April 29, 2025 • 39 mins
I had a conversation with a friend recently about raising boys (of all things) that reminded me of something I already know: a story without conflict or tension is not a story.
So why are so many of us trying to avoid conflict and tension in our lives?
Sure, problems are unpleasant to deal with but tiptoeing around potential problems causes a story (read: a life) to fall flat. A story without tension or conflict is uninteresting, dull and even a bit depressing.Problems are an essential ingredient to great, inspiring stories. It’s time we acknowledged that life is full of them and stopped wishing them away.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold, it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write you write your story. Hi, and welcome
back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon,
I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to
talk about this obsession that we all seem to have
with avoiding heartbreak. For whatever reason, this has been coming
up for me so much lately, and I've noticed that
(00:47):
we have this obsession both as a broader culture but
also within a handful of subcultures, and it literally pops
up every single place that I look, in movies and books,
in media, on social media, on TV and TV shows.
And so I wanted to just address this, the subsession
that we have as a culture with avoiding pain, avoiding heartbreak,
(01:09):
avoiding problems, avoiding the same mistake that I made, avoiding regret,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When what we know
to be true intuitively and also from everything that we
know about telling great stories is that great stories are born,
and great character is even born from facing problems, facing hardship,
facing difficulty with conviction, with determination, and learning to overcome
(01:32):
those exact problems that we have been trying to avoid.
So I want to unpack this a little bit today,
and in the meantime, I'm distracted because it is officially
spring here in Nashville. Spring has absolutely sprung. It's obviously
end of April. But also I don't know if you
can hear the birds that are tripping outside of my window.
Those were not added in post production. They are chirping
(01:53):
so loud. Birds. I think like ten of them have
built a nest up in the porch on the front
of my house and had babies. So maybe not ten
built a nest, maybe like two sets of I don't know,
Mom and dad birds built a nest and then there's babies.
So now there's like ten birds total, and they are
chirping so loud, and it is such a reminder that
it is spring. Here's there's a deer, no joke. As
(02:16):
I speak, there is a deer wandering through my front yard.
Everything has exploded with green every time spring shows up,
like this, I just think about how quickly things can change.
And this is pertinent to the topic that I want
to unpack today, because we are so worried about avoiding heartbreak,
avoiding pain, avoiding problems so that we can curate a
life and curate a story where we have joy and
(02:39):
pleasure and ease and there's nothing wrong with those things.
And yet at the same time, just like there are
seasons in nature, there are also seasons in life. And
so we move through seasons in life that are more
like a winter, where things are more barren. It doesn't
mean that it's bad or wrong or anything like that,
but we do move through seasons that are more barren,
more chilly, more you know, uncomfortable I guess to be
(03:00):
outside unless you have the correct gear. And so we
move through those seasons, and then quickly we move into
another season called spring, where things are very different. If
you look outside of my front window right now, things
look very different than they did even four weeks ago,
and especially than they did eight weeks ago. Things feel
very differently outside now than they did eight weeks ago.
(03:22):
So we move through seasons just like this in our life,
where sometimes we're going to be moving through a season
of heartbreak and stress or frustration or pain or whatever,
and then sometimes we move through a season of more pleasure.
And one of the things that I've noticed in my
life is that when I move through a season that's
like a winter, that's more barren, that's more challenging, that
(03:44):
requires some grit from me, that forces me to put
my head down, and then I move through a season
called spring. When I move into the season called spring,
my appreciation and gratitude for it is so much deeper.
It's like the well inside of me that can take
it in is so much deeper, so much richer, so
much more sturdy and steady. There's something about moving through
(04:08):
the winter beforehand that makes the arrival of spring feel
just extra exciting and extra delicious and extra necessary and needed.
And we can just take it in in a different
way because we had the winter before it. And yet
most of us are moving through our lives trying to
figure out and myself included, I mean, I definitely have
done this, and I as I've started to notice how
(04:30):
culture teaches us this way of being, I've noticed how
even in the last five years, the challenges that I've
been through that I have seen them through a lens
of I am not supposed to struggle. Struggle is bad,
struggle is wrong. If I really had my act together,
I wouldn't be struggling. I'd be above the struggle. And yet,
(04:51):
what if the struggle is exactly what we need in
order to birth something new in order to berth the spring.
What if the winter was exactly what we needed in
order to really we fully receive and take in what
is available for us in spring. This past weekend was
my husband's forty fifth birthday, believe it or not, forty five,
and I wanted to do something really special for him,
(05:12):
mostly because his birthday oftentimes gets missed. He is not
a real big birthday person. But you know, he turned
forty in the middle of COVID in April of twenty twenty,
and so his fortieth birthday got kind of passed over
because we were still in lockdown in LA. Then when
I turned forty a few years later, we did a
big trip to New York City and it was very
(05:34):
I felt very special and celebrated. And his birthday, because
he's not a real big birthday person, usually just kind
of passes without much fanfare. I always do something for him,
but I just on his forty fifth birthday, wanted to
do something extra special, so I coordinated a surprise where
I flew in his best friend from Seattle, and I
worked with his brother to basically book like a whole
(05:56):
weekend of surprises for the three of them, and the
three of them, who were very close friends since they've
known each other since they were fifteen years old, got
to spend some time together, you know, away from the kids,
good quality conversation, hanging out, having fun. And so I
had Danny come into town for the weekend, so the
guys all hung out. They had a great weekend. And
then on Sunday, my mother in law made brunch for
(06:17):
everyone and they all came back to the house and
we had a big family brunch together. And I was
sitting next to Danny, catching up with him because I
don't ever get to see him or his wife and
they have three kids, and I was just asking him
about life, and we got to talking about having boys. Okay,
this is going somewhere. This is connected to what I'm
talking about, I promise. Danny and I got to talking
about what it's like to raise boys differently than it
(06:39):
is to raise girls. And I know that I'm only
three and a half years into raising a boy, so
I'm not at all claiming to be an expert. But
I was talking to Danny about certain things that I've noticed,
like how much more likely a boy is to let's say,
like climb a tree and jump out of it or
something like that then a girl. And maybe that's not true,
(07:01):
you know, a thousand percent of the time across the board,
But in the majority of boy moms and dads that
I've talked to, they say that this is true. There's
just like a gene that boys have or I don't
know if it's testosterone or something, but there's something going
on in a boy brain, a little boy brain that
they just take these crazy risks. And I was telling
(07:22):
Danny that as a mom who is also so I'm
a mom who really cares about my son, but I'm
also a person who's very squeamish about injuries. And as
both a mom to a boy who is worried about
my son, and also as a person who is extremely
squeamish about injuries, I find myself having to bite my
(07:45):
tongue very often because my impulse is to want to
say like Hugh, be careful, be careful, don't do that. Hey,
watch out, come down here, get down there, don't do that,
don't climb up there, over and over and over again
all day. Which I don't want that to be the
track that plays in Charlie's brain when he's climbing a tree,
when he's doing anything in his life. I don't want
him to constantly have a voice in the back of
his mind that's saying, be careful, be careful, be careful,
(08:06):
be careful. And yet this is what I'm talking about,
that so many of us do have that voice in
the back of our brain. Be careful, be careful, be careful,
be careful, don't hurt yourself, don't get don't get an injury,
you know. And as an adult, I guess it's more
like an emotional injury than a physical injury. And yet
so many of us move through the world that way. Anyway,
Danny was saying to me that one of the best
(08:27):
teachers for boys as far as their limits, and this
is true for girls too. This is not a boy thing,
but as far as boys having that like risk taking,
you know, thing inside of them, one of the best
teachers for them is actually the injury itself. That part
of how they learn their limits is by breaking a
bone or you know, getting a gash in their head
(08:49):
or whatever it is. They take a risk, they get
a real time consequence, and the real time consequence is
what teaches them their boundary. And that's not to say
that we should just let our three year old jump
out of a tree necessarily. But also, you know, I
said to Danny that the outdoor play camp that my
(09:10):
kids go to takes that approach. You know, there are
adults there for sure, keeping the kids safe, but they
really do let the kids do a lot of explorative
play where they can climb a tree, or they can,
you know, play with a hammer, or they can, you know,
do various things. They can test out their limits, and
they can experience those real time consequences. And yeah, kids
(09:31):
get like nicks and cuts here and there, but nobody
has ever gotten seriously injured because they just let the
kids explore on their own terms, in their own way.
