than us, Like to write a book about it
is a whole other level of curiosity. Well, the Facebook
(11:07):
thing is interesting, right, because what we see is this
tiny little sliver of who someone became, and yet we
make up all of these stories about what we think
that person's life is like. So part of what I
was actually interested in with this book was getting past
that superficial viewing of someone's world, because I do feel
(11:31):
I'm sure everyone feels this way now, where it's stuck
in like comparison land. You know, what if land is
exacerbated by comparison land because we're on social media all
the time and we think that we're seeing people's reality
when even though we know intellectually that's not what we're seeing.
You know, they've done research that like, Emotionally, we can't
help but feeling bad when we see that someone got
(11:53):
something that we thought we wanted. You know, someone's in
a better job, someone has a better relationship, someone's thin,
or someone's which or whatever it is. So I, you know,
wanted to push past that and really try to get
at some of the meteor stuff, you know, the in
our lives of these people. And the reason that I
(12:14):
tracked them down was that I couldn't shake this curiosity
that I had about what became of their lives. And
the reason I probably couldn't shake it at this particular
time is because I was struggling as a writer in
a similar way I had struggled as a musician, with
this kind of gap between what I thought my fantasy
life as a writer would look like and it's much
(12:34):
more complicated reality. And at this particular one, I struggling
financially and I had gone to my account and I
had owed way more money than I had for taxes,
and I was just like, what am I doing? I
thought I was like pulling this off living in New
York and being a freelance writer and I'm working all
the time, I'm taking every assignment, I'm being published places,
(12:55):
you know, I'm still not making a living. And right
around that time, I had gone into a movie theater
and found myself kind of accidentally watching a movie starring
one of my former campmates from Interlockin, who is now
a very well known actor named Ben Foster. And I
just was sitting there thinking, like what the I allowed?
(13:21):
You know, like he just got he is doing exactly
what he was doing so brilliantly at eleven and I'm
sitting here with this tax bill that I can't pay.
And what's the difference in those paths? Is it talent?
Is it hard? Work? Is it luck? Is it? What
is it? And I just I couldn't let it go?
(13:42):
What is it? Do you think? Certainly there's many answers
to that question. But what did you find sort of
when you went and tracked down your former interlock in peers,
were the vast majority closer to where you felt like
you were, or closer to work Ben was, or somewhere
all over the map? They were all over the map.
(14:06):
But no one in the book as an outlier. No
one is a famous person, No one has won an oscar.
You know, these are successful working people trying, like so
many of us, to figure out how to be artistic,
how to live a creative life, and doing it in
(14:26):
all sorts of different ways. Do you turn some of
the classic advice for artists on its head with with
(14:48):
chapters like never quit but maybe quit, and never compromised,
but definitely compromised. How do you make sense of the
single mindedness require to get to the level that you
achieved and the classic refrain to follow your dreams with
the reality of what life is really like on that
(15:10):
professional path, and the acknowledgement that like priorities change, dreams change,
and rent is not cheap, right. I think about this
a lot in terms of single mindedness. I don't think
it's a single mindedness that's necessarily at the root of
the let's say, the problem, you know, or what makes
(15:30):
us miserable. It's more it's a broader mindset problem, a
way that we're hard on ourselves, a way that we
think that success should look like X, like why and
if it doesn't look that way, then we're not successful.
It's when we're single minded and we're miserable, but we
keep beating our head against the wall because we want
(15:52):
to do anything except give up, because giving up means
we're a failure. You know. The reason I wanted to
deconstruct these myths is because they don't serve us. They
don't reflect the complicated reality of making any sort of
creative living. I just wanted to try to nuance a
little bit the stuff that we tell ourselves and that
(16:14):
we're telling other people about what it looks like to
make it, what success looks like? What does failure mean?
What does compromise mean. We have a very single minded
idea about success that I think is not only inaccurate
much of the time, but is so abstract that it
(16:36):
doesn't actually relate to any personal definition of success or
fulfillment or happiness. These are things like we have to
fare it out for ourselves. And as you say, ambitions change,
you know, and I was really scared of my own
changing ambition. I was really scared to take a part
time job that meant I was going to be in
(16:56):
office three days a week, because oh, does that mean
I'm not ambitious and more I'm just giving up. It's
a slippery slope, like into full time office drone working
for the man life. It's the way that we get
fixed in our identities and in our belief systems that
I think is what makes it hard for us to
be happy. I'm so happy to hear you talk about that,
(17:19):
because I also know from experience. You know, we're all
classically trained musicians here. I then went the acting conservatory route.