And the director of the camp, who's become a good
friend of mine, I've talked to her so much about
this because it's so counterintuitive for me, and I don't
know exactly where that comes from. But I think it's
just you know, being a mom, being nervous about your kids,
(09:52):
and also maybe like having a more cautious temperament in general.
But she has talked to me so much about how
how cool it is to watch the kids explore and
learn their own limits, and that they really do that
when you step back and you stop saying be careful,
and you stop like dictating every single step that they take.
So it was just another reminder yesterday as I was
(10:14):
talking to Danny, He's saying, this is how kids learn
their limits. The best way for them to learn their
limits isn't to hear mom say be careful. The way
to learn their limits is to have a real time
experience about what happens when you jump out of a tree.
You skin your knee. You know what happens when you
fall off your bike, you skin your knee. And yeah,
am I going to make my kids wear helmets when
(10:35):
they're on their bikes or when they're on their scooters?
One hundred percent? Am I going to, you know, boost
my kid up into the highest branch in the tree. No,
I'm not going to do that. I'm going to allow
them to explore in a way that's age appropriate for
their bodies and allow them to get injuries that are
I guess like congruent to the type of exploring that
(10:57):
they're able to do at their physical age. And there's
a parallel here, I think for us. I think many
of us, like I mentioned a minute ago, have a
track running in the back of our brains that says,
be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful, whatever you do,
don't get your heart broken. As I've started to notice
this sentiment pop up literally everywhere I turn, I've started
to think about where some of this might have come
(11:18):
from for me, Like where did this originate? This track
that plays in my brain that's like, be careful, be careful,
be careful, don't hurt anyone, don't get hurt, don't get
into any kind of problem. And one of the places
that I think it came from for me, and I
would encourage you to think about where it might have
come from for you, is the subculture of Christianity, and
in particular Christianity in the eighties and nineties. And I
(11:42):
say all of this while also saying, you know, all
of the adults in my life or at least ninety
nine percent of them were doing the best that they
could with what they had been offered, And I don't
think that like Christianity as a whole, there are a
lot of flaws in the programming of Christianity. Still are
just as many flaws as they're we're in the eighties
and nineties, and yet I think most people who are
(12:03):
a part of that ecosystem are doing the best they
can with what they know and what they have. And
so while there are many flaws in the system, I
don't think that there's any one conspiracy or one person
who's trying to hurt kids or anything like that. But
there was a lot of language around don't get your
heart broken. You know, you don't want to do that.
You want to avoid that pain that other people have
(12:24):
to face. And I feel like there was a lot
of talk about, you know, for example, this is just
one of many examples, don't have sex before you're married.
That's just a recipe for heartbreak. You want to only
have sex with one person in your whole life, otherwise
you know you're going to get your heart broken. And
there were so many other ways that that messaging showed up.
But it was like, don't do this don't sin, don't
(12:47):
don't drink, don't do these things. You're gonna get your
heart broken. It's only a recipe for pain and frustration.
And you can see that there are truths to those things,
you know, Like, addiction is definitely a painful process that
so many people have had to live through. And yeah,
if you can stay away from alcohol, maybe you could
avoid addiction completely. And yet, and yet, this is where
(13:13):
the nuances become so important because the pain, the frustration,
the heartbreak that we face in our lives also makes
us who we are. It also teaches us about the
beauty of spring. It also, you know, invites us into
a deeper relationship with God. It also makes our stories
extremely rich and meaningful. So you know, you think about
(13:36):
like your kids. If you have kids, do you want
your kids to move through the world with no pain
and no frustration? Do you want that for yourself? Do
you want to move through the world with no pain
and no frustration? Or do you want to become the
kind of person who can face pain, face heartbreak, face
frustration and move through that experience with integrity, with character
(14:00):
or maybe not the first time even you know, I mean,
that's part of pain. Is that it breaks us. And
maybe the first few times we move through pain, we
don't move through it with character or with integrity, and
we come to the very end of ourselves and then
we're able to pick ourselves up and write a news
story after that, and that's its own kind of spring.
So the point that I'm getting at here is that
(14:22):
avoiding pain doesn't create a meaningful life. Every single meaningful
story that you will read, every movie that you will
watch that engages you, every person who you admire, who
you love, who you want to be like, who you
think about and think you know that person is someone
(14:43):
worth emulating in the world, every single one will have pain, frustration, problems, heartbreak, loss,
you know, meltdowns, messiness, frustration that they have come to
the end of theirselves at some point in their life
before now. And maybe the version of them now that
(15:04):
you see is the spring version of them. But this
spring version of them wouldn't even exist if it weren't
for the winter that they've walked through. And one of
the ways that this has come up for me recently
(15:24):
is that I noticed that I've been through a lot
of pain and frustration in my life. I really have.
I you know all of the books that I've written,
especially Indestructible, which came out in twenty eighteen, is a
book about pain and frustration and heartbreak and learning to
face my own heartbreak and learning to pick myself up
off of the floor of my life and rebuild it
from the ground up. So I am no stranger to
pain and heartbreak. And I think during that season of
(15:47):
my life, the Indestructible season, I learned what it meant
to receive heartbreak for what it had to show me,
and receive heartbreak for what it had to teach me,
and I became so much better and so much stronger
for it. Life that I have now is in many
ways this perpetual spring of a deep love with Matt
and two beautiful, you know, healthy happy kids that I
(16:10):
get to call mine. This life that I get to
call mine, is all because I dug in and did
the work during a time of heartbreak. And so I'm
no stranger to that. And yet I think that maybe
some of us come to an age and it might
be a different age for every single person where you think, like, okay,
I did that. The hardship is behind me, the heartbreak
(16:32):
is behind me, and now I want to live a
life like the shiny, happy people of the world who
don't have to face heartbreak. Maybe I'm saying something that
doesn't actually resonate with you or doesn't make any sense
to you at all, but I wonder if you have
ever felt like you had this heartbreak you went through,
you put it in your past, and then now you
(16:52):
want to sort of pull yourself up and live a
life where you know heartbreak doesn't touch you and hardship
doesn't come your way. I also want to be really clear,
and I want to say something that's very important to
this conversation, which is I do not have a theology
of suffering, meaning I don't think that we should go
seek out suffering. I don't think that the choice that
(17:13):
causes more suffering is the better choice. I don't think
that you need to create suffering in your life. I
don't think that people who suffer are holier than people
who don't suffer. I just simply think that life is
full of suffering, and for us to create a life
where we have no suffering would be not only impossible,
but also would be a life that I don't think
(17:35):
would be one worth emulating. That's a big statement, But
I think I agree with myself on that. I don't
think a life if I could create a life with
zero suffering, where nothing touches me, I don't think that
would be a life worth emulating. It doesn't, at least
here on planet Earth, where we live within the realm
of what we know, a life with no suffering. I
(17:57):
don't know of any life with no suffering that is
one that I would want to emulate. Every person that
I know that I want to emulate has lived through
massive suffering. You know, you think about the authors that
you love. I'm reading a book right now that's an
over book Club pick that I found on Audible, and
I'm listening to it on Audible and I recommend it
one thousand percent. It is called The Many Lives of
(18:19):
Mama Love, and it's about a woman who, without giving
too much a way, develops a drug habit. She also
has four children, and she ends up going to prison,
and it is about her experience of missing her kids
and trying to be reunited with her kids. And the
(18:40):
depth of the pain in this story is what draws
me into it, and it is also what makes her
so interesting, and it is what has developed the character
in her that makes her someone that I go, yeah,
I want to listen to her for five or six
or seven hours of my life. Her writing is poetic,
it's beautif it draws you in. Her story is gripping
(19:02):
and heart wrenching. I imagine, you know, her youngest son,
she has four boys, Her youngest son is three and
a half when he gets torn away from her by
CPS when she gets arrested, And I imagine my Charlie,
who's also three and a half, getting torn away from me,
and I just can't even fathom. And yet listening to
(19:22):
her story of trying to overcome this insane addiction, it
gives me like a deep, deep compassion for anyone who's
facing addiction in particular, but any other challenge like that
in their life. And you just zoom out from the
story and go like, this is horrific that this happened,
And yet this experience is what has produced such a
(19:44):
beautiful woman, a beautiful person. So do we go out
seeking suffering? No? Do we say that someone who suffers
is holier or better, or there's any kind of hierarchy
like that. No, I don't. That's not a theology that
I hold, and yet I have to acknowledge that people,
we all have our own forms of suffering, and that
(20:06):
those of us who suffer in whatever ways we suffer,
that suffering is a gateway to more spiritual depth, to
a greater understanding of the human condition, to a greater
ability to connect to others around us, to art, to
beautiful art that connects with others, to so many beautiful things.
(20:28):
Without suffering, we wouldn't have access to those things. So
you can't just say suffering is bad and pleasure is good.
You know, joy is good and sadness is bad, because
these things are all part of the human experience. So
I guess what I'm suggesting is that we all begin
to notice the ways that in many parts of culture
(20:51):
we hear ourselves or we hear other people say things like, oh,
you know, you want to avoid that heartbreak, or you
don't want to walk down that road or whatever. I'm
not saying that we should make decisions that are bad
for us at all. There's nuance here to this conversation, Okay,
I'm just asking us to notice. Like, for here's an example,
I hear a lot of times on social media people
(21:14):
say I want to help you avoid the pain that
I suffered. That seems great right on the surface. And yes,
we do want to help each other avoid the pain
that we suffered, and part of how we do that
is by sharing our own stories. And yet there's one
thing that's sharing our own stories. Like imagine like people
sitting around, you know, a fire, a campfire, and we're
(21:37):
all sharing stories of personal experiences from our lives. And
I share a story of divorce, and someone else shares
a story of addiction, and someone else shares a story
of a really painful, physically painful accident they were in
or something like that, and we're all sharing these stories,
and we all can learn from each other. We can
kind of glean our own information from the way that
the story is told. And there's something different that's like,
(21:58):
let me give you a three step process to make
sure that you never face the heartbreak that I faced.
It starts to feel like when you package things that way,
that the goal of life is to avoid pain and suffering.
The goal of life is to avoid the very things
that taught the person who made the formula how to
(22:21):
make the formula, the very thing that taught the person
the lessons that they can now teach you they learned
from suffering, and so why are we all trying to
stop each other from suffering? And again, I don't mean
that we should like willingly, knowingly walk into addiction or
walk into abuse or anything like that at all. I
just more mean like, I'm watching my kid climb a tree,
(22:42):
and maybe instead of saying, oh gosh, Charlie, be careful,
be careful, don't put your foot there, maybe I can
step back and let him learn from experience and sure say, like, hey,
that branch that you're grabbing onto, it doesn't look like
it's going to be sturdy enough to hold you, So
maybe try this branch over here. There's a difference between
(23:02):
that and me hovering underneath of him terrified he's going
to fail. I don't know if that resonates with you
at all, if you feel like there are people around
you who are hovering underneath of you, terrified that you're
going to fail. But it doesn't necessarily breed confidence. It
doesn't necessarily make you feel like you know you can
trust yourself and you can move through the world with
(23:25):
a relative sense of assurance that like, if you run
into a problem, you're going to know how to overcome it.
And the irony of this, I think is that stories
and I'm speaking about this specifically because this is what
I do for work and this is what this podcast
is about. But stories are built around problems. Without problems,
without heartbreak, without loss, without despair, there is no story.
(23:48):
Stories are bored. We'ven we don't even repeat the things
that happened when they went well, Like if there was
no problem. You know, imagine like if someone came home
and we're like, I have a story for you, and
they started telling a story about going to the grocery store.
You'd be like, and then what you know? And then
what and they'd be like, and then I was on
(24:09):
the sereal aisle, and you'd be like, okay, and you
would be waiting, intuitively for them for the back, you know,
the intruder to come into the grocery store, or some
stranger to say something rude to them, or something to
happen to ramp up the tension. Otherwise it's not a
story worth telling. We don't even repeat those stories. The
(24:32):
stories worth telling are the ones that have heartbreak, problems,
lost to spare, you know, the rug pulled out from
underneath of us and So maybe instead of trying to
help everybody around us from ever experiencing any heartbreak, maybe
the approach is the sharing of stories, the sharing of
(24:53):
our stories, the sharing of how I faced my own
worst nightmare and I came out alive on the other side,
to instill a feeling of confidence and assurance that the
human spirit is stronger than anything out there and nothing
can destroy it, nothing can diminish it. Even death can't
(25:13):
destroy the human spirit. The human spirit conquers even death.
And those are the stories that will inspire us to
face our life with courage and confidence. Rather than to
never climb a tree. Now we can climb a tree
with some measure of courage and confidence. So I love
the tree metaphor because it really shows me, you know what,
(25:35):
as human beings, we need surrounding us beneath the tree
in order to climb that tree with courage and confidence.
Rather than someone saying, oh, be careful, don't do that.
Maybe you should come back down. I don't know how
I feel about you being up that high. We really
need people who are like, hey, the branch you're hanging
onto is not a sturdy branch. Maybe this branch there's
two other branches next to you that you could also
(25:55):
grab onto, or you know, what's your plan with your
foot there? You don't have anywhere for it to go.
Can you look around and find a branch where you
could put your foot. That's what we really need, our
cheerleaders on the ground surrounding us, instilling us with confidence
that no matter what happens, we can face our lives
with courage and confidence. We can face heartbreak with courage
(26:16):
and confidence that even the greatest heartbreak, even the most
painful experience we could ever walk through, will not destroy
the human spirit. It will not destroy the human soul.
I don't think most of us were taught that way.
I definitely wasn't taught that way. I don't feel like
I move that way as a person through the world,
(26:36):
like no matter what happens, I can face this. But
this experience of having the conversation with Danny, of noticing
the different cultures and subcultures and ways that we try
to prevent people from experiencing pain or suffering or heartbreak,
has made me very aware of how cautiously and tenuously
(26:57):
I move through the world. I'll tell one more story
before I wrap. I find myself retelling my love story
with Matt every now and then about how we met
and how we fell in love and all of that,
and people will always ask the way they do. They'll ask,
(27:18):
you know, like if it was love at first sight,
or did you know when you first met him or whatever.
I think there was like a really small sense of
knowing when we first met that this was something really good,
and yet both Matt and I really tiptoed around each other.
We met on a blind date. By the way, I
was in La on a work trip. Matt lived in
Pasadena at the time. I ran into an old acquaintance
(27:42):
of mine, someone who I didn't know very well but
who Matt knew very well, and we were just catching
up and he was like, what's your status? Are you
single or are you dating? Which I thought was a
very strange question at the time because I'm like, aren't
you married? But then he quickly was like, I have
this friend I want to introduce you to. I was like,
I'm up for it. I'll go on a date. Sure,
no problem. You know, I leave tomorrow morning, so it'd
(28:03):
have to be tonight. So it was very fast. We
got introduced to each other via text. He picked a
location I was going to meet him for a quick drink.
It was going to be really quick because it was
like eight pm by the time I finished my workday.
So I met him at this bar for a quick drink.
We were together for like an hour tops, like I mean,
I can't imagine it was any more than an hour.
(28:23):
And we had a great conversation and things went very well.
But then I got on a flight and went back
to Nashville. And I was in Nashville and he was
in LA and we honestly, for the first month that
after I went back to Nashville, we didn't even speak.