I mean that is so embedded in the training ground
and those places right that you have to have that
singular focus suffer for your art, that completely specialized point
(17:42):
of view and I know for me that there have
been times when I've thought it's the whole kind of
whiplash idea right of like if I stop, I'm not
strong enough. And to be able to make that call
is such a personal decision, and I feel like there's
just so much weeding through the messaging to be able
to even go, well, what's really right for me? I
(18:02):
think that's the key. And getting back in touch with
our intuition is another thing that's made very difficult by
all of the messages we get about what success looks
like and what we see on social media. You know,
that's part of what I was doing in the book too.
I was trying to just get back to a place
where I could check in with myself and really, in
(18:23):
an honest way, a warm hearted but realistic way, have
some understanding of what do I really want versus what
do I think I want? Was there anything that surprised
you about the book? Any conversation or take away that
you really didn't see coming. The first thing that surprised
me about the book was just that everyone was so
(18:44):
open about letting me back into their lives. I will say,
I mean, you come to people twenty years later, more
than twenty years and you're like, hey, remember me, can
you tell me if you're happy? You know I'm happy,
don't even you know? Even that's like a slippery concept
that I don't find very useful. I think much more
(19:06):
useful to think about fulfillment and meaning an acceptance and
contentment in those kind of softer words. But I was
really surprised by many of the takeaways. I would say
the one that is coming to mind right now is
the idea that being a creative person it's something that,
(19:26):
as one of the people profiled on the book said,
it's in our bones. You know. It can't be taken away.
It's not an identity that others bestow on you. It
doesn't grow rusty from lack of use, like it's there
for you to access at any point. And it doesn't
have to be in this way where you have this
sustained creative output that's going to end in you releasing
(19:49):
X into the world, right Like, it's sometimes that, but
there are other ways to access it. And this person
in the book, her names Dahlia, for her creativity was
really a mindset, really a way of being vulnerable and
open and present in the world and That was a
really useful takeaway from me, because I worried a lot
(20:12):
about things like, Oh, if I take this dage up,
I'm no longer a writer. I can't call myself a writer.
I'm kind of a fraud if I do that. I
worried a lot before I had a child, Oh what
happens to my artistic identity when I have a kid?
You know, you read kind of terrifying stuff that's like, like, oh,
(20:34):
you're a mother. Now your life just becomes like a
monotonous landscape of making dinners and doing laundry and staring
at your child. Well she stares at leaves on the
walk home, you know, for forty five minutes. I don't know.
So there are all these moments when I've worried that
I was not a real artist or not artistic enough,
(20:56):
creative enough. And I think that if you're someone who
moves through the world in a way that is related
to self expression, it's just it's always there for you.
It sounds like what you're saying is is that it
begins with, well, what does creative success look like for me? Right,
which certainly is a an evolving question with an evolving
(21:17):
answer for those listeners who haven't yet read the book,
What were some common traits or outlooks or patterns in
(21:39):
those who consider themselves fulfilled in a sustainable way. The
common traits were mindset. Again, you know, people who were
flexible and adaptable and open minded and who had put
a spin on their narratives that was positive. Sounds like
self help, positive, thinking positive. I'm talking more about making
(22:02):
sense of their paths in a way that was meaningful
for them. So for one person, she was really focused
on balance, and that's how she viewed her life. That's
the lens through which she viewed the choices that she
had made about being a musician. She was an incredible performer.
She is a director of a high school orchestra program.
(22:22):
There's another person who talked about how he divorced outcome
from process. So he's a screenwriter. He says, you're my
job is only to put in the hours. I'm not
responsible for how talented I am. I'm not responsible for
how successful my work is. All I can do is
put in the time. Another person saw her path as destiny.
(22:44):
She was a musician. She quit. Oh this didn't work
out for me, but it's okay because this is where
I was meant to be. These are the steps that
led me to where I am now, and I'm fundamentally
okay with where I am now. I find it so
interesting you traded one creative pursuit for another, swapping of
Yola for writing, and this now makes sense, right this
mindset of your You're a creative person. You're going to
(23:05):
find a way to be creative. Did you imagine writing
might be more stable career than viola playing. Did the
project based nature of freelancing surprise you or was it
just this is the business model of what it is
to be a writer, and now I'm going to have
to figure that out. I was very naive, just like music.
(23:27):
I wish I could say I brought to my writing
career some sort of wisdom, but I didn't. It was
so different than music. I really didn't know that I
would have a career as a writer. I just knew
I wanted to write. My path is a little bit
accidental in that I was working on my first book
(23:48):
while I was in an m f A program, and
I was also at the time working as an assistant
editor for an academic press, and so I was seeing
proposals come in for books. I was watching that process
on the editorial side, and I knew how long it
could take. And I had this book idea, and I
had material from my m f A program, and I thought,
I'm just going to send it out, because it's going
(24:10):
to take me years to get this published. I'll just start.
And I got lucky and that an agent really connected
with it, and then an editor. And this was pre recession.
I always feel like I have to say that this
is before the time when anyone cared how many Twitter
followers you had, and remember such a time. It happened
as kind of a whirlwind, and then my freelance career
(24:33):
followed it. It's usually happens in reverse. You know, you're
building a freelance career and then it culminates in a book.
At a certain point. I was still at the time
that I was writing the book freelancing, I was also teaching.
For most of that time, I was teaching literature and
journalism and creative writing. I always had a little bit
of steady income from doing those jobs, but I was
(24:57):
figuring it out along the way. One of the things
I figured out as a writer at that moment when
I had those unpayable taxes was the balance of how
much of my income I wanted to be directly tied
to my art, and I realized, as the writer was
much more important to me to be able to write
what I want and to pay the bills another way.
(25:20):
If I had to then to be able to say, oh,
I'm a full time writer, that's all I do, but
to be writing pieces like I was at the time,
that I couldn't pay those taxes that I did not
care about and that were very unfulfilling, and it was
kind of soul sucking, you know, to have to say
yes to everything, to be up till two am working
(25:41):
because you never knew when the next assignment was going
to come in. So I learned along the way how
to make it work. But the hustle of freelancing, just
like certain parts of music, I realized, Oh, I'm not
suited to parts of this, and I need to reconfigure
what my life looks like because of that, so that
(26:02):
I can hone in. You know, I said that I
can take advantage of the parts of my personality that
are suited to my art, and that meant making some
money some other way. That's so interesting we've we've talked
on this show about how much the business model of
your life, of your art, of your work needs to
(26:22):
fit you as much as the making of the work
needs to fit you. And yet the business model side
is typically not one that's talked about, certainly not taught
in schools for the most part. Maybe in master's programs,
but not very often. As you mentioned, finding out there
are aspects of this, like the freelance hustle that isn't
(26:43):
suited to you know, making you happy to find that
out after you've gone down this path feels really not
just jarring, but like we're not serving students and people
who are coming up through these paths when you are
pursuing an art for that often has money that will
come in later, and you've got to find a way
(27:04):
to make money currently. What I've learned, certainly with my
fellow acting peers, is that it's so personal what that
looks like for you and I. That's what you're touching on, Rachel,
which is that I have some friends who are actors
who prefer to have a day job that they do
not care about, and they can just compartmentalize that and
(27:25):
go when I'm there that's just this part of my
life that's supporting what I'm doing now. And then I have, like,
for example, myself, I had to learn that whatever I do,
I'm going to do wholeheartedly, even if it is a
crummy temp job. Right, so I had to really get
creative about other sources of income that I felt would
be fulfilling while they may not be my primary outsource
(27:48):
of creativity. It's just such a personal discovery to figure
out what lifestyle is going to keep me solvent and
not drain me. And that's why these formulas for success
are so useless because they are not customized to you.