It was a very slow start. I don't have to
tell you the whole story, but it was a very
slow start. And I think a big reason why it
(28:44):
was a slow start, it was like six months of
a slow start. You know, we did start dating long distance,
and even in dating long distance, I describe it to
people like we were tiptoeing around each other. I, for one,
had just been through a divorce and I had it
in my past relationship gotten engaged and married very quickly,
and so I was feeling real cautious, and you know,
(29:07):
Matt had been not engaged but very close to engaged,
and same thing had kind of gotten his heart broken,
and so both of us were really cautious. Both of
us were very much tiptoeing around each other. And I
describe it to people like it was not a falling
in love kind of experience. It was not like a
throw caution to the wind like Matt and I never
had that. We had a very slow burn of a relationship.
(29:30):
It wasn't like the most passionate, you know, like we
knew and then we just spin every moment together. And
in so many ways it was much much healthier, or
the experience of us falling in love was much healthier.
And also there was so much caution that it was
almost like in the beginning and even until we were married,
I would say, like even while we were engaged, we
(29:52):
still were sort of playing this caution game with each other,
of like trying not to get our hearts broken. And
it was just such a different experience then the experience
of falling in love at eighteen that it feels worth noting,
you know, that that experience of just like a total
like ego boundaries dissolving into this other person. I had
(30:13):
been told my whole life don't have sex before you're married,
don't marry someone who's outside of the church, don't fall
in love with just anyone. Don't give your heart away
to just anyone. Be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful,
be careful. You're going to get your heart broken. You're
going to get your heart broken. You're going to get
your heart broken. And when I met my first husband,
you know, we went from meeting to dating to engage
too married in four months, no joke, four months. I
(30:36):
could even should have maybe been more cautious in that relationship.
All I'm saying is, no matter how many people told me,
be careful, be careful, be careful, You're going to get
your heart broken. You couldn't have said that to me enough.
The way that our relationship unfolded was very unhealthy and
childish and whatever. But I just also hadn't had a
lot of experiences. I hadn't had enough experiences with love
(30:59):
and with really relationships to teach me how to move
into this in a healthy way. So we fell in
love very quickly. We got married. It was a toxic situation.
It was bad from the beginning, and I stayed married
for four years before I filed for divorce or almost
four years, almost exactly when I met Matt. My caution
didn't come from a place of other people telling me
(31:23):
I needed to be careful I wanted to avoid getting
my heart broken. My caution came from my lived experience.
My caution taught me to move slower. My caution told
me not everyone has your best interest in mind. My
caution told me someone might seem like they love you,
but actually their motives are self serving. My caution came
(31:47):
from my life, the facing of the heartbreak head on,
the lived experience of falling apart and putting myself back together.
And because of that experience, I could move into this
next relationship with more confidence. With you know, in spite
of the caution, I was tiptoeing around Matt. But I
(32:09):
also just knew that I was unwilling to move into
a relationship that wasn't good for me. I wasn't going
to do it. My life was too good on its
own to let someone come in who was going to
mess any of that up. So my standards were very high.
I was really looking I knew exactly what I was
looking for. I was looking for someone who was a
(32:29):
friend and who was really grounded and who wanted to
build a solid relationship, and who was a family man.
I knew I wanted to have kids. I really wanted
to have kids, and so that's what I was looking for,
and that's what I found in Matt. And we got
to slowly build our relationship together, and what we have
is not perfect by any stretch, but it is incredibly
sturdy and strong, and there's so much goodness in our relationship.
(32:54):
And there's not a day that passes now that I
don't think about, like, what I have now is light
years apart from what I had back then, and I
just didn't I only knew what I knew in that
first relationship, and so I just thought this is how
relationships went. I did not know it was possible to
have a relationship like this one. And in my opinion,
(33:14):
I think I needed that first heartbreak. I needed everything
to fall apart in order to become the person who
could contain a relationship like this one. So maybe there's
some danger in making that connection. It's I'm not saying,
throw caution to the wind and just do whatever, and
you know, hope it turns out okay. There's a so
(33:35):
much nuance here, I am saying, maybe, instead of telling
everyone around us to be careful, be careful, be careful,
don't do this, you know, don't try this, or don't
do this, because this happened to someone that I know,
and this happened to the neighbor of someone that I know,
and this happened to my third cousin's neighbors friends, dog,
you know whatever. I feel like we do that where
we like tell these cautionary tales, and there's nothing wrong
(33:57):
with a cautionary tale. But I do wonder if part
of of how we become the type of people that
we want to be in the world is by moving
through heartbreak, moving through suffering, moving through pain, and becoming
stronger on the other side. This is what Indestructible the
book was even about the book Indestructible. The title comes
from a John Steinbeck quote that says, I guess a
(34:20):
woman is stronger than a man, after all. I think
the quote goes, particularly if she has love in her heart.
A woman with love in her heart must be indestructible.
I'm not quoting that word for word, but that's essentially
what the quote says, and that's where the title of
that book came from that. Moving through that heartbreak taught
me how to be indestructible because I became a woman
(34:42):
with love in my heart. And part of how I
got that love in my heart was by having my
heart broken. Before my heart was broken, I was too
short up, I was too judgmental, I was too I was,
you know, kind of like standing on my pedestal looking
down at the rest of the world. And I needed
to I have that experience to break me apart, to
(35:03):
flatten me on my face, to pull the rug out
from underneath me, for my entire life to fall apart,
to know what it felt like to be a human being,
so that I could have compassion, so that I could
have joy, so that I could have pleasure, so that
I could really fall in love, so that I could
really let myself be seen. I couldn't do any of
those things in that first relationship, not just because of
(35:24):
who the other person was, but also because of who
I was. So I needed to become someone different in
order to have the relationship that I wanted with someone
like Matt. And yet the only way to become that
someone different was to move through my own suffering and
to fully receive what that suffering wanted to show me,
and so I just started asking myself this week, how
(35:45):
can I pull that understanding into my life. Now It's
not just like, oh, we closed the book on Indestructible.
That was my one heartbreak for my life, and now
I get to move on and live life with the happy,
shiny people. The happy shiny people, by the way, are
also suffering behind the scenes. This was one of the
big takeaways for me from that period of time of
(36:05):
divorce in my life. You can put whatever you want
on social media. You really can. You can put whatever
you want on social media, and no matter how happy
people look on social media, it doesn't tell you what's
really happening behind the scenes of their life. Because I
lived in that first marriage for four years, suffering, struggling
toxic environment and standing on stages and delivering messages and
(36:29):
going and selling books and doing the things, jumping through
the hoops, and you know, my career was growing and
things seemed to be going great from Instagram, and yet
behind the scenes, I was living in my own personal hell.
So you never know what's going on behind the smiling, happy,
happy people. And I think the important thing to note
here is that suffering is inevitable. Suffering is just a
(36:52):
part of life. Suffering is what makes life here on
earth what it is here on earth. Suffering is very
human of us. So if you're suffering, you sufferings in
some way. I mean, you might be living in a
moment of bliss and pleasure right now, and I hope
you are, and I hope you find ways to live
in bliss and pleasure even if you're in a time
of suffering. And yet whatever way that you're suffering right now,
(37:14):
my question for you would be, is there a way
for you to let that suffering in a little bit more?
Can you let the suffering teach you what it wants
to teach you? Can you let it show you what
it wants to show you? Can you let it break
you open so that you can become more of love,
more of the love that you already are. That's my
(37:36):
challenge for you this week. It is no small challenge.
I am still working on this. I realized this this week.
I had this epiphany that I felt like I closed
the book on suffering after Indestructible, and that my life
was supposed to be only only up from there, and
it has been in so many ways only up from there.
And yet I think that's part of why I have
(37:58):
not only had the suff that I've had, but also
suffered because of the suffering, Because I think we create
double suffering when we not only have a moment of suffering,
but we also tell ourselves I shouldn't be suffering like this.
What if we just go of course, I'm suffering here.
I am on planet Earth, a human being on planet Earth.
Suffering is just part of this. Death is part of
(38:19):
this loss, as part of this. You know, not everything
goes the way that we plan. Big shocker, almost forty
two years old. Not everything goes the way that we plan.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe I can let that be okay.
So then I just have the one suffering, but I
don't have the layer of suffering on top of the
(38:39):
suffering that tells me I've got to make the suffering
go away. I can just receive the original suffering for
what it wants to show me. So I dare you
to do that this week, and I would love to
hear from you to tell me how it goes. You
can find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon. I would
love to chat with you there. You could also email
me at my story at writerrstory dot com. I'll see
you next week on the Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold, it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write you write your story. Hi, and welcome
back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon,
I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to
talk about this obsession that we all seem to have
with avoiding heartbreak. For whatever reason, this has been coming
up for me so much lately, and I've noticed that
(00:47):
we have this obsession both as a broader culture but
also within a handful of subcultures, and it literally pops
up every single place that I look, in movies and books,
in media, on social media, on TV and TV shows.
And so I wanted to just address this, the subsession
that we have as a culture with avoiding pain, avoiding heartbreak,
(01:09):
avoiding problems, avoiding the same mistake that I made, avoiding regret,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When what we know
to be true intuitively and also from everything that we
know about telling great stories is that great stories are born,
and great character is even born from facing problems, facing hardship,
facing difficulty with conviction, with determination, and learning to overcome
(01:32):
those exact problems that we have been trying to avoid.
So I want to unpack this a little bit today,
and in the meantime, I'm distracted because it is officially
spring here in Nashville. Spring has absolutely sprung. It's obviously
end of April. But also I don't know if you
can hear the birds that are tripping outside of my window.
Those were not added in post production. They are chirping
(01:53):
so loud. Birds. I think like ten of them have
built a nest up in the porch on the front
of my house and had babies. So maybe not ten
built a nest, maybe like two sets of I don't know,
Mom and dad birds built a nest and then there's babies.
So now there's like ten birds total, and they are
chirping so loud, and it is such a reminder that
it is spring. Here's there's a deer, no joke. As
(02:16):
I speak, there is a deer wandering through my front yard.
Everything has exploded with green every time spring shows up,
like this, I just think about how quickly things can change.
And this is pertinent to the topic that I want
to unpack today, because we are so worried about avoiding heartbreak,
avoiding pain, avoiding problems so that we can curate a
life and curate a story where we have joy and
(02:39):
pleasure and ease and there's nothing wrong with those things.
And yet at the same time, just like there are
seasons in nature, there are also seasons in life. And
so we move through seasons in life that are more
like a winter, where things are more barren. It doesn't
mean that it's bad or wrong or anything like that,
but we do move through seasons that are more barren,
more chilly, more you know, uncomfortable I guess to be
(03:00):
outside unless you have the correct gear. And so we
move through those seasons, and then quickly we move into
another season called spring, where things are very different. If
you look outside of my front window right now, things
look very different than they did even four weeks ago,
and especially than they did eight weeks ago. Things feel
very differently outside now than they did eight weeks ago.
(03:22):
So we move through seasons just like this in our life,
where sometimes we're going to be moving through a season
of heartbreak and stress or frustration or pain or whatever,
and then sometimes we move through a season of more pleasure.
And one of the things that I've noticed in my
life is that when I move through a season that's
like a winter, that's more barren, that's more challenging, that
(03:44):
requires some grit from me, that forces me to put
my head down, and then I move through a season
called spring. When I move into the season called spring,
my appreciation and gratitude for it is so much deeper.
It's like the well inside of me that can take
it in is so much deeper, so much richer, so
much more sturdy and steady. There's something about moving through
(04:08):
the winter beforehand that makes the arrival of spring feel
just extra exciting and extra delicious and extra necessary and needed.
And we can just take it in in a different
way because we had the winter before it. And yet
most of us are moving through our lives trying to
figure out and myself included, I mean, I definitely have
done this, and I as I've started to notice how
(04:30):
culture teaches us this way of being, I've noticed how
even in the last five years, the challenges that I've
been through that I have seen them through a lens
of I am not supposed to struggle. Struggle is bad,
struggle is wrong. If I really had my act together,
I wouldn't be struggling. I'd be above the struggle. And yet,
(04:51):
what if the struggle is exactly what we need in
order to birth something new in order to berth the spring.
What if the winter was exactly what we needed in
order to really we fully receive and take in what
is available for us in spring. This past weekend was
my husband's forty fifth birthday, believe it or not, forty five,
and I wanted to do something really special for him,
(05:12):
mostly because his birthday oftentimes gets missed. He is not
a real big birthday person. But you know, he turned
forty in the middle of COVID in April of twenty twenty,
and so his fortieth birthday got kind of passed over
because we were still in lockdown in LA. Then when
I turned forty a few years later, we did a
big trip to New York City and it was very
(05:34):
I felt very special and celebrated. And his birthday, because
he's not a real big birthday person, usually just kind
of passes without much fanfare. I always do something for him,
but I just on his forty fifth birthday, wanted to
do something extra special, so I coordinated a surprise where
I flew in his best friend from Seattle, and I
worked with his brother to basically book like a whole
(05:56):
weekend of surprises for the three of them, and the
three of them, who were very close friends since they've
known each other since they were fifteen years old, got
to spend some time together, you know, away from the kids,
good quality conversation, hanging out, having fun. And so I
had Danny come into town for the weekend, so the
guys all hung out. They had a great weekend. And
then on Sunday, my mother in law made brunch for
(06:17):
everyone and they all came back to the house and
we had a big family brunch together. And I was
sitting next to Danny, catching up with him because I
don't ever get to see him or his wife and
they have three kids, and I was just asking him
about life, and we got to talking about having boys. Okay,
this is going somewhere. This is connected to what I'm
talking about, I promise. Danny and I got to talking
about what it's like to raise boys differently than it
(06:39):
is to raise girls. And I know that I'm only
three and a half years into raising a boy, so
I'm not at all claiming to be an expert. But
I was talking to Danny about certain things that I've noticed,
like how much more likely a boy is to let's say,
like climb a tree and jump out of it or
something like that then a girl. And maybe that's not true,
(07:01):
you know, a thousand percent of the time across the board,
But in the majority of boy moms and dads that
I've talked to, they say that this is true. There's
just like a gene that boys have or I don't
know if it's testosterone or something, but there's something going
on in a boy brain, a little boy brain that
they just take these crazy risks. And I was telling
(07:22):
Danny that as a mom who is also so I'm
a mom who really cares about my son, but I'm
also a person who's very squeamish about injuries. And as
both a mom to a boy who is worried about
my son, and also as a person who is extremely
squeamish about injuries, I find myself having to bite my
(07:45):
tongue very often because my impulse is to want to
say like Hugh, be careful, be careful, don't do that. Hey,
watch out, come down here, get down there, don't do that,
don't climb up there, over and over and over again
all day. Which I don't want that to be the
track that plays in Charlie's brain when he's climbing a tree,
when he's doing anything in his life. I don't want
him to constantly have a voice in the back of
his mind that's saying, be careful, be careful, be careful,
(08:06):
be careful. And yet this is what I'm talking about,
that so many of us do have that voice in
the back of our brain. Be careful, be careful, be careful,
be careful, don't hurt yourself, don't get don't get an injury,
you know. And as an adult, I guess it's more
like an emotional injury than a physical injury. And yet
so many of us move through the world that way. Anyway,
Danny was saying to me that one of the best
(08:27):
teachers for boys as far as their limits, and this
is true for girls too. This is not a boy thing,
but as far as boys having that like risk taking,
you know, thing inside of them, one of the best
teachers for them is actually the injury itself. That part
of how they learn their limits is by breaking a
bone or you know, getting a gash in their head
(08:49):
or whatever it is. They take a risk, they get
a real time consequence, and the real time consequence is
what teaches them their boundary. And that's not to say
that we should just let our three year old jump
out of a tree necessarily. But also, you know, I
said to Danny that the outdoor play camp that my
(09:10):
kids go to takes that approach. You know, there are
adults there for sure, keeping the kids safe, but they
really do let the kids do a lot of explorative
play where they can climb a tree, or they can,
you know, play with a hammer, or they can, you know,
do various things. They can test out their limits, and
they can experience those real time consequences. And yeah, kids
(09:31):
get like nicks and cuts here and there, but nobody
has ever gotten seriously injured because they just let the
kids explore on their own terms, in their own way.