You know, there's some good advice obviously, of course, you know,
for beginners, I think mostly about putting in the hours. Obviously,
(28:11):
you have to be disciplined, you have to put in
the time, you have to have passion. But it's so
much more complicated when you're in the middle of your career,
when you're anywhere past that kind of initial burst of
energy and discipline, enthusiasm, like all this stuff that propels you.
You still at a certain point, I have to take
stock and really think in the day to day, am
(28:35):
I happy with what I'm doing here? With the balance
of what I've got going on. And yeah, I think
your point about the day jobs is a really important
one because that's something I thought about a lot. Oh,
do I want to just waitress forever? That's a job
I could do and not care about and find fun
and you know, make good money. Or do I want
(28:55):
to try to be a staff writer somewhere? Do right?
You know what? Like what is that going to look like?
Because I found it and point I couldn't totally divorce
my attention from what I was doing for twenty to
thirty hours a week. I wanted to do it well,
but I also didn't want it to overtake my creative life.
That's actually one of the reasons that I left teaching,
(29:15):
because as much as I loved teaching, first of all,
paid horribly. I was it's incredibly It's like competitive when
you look at how much time you have to put. Yeah,
and I had long ago chos in New York over
an academic career. You know, I went to get an
m f a it to terminal degree. I could have
taught different places, but I didn't want to go move
(29:36):
out to the middle of the country somewhere. I wanted
to be in New York was where my network was
at the time I was married. For all sorts of reasons,
I wanted to be here, And that's another kind of
choice to Okay, you choose to be here. It's expensive,
Like guess what, there's a reality that goes along with that,
you know. So I wish we would talk to younger
people more about it in a way that didn't depress them,
(29:58):
but that made them feel like they had some agency
because you just take writing. You're a freelance writer. You
are running a small business. And no one gave me
any of those skills, and no one told me that
a big part of my job was going to be
chasing down money that I was owed. That was incredibly
disheartening for me first and a terrible way to be
(30:22):
able to count on paying your rent on time. Yeah,
for sure, I wish there was something like a BuzzFeed
quiz or something where you could put in a combination
of like your personality, the industry you want to go into,
the flexibility you might have geographically, whatever add in. You know,
do you have a trust fund? Yes or now? And
then it will tell you, you know, here are a
(30:44):
few options that suit you well, whether it is as
a staff writer or a day job, or if you're
someone who doesn't mind tracking down, you know, getting paid
for things. I feel like there's got to be some
form of an algori of them that could help us
kind of direct students into a world that might be
(31:05):
slightly better suited for what's going to make them happy.
And to change the narrative from if you're spending all
this time figuring that part out, you're not serving your art,
to figuring that out serves your art, right, Like we
are as creatives in the business of humanity, and if
(31:25):
we are not fit in our own humanity and every
aspect of that word mentally, financially, emotionally, physically, then we're
bringing just part of ourselves to the actual work. Absolutely,
And that's why I have this chapter on compromise, which
is the word we've loaded up with all sorts of
negative connotations, but compromises the way we navigate the world,
(31:48):
I think to make it work for us. To me,
it's that process of figuring out things like what are
you suited for, what's your particular combination of variables in
terms of person sinality and privilege and um, you know,
there's a role things like luck play that we don't
want to talk about, but that is quantifiable, and researchers
(32:08):
have quantified, you know. So it's all of that. It's
how do you see yourself in terms of your family life.
It's customizing the choices you make to your own definitions
of fulfillment and success. As a new mother with a
very small child, I am fascinated by this idea of
how do you raise creative children. You have a son,
(32:30):
you write about how hard it is to not see
these snippets of his musical greatness and not project the
whole future for him. How do you think about encouraging
that creativity without turning it into this preconservatory route. How
do you think about the balance of discipline, which is
(32:52):
important to learn and I think so much of what
I value of my piano training was the discipline. But
balance that with the exploration that you want children to
have and the joy that you want to build in them.
I think about this all the time. My child Just
(33:12):
this morning it became clear that he knew both parts
of a duet from Frozen, and he began to sing
els a part, and then I sang the an apart
and we went through the entire duet. He's not even
for it, and I was like, oh my god, Broadway
is calling. No. I mean a part of my brain
(33:34):
always goes there, and I think that's okay. You know,
like where we do that as parents, we are picturing
the biggest, brightest lives for our kids in whatever way
that makes sense for us all the time. I think
that's a good thing that we want so much for them.