And the director of the camp, who's become a good
friend of mine, I've talked to her so much about
this because it's so counterintuitive for me, and I don't
know exactly where that comes from. But I think it's
just you know, being a mom, being nervous about your kids,
(09:52):
and also maybe like having a more cautious temperament in general.
But she has talked to me so much about how
how cool it is to watch the kids explore and
learn their own limits, and that they really do that
when you step back and you stop saying be careful,
and you stop like dictating every single step that they take.
So it was just another reminder yesterday as I was
(10:14):
talking to Danny, He's saying, this is how kids learn
their limits. The best way for them to learn their
limits isn't to hear mom say be careful. The way
to learn their limits is to have a real time
experience about what happens when you jump out of a tree.
You skin your knee. You know what happens when you
fall off your bike, you skin your knee. And yeah,
am I going to make my kids wear helmets when
(10:35):
they're on their bikes or when they're on their scooters?
One hundred percent? Am I going to, you know, boost
my kid up into the highest branch in the tree. No,
I'm not going to do that. I'm going to allow
them to explore in a way that's age appropriate for
their bodies and allow them to get injuries that are
I guess like congruent to the type of exploring that
(10:57):
they're able to do at their physical age. And there's
a parallel here, I think for us. I think many
of us, like I mentioned a minute ago, have a
track running in the back of our brains that says,
be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful, whatever you do,
don't get your heart broken. As I've started to notice
this sentiment pop up literally everywhere I turn, I've started
to think about where some of this might have come
(11:18):
from for me, Like where did this originate? This track
that plays in my brain that's like, be careful, be careful,
be careful, don't hurt anyone, don't get hurt, don't get
into any kind of problem. And one of the places
that I think it came from for me, and I
would encourage you to think about where it might have
come from for you, is the subculture of Christianity, and
in particular Christianity in the eighties and nineties. And I
(11:42):
say all of this while also saying, you know, all
of the adults in my life or at least ninety
nine percent of them were doing the best that they
could with what they had been offered, And I don't
think that like Christianity as a whole, there are a
lot of flaws in the programming of Christianity. Still are
just as many flaws as they're we're in the eighties
and nineties, and yet I think most people who are
(12:03):
a part of that ecosystem are doing the best they
can with what they know and what they have. And
so while there are many flaws in the system, I
don't think that there's any one conspiracy or one person
who's trying to hurt kids or anything like that. But
there was a lot of language around don't get your
heart broken. You know, you don't want to do that.
You want to avoid that pain that other people have
(12:24):
to face. And I feel like there was a lot
of talk about, you know, for example, this is just
one of many examples, don't have sex before you're married.
That's just a recipe for heartbreak. You want to only
have sex with one person in your whole life, otherwise
you know you're going to get your heart broken. And
there were so many other ways that that messaging showed up.
But it was like, don't do this don't sin, don't
(12:47):
don't drink, don't do these things. You're gonna get your
heart broken. It's only a recipe for pain and frustration.
And you can see that there are truths to those things,
you know, Like, addiction is definitely a painful process that
so many people have had to live through. And yeah,
if you can stay away from alcohol, maybe you could
avoid addiction completely. And yet, and yet, this is where
(13:13):
the nuances become so important because the pain, the frustration,
the heartbreak that we face in our lives also makes
us who we are. It also teaches us about the
beauty of spring. It also, you know, invites us into
a deeper relationship with God. It also makes our stories
extremely rich and meaningful. So you know, you think about
(13:36):
like your kids. If you have kids, do you want
your kids to move through the world with no pain
and no frustration? Do you want that for yourself? Do
you want to move through the world with no pain
and no frustration? Or do you want to become the
kind of person who can face pain, face heartbreak, face
frustration and move through that experience with integrity, with character
(14:00):
or maybe not the first time even you know, I mean,
that's part of pain. Is that it breaks us. And
maybe the first few times we move through pain, we
don't move through it with character or with integrity, and
we come to the very end of ourselves and then
we're able to pick ourselves up and write a news
story after that, and that's its own kind of spring.
So the point that I'm getting at here is that
(14:22):
avoiding pain doesn't create a meaningful life. Every single meaningful
story that you will read, every movie that you will
watch that engages you, every person who you admire, who
you love, who you want to be like, who you
think about and think you know that person is someone
(14:43):
worth emulating in the world, every single one will have pain, frustration, problems, heartbreak, loss,
you know, meltdowns, messiness, frustration that they have come to
the end of theirselves at some point in their life
before now. And maybe the version of them now that
(15:04):
you see is the spring version of them. But this
spring version of them wouldn't even exist if it weren't
for the winter that they've walked through. And one of
the ways that this has come up for me recently
(15:24):
is that I noticed that I've been through a lot
of pain and frustration in my life. I really have.
I you know all of the books that I've written,
especially Indestructible, which came out in twenty eighteen, is a
book about pain and frustration and heartbreak and learning to
face my own heartbreak and learning to pick myself up
off of the floor of my life and rebuild it
from the ground up. So I am no stranger to
pain and heartbreak. And I think during that season of
(15:47):
my life, the Indestructible season, I learned what it meant
to receive heartbreak for what it had to show me,
and receive heartbreak for what it had to teach me,
and I became so much better and so much stronger
for it. Life that I have now is in many
ways this perpetual spring of a deep love with Matt
and two beautiful, you know, healthy happy kids that I
(16:10):
get to call mine. This life that I get to
call mine, is all because I dug in and did
the work during a time of heartbreak. And so I'm
no stranger to that. And yet I think that maybe
some of us come to an age and it might
be a different age for every single person where you think, like, okay,
I did that. The hardship is behind me, the heartbreak
(16:32):
is behind me, and now I want to live a
life like the shiny, happy people of the world who
don't have to face heartbreak. Maybe I'm saying something that
doesn't actually resonate with you or doesn't make any sense
to you at all, but I wonder if you have
ever felt like you had this heartbreak you went through,
you put it in your past, and then now you
(16:52):
want to sort of pull yourself up and live a
life where you know heartbreak doesn't touch you and hardship
doesn't come your way. I also want to be really clear,
and I want to say something that's very important to
this conversation, which is I do not have a theology
of suffering, meaning I don't think that we should go
seek out suffering. I don't think that the choice that
(17:13):
causes more suffering is the better choice. I don't think
that you need to create suffering in your life. I
don't think that people who suffer are holier than people
who don't suffer. I just simply think that life is
full of suffering, and for us to create a life
where we have no suffering would be not only impossible,
but also would be a life that I don't think
(17:35):
would be one worth emulating. That's a big statement, But
I think I agree with myself on that. I don't
think a life if I could create a life with
zero suffering, where nothing touches me, I don't think that
would be a life worth emulating. It doesn't, at least
here on planet Earth, where we live within the realm
of what we know, a life with no suffering. I
(17:57):
don't know of any life with no suffering that is
one that I would want to emulate. Every person that
I know that I want to emulate has lived through
massive suffering. You know, you think about the authors that
you love. I'm reading a book right now that's an
over book Club pick that I found on Audible, and
I'm listening to it on Audible and I recommend it
one thousand percent. It is called The Many Lives of
(18:19):
Mama Love, and it's about a woman who, without giving
too much a way, develops a drug habit. She also
has four children, and she ends up going to prison,
and it is about her experience of missing her kids
and trying to be reunited with her kids. And the
(18:40):
depth of the pain in this story is what draws
me into it, and it is also what makes her
so interesting, and it is what has developed the character
in her that makes her someone that I go, yeah,
I want to listen to her for five or six
or seven hours of my life. Her writing is poetic,
it's beautif it draws you in. Her story is gripping
(19:02):
and heart wrenching. I imagine, you know, her youngest son,
she has four boys, Her youngest son is three and
a half when he gets torn away from her by
CPS when she gets arrested, And I imagine my Charlie,
who's also three and a half, getting torn away from me,
and I just can't even fathom. And yet listening to
(19:22):
her story of trying to overcome this insane addiction, it
gives me like a deep, deep compassion for anyone who's
facing addiction in particular, but any other challenge like that
in their life. And you just zoom out from the
story and go like, this is horrific that this happened,
And yet this experience is what has produced such a
(19:44):
beautiful woman, a beautiful person. So do we go out
seeking suffering? No? Do we say that someone who suffers
is holier or better, or there's any kind of hierarchy
like that. No, I don't. That's not a theology that
I hold, and yet I have to acknowledge that people,
we all have our own forms of suffering, and that
(20:06):
those of us who suffer in whatever ways we suffer,
that suffering is a gateway to more spiritual depth, to
a greater understanding of the human condition, to a greater
ability to connect to others around us, to art, to
beautiful art that connects with others, to so many beautiful things.