And I often think about how to cultivate work ethic
(33:57):
in him where he's practicing whatever where it is he
wants to pursue, whether that's in the arts or sports
or writing, whatever it is. I said, the arts and
writing seem clearly biased. I was like arts and squeezed
in sports like I care about sports. And then I
went back to just a specific art um platform. Whatever
(34:19):
he wants to do, I want him to aspire to excellence.
What I'm hoping I can help him with that I
needed help with is being a little less hard on
himself along the way to teach him that. You know,
quitting serves us sometimes and a lot more than we think.
(34:40):
Not way too late know of me either. And there
there's also been research on this that people who are
able to quit at the right time. And that's tricky
because it has to be long enough that you feel
like you put in the effort and not so long
that you feel like you wasteed tremendous amounts of time.
Only you know when that moment is. And again, you know, intuition,
(35:01):
checking in, being open minded, flexible, adaptable. I think those
are all things that help you figure out that moment.
But that when you can quit at quote unquote the
right time and put your energies elsewhere, that you have
a greater chance of success in that new endeavor because
you've been able to pivot. You know, the quicker you
can pivot, the quicker you can pursue something else. And
(35:21):
these studies to have shown you know, the people who
can do that without hanging on so tightly to the
what ifs. They're healthier people. I mean, they're like their
stress hormones, their court as a levels are better, they
have lower inflammation. These are bio markers actually related to
being able to let go of things at the right time.
So I don't have all the answers for how to
(35:43):
do that, and I'm telling myself that the first step
and the most important step is really being thoughtful about it,
and being thoughtful with him about it and talking about
it along the way. Where is your viola right now?
And yes, physically, but also where is it in your life?
My viola is physically in a closet in my very
(36:06):
small Brooklyn apartment, so it's still there. I am not
playing it right now. I do think about it. I
don't get hooked into those fantasies the same way I did,
but I do think about going back to it in
a way that would feel good. And I think why
I don't right now is because the way that felt
(36:30):
good for me when it came to playing was playing
with other people, and as a parent, someone very busy career,
I just don't have the ability to do that right now.
And because of that, I've actually veered two other instruments.
I don't know what my future holds with viola. I
don't think I'm totally done with viola, but I'm not sure. Kate.
(36:55):
I think next time you come to New York, you
should bring your violin. My cello is in the backup closet.
We just need to track down one more violent easy.
We are one away from a quartet string quartet. Second. Yeah,
I mean it's just it's asking for a Netflix spinoff,
(37:18):
is what I'm saying. Clearly. No, that's what I want.
I want a quartet. That's what I think about going
back to, you know. And so I don't pine for
the viola, but I do. I am open minded about
what could be there in terms of returning to it.
But I'm having so much fun playing mediocre guitar right now.
You know, I have to tell you I am too.
(37:38):
By the way, I recently picked up the guitar and
my father as a guitarist, and I a lot of
it feels like turning the violin sideways, and it also
feels like there's no pressure. And yeah, I really I
really relate to that. I just want to be like
a campfire, the person who can play the songs that
everyone sings to. That to me, great. You don't mean
(38:00):
you have a very good point, because anytime I show
up somewhere and there's a piano, someone's like, go play
And I was like, do you think I just sit
down and jam? Right? Do I have this work? I'm like,
do you have any of Beethoven sonata music? Okay? I
recently picked up my violin again and I started taking
lessons and my teacher. One of the first things she
(38:21):
said was you've got to just start improvising on your violin,
and I was like, makes me very uncomfortable. So what
she explained to me is is that before the conservatory
system even existed, all musicians would learn other music, but
they also improvise and write their own. And I was like,
wait a minute. It just blew my mind open, because certainly,
(38:42):
as an actor, improv has opened me up so much,
and so I would say yes to the jam. We
all just need to get together and jam. Oh this episode, Christina,
I mean for real, So long time listeners might remember
(39:06):
we did a live show at Interlocking with the current
high school students, and in fact I went to high
school there, so you did. So this definitely hits me
in the fields. It's funny because one of the most
common things I hear when I go back for reunions
is a fear among my friends that Interlock and won't
(39:29):
be proud of us because we left the arts like
these are I kid you not. These are like surgeons
and college professors and entrepreneurs that are probably worth millions
of dollars right, These are not unimpressive people, and yet
we're afraid that we've let our teachers down, the institution
(39:51):
down by not pursuing our creative path professionally. And I
never hear that sentiment from the teach just from each other.