(20:28):
Without suffering, we wouldn't have access to those things. So
you can't just say suffering is bad and pleasure is good.
You know, joy is good and sadness is bad, because
these things are all part of the human experience. So
I guess what I'm suggesting is that we all begin
to notice the ways that in many parts of culture
(20:51):
we hear ourselves or we hear other people say things like, oh,
you know, you want to avoid that heartbreak, or you
don't want to walk down that road or whatever. I'm
not saying that we should make decisions that are bad
for us at all. There's nuance here to this conversation, Okay,
I'm just asking us to notice. Like, for here's an example,
I hear a lot of times on social media people
(21:14):
say I want to help you avoid the pain that
I suffered. That seems great right on the surface. And yes,
we do want to help each other avoid the pain
that we suffered, and part of how we do that
is by sharing our own stories. And yet there's one
thing that's sharing our own stories. Like imagine like people
sitting around, you know, a fire, a campfire, and we're
(21:37):
all sharing stories of personal experiences from our lives. And
I share a story of divorce, and someone else shares
a story of addiction, and someone else shares a story
of a really painful, physically painful accident they were in
or something like that, and we're all sharing these stories,
and we all can learn from each other. We can
kind of glean our own information from the way that
the story is told. And there's something different that's like,
(21:58):
let me give you a three step process to make
sure that you never face the heartbreak that I faced.
It starts to feel like when you package things that way,
that the goal of life is to avoid pain and suffering.
The goal of life is to avoid the very things
that taught the person who made the formula how to
(22:21):
make the formula, the very thing that taught the person
the lessons that they can now teach you they learned
from suffering, and so why are we all trying to
stop each other from suffering? And again, I don't mean
that we should like willingly, knowingly walk into addiction or
walk into abuse or anything like that at all. I
just more mean like, I'm watching my kid climb a tree,
(22:42):
and maybe instead of saying, oh gosh, Charlie, be careful,
be careful, don't put your foot there, maybe I can
step back and let him learn from experience and sure say, like, hey,
that branch that you're grabbing onto, it doesn't look like
it's going to be sturdy enough to hold you, So
maybe try this branch over here. There's a difference between
(23:02):
that and me hovering underneath of him terrified he's going
to fail. I don't know if that resonates with you
at all, if you feel like there are people around
you who are hovering underneath of you, terrified that you're
going to fail. But it doesn't necessarily breed confidence. It
doesn't necessarily make you feel like you know you can
trust yourself and you can move through the world with
(23:25):
a relative sense of assurance that like, if you run
into a problem, you're going to know how to overcome it.
And the irony of this, I think is that stories
and I'm speaking about this specifically because this is what
I do for work and this is what this podcast
is about. But stories are built around problems. Without problems,
without heartbreak, without loss, without despair, there is no story.
(23:48):
Stories are bored. We'ven we don't even repeat the things
that happened when they went well, Like if there was
no problem. You know, imagine like if someone came home
and we're like, I have a story for you, and
they started telling a story about going to the grocery store.
You'd be like, and then what you know? And then
what and they'd be like, and then I was on
(24:09):
the sereal aisle, and you'd be like, okay, and you
would be waiting, intuitively for them for the back, you know,
the intruder to come into the grocery store, or some
stranger to say something rude to them, or something to
happen to ramp up the tension. Otherwise it's not a
story worth telling. We don't even repeat those stories. The
(24:32):
stories worth telling are the ones that have heartbreak, problems,
lost to spare, you know, the rug pulled out from
underneath of us and So maybe instead of trying to
help everybody around us from ever experiencing any heartbreak, maybe
the approach is the sharing of stories, the sharing of
(24:53):
our stories, the sharing of how I faced my own
worst nightmare and I came out alive on the other side,
to instill a feeling of confidence and assurance that the
human spirit is stronger than anything out there and nothing
can destroy it, nothing can diminish it. Even death can't
(25:13):
destroy the human spirit. The human spirit conquers even death.
And those are the stories that will inspire us to
face our life with courage and confidence. Rather than to
never climb a tree. Now we can climb a tree
with some measure of courage and confidence. So I love
the tree metaphor because it really shows me, you know what,
(25:35):
as human beings, we need surrounding us beneath the tree
in order to climb that tree with courage and confidence.
Rather than someone saying, oh, be careful, don't do that.
Maybe you should come back down. I don't know how
I feel about you being up that high. We really
need people who are like, hey, the branch you're hanging
onto is not a sturdy branch. Maybe this branch there's
two other branches next to you that you could also
(25:55):
grab onto, or you know, what's your plan with your
foot there? You don't have anywhere for it to go.
Can you look around and find a branch where you
could put your foot. That's what we really need, our
cheerleaders on the ground surrounding us, instilling us with confidence
that no matter what happens, we can face our lives
with courage and confidence. We can face heartbreak with courage
(26:16):
and confidence that even the greatest heartbreak, even the most
painful experience we could ever walk through, will not destroy
the human spirit. It will not destroy the human soul.
I don't think most of us were taught that way.
I definitely wasn't taught that way. I don't feel like
I move that way as a person through the world,
(26:36):
like no matter what happens, I can face this. But
this experience of having the conversation with Danny, of noticing
the different cultures and subcultures and ways that we try
to prevent people from experiencing pain or suffering or heartbreak,
has made me very aware of how cautiously and tenuously
(26:57):
I move through the world. I'll tell one more story
before I wrap. I find myself retelling my love story
with Matt every now and then about how we met
and how we fell in love and all of that,
and people will always ask the way they do. They'll ask,
(27:18):
you know, like if it was love at first sight,
or did you know when you first met him or whatever.
I think there was like a really small sense of
knowing when we first met that this was something really good,
and yet both Matt and I really tiptoed around each other.
We met on a blind date. By the way, I
was in La on a work trip. Matt lived in
Pasadena at the time. I ran into an old acquaintance
(27:42):
of mine, someone who I didn't know very well but
who Matt knew very well, and we were just catching
up and he was like, what's your status? Are you
single or are you dating? Which I thought was a
very strange question at the time because I'm like, aren't
you married? But then he quickly was like, I have
this friend I want to introduce you to. I was like,
I'm up for it. I'll go on a date. Sure,
no problem. You know, I leave tomorrow morning, so it'd
(28:03):
have to be tonight. So it was very fast. We
got introduced to each other via text. He picked a
location I was going to meet him for a quick drink.
It was going to be really quick because it was
like eight pm by the time I finished my workday.
So I met him at this bar for a quick drink.
We were together for like an hour tops, like I mean,
I can't imagine it was any more than an hour.
(28:23):
And we had a great conversation and things went very well.
But then I got on a flight and went back
to Nashville. And I was in Nashville and he was
in LA and we honestly, for the first month that
after I went back to Nashville, we didn't even speak.
It was a very slow start. I don't have to
tell you the whole story, but it was a very
slow start. And I think a big reason why it
(28:44):
was a slow start, it was like six months of
a slow start. You know, we did start dating long distance,
and even in dating long distance, I describe it to
people like we were tiptoeing around each other. I, for one,
had just been through a divorce and I had it
in my past relationship gotten engaged and married very quickly,
and so I was feeling real cautious, and you know,
(29:07):
Matt had been not engaged but very close to engaged,
and same thing had kind of gotten his heart broken,
and so both of us were really cautious. Both of
us were very much tiptoeing around each other. And I
describe it to people like it was not a falling
in love kind of experience. It was not like a
throw caution to the wind like Matt and I never
had that. We had a very slow burn of a relationship.