You know, like we have found ways to keep creativity
in our life, and yet we feel like a failure
because we didn't follow our high school dreams, even though
for almost all of us those dreams evolved. I don't know.
(40:14):
I feel like this conversation with Rachel gave me permission
to forgive myself for having my dreams evolved. Do you
know what I'm saying? I do? I do. I think
that this conversation shines such an important, big, warm, glowy
light on how high the expectations can be when you
(40:37):
are pursuing a primary mode of creativity as a young person,
and with that sort of the ingrained personal expectations, there's
a lot to sift through when you're even thinking about
letting something go or or giving something up. We so
often use those terms rather than doing something instead to
(41:00):
right or adding something on. It's so powerful to allow
ourselves to evolve and grow in the way that's true
for us, and by the way, I think it's possible
to continue to do that while pursuing the same dream right,
and not just possible, but necessary. So that's certainly been
true for me as an actress. You know, when I
(41:21):
first stepped on stage as a child, I had this
feeling that I can only describe as complete wholeness. It
felt right and pure and and me. And it reminds
me of what Britt Marling recently wrote in her fantastic
New York Times op ed definitely worth checking out, and
Britt Marling is the creator of the O A wonderful
(41:44):
actress director writer. She says, I was drawn to acting
because I felt it would allow me to become the whole,
embodied person I remembered being in childhood, one that could
imagine freely, listen deeply, and feel wholeheartedly. And so for
me as an actress, I really identify with that. And
(42:05):
there have been many key times that the role of
acting in my life has not reflected that wholeness right
like at all. It's felt indirect opposition to it. And
at those times I've had to very consciously step back
and figure out how to shift and expand my approach.
Sometimes that's meant making my own work, taking back my
(42:25):
power in whatever way that means, loosening my grasp, finding
teachers who are right for me, and often just taking
time away with no guarantee that I will return in
order to sustain the pursuit. That's so crucial, right to, Like,
if you're not feeling that wholeness either not ever or
not anymore, it is your job as a human, as
(42:50):
a creative to go after what it is that will
make you feel whole. Right Like, there's so much When
I think about piano, which was my primary you pursuit
for seventeen years growing up, and I was good at it,
I was really good, but it did not make me
feel whole. It never did. And there was so much more,
(43:15):
whether it was singing or directing in theater or math,
even that did make me feel whole that I that
I went toward because it was the thing that I needed.
But I never let go of the guilt of stepping
away from piano because I was so good at it,
right Like, I felt an obligation to continue it because
(43:38):
of skill, even though it wasn't feeding me. Just because
you're good at something does not mean that you have
to pursue that thing to the very end, and even
just that idea is can feel so out there in
in the way that our our culture around creativity is
(43:58):
often built, right, And I would wager to say that, yeah,
I feel like the creative process and the process of
figuring out what your creative pursuits are is often this
excavation process through those early expectations, through messaging from teachers
and authority, figures to really get to the core of
(44:19):
what do I love and why do I love it?
And can I allow myself away even if I can't
trust that right away, away towards trusting that, whether that's
following curiosity of many disciplines and then that leads you
back to a few or whatever I think about. You know,
so many of the things that I value from that education,
(44:40):
and there is so much that I was able to
take away from piano, but so much of it is
really kind of that discipline and the rigor and and
the excellence, right Like, you know, sticking with something to
become excellent at it is a real commitment as a child,
um and I do value that commitment and that, But
(45:02):
when I think about my relationship to the piano, like
I have one in my apartment, and Chas will sit
down and he'll pick out a McCartney tune and sing
along on Sunday morning while the bacon cooking everything that
that it's fun for him. And I don't do that.