(29:30):
It wasn't like the most passionate, you know, like we
knew and then we just spin every moment together. And
in so many ways it was much much healthier, or
the experience of us falling in love was much healthier.
And also there was so much caution that it was
almost like in the beginning and even until we were married,
I would say, like even while we were engaged, we
(29:52):
still were sort of playing this caution game with each other,
of like trying not to get our hearts broken. And
it was just such a different experience then the experience
of falling in love at eighteen that it feels worth noting,
you know, that that experience of just like a total
like ego boundaries dissolving into this other person. I had
(30:13):
been told my whole life don't have sex before you're married,
don't marry someone who's outside of the church, don't fall
in love with just anyone. Don't give your heart away
to just anyone. Be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful,
be careful. You're going to get your heart broken. You're
going to get your heart broken. You're going to get
your heart broken. And when I met my first husband,
you know, we went from meeting to dating to engage
too married in four months, no joke, four months. I
(30:36):
could even should have maybe been more cautious in that relationship.
All I'm saying is, no matter how many people told me,
be careful, be careful, be careful, You're going to get
your heart broken. You couldn't have said that to me enough.
The way that our relationship unfolded was very unhealthy and
childish and whatever. But I just also hadn't had a
lot of experiences. I hadn't had enough experiences with love
(30:59):
and with really relationships to teach me how to move
into this in a healthy way. So we fell in
love very quickly. We got married. It was a toxic situation.
It was bad from the beginning, and I stayed married
for four years before I filed for divorce or almost
four years, almost exactly when I met Matt. My caution
didn't come from a place of other people telling me
(31:23):
I needed to be careful I wanted to avoid getting
my heart broken. My caution came from my lived experience.
My caution taught me to move slower. My caution told
me not everyone has your best interest in mind. My
caution told me someone might seem like they love you,
but actually their motives are self serving. My caution came
(31:47):
from my life, the facing of the heartbreak head on,
the lived experience of falling apart and putting myself back together.
And because of that experience, I could move into this
next relationship with more confidence. With you know, in spite
of the caution, I was tiptoeing around Matt. But I
(32:09):
also just knew that I was unwilling to move into
a relationship that wasn't good for me. I wasn't going
to do it. My life was too good on its
own to let someone come in who was going to
mess any of that up. So my standards were very high.
I was really looking I knew exactly what I was
looking for. I was looking for someone who was a
(32:29):
friend and who was really grounded and who wanted to
build a solid relationship, and who was a family man.
I knew I wanted to have kids. I really wanted
to have kids, and so that's what I was looking for,
and that's what I found in Matt. And we got
to slowly build our relationship together, and what we have
is not perfect by any stretch, but it is incredibly
sturdy and strong, and there's so much goodness in our relationship.
(32:54):
And there's not a day that passes now that I
don't think about, like, what I have now is light
years apart from what I had back then, and I
just didn't I only knew what I knew in that
first relationship, and so I just thought this is how
relationships went. I did not know it was possible to
have a relationship like this one. And in my opinion,
(33:14):
I think I needed that first heartbreak. I needed everything
to fall apart in order to become the person who
could contain a relationship like this one. So maybe there's
some danger in making that connection. It's I'm not saying,
throw caution to the wind and just do whatever, and
you know, hope it turns out okay. There's a so
(33:35):
much nuance here, I am saying, maybe, instead of telling
everyone around us to be careful, be careful, be careful,
don't do this, you know, don't try this, or don't
do this, because this happened to someone that I know,
and this happened to the neighbor of someone that I know,
and this happened to my third cousin's neighbors friends, dog,
you know whatever. I feel like we do that where
we like tell these cautionary tales, and there's nothing wrong
(33:57):
with a cautionary tale. But I do wonder if part
of of how we become the type of people that
we want to be in the world is by moving
through heartbreak, moving through suffering, moving through pain, and becoming
stronger on the other side. This is what Indestructible the
book was even about the book Indestructible. The title comes
from a John Steinbeck quote that says, I guess a
(34:20):
woman is stronger than a man, after all. I think
the quote goes, particularly if she has love in her heart.
A woman with love in her heart must be indestructible.
I'm not quoting that word for word, but that's essentially
what the quote says, and that's where the title of
that book came from that. Moving through that heartbreak taught
me how to be indestructible because I became a woman
(34:42):
with love in my heart. And part of how I
got that love in my heart was by having my
heart broken. Before my heart was broken, I was too
short up, I was too judgmental, I was too I was,
you know, kind of like standing on my pedestal looking
down at the rest of the world. And I needed
to I have that experience to break me apart, to
(35:03):
flatten me on my face, to pull the rug out
from underneath me, for my entire life to fall apart,
to know what it felt like to be a human being,
so that I could have compassion, so that I could
have joy, so that I could have pleasure, so that
I could really fall in love, so that I could
really let myself be seen. I couldn't do any of
those things in that first relationship, not just because of
(35:24):
who the other person was, but also because of who
I was. So I needed to become someone different in
order to have the relationship that I wanted with someone
like Matt. And yet the only way to become that
someone different was to move through my own suffering and
to fully receive what that suffering wanted to show me,
and so I just started asking myself this week, how
(35:45):
can I pull that understanding into my life. Now It's
not just like, oh, we closed the book on Indestructible.
That was my one heartbreak for my life, and now
I get to move on and live life with the happy,
shiny people. The happy shiny people, by the way, are
also suffering behind the scenes. This was one of the
big takeaways for me from that period of time of
(36:05):
divorce in my life. You can put whatever you want
on social media. You really can. You can put whatever
you want on social media, and no matter how happy
people look on social media, it doesn't tell you what's
really happening behind the scenes of their life. Because I
lived in that first marriage for four years, suffering, struggling
toxic environment and standing on stages and delivering messages and
(36:29):
going and selling books and doing the things, jumping through
the hoops, and you know, my career was growing and
things seemed to be going great from Instagram, and yet
behind the scenes, I was living in my own personal hell.
So you never know what's going on behind the smiling, happy,
happy people. And I think the important thing to note
here is that suffering is inevitable. Suffering is just a
(36:52):
part of life. Suffering is what makes life here on
earth what it is here on earth. Suffering is very
human of us. So if you're suffering, you sufferings in
some way. I mean, you might be living in a
moment of bliss and pleasure right now, and I hope
you are, and I hope you find ways to live
in bliss and pleasure even if you're in a time
of suffering. And yet whatever way that you're suffering right now,
(37:14):
my question for you would be, is there a way
for you to let that suffering in a little bit more?
Can you let the suffering teach you what it wants
to teach you? Can you let it show you what
it wants to show you? Can you let it break
you open so that you can become more of love,
more of the love that you already are. That's my
(37:36):
challenge for you this week. It is no small challenge.
I am still working on this. I realized this this week.
I had this epiphany that I felt like I closed
the book on suffering after Indestructible, and that my life
was supposed to be only only up from there, and
it has been in so many ways only up from there.
And yet I think that's part of why I have
(37:58):
not only had the suff that I've had, but also
suffered because of the suffering, Because I think we create
double suffering when we not only have a moment of suffering,
but we also tell ourselves I shouldn't be suffering like this.
What if we just go of course, I'm suffering here.
I am on planet Earth, a human being on planet Earth.
Suffering is just part of this. Death is part of
(38:19):
this loss, as part of this. You know, not everything
goes the way that we plan. Big shocker, almost forty
two years old. Not everything goes the way that we plan.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe I can let that be okay.
So then I just have the one suffering, but I
don't have the layer of suffering on top of the
(38:39):
suffering that tells me I've got to make the suffering
go away. I can just receive the original suffering for
what it wants to show me. So I dare you
to do that this week, and I would love to
hear from you to tell me how it goes. You
can find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon. I would
love to chat with you there. You could also email
me at my story at writerrstory dot com. I'll see
you next week on the Write Your Story podcast
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