I only sit down when I have an hour to
(45:23):
drill the notes from a Beethoven sonata or a Bach
French suite, and and you know, be raped myself for
having lost them in the first place. I don't sit
down to improvise or jam. I don't even know how
to improvise the right like, it's just that wasn't my
experience with it, and so and I have such guilt
even today that I don't have a relationship with the
(45:47):
piano except for one of like obligation and discipline and
rigor recognizing that and saying like, maybe it gave me
what it needed to give me, and now it's time
to step away and embrace the other things that really
do bring me joy. And I really do believe that
when the time is right, we will be called back.
You know, Christina, I relate to that so much because,
(46:09):
as I briefly mentioned in our conversation, I was trained
classically on the violin until I made a very line
in the sand decision in high school not to go
to a conservatory and pursue it for the rest of
my career. But I played the violin for twelve years rigorously,
and recently I picked my violin back up, which I
(46:30):
still have, and I've got to tell you, I got
in that practice room and I just went hard. You know.
I really realized that I needed to just sort of
have this come to Jesus moment with my violin where
I think it for all it's given me. Because when
I picked it up again, I realized that the meticulous
(46:51):
way that I approached my work as an actress, as
a podcaster, as a creative in all forms can directly
be traced back to the way I was trained on
the violin. But then also to just really keep working
on letting that go, letting it be messy, like you know,
(47:13):
I want to get on the violin and just play bluegrass,
like just not play. That's why I love picking up
the guitar because it's sort of with this new beginning,
I've said to myself, you don't you don't have to
play this in any right way, you know, and that
runs deep, it really does. I think part of finding
that joy again and finding what is it about it
(47:34):
that makes you happy? What is your why? Right? Why
are you doing this art, whatever it might be. If
you don't know what that is or you can't find
it anymore, I think that's your primary job. Go back
and find the why. And if why isn't there for you,
as it isn't for me right now with piano, but
it is for singing, for choir, for podcasting, for creative writing,
(48:00):
I'm giving myself permission to let those be as important
to me as piano once was. Yeah, that's our job
as creatives and as humans that are constantly We're dynamic people, right,
We're constantly evolving. If we were exactly the same as
we were at sixteen, that would be pretty depressing. So
that would be my advice to anyone out there who's
(48:23):
who secretly be rating yourself for having lost something. Go
back and figure out if you still have a y
for that thing, and if so, find a way back
to it, and if not, figure out where you do
have a y go toward that instead. You know, it
reminds me of this passage in the Great Book The
War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, where he writes that
(48:44):
a professional distances herself from her instrument and it makes
me think about the fact that when we are so young,
whatever that creative pursuit is for us, we're so close
to it, you know. And and to add on top
of that, creative war work or any type of work
that we are close with is deeply personal. I think
(49:05):
that's something that we are constantly talking about on this show.
And so, just like any relationship with anyone or anything,
sometimes we just need some space. Only you know what's
right for you. I think a really great thing to
do this week is to think about the different modes
of your creativity and if there's one that you used
(49:28):
to pursue and aren't anymore, and you feel like there's
still some unfinished business there, just kind of ask yourself
what don't need to explore there, and how can I
kind of start to do that in a way that's
on my terms that feels right to me absolutely. So
let us know how you have customized your creativity to
fit into your life. We love hearing your updates and questions,
(49:51):
and you can send them to us on Twitter or
Instagram at t L d N E pod, or you
can email us at hello at t L d n
E pod asked dot com, or you can leave us
a voicemail at eight three three high t L d
n E. That's eight three three four eight five three
six three and when you first call the number, you'll
(50:11):
hear a computer voice. That's when you dial eight oh three,
and you'll hear a much more familiar voice after that.
We'll link to Rachel's book in the show notes, along
with our live show from Interlocking britt Marlinks, op Ed
and the War of Art, and you can find all
of those links at t L d n E podcast
dot com slash. Thanks so much to our producer, Miya
(50:42):
Coole and Tu for tuning in. As always, please subscribe, rate,
and review on Apple Podcasts if you like what you heard,
It really helps us get the word out to fellow
human ven Diagrams. Until next time, remember the Limit does
not ex The Limit does not Exist is a production
(51:05):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah
Popular Podcasts
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com